Diminished Democracy by Theda Skocpol

...Instead of raising money from members (of whom they had relatively few), post-1960s advocacy organizations relied on private foundations (Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc...

...As a consequence, power in Washington is increasingly skewed away from the interests of the working class and the working poor...

...During the 1990s, communitarianism became one such tag, as did compassionate conservatism, neoliberalism, and the third way...

...Skocpol reminds her readers that "the GI Bill of 1944 was drafted and championed by a vast voluntary membership federation, the American Legion...

...Citizens may have pined to volunteer, but didn't actually do much of it...

...Unlike Putnam, who blames television for turning citizens into couch potatoes, Skocpol targets the "new politics" that took hold after the decline of the protest movements of the 1960s...

...In his book Bowling Alone, Putnam poured out abundant statistics and graphs that illustrated the decline of Elks Lodges, bowling leagues, even dinner parties...

...Nor were voluntary associations independent from government...

...Instead of mobilizing their members, advocacy groups hired professional researchers who crafted media-savvy messages and lobbyists who advocated for people they might never have met...

...Still, this initiative hasn't exactly spread like wildfire across America...

...Her evidence challenges those who romanticize the ability of stable, self-sufficient communities in the past to solve their own problems...

...Skocpol also believes that the Industrial Areas Foundation (a center-left network of community organizations started by Saul Alinsky) should give us hope...

...Essentially, there was never an age when local associations went it alone...

...Nonetheless, for debunking nostalgic communitarians of the right and for documenting the transformation wrought by the advocacy explosion of the 1960s, this book deserves a wide audience...

...Most obviously, it has heightened alienation from politics...

...It has also tilted politics in favor of the wealthy...

...Their arguments are also susceptible to expropriation by conservative ideologues who want to argue, as William Schambra and George W. Bush do, for downsizing the federal government and "returning" power to local civic institutions (Putnam himself, it should be pointed out, would not endorse such proposals...

...Skocpol unearths the historical relationship between voluntarism and the state...

...Instead of doing what academics tend to do-indulge in esoteric debates among themselves-she has written an important book that goes to the political heart of Putnam's and other neo-Toc-quevillians' arguments...

...Kevin Hattson To make a dent in political and intellectual debates, it helps to hang a tag on your philosophy, giving your ideas the feel of a movement...

...The results, he argued, were social distrust and civic disengagement...

...This is a depressing picture indeed...

...She explains, "Translocal associations flourished in early America in significant part because people were constantly on the move...

...Skocpol focuses on organizations like the Children's Defense Fund...

...Finally, when Americans found themselves wanting to reengage in civic endeavors-precisely what happened in the wake of 9/11-they had few places to turn...

...She asks, "Why should highly trained and economically well-off elites spend years working their way up the local-state-national leadership ladders of traditional membership federations when they can, instead, simply send checks to advocacy groups...

...For instance, lodges, social clubs, and churches enabled people to develop political skills...

...In many ways, Christian fundamentalists serve as "foot soldiers" during election time...

...Finally, Skocpol's praise of "civic journalism" is disappointing...

...Kevin Mattson is author of Intellectuals in Action and co-editor of Steal This University!: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement.ademic Labor Movement...

...While avoiding the nostalgia trap, Skocpol doesn't downplay historical change...

...Another was neo-Tocquevillian-ism...

...These thinkers emphasized the importance of "civil society"-that realm of voluntary associations (lodges and churches) that Tocqueville argued nurtured an active citizenry during the nineteenth century...

...Instead, they settled for President George W. Bush's call to return to normalcy...

...In short, Skocpol's optimism about the possibilities of a more progressive politics seems unjustified...

...The "advocacy explosion" of the 1970s created "memberless entities" that worked "inside the Beltway" on a host of issues...

...She points out that fewer people wanted to be associated with male-only (and sometimes white-only) lodges, and how the Vietnam War attenuated the patriotism of traditional veteran groups...

...The fact that this organization has tried historically to remain nonpar-tisan and disconnected from politics should also give Skocpol pause...

...Nonetheless, Skocpol ends her book optimistically, even if her own findings make this difficult...

...She thinks Putnam overlooked an important aspect of how voluntary groups have organized themselves in America...

...Robert Putnam-if only because his visage made it into People magazine- became the most famous neo-Toc-quevillian (though Michael Sandel, William Galston, and Jean Bethke Elsh-tain were also important...

...Certainly evangelical churches-with their burgeoning memberships-played a role in consolidating the New Right's power base...

...More important, a new form of political activism began to displace membership organizations like the American Legion, resulting in an advocacy revolution...

...Since neo-Tocquevillians document a decline from a healthier civic past, their work tends toward nostalgia...

...They learned rules of governance and the skills of deliberation in these organizations and then turned them to political advantage...

...For instance, she argues that "new right conservatives" have rediscovered grassroots political organizing, suggesting this might portend a welcome return to bottom-up politics...

...One of Putnam's critics, Theda Skocpol, happens to be a colleague of his at Harvard...

...Putnam's book was a strange read, since it proceeded through cold hard facts of social science and jargon ("social capital") only to culminate in what was essentially a sermon encouraging Americans to volunteer in their local neighborhoods...

...Citizens often used elected office in a voluntary organization as entry into national politics...

...Once again, churches and membership organizations are central to the work of these organizers...

...Yet the right's central call for deregulation and a more hawkish foreign policy comes out of that vast network of think tanks, conservative foundations, and media outlets that sprang up during the advocacy revolution that Skocpol documents and laments...

...Often voluntary organizations wound up formulating public policy in order to confront social problems...

...Skocpol characterizes the resulting "civic universe" as troubling...

...To counter such claims, she shows how the lodges, temperance societies, and church networks that dotted America's civic landscape in the nineteenth century were very often transnational and federated-not purely local...

...Massive transformations took place throughout the 1960s and 1970s...

...Skocpol is alert to how easily Putnam's arguments can be appropriated by conservatives...

...Sure, it would be nice to see journalists covering local issues more honestly, but how can that happen when local ownership of the media is giving way to media con-glomerization...

...It would seem just as plausible to take the right's recent success in American politics as a symptom of the problem, not the solution...