Social Cohesion Lost
Analysis of the history and current status of liberal democracy in the United States often begins with the mid-20th century, a period of growth and prosperity. The following decades saw widening disparity in the distribution of wealth and income, a decrease in intergenerational mobility, and political polarization. The trend has been described in postings to Fifty Year Perspective: a federal income tax that has become less progressive since 1950, and an inequality index steadily increasing since the 1970s.
This sixty year period has been incorporated into a broader context of the 125-year span since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. In a new book by political scientist Robert Putnam and writer Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, the authors supply a wealth of statistics documenting increasing social solidarity beginning with the Progressive movement as the twentieth century began.
Graphs of union membership, cross-party collaboration, civic engagement, church membership, and marriage rate, among others, mix with measures of income and wealth. Together they produce a consistent trend of rising interdependence and cooperation until the 1960s, followed by “a steep descent into greater independence and egoism” continuing to today. The authors call their graphs’ inverted U-curve the “I-we-I” curve, to coincide with the periods of independence and interdependence.
The Progressive movement that brought the years of interdependence established an impressive array of reforms and innovations:
The secret ballot; the direct primary system; the direct election of senators; the initiative, referendum, and recall; women’s suffrage; new forms of municipal administration; the federal income tax; the Federal Reserve System; protective labor laws; the minimum wage; antitrust statutes; protected public lands and resources; food and drug regulation; sanitation infrastructure; public utilities; a vast proliferation of civic and voluntary societies; new advocacy organizations such as labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP; the widespread provision of free public high schools; and even the spread of public parks, libraries, and playgrounds.
However, the movement is faulted for its failure to assure full inclusion for minorities, women, and poor people, which “seriously compromised the integrity of America’s ‘we’ decades and ultimately sowed the seeds of our subsequent downturn.” Four best-selling books published in 1962 and 1963 each “helped trigger a major intellectual and social counter-movement that would reverberate well into the next century:” Michael Harrington’s The Other America on poverty; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on the environment; James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time on racism; and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique on feminism.
An abundance of crises starting in the 1960s fed public anguish: Assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr; Vietnam War; student upheavals; civil rights revolution; urban crisis and riots; domestic terrorism; women’s movement; the pill and sexual revolution; counterculture and drug epidemic; questioning of traditional religious and family values; series of environmental crises; Watergate and Nixon’s resignation; stagflation, oil shortage and economic malaise.
The authors do not suggest “how we can do it again,” as their subtitle suggests, other than to say that the Progressive era did not set its sights high enough in achieving full inclusion and redressing racial and gender inequalities. Although Congress has more Black, Latino and women members, overall our accomplishments pale in comparison to what the Progressive movement achieved. Recent innovations such as telemedicine and artificial intelligence, and international accord on the Paris Agreement, may be setting the stage for a new age of interdependence. Exiting from the Covid-19 pandemic could be a push to solidarity as occurred after World War II
In 2010 scientist Peter Turchin predicted 2020 would be a year of social unrest, based upon research using 40 social indicators over a 200 year span. In a July 2020 article in The Globe and Mail, he described the U.S. “getting awfully close to the point where a civil war or revolution becomes probable.” However, “in some cases wise leaders and prosocial segments of the elites … turn things back to stable waters.”
Both Turchin and Putnam/Garrett cite the importance of involvement by mass social movements. Is 2020 the beginning?