‘The Upswing’ Review: Bowling Alone No More?

Some books are so persuasive that they become clichés. This was the fate of Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” published two decades ago. Backed with mountains of alarming data, the book’s core argument—that Americans were falling away from civic, social and political engagement and toward an atomized individualism—served as a kind of foghorn, warning of coming trouble in a moment of relative hope and confidence. It was an immediate hit, but many critics thought its case too gloomy. 

Within a decade, the critics’ hopefulness had mostly dissipated, and the book was understood as a guide to an increasingly angry and frustrated society. And by now, republished in a slightly revised and expanded 20th-anniversary edition, “Bowling Alone” (Simon & Schuster, 581 pages, $20) seems if anything to understate its case. Americans are not just less engaged in civic life; many are intensely alienated, isolated and lonely. We have adopted the parlance of “deaths of despair” and internalized the sense that we are coming apart. 

And yet returning to this now-classic text also reveals layers of complexity that go beyond the cliché. Mr. Putnam, a Harvard political scientist and a master of the illustrative example and the clarifying use of quantitative data, offered a sophisticated theory of what had gone wrong in American civic life. Two decades later, he is also willing to acknowledge some things he missed, or misconceived. 

The revised edition, for instance, acknowledges that the very first trend taken up in “Bowling Alone”—declining rates of political participation as measured by voting rates—has actually reversed in the intervening years. Voting rates in 2016 were almost 10 percentage points higher than they had been in 1996. Yet this increased intensity of political engagement is not simply good news: It is a marker of intensified polarization, and in some respects a sign of trouble. Mr. Putnam also takes up the advent of social media, which had not yet really emerged when his book was first published, and offers a nuanced assessment of its implications for social engagement—which it both enables and deforms. 

But what stands out most about “Bowling Alone” at 20 is the absence of any clear way forward. The book describes a multifaceted decline and calls upon the reader to reverse it somehow. But it doesn’t offer much advice about just how that could happen. This absence of plausible prescription has become more evident over time because the past two decades have overflowed with books that follow the same pattern. They offer a detailed sociology of decay followed by vague sermonizing about revival. But what would a sociology of revival look like? How, specifically, does a society like ours recover from the kind of broad-based breakdown of solidarity we are experiencing?

It is a mark of Mr. Putnam’s creativity, energy and public spiritedness that, at the age of 79 and with countless laurels to rest on, he is not content to publish just a revised version of his 20-year-old masterpiece but has set out to answer the question that “Bowling Alone” left unaddressed. Alongside this anniversary edition, Mr. Putnam and a co-author, the scholar and social entrepreneur Shaylyn Romney Garrett, have released “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.”

At the core of “The Upswing” is a simple and powerful insight: The heights of solidarity from which America has fallen since the middle of the 20th century were themselves reached by a steady ascent over the prior half-century. 

Perhaps because of when modern social-science survey methods first appeared, or because of the still-powerful cultural dominance of Americans born in the 1940s and ’50s (consider this year’s election contest between two septuagenarians), we tend to think of midcentury America as a norm against which to measure ourselves now. But what if an earlier America was divided and troubled just as we are? And what if it revitalized itself in just the way that we might wish to do today?

Drawing ingeniously on a vast array of data—economic, political, cultural, social and more—Mr. Putnam and Ms. Garrett persuasively demonstrate that Gilded Age America suffered from civic and social strains remarkably similar to our own. Then they explore how, from the final years of the 19th century until the end of the 1950s, an extraordinary range of forces in our national life, in their words, “shaped an America that was more equal, less contentious, more connected, and more conscious of shared values.” Finally they consider why, all of a sudden and without clear warning, “the diverse streams simultaneously reversed direction, and since the 1960s America has become steadily less equal, more polarized, more fragmented, and more individualistic.” 

They chart this path from “I” to “we” and back again to “I” across essentially every facet of the American experience. Drawing some lessons from the Progressive Era, broadly understood, they suggest that a return toward a culture of “we” would need to involve a restoration of civic ambition directed toward pragmatic, concrete, incremental changes. That means building new institutions to address new problems, and it means paving paths from shared frustrations toward accommodations and reforms that could endure. It means devoting time to local service organizations and religious and professional groups, and talking less about how things got so bad and more about how to make them better where we are. It means fighting corruption and combating despair. And it means helping a rising generation think about its future, rather than drowning in debates about past feuds and divisions. 

But the key, for Mr. Putnam and Ms. Garrett, is to move from broad categories of action like these to specific instances of practical organization and engagement. This is why the example of America in the first half of the 20th century can be so powerful. It is a positive answer to the question that threatens to debilitate anyone looking to turn things around in contemporary America: Is revival even possible? The authors make a strong case that a recovery of solidarity is achievable. 

In the process, they point to a profound cultural confusion about the nature of the past half-century in America. They imply that the baby boomers were—to adapt Barry Switzer’s memorable phrase—born on third base and then went through life thinking they hit a triple. They have spent capital accumulated by others and have never really known how to replenish it. The way forward can’t be found by recovering the era of the boomers’ youth—the 1950s and ’60s, upon which Americans have lavished so much attention—but by looking to the era of revitalization that preceded it. The past century has not been a steady decline but an inverted U-shaped curve.

Mr. Putnam and Ms. Garrett’s description of the history involved is not without its own distortions. They take on enormously complicated economic, social, cultural and political trends with only limited space to describe them, and the result inevitably tends to magnify their preconceptions.

The complicated links between solidarity and exclusion (and between fragmentation and inclusion) fall into a recurring blind spot in the book. So, for instance, Mr. Putnam and Ms. Garrett clumsily dismiss the severe multi-decade constraints on immigration as a source of unity in the period of early-20th-century upswing they describe. But however uncomfortable it may be to admit, the fact that the proportion of foreign-born residents reached its lowest point in our history in the mid-1960s was presumably related to the high levels of cohesion that our society achieved in that era. And as some of Mr. Putnam’s other work has helped to show, the explosion of immigration since that time has probably contributed to declining social trust.

More generally, Mr. Putnam and Ms. Garrett tend to underplay the upside of declining solidarity. The second half of the 20th century was a period of liberalization, both social and economic, pursued in response to excessive cohesion experienced as constriction and conformity. Conservatives often celebrate the liberalization of the economy and the growth it made possible while decrying the surge of social liberationism. Progressives (like Mr. Putnam and Ms. Garrett) tend to celebrate greater cultural diversity and inclusion while decrying the increased market orientation of the economy. But these are two sides of one coin. The liberalization that began in the 1950s and ’60s has surely gone too far in some respects, and we need to recover some essential solidarity. But that liberalization was pursued for powerful reasons, and the dark sides of solidarity should be noticed, too. 

Mr. Putnam and Ms. Garrett also tend to play down the role of the intense national mobilizations of the first half of the 20th century—around the two world wars and the Great Depression—in enabling the remarkable increase in social cohesion they describe. This is always a touchy subject for communitarians. Mass mobilization can bring societies together, but that can only really happen around disasters and deep crises. Efforts to mobilize around more mundane challenges have never quite succeeded. Could we re-create the silver linings of an era of unremitting catastrophe without suffering its storms?

Even so, the fact that “The Upswing” enables us to ask such a question, and so to think about the practical preconditions for revitalization, is a mark of its achievement. In a sweeping yet remarkably accessible book, Mr. Putnam and Ms. Garrett provide a crucial missing ingredient in contemporary social commentary: They lay out a sociology of success that, drawing on our history, can help us think concretely about how to enable a revival of American life. 

—Mr. Levin is director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs.