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

by Robert D. Putnam

Tocqueville was inspired by what he saw in America: Its citizens were profoundly protective of their independence, but through associating widely and deeply, they were able to overcome selfish desires, engage in collective problem solving, and work together to build a vibrant and—by comparison to Europe at that time—surprisingly egalitarian society by pursuing what he called “self-interest, rightly understood.”

what Tocqueville saw in our nation’s democracy was an attempt to achieve balance between the twin ideals of freedom and equality; between respect for the individual and concern for the community.

widespread progress and prosperity driven by education, technological innovation, and sustained economic growth.

American idealism increasingly gives way to cynicism about a rigged system.

Corporate conglomerates are replacing local and craft economies in almost every sector, including agriculture. America’s rugged individuals struggle against the loss of identity, autonomy, and mastery as they are subsumed into the anonymous labor of hyper-consolidated corporate machines and forced to pool meager wages to make ends meet.

The result is a nation more and more fragmented along economic, ideological, racial, and ethnic lines, and more and more dominated by leaders who prove shrewdest at the game of divide and conquer.

The United States in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s was startlingly similar to today.3 Inequality, political polarization, social dislocation, and cultural narcissism prevailed—all accompanied, as they are now, by unprecedented technological advances, prosperity, and material well-being.

Between the mid-1960s and today—by scores of hard measures along multiple dimensions—we have been experiencing declining economic equality, the deterioration of compromise in the public square, a fraying social fabric, and a descent into cultural narcissism.

The story of the American experiment in the twentieth century is one of a long upswing toward increasing solidarity, followed by a steep downturn into increasing individualism. From “I” to “we,” and back again to “I.”

As Tocqueville rightly noted, in order for the American experiment to succeed, personal liberty must be fiercely protected, but also carefully balanced with a commitment to the common good. Individuals’ freedom to pursue their own interests holds great promise, but relentlessly exercising that freedom at the expense of others has the power to unravel the very foundations of the society that guarantees it.

In the last few years, however, that line not only stopped ascending, but began to descend.10 This unfortunate change can be largely attributed to sharp rises in fatalities due to drugs, alcohol, or suicide—more commonly known as “deaths of despair.”

When the Pew Research Center asked Americans in 2017 to name the biggest improvements to life over the past half century, we overwhelmingly cited technology (42 percent) and medicine and health (14 percent), and when asked to predict the biggest improvements to life over the next half century, technology (22 percent) and medicine and health (20 percent) again topped the list.

The fierce and growing hostility to “plutocracy” at the opening of the twentieth century reflected moral outrage about inequality that had been absent during the Gilded Age with its emphasis on social Darwinism and the rights of ownership. This normative change was temporarily disrupted by the Red Scare of the 1920s, but the utter devastation of the Great Depression gave renewed force to the ideals of social solidarity instead of naked individualism, even among Republicans like Herbert Hoover.120 The widely shared sacrifices of World War II strongly reinforced egalitarian norms among the Greatest Generation, who would then dominate American society and politics for a quarter century after the war.

The party conflict underlying the election of 1896 remained as much sectoral and regional as class-based or ideological, as most Republicans represented industrial constituencies, especially in the North and East, and most Democrats represented agricultural areas, especially in the South and West. In the 1896 House elections, for example, 86 percent of the victorious Republicans came from industrial districts, whereas 60 percent of the victorious Democrats came from agricultural districts.

For now, the crucial point is that at the turn of the twentieth century, American politics, both North and South, was violently riven as it had not been for nearly half a century. The very intensity of these partisan divisions prevented major new problems from being recognized and resolved. In the eyes of increasing numbers of voters, the two traditional political parties and their leaders were not helping the country to address newly pressing issues.

Congressional reform reduced the power of centralized leadership structures, and more legislating began to happen in committees, where a cross-party coalition (renewed and formalized in a bipartisan Progressive Coalition) could more freely operate independently of the two parties.

In other words, just like the trend toward economic equality that we examined in the previous chapter, collaboration across party lines was no mere temporary wartime parenthesis, but the intensification of a depolarization that had been clearly visible for nearly half a century and would remain so for another quarter century after the war’s end. For more than two decades after World War II American politics remained much less tribalized and polarized, as compared to the intense and even violent conflicts at the outset of the twentieth century or the party vitriol that would characterize the early part of the twenty-first century. An informal content analysis of all inaugural addresses from 1901 to 2017 shows that those in the 1949–1965 period (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson) were distinctive in their emphasis on shared values, fairness, and unity, rather than self-reliance, individualism, and identity.

Political scientist Nolan McCarty has summarized virtually all nonpartisan assessments, “During the period of increased polarization, the main driver has been the increasing conservatism of the Republican party.”58 Whether

In contemporary America, party polarization and tribalization has reached an intensity unseen since the Civil War with no end in sight.

More people are likely today than thirty years ago to say that they are “independents,” rejecting both parties, but the evidence suggests that that category is quite heterogeneous, including many self-camouflaged partisans, and that it coexists with a trend toward stronger partisan commitment among partisans. Some self-described “independent” voters actually behave more like partisans in that they are nowadays less likely to switch from election to election. One possible interpretation is that a growing fraction of partisan, follow-the-leader voters are highly polarized and tribal, turning off many other voters, who may be choosing the “independent” title as a way of symbolically separating themselves from tribalization.

Finally, recent political science research has found that voters tend to adjust their policy positions to fit their “tribal” party loyalties, rather than the other way around.70 Sports fans typically feel a strong affinity for their team, even though they could not offer a reasoned explanation for their attachment. Similarly, political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue that “group and partisan loyalties, not policy preferences or ideologies, are fundamental in democratic politics,”71 and Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope find that “group loyalty is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.”72 Partisan identification is more a tribal affiliation than an ideological commitment, and that is a crucial part of the story of party polarization.

Even in local affairs far from the pinnacles of national politics, mass polarization became increasingly common after the early 1970s, not because of who showed up, but because of who didn’t. Participation in public meetings, local civic organizations, political parties, and political rallies by self-described middle-of-the-roaders fell by more than half between 1973 and 1994.

Ironically, at the same time that more and more Americans described their political views as “middle of the road” or “moderate,” the extremes on the ideological spectrum accounted for a bigger and bigger share of those who actually attend meetings, write letters, serve on civic committees, and even go to church. Because moderate voices have fallen silent, more extreme views have gradually become more dominant in grassroots American civic life. Even though many Americans remain self-described moderates, local civic life has become steadily more polarized.76 In the widely discussed book The Big Sort, published in 2008, political observers Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing argued that Americans are increasingly sorting themselves into politically homogenous and geographically segregated enclaves, with growing cultural and lifestyle differences between the two party-tribes as both cause and consequence of this sorting on the basis of partisan identity.

Cross-cutting ties and “inconsistent” identities (e.g., a liberal Republican or a conservative Democrat, an evangelical Democrat or an African American Republican) once softened partisan prejudice, but those are rarer now.79

Thus, as Americans have increasingly sorted themselves more consistently between the two political parties, and as social identities have aligned more completely with partisan loyalties, interparty prejudice and even anger have been heightened. Interpersonal partisan hostility has increased.81 American voters increasingly see supporters of the other party as extreme ideologically and flawed personally. Both Democrats and Republicans increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents. Out-party stereotyping in assessing the “intelligence” of Americans rose from 6 percent in 1960 to 48 percent in 2008; out-party bias in perceptions of “selfishness” rose from 21 percent to 47 percent. In slightly more than two decades (1994–2016) the rate of “extremely unfavorable” views of our party opponents rose steadily from less than 20 percent to about 56 percent.82

In this very intimate way, over the last half century partisanship has gradually replaced religion as the main basis of “tribal” affiliation in America.

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.

“We are unsettled to the very roots of our being,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1914. “There isn’t a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn’t move in a strange situation.… We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.”3

William Allen White’s 1910 utopian vision the new technological advances harbored the possibility of “making the nation a neighborhood.… The electric wire, the iron pipe, the street railroad, the daily newspaper, the telephone… have made us all one body.… There are no outlanders. It is possible for all men to understand one another.… Indeed it is but the dawn of a spiritual awakening.”

Already by the late 1950s, however, this burst of community involvement began to tail off. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, membership growth began to fall further behind population growth. On average, across all these organizations, membership rates began to plateau in 1957, peaked in the early 1960s, and began a period of sustained decline by 1969. Membership rates had more than doubled between the early 1940s and the early 1960s, but by 2000 the results of that massive postwar boom in joining had been entirely erased. The decline would continue uninterrupted through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and by 2016 more than a century’s worth of civic creativity had vanished. These averages conceal some

Three major survey archives contain relevant information: The General Social Survey (GSS), the Roper Social and Political Trends archive, and the DDB Needham Life Style archive.34 How has group membership in general changed over the last half century?

This modest conclusion, however, is drastically altered when we examine evidence on more active forms of participation than mere card-carrying membership. Service as an officer or committee member was once very common among active members of American organizations.35 Sooner or later, in the heyday of civic America the overwhelming majority of active members in most voluntary associations were cajoled into playing some leadership role in the organization.

Between 1973 and 1994 (the last time this question was posed by the Roper researchers) the number of men and women who took any leadership role in any local organization—from “old-fashioned” fraternal organizations to New Age encounter groups—was cut in half. Across the two decades, whites were more likely than blacks to hold a leadership role, but the trend was similar in both races. The leadership rate among whites fell from 17 percent to 9 percent between 1973 and 1994, while the rate among blacks fell from 12 percent to 7 percent. By this measure, across racial lines, virtually half of America’s civic infrastructure was obliterated in barely two decades.36

In 1975–1976, American men and women attended twelve club meetings on average each year—essentially once a month.38 By 2005 that national average had shrunk by two thirds to four meetings per year. In 1975–1976, 64 percent of all Americans attended at least one club meeting in the previous year. By 2005 that figure had fallen to 33 percent. In short, in the mid-1970s nearly two thirds of Americans still attended club meetings, but by the mid-2000s two thirds of Americans never

Thus, the quantity and quality of education available to black Americans expanded dramatically in the first half of the century, a surprising fact that corresponds to the larger story of America’s turn from “I” to “we.” However, the vast majority of schools during the first half of the twentieth century were racially segregated—by law in the South, and often de facto in the North.

Thus, measures of the drive for racial equality in the quality, quantity, and integration of education also show a clear “foot off the gas” pattern, with progress being made in the first two thirds of the century, followed by stagnation beginning in roughly the 1970s—precisely when America began its downward plunge from “we” to “I.”

In fact, progress toward income equality between blacks and whites—as we have now seen in many other measures—flatlined or outright regressed after the late 1970s, as Figure 6.4, as well as much other data, suggests.42 As Robert A. Margo writes, the black-to-white income ratio improved on average 7.7 percentage points per decade between 1940 and 1970. This was by no means a rapid enough convergence, but had this rate of change continued, the income ratio “would have been 0.88 in 2010, instead of its actual value of 0.64.”43 The critical result of widening, rather than further narrowing, of the national income gap during America’s “I” decades is that the difference between median black and white earnings today is “as large as it was in 1950.”

Once again, we see the unexpected pattern of change in black-white ratios of material well-being over the last 125 years: Incomplete, but substantial progress toward racial equality over the half century before 1970, but then a surprising halt to this progress over the subsequent half century.

However, the data indicate that nearly all of the gains toward equality in voter turnout occurred between 1952 and 1964—before the Voting Rights Act passed—and that modest gains made between 1964 and 1968 then almost entirely halted for the rest of the century—a shocking fact, entirely consistent with the other “foot off the gas” phenomena we have observed, as well as our now familiar turning point from “we” to “I.”

What is striking about these trends in African Americans’ progress toward equality in health, education, economic outcomes, and voting is both how similar they look to one another, and how different they look from the “hockey stick” story often assumed in discussions of the history of race in the twentieth century.

whites were moving into more secure, unionized jobs, while blacks were employed largely in what historian Thomas J. Sugrue has called the “meanest and dirtiest” jobs,

These jobs were more vulnerable to economic shocks and offered less long-term security, making it more likely that African Americans would suffer in tough economic times, which, as the century wore on, they did.65 But by far the most consequential form of racial exclusion has been residential.

As a result, at a time when white Americans were increasingly purchasing high-quality homes in suburban rings, black Americans remained disproportionately confined to older properties in the urban core.70

Meanwhile, black males were being subjected to increasingly high rates of incarceration for most of the century, a reality which, like residential segregation, has brought devastating consequences to the African American community. As

In other words, as blacks moved from farms to cities in both the South and the North, they moved not only out of places in which they were treated as worse than second-class citizens, but also into places that had an infrastructure of public goods. Though still largely segregated, black Americans’ overall access to institutions such as public hospitals and public schools increased dramatically as they migrated.

As Isabel Wilkerson, a master chronicler of the Great Migration, put it, “the former Confederacy was made better in part by the pressures put upon it by those who made the sacrifice to leave it.”82

And yet, by far the most consequential force for positive change was the organizing and advocacy of blacks themselves. The simultaneous upward climb toward racial parity but persistent exclusion from the mainstream that they experienced during the first two thirds of the century fueled a growing activism among African Americans who resisted oppression and called for true equality and full inclusion.

Bruce Schulman argues that the embrace of identity politics and culture in the 1970s, which we discussed in the preceding chapter, fueled the rise of a competitive ethos and the abandonment of a broader cooperative ethic in the public square. The result, he believes, was a fractured notion of citizenship—based less on broad commonality and more on claiming rights and privileges associated with a narrowed sense of group identity.152

And, despite the fact that gender parity has yet to be achieved on many dimensions, there has been little appreciable slowing down of progress in recent decades, unlike the phenomenon that we saw over and over again in the case of race. On the contrary, once women began to move toward educational, economic, and political equality (whether early in the century or much later), that progress largely continued unabated.14

delay in progress toward equality, followed by rapid progress in the last three decades of the twentieth century. To explain this dramatic uptick after 1970, Claudia Goldin identifies several factors that encouraged women to seek higher education, especially career-oriented education: the influence of post-Sixties feminism in encouraging an independent mind-set, an increase in divorce rates and women’s resultant need to support their families economically, the advent of the birth control pill, which allowed delayed childbearing, and young women seeing older counterparts participating in the workforce in greater numbers and with greater longevity.