Putnam's Real Revalation

 

THE PROBLEM:

             Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting a young United States in the early 19^th century, observed that one of America’s greatest strengths lay in its people’s habits of voluntary association, which allowed their democracy to function a successful degree that Europe had never been able to achieve. Writing a couple hundred years later, Robert Putnam wrote of a  historic decline in civic engagement over the latter half of the 20^th century, a phenomenon that he labeled Bowling Alone and lamented, as Tocqueville would have concurred, as unquestionably bad for America; he sought to show the fact of the decline, its causes, and propose solutions. Fixating on the problem of civic disengagement as today's great American civic disaster and pointing to Putnam as the main expose on the crisis is not a new revelation. However, I have found myself wondering how much of Putnam's analysis really fits with the observations of Tocqueville, the original observer of the unique strength that came from American voluntary association, for in very key aspects Putnam's work seems incomplete in light of Tocqueville. If I am right about that, and if the incongruousness in literature is reflective of reality, then to a very real degree the hand-wringing over Putnam's book in the 24 years since he published is, in many ways, just sound and fury, for we, as Americans, have missed the real truth that his data reveals.  The two men would probably agree substantially about the effect of WWII  in forging the last, great civic generation, but, it seems clear to me that rather than focus on the virtues of the Greatest Generation’s formative years, the author of Democracy in America would probably choose to focus on what came after the War as being the real point of focus for understanding the decline of civic life in America, probably even calling it all utterly predictable given the post-War history.

             Putnam draws on a broad range of diverse statistics to conduct an analysis that concludes with the observation that American civic engagement has been declining for decades (as of 2000 when he published). His primary causes of American disengagement from civic life that he ultimately arrives at are fourfold: greater scarcity of time and resources, “suburbanization, commuting, and sprawl,” the advent of television and other electronic entertainment, and the slow, gradual demise of the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation. Of these four, he puts the blame for up to 10% of the decline each on the first two factors, up to 25% on the second, and up to 50% on the last.

             The mechanisms by which the first three of these factors have worked to erode civic engagement are unimportant to the conversation between Tocqueville and Putnam and, in any case, largely intuitive. It is regarding generational replacement’s modus operandi vis-à-vis civic disengagement that the contention between the two arises.

             This last, most important, and most causally ambiguous factor Putnam asserts is the demise of what he refers to as “the long civic generation,” Americans born between 1910 and 1940, the Greatest Generation and most of the Silent Generation, with a special emphasis on those born between 1925 and 1930. This generation, he explains, was the most civically engaged in all of American history (to the extent we can track such things). By contrast, the Baby Boomers, Generation X, and the Millennials were and are, Putnam shows, several orders of magnitude less civically engaged than any polled generation that preceded them. He does note a slight increase in engagement among the millennials, but not even a fraction of the amount needed to close the gap (The book predates Generation Z coming of age and thus has no data to offer on their propensity for engagement). Putnam has nothing even approaching a definitive answer as to why this should have been the case, but he does offer one intuitively appealing explanation. First, WWII necessarily jumpstarted civic engagement across America as the country united to support the war effort, calling on everyone to organize and step up to execute this massive national sacrifice of blood and treasure, and, no doubt, Putnam argues, growing up and coming of age during such a time indelibly affected its youth. This is the only explanation he offers for this generation’s extraordinary civic devotion, but he is quite clear and emphatic that their story’s conclusion, more than any other factor, is the most important contributor to civic disengagement in America.

             However, the consequence of it notwithstanding, this, more than any other explanation Putnam offers of the factors of civic decline is prima facie unsatisfactory and incomplete. It is not that it is implausible, or even unpersuasive, so far as it goes, but by itself, the argument he has made on this point, at least as he has made it, does not explain what made this generation’s successors so especially un-civic. To point to just the most blaringly unanswered question, why should the Long Civic Generation not have started with the Lost Generation? It is not as though WWI was not a similar generational experience, producing a similar spurt of civic activity; Putnam acknowledges that it did, as, indeed, major war generally does in American history, though admittedly not usually as pronounced of one as that of WWII. Putnam gives only one, indirect answer to these points: the perceived nobility and objective victory of WWII. The enemy America had fought had attacked them first, was truly evil, and was, ultimately, totally defeated. However, he makes this observation in the context of distinguishing it from Korea and Vietnam, doing nothing to answer the question of how it was substantially different from WWI, which, though not as romanticized as WWII, was a decisive victory over a clear enemy and never produced its own counterculture. Nor, if it comes to it, does he answer another quite obvious question: if, as he accepts as fact, the character of WWII was the important distinguishing factor,  and the character of the Vietnam war and the character of Korea were of a substantially similar tarnished nature relative to WWII, at least in public perception, as he claims, then the Greatest Generation should have been the only members of the Long Civic Generation; the first two generations of civic decline should have been the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers. However, Putnam is clear in a number of places that the latter mark the start, and, the time parameters he has given for the Long Civic Generation very clearly include the substantial majority of the former. Finally, even setting all of this aside, the most important question of why generational replacement should be so important a factor, why the Baby Boomers and their successors should have been so much less civically engaged relative to any American generation preceding them, remains only partially answered. Putnam has offered only an explanation for why their parents were so civic, not for why they were not so. This is an obviously incomplete argument.

             To be sure, there are quick answers to all of these objections. The first might be answered by distinguishing between the sudden spurt of activity major war typically produces and the sustained, heightened level over decades that WW II yielded as being specifically in an effort to avoid the mistakes of the post-WWI era. To the second you could argue that, perhaps, it is too precise with generational experience, that the youngest members of the Silent Generation are excluded from Putnam’s Long Civic Generation, that substantial numbers of its older members would have remembered and been shaped by WWII’s America, shaped enough to counteract any more negative effects of the Korean War and that, therefore, their generational experiences are similar enough to, for the purposes of this discussion, group them together with the Greatest Generation. It might also be added that he calls these younger members of the Long Civic Generation markedly less civic relative to the Greatest Generation, though still very engaged relative to the Baby Boomers. Finally, the last objection might be answered by saying that it relies on a flawed understanding of Putnam’s statistics, for, when he says that the first three factors account for only 45% of the civic decline, he means the aggregate 20^th century decline, not the aggregate deficit of post-war Americans’ civic activity relative to their parents’—in other words the reader has to remember overlap.

             If the first two answers are accepted, then the mystery of Putnam’s analysis is heightened even further, for it means accepting that there was something about the character of WWII so distinct from that of WWI that it impacted both its young adults AND its adolescents AND its children AND its babies (The youngest members of the Long Civic Generation as defined by Putnam would have been mere toddlers during Pearl Harbor) in such similar fundamental ways that they all collectively carved out a distinct place for themselves in history to which the proteges of a chronologically close war of similar magnitude never attained, but, despite being so impacted, they passed on none of those habits to their children, whereas Putnam is clear that the Lost Generation did. As to the third answer, it does not take close examination of Putnam’s statistics to rebut it; he does so himself. He clarifies that only, at most, 15% of the effects of television can be said to overlap with the effects of generational decline, and that is the only factor he notes in his discussion of overlap. Further, one who has been paying attention will have noticed that the total of Putnam’s factors’ accounting only adds up to 95%; the last 5%, he acknowledges, is unknown. Overlap does account for a statistically significant portion of the decline, but not nearly enough to provide an answer.

             Thus, Putnam’s analysis helps to shed a great deal of light on what is happening, and even a bit of illumination on why it is, but when it comes to the most important aspect of “why?”, his analysis is incomplete. To help fill in the holes, turn to Tocqueville.

             Tocqueville defines individualism as “a reflective and peaceable sentiment that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of those like him and to withdraw to one side with his family and his friends, so that after having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to itself.” He also writes that, as societies become more democratic, the obligations of people towards one another imposed by aristocracy fade, and equality of conditions becomes realized, their members all tend toward individualism. In other words, individualism is a natural state for democratic peoples. Americans have managed to counteract this impulse by an almost artificial means, importing wholesale Puritan societies that brought with them the spirit of the township: “[An American] is attached to his township not so much because he was born there as because he sees in that township a free and strong corporation that he is a part of and that is worth his trouble to seek to direct.” The Frenchman is speaking here on the New England township particularly, but this is a spirit that has pervaded all across America in some degree or another. This spirit is what has allowed the Americans to achieve their historic plethora of associations and civic life despite the fact that “the same social state that renders associations so necessary to democratic peoples renders them more difficult for them than for all others.” Thus, if de Tocqueville were to be told that some cause was making American associations evanesce with the disappearance of a generation, he would probably infer that the legacy of Puritan mores, which led every single generation before 1940 to continue in the associational tradition, was simply not passed on from the Greatest Generation to their children, and, obviously, once one generation had lost it, it would not have been passed on to any others. In the absence of such a tradition that artificially amends the consequences of social equalizing, equality of conditions would run its natural course, which, Tocqueville explains, is to push everyone towards individualism. Thus, if confronted with Putnam’s analysis, Tocqueville would probably say that he is focusing his investigations in the wrong place. The question is not what mores the Long Civic Generation had, but why those mores were not passed to their children.

             Putnam focuses on what made the Long Civic Generation so especially civic relative to previous generations and considers what circumstances of their youth might be emulated to re-achieve this. But this is a red herring. The real question is not why there was a sudden new apex in civic activity in post-War America, but why a sudden new nadir followed. Put another way, the most important question is not why the Baby Boomers were less civically engaged than their parents, but why they were less civically engaged than the Lost Generation, or any other American generation that preceded them (Strictly speaking, there is not data I know of to confirm that all generations previous to them were more civic, but I'll assume readers won't begrudge me this liberty of assertion).

             Most would probably agree with Putnam that the key event that distinguishes the Long Civic Generation from all others is WWII. Therefore, in seeking the reason for that generation’s failure to pass on mores, that might be a good place to begin searching for a cause. Tocqueville’s observed that, “all those who seek to destroy freedom within a democratic nation ought to know that the surest means of succeeding at this is war.” The reason is that “war…cannot fail to increase immensely the prerogatives of civil government in these peoples; it almost inevitably centralizes the direction of all men and the employment of all things in its hands. If it does not lead one to despotism suddenly by violence, it leads to it mildly through habits.” Putnam shows with data that this change of habits did not occur in the war’s proteges, but either the war or something proximate to it altered the nation’s character in a way that caused the change to occur in their children.  While there is no reason to think that Tocqueville would disagree with Putnam about the effect of WWII on its proteges, he would probably dismiss this as of comparatively little importance. The plus factor of the war notwithstanding, he would say, the key to the Long Civic Generation’s civic development lay, just as with all their predecessors, with their foundation in a antebellum America. As Putnam notes, the habits of civic engagement are formed in the youth, and, Tocqueville might well concede, for a generation with that historic American foundation, the effects of a war on it during its coming-of-age might very well be civically stimulating rather than deleterious. For generations without that grounding, however, he would argue, it would have precisely the effect the latter half of the 20^th century has shown. WWII’s most impactful effect on the Long Civic Generation, then, was to alter the mores that they passed to their children so that they were no longer focused around that “corporation that [they were] a part of,” but instead around the new external goals of civic government that war sets.

             Astute readers would probably point out here that the previously set objections to Putnam’s argument are being conveniently ignored. In the first, place the explanation for most of the Silent Generation being part of the Greatest Generation—similar generational experience—no longer seems to work, for, in all but the youngest cases, they really cannot be said to have a grounding in antebellum America like the Greatest Generation can be. Further, the question of why the Lost Generation did not fail to pass on the Puritan mores, despite being heirs of a similar conflict, is unanswered.

             The answer to both observations is that the wrong distinguishing variable has been highlighted. WWII distinguished the Long Civic Generation from others, but what distinguished the Baby Boomers and Generation X was the Cold War. The difference between the Lost Generation and the Long Civic Generation is that, after WWI, America turned inward. It obviously did not wholly return to its antebellum state, but the energies of the nation that had been temporarily centralized around the war effort were free to turn back to the community. The people of the United States could return to being primarily concerned with the “corporation that [they were] a part of.” In addition to this, American involvement in WWI lasted less than a year, and in WWII only four years, and it is especially “long war” which de Tocqueville says poses a threat to democracy. This should be  fairly obvious, as despotism arrived at “through habits” requires time to form those habits, time which was lacking in either of the world wars, but which was present during the Cold War. This also explains why members of the Silent Generation can be included in the Long Civic Generation, for it was not really WWII that had so deleterious an effect on American civic engagement, but the habits of the Cold War. That “war” lasted forty-odd years depending on when its start is dated, and necessarily involved the constant centralization of civic government which de Tocqueville warned against, including in the prosecution of two massive wars, the second of which lasted over ten years. Obviously this conclusion is not backed up by data, but it would seem to be the one that Tocqueville would point to if confronted with the facts of America’s 20^th century history. Further evidence in favor of this interpretation could be seen in the Millennials’ muted, but nonetheless present, tendency for renewed civic engagement that Putnam notes. The book unfortunately predates 9/11 and the War on Terror, which this argument would anticipate as muting Generation Z’s civic involvement in a similar fashion to the Baby  Boomers’ and Generation X’s--and this writer is unfortunately too lazy to check whether this occurred--but even such evidence as it does present conforms quite well to the French aristocrat's predictions.

             Obviously this factor of semi-martial confrontation in the international sphere does not explain everything. There are still the effects of temporal scarcity combined with economic hardship, suburbanization, and electronic media to consider, and no doubt these, along with other modern factors will continue to be obstacles to civic engagement going forward. However, as America has just “finished” (though with no real resolution that guarantees the end’s permanence) over two decades of war in the Middle East and is now entering a new decade of great power conflict that seems ripe with potential for Cold War-esque national efforts, it seems of the utmost importance that, just as she continues to grapple with modern obstacles to civic life, she find a way of surmounting this old one predicted by de Tocqueville in the republic’s earliest days.

             Putnam says that Americans should look to emulate the Progressives, a generation responsible for a truly shocking number of today’s civic institutions in “create[ing] new structures and policies (public and private) to facilitate renewed civic engagement.” They should deliberately seek to civically educate the youth, to make the workplace more conducive to family and community activity, to spend less time commuting, to become more spiritually aware and involved, to cut down on screen time and make what screen time they do have socially engaging, spend greater time on cultural activities, and ensure greater political activity in communities. None of these recommendations, it seems, Tocqueville would object to, but he would probably say that they do not address a deeply profound problem in an age where foreign policy, world involvement, and military might will necessarily continue to play such a large role in America. The effects of centralization of which he spoke, though perhaps not always so pronounced as during the world wars or the Cold War, will not be going away any time soon. The federal government will, of necessity, continue to receive aggrandizement and power far above what it held during Tocqueville’s visit, and the federal state will continue to grow. Unless the political problem of how to keep the growth of the federal state from coming at the expense of the individual states, and thereby at the expense of the counties and townships, is solved, then no amount of progress on the initiative Putnam puts forth will suffice to counteract this one, systemic predator on American civic life. Even further involvement in local politics will not suffice if the orientation of those politics is consistently turned towards a central point, but that is the inevitable pull of this age of American foreign policy. That is the problem which Putnam does not solve, Tocqueville would say; that is the great threat to civics of this time.

THE SOLUTION:

             I have painted a bleak picture, but I do believe there is a way to solve this threat to civic life. One point has to be settled up front; it is no good trying to fundamentally change the policy so that America can turn inward and not have to worry about the effects of centralization from this source at all. contra Pat Buchanan's "great exception" garbage that he promoted post-1989 and to which many MAGA disciples are unwitting heirs today, the only way this age ends in the sense I am here characterizing it is in a manner damning to America that we should all dread and hope and pray against. We tried to forcibly end it after WWI and paid for it with the blood of over 400,000 men. For better or worse, the world we live in now requires, for our own security if not for moral reasons, hegemonic strength and activity from America and will for the foreseeable future.

             This fact means that an aspect of Tocqueville's famous concept of self-interest well understood will have to be altered. At our nation’s founding, Washington “established as a point of doctrine that the self-interest well understood of Americans was never to take part in the internal quarrels of Europe.” This doctrine could be extended to apply to all states outside of the Western Hemisphere. It simply flows from the belief, correct at the time, that America could not, without severe damage to her own affairs, take sides in Old World international politics. Fortunately, this was a point of doctrine, not dogma. It can be argued to the American people that the facts of the world have changed and that it would now not only not be detrimental to actively participate in the politics of the world, but that it would be detrimental not to without offending their sense of self-interest well understood. In fact, the idea that, by helping other free countries, we are helping ourselves is one that the sense would be quite disposed toward if once convinced that circumstances have changed. Indeed, I believe that the consensus achieved on the Truman Doctrine and the initially overwhelming support among them for aiding Ukraine demonstrates that the legacy of WWII and the Cold War have already imparted this belief to many Americans. However, the populace must be continually educated and persuaded on this point, for, if  a substantial portion are not, then no other measure will work towards the goal of reversing de Tocqueville’s effects, as a portion will be disposed, by this basic instinct, to continually fight this foreign policy politically, which will in turn require those who are persuaded to respond politically, which will guarantee a continuous, centralized, national fight over this question in the federal sphere, a guaranteed orientation of political energy toward this central point.

             The second step, which follows naturally from the first, that must be taken is to cultivate the idea of this dangerous state of foreign affairs as being normal in the American mind. From WWII to the Cold War to the War on Terror, every mission in foreign policy has been treated as a crisis requiring extraordinary centralization. That cannot continue to be the case. They must come to be seen as surmountable problems which require ordinary levels of centralization. The problem with changing from a doctrine as old as Washington’s is that there is no new standard for federal limitation agreed upon. If a new level  of power for the federal government is once decided on and fixed, and that is agreed upon as the norm generally, the energies of national politics can return to looking inward most of the time, except in the case of actual war. This does not contradict what  Tocqueville argued. Remember, he does not say that involvement in international politics leads to mild despotism, but that war—meaning actual war in which generations of boys are drafted and killed—does so. The problem in America is that its default federal foreign policy powers are so impotent that it is only through claiming the seemingly unlimited powers of a nation at war that she can adequately answer the problems she faces today (I do not mean its constitutional powers, but the default powers the people are prepared to yield).

             So then, what we ought to have gleaned from Putnam's work when it was published are two essential civic tasks to cure the societal disease he exposed: first, education and persuasion of Americans on the changed world of today and on how self-interest well understood now demands American involvement in the world on a massive scale and, second, forging a new consensus on what the appropriate limits to the federal government are in that world. I confess that I do not anticipate easy success in either talk, and I am even inclined to pessimism, but not to despair, which the Catholics are right to characterize as a sin. Creating the civic life at which our Old World observer marveled was of itself a miracle; I believe it is in our power to achieve a second one.