For some scholars, the study of democratic politics has moved from a focus on why some societies have it and others don’t, to a speculation about why it isn’t working so well in the nations where it has been deeply rooted. Time after time, our system for electing leaders and making collective decisions seems to fall short, and we wind up unable to engineer collaborative solutions to shared problems. The next two years will be a case study in this type of dysfunction. Who is to blame for the failure of democracy’s promise? One theory – Robert Putnam's work involving the production and distribution of social capital - seems to have become popular.
Indeed, as is always the case in scholarly discourse, Putnam didn’t invent the concept. It’s a very old one. Putnam cites Alexis de Tocqueville, as his intellectual predecessor. Tocqueville, of course, is the brilliant French theorist and cultural eyewitness who traveled to the United States during our collective national infancy to observe our habits. Tocqueville concluded that we had, among all the other gifts we could call our own, a special skill at associating with one another. We were a nation of joiners. In working together in our lodges and secret societies we learned the tricks of cooperation and compromise. And from this came a readiness to work together on common problems as a collectivity. This set us apart from the rigidly hierarchical societies of the old world, where individuals owed allegiance to their superiors, and did what they were told. Europeans lacked the talent for deliberating among one another. And, more importantly, they lacked the trusting nature necessary to work together with others. Europeans acted from obligation, not consensus, and from fear of the repercussions if they failed to do as their social superiors commanded them. They trusted only in the willingness of their political and economic masters to exile them, or to seize their property, or to kill them.
America was a vast community of equals, with good-will in our hearts, and a trusting regard for one another. Tocqueville largely ignored the fact that a sizable portion of our population—women, slaves, the illiterate—were denied a part in collective deliberations and often suffered all manner of insult and injuries as a result of the decisions manufactured among the small part of the population permitted full citizenship. Also, although he couldn’t be aware of it at the time, our great machinery for manufacturing consensus and cooperation and collective solutions was due to breakdown in bloody calamity over the issues of state sovereignty and slavery a generation after his landmark contribution to social theory, Democracy in America, was published.
Nevertheless, however imperfect Tocqueville’s analysis was, it was celebrated as one of the great early contributions to social science. Tocqueville, consciously or not, invented many of our familiar social scientific tools. Democracy in America was a grab-bag of carefully made observations magnificent in size. Any scholar’s work, even the great ones, remains unfinished. Certain questions are fenced off, while analytical attention is focused on other ones (usually the easier ones). Subsequent scholars can come back and kick down the fences to expand the analytical project into new areas. Some conclusions are proven wrong by subsequent history, and younger scholars can return and reengineer the analytical apparatus to improve it, so earlier mistakes are fixed.
Social capital, as defined by Putnam, consists in the “networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.” For Putnam, trust, norms and networks—social capital—improve “the quality of public life and the performance of social institutions.” Without trust and interconnectedness we can’t have public life. Or, at the very least, it would be a morally impoverished game of grab-what-you-can whenever no one was looking. This is important, because we expect (or at least we once expected) public life and social institutions to facilitate the achievement of the aims of civilization, the accomplishment of great collective projects, like building economies and physical infrastructure, legal systems and political order. The cooperation required for public life, at least on the scale required for great national societies to accomplish their far-reaching aims, is impossible without trust and reciprocity. We agree to pitch in now, lend our muscle-power and income taxes to great public projects, because we trust that we will be permitted to share in the resulting benefits and we believe that others will contribute as well. Trust and reciprocity are manufactured when individuals are connected in dense networks of association and work together, face to face, to solve problems collaboratively. Where members of a society are most likely to join others in doing shared work under the umbrella of religious, social, charitable, recreational, or occupational associations, trust and expectations of reciprocity are most likely to develop and responsive, representative democracy is most likely to flourish. There’s a type of beneficial mass delusion that takes place: because we can trust those we share secret handshakes with in our Masonic lodge, we begin to believe we can trust everyone in the huge, sprawling community that extends out beyond the horizon.
Putnam’s enormously influential contribution, Bowling Alone, carried this conclusion: if our political institutions and public life are miserable, we have no one but ourselves to blame. The reason we are in the political mess we are in is because we have allowed our Elks memberships to lapse. We have quit going to church. We have abandoned our workplace bowling team. In some venues, this message resonated with the right-wing talking heads on television and neo-conservative public intellectuals. They joined Putnam in pointing the finger at the T.V. addicted masses, who turned their backs on the original spirit of American volunteerism.
Bowling Alone has a convenient blindness to the dysfunctions of our contemporary political process and their role in the decline of democracy in the U.S. The corrupting role of money in politics and the unequal distribution of wealth, not the collapse of our local gardening clubs and Boy Scout troops, go a long way to explain the sad state of participatory politics in the U.S. The withdrawal of trust in the U.S. is a predictable and easily understood consequence of a social and political system that fails to serve the needs of the nation’s population.
At the core of Putnam’s work is the idea that American’s are somehow to blame for their failure, because they have lost their skill at negotiating trust and interconnectedness. They don’t believe in themselves enough. They can’t come together for the big hug (or the thousands of local hugs in their neighborhood lodges and clubhouses) that builds civic union. But this ignores the machinery Republicans have built to shred trust, to destroy our unity, to tear us apart. Putnam refers to social capital as both the “lubricant” that helps societies get things done, and the “social glue” that holds them together. This contradictory language, both slippery and sticky, is still somehow right. At one point, Americans found ways to more easily glide toward agreement, and we stuck together through difficult and contentious times. Today’s Republican Party is devoted to making agreement harder, and using crises to splinter us apart.
We have, in fact, turned away from a shared associational life, stopped working together in small and larger ways, crafting collaborations and engineering solutions. And we don't trust one another. Maybe we never did, not completely. Many of the associations Putnam pictures when he talks about his work - Elks Clubs, bowling leagues, Episcopal churches - were awfully white. Maybe the work of building trust was only accomplished within this sliver of our wider diversity. We just didn't notice because whites were the politically relevant class within our society for a very long time. They all got along! And things worked out OK. (Putnam's new book, American Grace, makes the interesting case that something similar was going on in African American communities, in black churches especially, where trust and expectations that we can work cooperatively were fashioned. And one consequence of this was the civil rights movement, a political effort that required trust, far-reaching cooperation, and expectations that big problems can be overcome with shared effort.)
The idea that we manufacture trust in local settings, and become conditioned to be trusting, is a robust idea, supported by lots of research of many types. In psychology research, in sociology, and anthropology, we find evidence that our vast social landscape, populated by millions and millions of people we will never meet, is made understandable, familiar, navigable, and less frightening because of lessons we learn (and trust we develop) in more intimate settings and face to face encounters.
For me, this says we need to build more local ties, reaching out across class and race, religion and age, and all the things that separate us. For this to work, we need to set aside our deeply rooted prejudices and hatreds, to be open to learn to trust others not like us. This is hard to do. In an earlier posting I discussed one reason why this might be true - a part of the nation holds an out-dated view of what it means to be an American. For this group, America is a white, Anglo-Saxon nation. It has been since its founding, and its core culture - the wellspring we draw our identity and strength from - still is. Republicans in recent years have been spinning a narrative about the country, and its problems, that reinforces rather than challenges this idea. In truth, all national identities evolve over time. Here is what I said in that earlier posting about America:
This narrower view of who we are imagines America as a land settled, long ago, by Europeans. This group, first to risk building something in the new world, and still the majority, should, properly and without apology, be at the levers of our governmental systems, and our state, our schools, our national identity, should all reflect this majority’s culture and morality.
But this isn’t how it should be in America. Or, at least, given one tradition, one strand of our national DNA, this is unacceptable: we are a national organized around a set of inclusive principles, a community of distinct groups, retaining their customs and faiths, yet combined, part of a shared destiny. According to Michael Walzer, our “political culture” – our system of laws, the assumptions behind them, our form of government – was established by the earliest settlers and, as a result, was “English and Protestant.” But other aspects of this Anglo Saxon culture were never firmly established, and subsequent groups weren’t “assimilated entirely into the dominate culture.” They resisted assimilation, preserving their separate cultures. All these groups, living intermixed and dispersed across the broad landscape of the country, occupied a “common political space,” and shared a common concern to use politics (and the state) to advance their common safety and well-being. Thus, this mix of ethnic, religious, and cultural groups finds their collective and separate fates joined. Each group plays a role in shaping the nation’s direction and history, and hence a takes a part in our narrative. America became what Walzer calls “a nation of nationalities.” It may not always be pretty, but, Walzer (and liberals like me) believe this works. Groups, perhaps invisible, perhaps bullied into fearful silence, perhaps uninterested in previous political issues, but now awakened by an issue that has salience and meaning for them, find a voice and articulate their views. Perhaps most central to our concerns, groups can demand a new, more just arrangement for their incorporation into the political process. What follows is a period of negotiation and a new, more just incorporation into the political contract. This is how the circle of inclusion and citizenship was widened over the nation’s long history.
This is how each group is written into our narrative and becomes "American." But Republicans have been deliberately sabotaging this process, persuading some of us that this machinery for transforming our narrative and our sense of ourselves and widening our community is weakening us, diluting what it means to be American.
I firmly believe this is undermining our prospects for a reinvigorated, more participatory political and civic life. If we can't push past our prejudices, and roll up our sleeves and work together on PTAs, in community organizations, and in our churches and synagogues and mosques, and perhaps more importantly, the interfaith efforts our churches and synagogues and mosques engineer, then we will capitulate to commercial and corporate interests and the wealthy, who view our splintering as a gift.
Interaction on Facebook isn't a substitute. Nor is pat-yourself-on-the-back volunteering. I know our lives are full, but this matters. Join your PTA, coordinate efforts at your church or synagogue to open and run a soup kitchen or shelter, support a network for substance abusers, or battered women, or new immigrants, or cancer survivors. What matters is working with others, those like you and different than you, doing the collaborative planning, the decision making, and shared effort necessary to accomplish your aims. It has to be hard, sometimes contentious. Simply showing up to ladle soup one Saturday a month isn't enough, because you aren't fighting with others, finding solutions, and building trust unless you are part of the planning and management of the effort.
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