The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

by Robert D. Putnam

Republican Party has become steadily more extreme. At least part of the explanation for this rightward shift is the investment by wealthy, highly conservative business elites in a sustained effort to shift American politics rightward,

mood. Teddy Roosevelt, Jane Addams, and other progressives were explicit in rejecting “individualism,” and endorsing (in Addams’s words) “a cooperative ideal of mutual assistance,” not merely charity or philanthropy, which she and her fellow reformers saw as patronizing forms of aid.24