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

by Robert D. Putnam

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.