Picture the swing, perhaps the most omnipresent piece of equipment in schoolyards and backyards.  You step back to provide a bit of momentum for moving forward.  Reaction and counter-reaction.  After moving backwards you propel forward and higher… but you also fall back, forward and back, again and again.  A perfectly balanced pendulum will reach the same peak in both its directions.

Twenty years ago, Robert Putnam, Harvard Professor and former Dean of the Kennedy School of Government wrote Bowling Alone, a profound sociological study tracking the demise of collective engagement and connection in American society.  As a planner working and steeped in Jewish community, in Cleveland at the time, the book spoke to so many of the challenging trends we were trying to address – declining affiliation trends resulting in the loss of connection of community members to communal institutions, the fall-off of small donors, the increasing difficulty in gaining and sustaining consensus.

This year Putnam, together with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, published a follow-up book titled The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.  It is an extremely important book for this moment in American society.  Its relevance transcends the US because the forces of polarization that plague us are also rampant globally, and have been playing out in every Western democracy for the past decade or more.

In the opening of The Upswing the authors describe a spectrum of social ills – political polarization, widening income disparity, loss of connection and affiliation in community institutions, loss of faith in government and other civic institutions.  But they aren’t describing the United States of 2020; they are describing the US in the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century. The parallels are stunning, and thought-provoking.  We’ve been here before.

Bowling Alone was a tour de force, documenting the decline in collectivism and social cohesion in American society from its peak in the post-World War II period.  It detailed this steady decline over decades as the counter-reactions to the civil rights gains of the 1960’s set in and took over.  This coincided with a shift in public policy away from a focus on creating greater opportunity for more people.  Policy shifted to instead focus on individual gain through rollbacks on taxes and social programs.  Public health systems were diminished and degraded.  The commitment to public education was eroded.  The value of public service was debased (remember Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric about government being the enemy of the people).  And in more recent years, attacks on voting rights aim to disenfranchise the groups who gains were so hard-fought and won in the 1950’s and 60’s.

But Bowling Alone was half the story – the backward half of the pendulum.  Putnam and Garrett have now brilliantly documented all the social trends that were actually on the upswing during the 60+ year period before the decline.  The Gilded Age gave us magnificent estates and commercial architecture, and rampant poverty and social dislocation.  We might have stayed there, or declined further in to violent revolution in response.  That’s not our story.

Rather, our story is one of progressive change on multiple fronts.  There wasn’t a single actor or factor.  There were, instead, a range of progressive leaders acting in multiple arenas – education, health, civil rights, etc…   

The major premise of the book, documented in chart after chart, is that in every conceivable facet of society we moved from a very individualistic and selfishly focused society steadily towards a more collectivist one, peaking in the 1960’s before shifting to a steady decline.  Putnam and Garrett call this the “I-We-I” curve.

I started reading The Upswing just after the 2020 election, when the election of President Joseph Biden seemed like maybe a first harbinger of the beginning of the swing forward and upward.  I finished it during the week of the failed insurrection at the US Capitol.

There are several themes that struck me as I read the book that I will be exploring in several follow-up posts:

1.      What are the Metrics that Define the Swing?

2.      Balancing Individualism and Collectivism within American Society

3.      Seeding Future Leadership Through Youth Activism

4.      Neighborhood Activism as a Key to Increasing Civic Engagement

Stay tuned.