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

by Robert D. Putnam

thoughtful retrospective on mid-century America makes clear its deficiencies: the shortcomings of a society that undervalued individuality and diversity and gave woefully insufficient attention to racial and gender justice. Nonetheless, the empirical evidence we have gathered in this book also makes clear that we have paid a high price for the Sixties’ pivot—the indefensible economic inequality of the second Gilded Age, the political polarization that is enfeebling and endangering our democracy, the social fragmentation and isolation that ignore the basic human need for fellowship, and most fundamentally, the self-centeredness that itself makes it so difficult to achieve the unity of purpose required to change our national course.