Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone

...when they are destroyed, it is too...

...Men and women don't join them for the same reason they don't get involved in the PTA: They simply lack the cultural capacity to make connections with other people...

...Like so many contemporary intellectuals, Putnam wants to have it both ways...

...For Putnam, the rise and fall of community is best captured by economic metaphors: Environmental organizations are the "growth stocks" of the "associational world...

...Putnam does discuss the decline of unions, but his analysis reflects the shortcomings of his overall thesis...

...Charges of political repression in contemporary America may sound melodramatic and anachronistic...

...For all its folksy optimism, Bowling Alone reminds us that communitarianism, even the most resolutely hardheaded, demands a Lear-like dispensation...

...As the older generation dies off, self-interested baby boomers and materialistic Generation Xers increasingly monopolize the public sphere...

...If people don't march, it's because of the zeitgeist...

...Community is a form of "social capital...

...Unions for him are like Rotary Clubs and the American Medical Association...

...Despite the range of these proposals, they are of the cultural uplift variety and radiate the spirit of Nancy Reagan...

...Perched at the top of what might well be a mile-long driveway, they complain that the world is more isolated than it used to be...

...And what does Putnam offer in its place...

...Mills was certainly no cold war apologist, and anyone could see the deep scratches of acrid criticism in the work of Riesman, Hartz, and Trilling...

...He invokes this economic vocabulary to show that, despite our differences, we ultimately have the same interest—increasing our social capital—and so he can heartily summon us to work together for a common good...

...less costly...

...Although he agonizes over the isolation and emptiness of American public life, he cannot see how elites have consciously restricted participation over the last thirty years...

...108 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 BOOKS American intellectuals have worried for years about declining community...

...The trophy stands forgotten in a corner of their big house, a furtive reminder of their modest beginnings...

...Under the shadow of war, this generation became patriotic and volunteered in droves...

...The "and so on" conveys his breezy dismissal of the idea that men and women don't join unions because they are just too frightened...

...Although Putnam sees some hopeful signs (volunteer rates among youth are up), things generally don't look good for democracy in America...

...And for that reason, his is a failed jeremiad...

...Men and women who have been punished for union activism go home, get depressed, and withdraw from all but the most intimate family circles...

...Having ditched communitarian sentimentality for the stern logic of social capital, Putnam ultimately settles for a weird form of economic romanticism...

...If they don't get involved, it's because of their souls...

...Conformity and alienation provided more serviceable metaphors for intellectuals unable to see political repression even when it stared them in the face...

...Historically, union members have marched and struggled for social justice outside the workplace, creating monuments of solidarity such as Social Security and civil rights—even, as Josh Freeman has recently shown, the lineaments of European social democracy in cities like New York...

...Like physical capital in economic theory, social capital is an asset...

...Propelling our flight from community—at least, says Putnam, a good 75 percent of it—is a lethal combination of television and the passing of what he calls the "long civic generation," those men and women who came of age around the Second World War...

...Because there is virtually no distinction between politics, entertainment, and hanging out, the same causes must explain how often people vote, go to a meeting of the Kiwanis Club, or visit their next-door neighbors...

...it's the society we have today, the very society where no one participates...

...Call it the treacly science...

...corporate executives raise money for the United Way and smash unions...

...Putnam also demonstrates the deleterious effects of declining community...

...What their accounts had in common was a refusal to confront political repression and fear...

...Instead of examining how elites have used political repression to prevent people from participating, and how that repression leads people to retreat to their homes, intellectuals invoke an imaginary culture of withdrawal and isolation...

...Television is a piece of technology that he believes has become a way of life...

...Coming up that driveway, they thought less about saying good-bye to neighborhood than saying hello to status...

...In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam, for a time one of our foremost political sociologists and philosopher-king of the Clinton White House, seeks to rescue anxiety about the loss of community from just this kind of sentimentality...

...Lost in the lonely crowd, contemporary intellectuals overlooked the impact of these events...

...Now they live in Chappaqua, New York...

...But community is an elusive concept, so it has been nearly impossible to establish its demise—until now...

...First, although he distinguishes between "bonding" and "bridging" social capital, Putnam believes that different forms of community or "civic participation" are essentially the same...

...The order of the day, then, is not, for the most part, political transformation but cultural regeneration...

...It's inefficiency...

...Today, my parents lament the loss of community symbolized by that lonely trophy...

...So such calls, no matter how heartfelt, sound mawkish...

...Faced with these choices— total withdrawal or the Parent Teacher Association— who wouldn't turn on the tube...

...Long before they were neighbors of Hillary and Bill, it seems, my mom and dad bowled with Ralph and Alice Cramden...

...Where centuries of political thinkers, from Aristotle to Arendt, believed that social mores were structured by politics—the distribution of power, the drama of political contest, the quality of public leadership—Putnam reverses that causality, deeming our weak-tea politics a manifestation of bad habits in society...

...In the real world, of course, none of us has an abstract interest in community: Feminists organize for the National Organization for Women and against the Promise Keepers...

...Whether people eat out or act up, shout at the ball game or in the streets, they are doing things together, and that's what counts...

...Like McCarthyism, the effects of anti-union repression dilate into the far reaches of civil society, which explains at least some of the apathy and civic despair that Putnam criticizes...

...After all, their major complaint was that the United States was "too" liberal, that it lacked a reactionary or even respectable conservative tradition...

...The report concluded that "many workers who try to form trade unions are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized in reprisal" and denounced the "culture of near-impunity [that] has taken shape in much of U.S...

...And so their mourning, for all its poignancy, is saddled with evasive sentimentality...

...In one paragraph, Putnam recites, almost as if it bores him, the usual causes offered by serious scholars of union decline: "adverse changes in public policy, such as the antistrike policy introduced by the Reagan administration during the air traffic controllers strike of 1982, virulent employer resistance, flaccid union strategy, and so on...

...Unions in and out of the workplace thus create the civic infrastructure that Putnam prizes...

...But if we think about the recent history of the labor movement, they appear less extreme...

...BOWLING ALONE: THE COLLAPSE AND REVIVAL OF AMERICAN COMMUNITY by Robert Putnam Simon & Schuster, 2000 544 pp $26 TUCKED AWAY on a shelf in my parents' home is a trophy honoring their achievements in the Knights of Pythias bowling league...

...Putnam's tract is thus perfectly calibrated to the dot-corn moment, when every virtue—even the fuzziest—must justify itself in the language of economics...

...Citing an economist, Putnam claims instead that unions are on the wane because "the young worker"—presumably hooked on Friends —"thinks primarily of himself...

...Actually, it's not difficult at all...

...With three appendices, nine tables, fifty-nine pages of footnotes, and ninety-five charts, he shows the relationship between social connectedness and racial toleration, tax evasion, mortality rates, violent crime, educational performance— even "national average happiness...

...How could a country asphyxiated by liberalism be guilty of overt political illiberalism...

...Where communitarians have tended toward the woozy and the gooey—even Amitai Etzioni or Jean Bethke Elshtain would tire quickly of an afternoon spent hanging out at the local drugstore, sipping ice cream sodas, figuring out who exactly's gonna be Bobby's girl—Putnam strains for the hardheaded...

...Second, those causes are cultural and individual rather than institutional and political...

...Linking people in tight networks, it encourages trust and reciprocity, making "everyday business and social transactions...

...The remote control, warns Putnam, is today's most insidious teacher: "I suspect," he says, "that the link between channel surfing and social surfing is more than metaphorical...

...Culture, in other words, determines politics, and not vice versa...

...Seinfeld...

...Last August, Human Rights Watch issued a report charging that every year more than twenty thousand workers in the United States are the victims of anti-union repression...

...Amassing a set of numbers that would make even the most earnest social scientist blanch, Putnam has the hard data to prove that across almost every conceivable measure of communal participation—voting, attending club meetings, playing cards, and, yes, bowling in leagues—Americans today are doing things together less...

...He is writing a book titled Fear: The Biography of an Idea...

...Everything, he says, "from team sports to choirs and from organized altruism to grassroots social movements...

...We need only invoke those classic dei ex machina of American cultural criticism: technology and nostalgia...

...Losing sight of how they uprooted themselves, they forget that their escape from community was also an attempt to escape from class, or, to be more precise, from the lower to the upper class...

...Crime goes down, workplace morale goes up, Rolodexes get fat...

...The very busyness of community participation, which Putnam praises as one of the vital signs of democracy, turns out to be Prozac for the politi110 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 BOOKS cally depressed...

...In the 1950s, for example, figures such as DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 1 0 9 BOOKS David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, Louis Hartz, and C. Wright Mills stared across the political desert of cold war America and concluded that its arid terrain was the product of anomie and cultural conformity...

...But he won't touch the political conflicts—particularly about capitalism and economic inequality—that drive people in and out of that square...

...But subsequent generations grew up on television instead of ration cards...

...To reverse the tide of civic decline, we should just say no . . . to what...

...labor law and practice...

...They were not unwilling to address America's dark side...

...My parents haven't bowled in years, but after they got married in 1957, bowling was the ticket to membership in their adopted community, an unassuming suburb near Atlantic City...

...The consequence of declining civitas, he says, is not the intangible loneliness of anomie...

...The more resourceful sometimes manage to involve themselves in the community, opting for socially acceptable activities such as volunteering on the weekend...

...Whether mourning our loss or compiling its vital statistics, the communitarian stands atop a lonely heath—or long driveway—unable to comprehend the reasons of his own exile...

...As part of his "agenda for social capitalists," Putnam proposes increased leisure time so that we can "replenish our stocks of social capital," more sidewalks to facilitate greater socializing, and such cultural activities as "group dancing" and "songfests"—even "rap festivals...

...But for all its shrewdness, Putnam's stance is no less evasive than my parents...

...Putnam's argument, then, is not eccentric...

...To Putnam, the loss of the "long civic generation" is a demographic, not a political, fact...

...Social movements sound fine, but it's difficult to imagine a society organized around football, blood drives, and Cats...

...For in a sense, union busting is to our time what McCarthyism was to the fifties...

...it comes out of a long-standing tradition of American thought...

...They simply could not imagine that political repression had produced the silence they bemoaned...

...Whenever political life in this country seems constricted, intellectuals start talking about habits of the heart...

...a neighborhood barbecue or an evening of poker with friends is "a tiny investment in social capital...

...F1 VEN THOUGH Putnam is a political scientist by training—he's slated to be the next president of the American Political Science Association—and is alarmed by a genuine political problem, his analysis is decidedly apolitical...

...To unravel the causes of declining participation, says Putnam, we need not consider the power of state elites, economic classes, or political conflict...

...Rather than confront the political sources of apathy and communal decline—particularly the role of repression—American intellectuals prefer to speculate about the American soul, rampant individualism, consumerism, or other deformities of popular culture...

...COREY ROBIN is an assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York...

...He longs for a vibrant public square where men and women meet to discuss the great questions of the day and then continue the conversation over beers...

...But even among leftists, the category of political repression had dropped out of their vocabulary, at least when it came to the United States...

...homophobes love the church and hate ACT-UP...

...If they talk about their experience, they teach their children and spouses lessons about the futility of democracy more powerful than anything learned in an afternoon watching the soaps...

...With its focus on cultural pathology as the source of civic withdrawal, Putnam's work echoes that of previous generations of American social critics...

...PUTNAM, like many communitarians, suffers from a similar blindness...

...The impact of union busting is not limited to the workplace...

...Lurking beneath his social science are two questionable assumptions...

...Cultural factors—the priorities and commitments of society—are, for him, the most important causes of civic decline...

...Through loyalty oaths and employment tests, union purges and blacklists, public- and private-sector investigations, Americans got the message that they should stay away from any activity that smacked of communism—which often meant any political activity at all...

...DISSENT / Spring 2001 n III...

...The repression of unions—like other kinds of political repression—also produces the culture of isolation that Bowling Alone decries...

...a dip in church membership in the 1960s was a "market correction" after an unhealthy boom in the 1950s...

...Their decline is a symptom, not a cause, of democratic erosion...

...Immediately following the unprecedented strike wave of 1946, a coalition of business elites, conservative Republicans, and timid Democrats spearheaded a crackdown on the left, culminating not only in the Taft-Hartley Act but in McCarthyism...

...Since the early 1970s, union busting has been perfected as a genuine political art, with sophisticated consultants and Ivy League lawyers honing their skills in workplace after workplace...

...During elections, they raise armies of precinct walkers and organizers who turn quiet streets into political battlegrounds...