The Upswing is one of the more recent titles in a long line of “America is broken” books.  Reaching back into the 1980s, there are Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, and Neil Postman’s Amusing O­urselves to Death.  The last five years have witnessed a proliferation of such hand-wringing social surveys, many released in 2017 and 2018:

• The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff; 

• The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, by Tom Nichols; or,

• Them: Why We Hate Each Other – and How to Heal, by Senator Ben Sasse.

These and similar books exude nostalgia for an earlier season of American health. For some, this is the decades following the Second World War; for others, it’s any time before mass media and the ubiquity (totalitarianism?) of the internet.  In many ways, each of these books struggles with the breakdown of previously stalwart institutions prior to virtually simultaneous cultural, geopolitical, and technological disruptions. 

The Upswing stands apart in its broad optimism, depth of analysis, and comparatively wide historical lens.  While many other discussions of the present turbulence point to a scapegoat of the recent past, Putnam and Garrett press deeper into history and ultimately deeper into the present cultural outlook. What they discover is that 1890s America looked similar along a variety of axes to 2020s America: economic inequality, political division, hyper-individualism, and isolation.  Many of those negative trends were reversed, reaching their upper bounds somewhere between 1960 and 1970.  Following this time there was a steady breakdown of these same gains into a state of disarray comparable to the Gilded Age.

Putnam and Garrett refer to this statistical phenomenon of rising and then falling cooperation as the “I-We-I curve.”  They demonstrate that this phenomenon pops up across a range of social-scientific metrics.  There are too many to describe in this brief review, but I will highlight a few.  In each case, the chapter titles themselves are illuminating. 

• Economics: The Rise and Fall of Equality 
  In this chapter the authors highlight how the middle class’s size and strength grew and then shrank from 1890 to 2020, specifically in terms of household income and intergenerational transmission of wealth.  For advanced discussion of this phenomenon on a global scale, see Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Twenty-first Century.  

• Politics: From Tribalism to Comity and Back Again 
  Putnam and Garrett use voting patterns in Congress to demonstrate that the two parties operated largely in concert through the 1950s and 60s. In Them, Ben Sasse waxes nostalgic about the bipartisan cooperation that existed in the Reagan era—already twenty years out from its height.  Putnam and Garrett show that this type of cooperation was a hard-won, special mid-century phenomenon. The two parties were sorely divided in the 1890s and partisan cooperation was built slowly and arduously.

• Society: Between Isolation and Solidarity 
  There were a few surprises for me in this chapter. Given some basic awareness of the American labor market, I was not surprised by the rise and fall (I-We-I) of the influence of unions and civic associations. What I did not know was that marriage rates and church attendance follow the I-We-I curve. I knew that marriage rates were astonishingly low at the turn of the present century. I was shocked to discover that less than half of adults age 30-44 were married at the turn of the last century. Similarly, I had no idea that in 1910 the number of Americans affiliated with some church was between 33 and 43 percent, even while I was aware that the secular Nones take up a large share of the present American population.  Given this information about the Nones, I had made the untutored assumption that secular activity simply devoured the church involvement. However, involvement begets involvement. They write, “Involvement in faith community turns out to be a strong predictor of connection to the wider, secular world.” (Putnam, Garrett, 127)

One of the most natural and ultimately painful questions that arises when looking at the mid-century “Golden Age” is whether the “We” of the mid-century was merely a white, male “We.” Did the success of the mid-century ultimately come at the expense of the marginalized? These authors contend that the answer is no, even if the lot of women and racial minorities could have been better.

Overall, America’s “We” at mid-century was never expansive enough, nor is it today.

Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing, p. 282

The authors show that in absolute terms, circumstances improved markedly for women and racial minorities throughout the twentieth century.  After all, women were not even permitted to vote until 1920.  For women, the story is mostly positive even if the gender gap hasn’t closed completely.  For example, women have surpassed men in educational attainment. 

 The racial story is much more complex.  Approaching the 1960s, the disparity between black and white Americans steadily shrank and the pace of positive movement was at its peak. Surprisingly, after the landmark Civil Rights victories of the 1960s, progress slowed, halted and in some cases reversed.  For example, following 1970, the aggregate black-white income gap widened, and black homeownership plateaued and even declined. It’s cold comfort that Black Americans are better off now than in 1900.  All of this is to suggest that while some things have improved for Black Americans following the 1960s, the “We” society (no matter how flawed) provided better soil for improving Black lives.  

A selfish, fragmented “I” society is not a favorable environment for achieving racial equality.

Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing, p. 244

What happened? While Putnam and Garrett have a (stereotypically academic) reluctance to explain everything, they offer a few suggestions that may have contributed to the downturn in social cohesion.  For them, a likely culprit was the emergence of negative feelings surrounding social conformity.  If our present age is individualistic and fractured to a fault, the postwar era was unified and cohesive to a fault.  Another likely—and grievous—culprit is racism.  They observe that as Black Americans were making their greatest gains, and as immigration law was most generous (e.g. the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965), majority culture decided that these previously “alien” peoples were getting too close for comfort. 

It is as if, sometime around 1980, the children of the people who made it through the Great Depression and into the suburbs had decided to pull up the drawbridge behind them.  

Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 86

While this racism was not the Jim Crow and lynching racism of the early twentieth Century, there remained a laissez-faire racism that produced, for example, “white flight” to the suburbs.  Overt racism became gauche, but one could fashionably adopt a not-my-problem posture.

Overall, I found this book provocative, well-researched, and challenging.  It’s tempting upon finding a problem to want to immediately solve it.  This study shows how present social ills began long before our favorite scapegoat arrived and will probably last much longer than we’d like.  Nevertheless, there were political remarks that gave me pause.  Putnam and Garrett speak favorably about the twentieth century Progressive movement and its role in overcoming the first “I” season.  Although I’d like to see social progress, I balk at the prospect of seeing Bernie Sanders and his ilk run the nation.  What does it mean that Putnam and Garrett speak so favorably about “progressivism”? The simple answer is that twentieth and twenty-first century progressivism are distinct movements, both historically and politically.  At present, those who describe themselves as progressive are almost entirely on the left, whereas the Progressive Era had leaders on both sides of the aisle: Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican, Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat.  No doubt there are commonalities between twentieth and twenty-first century progressivism, e.g. their mutual anxiety about economic inequality. But to celebrate twentieth century progressivism is not an endorsement of the twenty-first century movement that calls itself by the same name.  In fact, Putnam and Garrett exhibit a (sadly abnormal) critical outlook on present-day American politics.  

Both the Left and the Right have taken to freeing people from constraints as their central goal. For the Left, constraints are on lifestyles; for the Right, constraints are on money.

Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing, p.188, emph. mine

What should a Christian make of all of this?  In many ways, there is little reason to doubt Putnam and Garrett’s research.  Christians know that we were designed to live in families and in community (cf. Genesis 1:28; 2:24; Romans 12:12-14).  Of all people, we should not be surprised by the negative outcomes when these values are surrendered. Unfortunately, in an effort to protect our own religious freedom, American Christians have supported and even advocated for policies that have eroded American society. Where Christians have spoken up, we’ve expended inordinate amounts of energy attempting to Christianize American politics, fight culture wars and resist secularism; meanwhile, we’ve gladly followed the broader culture in its social disintegration. I’m definitely not saying that more political action on the part of Christians is the answer to America’s ills. But I will say that there’s something disturbing about our self-protective impulses and delight in partisan division. Regardless of how we interpret matters, I doubt that people see Jesus Christ in American Christianity. Rather than fret endlessly over disappointing Supreme Court rulings, we should look at the log in our own eye. Christians should acknowledge our passive refusal to follow the Greatest Commandment: love your neighbor as yourself. Let’s start there, and maybe we’ll learn to carry our cross and turn the other cheek.

How would Jesus tell the parable of the Good Samaritan to the America of the 2020s?  Who would be the man left for dead?  Who would be the Samaritan?  Regardless of how one answers these questions, it’s no stretch to imagine the American Christian discreetly crossing the street.