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

by Robert D. Putnam

Danielle Allen has pointed out, in a democracy when our side is defeated, we need to understand that to accept losing in the short run is essential to preserve the long-run goal of democracy.

is no accident that most substantial legislative reform programs of the last 125 years—the Progressive Era reforms, the New Deal, the Great Society, and even the Reagan Revolution—had substantial support from both sides of the aisle.109

When societies divide into partisan camps with profoundly different worldviews, and when those differences are viewed as existential and irreconcilable, political rivalry can devolve into partisan hatred. Parties come to view each other not as legitimate rivals, but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe.112

So what have we learned about polarization in this chapter? We have discovered that as the twentieth century opened, American politics was riven by deep, even violent political rivalries, but that over the ensuing six decades Americans gradually learned to cooperate across party lines to solve shared problems. Of course, we continued to disagree vigorously on many public issues, as is natural in any pluralist democracy, but then in the mid-1960s our disagreements began to become more rancorous, stimulated initially by long-suppressed conflicts over racial justice, but then spreading rapidly across the entire spectrum of issues. The polarization spread to local politics and eventually even into our private lives, until many of us could hardly imagine living in the same community. Polarization led to gridlock, preventing government from responding even to problems on which most people actually agreed. The inevitable result was widespread cynicism and alienation from basic democratic institutions.

(Americans of the twenty-first century might be surprised that as late as the mid-1960s religiously observant Americans were more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, even among whites.65)

“People wanted a religious experience that made them feel at home. Inhabiting the sacred space of a church or synagogue gave them a sense of membership in a community.”68

In 1957, 69 percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters that “religion is increasing its influence on American life.” Within barely a decade, those expectations would be shattered.

Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, preeminent chroniclers of the Sixties, conclude that “Nothing changed so profoundly in the United States during the 1960s as American religion.”74 Alongside other major institutions, religious institutions suffered a dramatic loss of both public confidence and self-confidence.

Attendance at Mass fell so rapidly during the Sixties that Catholics alone accounted for much of the total decline in religious attendance, but the number of self-identified Catholics did not immediately decline. Leaving the Church entirely became much more common with the gradually emerging clerical sex abuse scandals of the 1990s.

The Sixties also witnessed unprecedented religious experimentation outside traditional channels.75 Some Boomers, interested in what they called the “spiritual,” but disdaining conventional religion, were dubbed “seekers,” looking for new spiritual homes.

Much less highfalutin but more evocative was the emergence of “Sheilaism,” named after a woman quoted by Robert Bellah and his colleagues in their best-seller Habits of the Heart (1985): “I believe in God. I am not a fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own lit...

“Spirituality has become a vastly complex quest in which each person seeks in his or her own way.”78 The religious “we” was giving way to the religious “I.”

Almost overnight, it seemed, America had turned from God’s country to a godless country. The rapid change in religious observance in the Sixties and an equally rapid change in sexual mores in those same years were closely intertwined.

As we shall see in Chapter 8, traditional sexual norms, especially with respect to premarital sex, changed almost overnight. And in turn, attitudes toward sexual norms (like premarital sex) strongly predicted which Americans moved away from religion during the 1960s and 1970s.

Many Americans experienced the social, sexual, and religious changes of the 1960s as “liberation,” but others were deeply unhappy about the direction the country had taken, especially about sexual permissiveness, but also about school prayer and other church-state issues. Their reaction to the Sixties soon produced a backlash strong enough to be visible nationally. For the next two decades, these people—conservative in both religion and politics—swelled the ranks of evangelicals and stanched the hemorrhage of religious engagement of the Sixties, a kind of aftershock to the Sixties’ earthquake.

1990s opened, a backlash against the growing public presence of conservative Christians manifested itself in the increasing numbers of Americans who objected to the political influence of religious leaders and organized religion more generally. Young Americans in particular came to view religion as judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical, and partisan.81 All these were warning signs that a second aftershock was about to roil the American religious landscape. The rise of the so-called nones after 1990 marked unmistakably the onset of this third temblor.

Who were these nones? Historically, whatever their degree of religiosity, almost all Americans have identified with one religion or another.82 In response to standard questions in the 1950s about “what is your religious preference?” the overwhelming majority expressed some sort of religious identity, just as Will Herberg had said. Only a very small fraction responded by saying “none.”

But the church has long played a more significant role in the life of nonwhites than among whites, whether measured by belief, or belonging, or behavior.85

Like the earlier turning points we have discussed, the rise of the nones in the 1990s was heavily driven by generational factors. Americans who reached adulthood after 1990 had markedly more liberal views on homosexuality and related issues than the generations before them, and these same young people increasingly rejected religious intervention in politics and indeed organized religion itself.

During the first two thirds of the twentieth century Americans gradually became more engaged with organized religion, whether measured by church membership or church attendance. But then at the now familiar turning point in the early 1960s, all those trends reversed course, declining sharply throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, pausing during the 1980s and 1990s, and then plunging ever downward in the twenty-first century.89

In short, philanthropy among most Americans has fallen steadily since the mid-1960s, only partially and temporarily offset by megagifts from the newly mega-rich.91 This is exactly what happened in the previous Gilded Age, as Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and some of their peers, immensely rich as a by-product of the massive increase in inequality, doled out megagifts.

Why should a Polish locomotive engineer put his livelihood at risk to benefit a black or Chinese gandy dancer merely because they both happened to work for the same large corporation? Labor agitation inevitably involves a dilemma of collective action, tempting some workers (strikebreakers or “scabs”) to defect from the union side. That temptation was especially great for African Americans and other ethnic minorities excluded from unions by white prejudice. Thus, successful unionization inherently involves remolding identities. Only intensive efforts by union organizers to build solidarity among all workers could hope to overcome that dilemma.

For the unionization drives of the 1930s and 1940s to be successful, union leaders and workers had to overcome racial and ethnic divisions.95 Replacing individualism with collective identity was thus an essential part of the rise of unions.

As an older laid-off manufacturing worker in Youngstown expressed this loss, decrying lack of solidarity from other union members: “they have lost the understanding of the brotherhood of the union shop, the camaraderie, the understanding. They’re only concerned about ‘me, me, me.’… That’s why I think the strength of the union is fading.”100

As the twentieth century opened, family formation in America was far from universal and surprisingly late. Relative to patterns earlier or later, many young adults in the Gilded Age lived with their parents well into their twenties and married only later in life—if at all, for many people remained lifelong “bachelors” and “spinsters,” unmarried and childless.

In the second half of the century, however, young Americans began to stay longer in their parents’ homes, and to postpone and even eschew marriage and children. Singletons became more common, perhaps more common than ever in America history.102 In short, in the two “I” periods at the beginning of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, fewer people married and had kids, and those who did, married later and had kids later, whereas in the mid-century “we” period, for virtually all Americans that “we” began with their nuclear family.

However, by 2016 the average age at first marriage had risen to about 27 for women and nearly 30 for men. The Boomers’ parents married young, but that was much less true of the Boomers themselves and the subsequent generations, as is clear in Figure 4.9, which compares the marriage rates of successive generations at the same stage in their life cycles.

leading family sociologist, Andrew Cherlin, has explained that in the late nineteenth century most marriages represented a kind of utilitarian bargain between two individuals who each needed what the other had to offer. In that era, the archetypal bargain involved the man providing material support, while the woman cared for children and the home.

During the Progressive Era, Cherlin explains, a new model of “companionate marriage” arose, based on romantic love, friendship, and partnership rather than convenience and self-interest.105 To be sure, companionate marriage was still gendered and far from egalitarian, because the male breadwinner model persisted, but the new model of marriage was definitely different from the nineteenth-century marriage of convenience.106

marketplace nor repression in American politics. At virtually the same time, however, a pair of seemingly independent developments extended the critique of America of the 1950s into the realm of political ideology. Strikingly, this occurred simultaneously on both the Right and the Left, giving rise to the New Right and the New Left.

On the Right the challenge had originated with Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek and eventually included orthodox economists like Milton Friedman. These “libertarians,” as they began to be called, appealed to younger conservatives because their ideas seemed fresh and attractive in an era of flatness and tired “big government.”

Rand had a genius for quotable, controversial aphorisms: “Nobody has ever given a reason why man should be his brother’s keeper” and “Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights.”55 Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” from the 1987 film Wall Street simply echoed Rand.

Atlas Shrugged was the source for a right-wing meme that would endure well into the twenty-first century: “makers” and “takers.” (Rand called them “producers” and “looters.”) According to this meme, society is composed of two classes of people: those who make stuff and those who take stuff.

The takers take from the makers, usually using the power of government. The makers, like the eponymous Atlas, bear the entire weight of society. All that is required for freedom and prosperity is for Atlas to “shrug” off the feckless takers.

The New Right, inspired by Rand’s extreme libertarianism, stressed the virtues of individualism, unfettered capitalism, and inequality over egalitarianism and collectivism.

The impact of this cultural shift went well beyond politics. For example, the dominant philosophy of business management during the “we” era (as epitomized by George Romney) had been that corporate decisions should take into account a wide range of constituencies beyond the owners—employees, customers, suppliers, and even the wider community within which they operated—what would later be called “stakeholders.” But the newer libertarian philosophy of the 1970s argued for sharply narrowing the focus of business management to a single group—the shareholders of the company’s stock—and closely linking the income of managers themselves to the stock price.

Ngram)

far-left end of the spectrum, as the Old Left was replaced by the New Left, similarly eager to replace institutionalized solidarity with individual liberation. While the New Right wanted to remove the fetters from capitalist entrepreneurs, the New Left wanted to free people from oppressive community bonds. Francis Fukuyama in The Great Disruption (1999) emphasized that both Left and Right have taken freeing people from constraints as their central goal. For the Left, constraints are on lifestyles; for the Right, constraints are on money.60

His ideas were echoed by more abstract thinkers, such as Herbert Marcuse, whose One-Dimensional Man (1964) argued that the political triumph of “technical rationality” had brought about “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” in American society, as managerial techniques achieved “freedom from want” at the cost of “the independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition.”61

Students for a Democratic Society, drafted by Tom Hayden and widely read on campuses throughout the 1960s, laid out the ideals of participatory democracy, racial equality, economic justice, and peace as a guide to the Left. In historical perspective the Port Huron Statement marked an inflection point on the Left, a high point of communitarianism, condemning “egoistic individualism,” while praising self-expression as against conformism.62

Outside the purely political sphere, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 8, the libertine hippie slogan “If it feels good, do it” became the watchword for the Left for the Sixties.

Chapter 3 we acknowledged that narrative, but we also argued that the more durable and pervasive change was from communitarianism to individualism, a dimension that is conceptually and empirically distinct from the left-right spectrum. The shift in the Sixties was less from left to right (or the reverse) than from we to I, a shift that was entirely visible on both extremes, as the Old Right gave way to the New Right and the Old Left gave way to the New Left.

For the most part the New Right had much more long-term success than the New Left. The Republican Party in 2018 was much more like the New Right of the 1950s than the Democratic Party was like the New Left of the 1960s.

“Identity” itself, unmodified by race, or gender, or politics, rapidly became an important theme in American culture after mid-century, as our trusty Ngram tool reveals with great clarity.

We can therefore get some measure of the changing balance between individualism and communitarianism by examining (see Figure 5.9) the changing cultural balance between “rights” and “responsibility” in our national literature.67 Overall, “rights” is a more common word in American English than “responsibility,” but that edge has varied enormously over time. From the Gilded Age to about 1960 American writers put ever increasing stress on “responsibility” (as compared to “rights”)—not just civic responsibilities, of course, but also family responsibilities, religious responsibilities, and so forth.

“Selfies” have come to dominate our photographic behavior, and we now speak of “sharing a selfie,” although the meaning of the verb “to share” has subtly changed. It once referred to other-directed behavior, or in the words of an older dictionary definition, “to give a portion of something to another.” More recently, however, its meaning has become more “inner-directed” or (according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary online) to “talk about one’s thoughts, feelings, or experiences with others.”

What names do we give our newborns? Concentration of parental baby-naming choices on fewer names implies tighter social constraints on appropriate baby names, whereas a wider dispersion of parents’ choices reflects a desire to assert individuality. Individualistic people give their children rare names, reflecting a desire to stand out, as opposed to common names, which reflect instead a desire to fit in. Among advanced countries, those whose inhabitants have more idiosyncratic names rank higher on the Hofstede index of cultural individualism, representing “a preference for a loosely-knit social framework in which individuals are expected to take care of only themselves and their immediate families.”

Social psychologist James Pennebaker in his fascinating book The Secret Life of Pronouns (2011) explains that our usage of the first-person plural and first-person singular pronouns is remarkably revealing. Use of “we” is more common in strong marriages and close-knit teams, for example. Similarly, high-status, confident people, focused on the task at hand, not on themselves, use fewer “I” words. Frequent use of “I” is associated with depression and suicide; indeed, researchers have reported that pronouns are actually more reliable in identifying depression than negative emotion words, like “sad.” On the other hand, in the aftermath of community trauma (such as 9/11; Princess Diana’s death; or a mass campus shooting) use of “I” declines, researchers have found, whereas use of “we” increases. Frequent use of “I” seems to be a signal of individual isolation, whereas “we” is typically a sign of solidarity and collective identification.83

In fact, over the period from 1900 to 1965 the word “I” appeared less and less often in American publications, but after 1965 (as both Greenfield and Twenge reported) that trend reversed itself, and in a paroxysm of self-centeredness the word “I” became ever more frequent.

But by the end of the nineteenth century the hope that Reconstruction would bring about racial equality was little more than a bitter memory. Under the banner of Southern Redemption, violent oppression of African Americans raged in the South, intensifying whenever blacks stood up to claim their new rights. Some four hundred black people were lynched between 1868 and 1871 alone.