“America is in a pickle.”
So said Robert Putnam – part-time Jaffrey resident, Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and co-author with Shaylyn Romney-Garrett of “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again” – during the Amos Fortune Forum Friday at the Jaffrey Meetinghouse.
That “pickle,” he said, is historic levels of economic inequality, social isolation, cultural self-centeredness and political polarization. He used a series of charts to show political comity, economic equality, social cohesion and cultural solidarity were low at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, increased steadily to a peak in the early 1960s and have been falling ever since.
“We’ve been through a cycle from an ‘I’ society to a ‘we’ society to an ‘I’ society,” said Putnam, who recently met with Pope Francis to discuss equality, immigration, polarization and the environment, calling it “the ultimate name drop.”
Regarding polarization, Putnam said it doesn’t mean there will be another civil war, but the only time America has reached similar levels of polarization was 1860 to 1865.
“We are deeply, deeply polarized,” he said.
The Monadnock region, Putnam said, probably has the highest level of social capital in the country and is not as polarized as the rest of America, but “We all live in a bubble.”
Romney-Garrett is an author, social entrepreneur, founding contributor to David Brooks’s Aspen Institute initiative and co-founder with her husband, James Garrett of Think Unlimited, a nonprofit venture working to catalyze social innovation in the Middle East.
Turning to what all of the data Putnam cited means and how the country got in this position, she said that instead of focusing on the downturn, even though it is important, the moment to learn from is the last time the country was in this situation.
“By scores of measures, we are living through a second American Gilded Age,” she said, referring to the late 19th century.
One common trait between the two eras, Romney-Garrett said, is the commentators decrying the end of democracy.
“The American experiment has failed. We have descended into tyranny and democracy. All is lost,” but none of those prophecies came true, she said.
According to Romney-Garrett, the turnaround started with the Progressive Era of 1900 to 1915, but economics, instead of driving the change, was actually a lagging indicator and the last to change.
“I am not saying that it’s not important to fix our economic inequality,” she said. “I am saying that there may be some other factors or phenomena underneath our economic system that we have to get at and change first.”
Romney-Garrett said that, looking at the data, culture changed first, as people began to say “Enough is enough. America has gone off the rails.” It started with the Social Gospel movement, originally led by Evangelical pastors, and their belief in social morality, that people were responsible for how they structured their society.
“The energy of that moral awakening led this shift into an upswing, because we began to rethink everything,” she said.
And she said the energy came from young people.
“These young people were innovated,” Romney-Garrett said. “They could imagine a future that didn’t exist yet, and they began to create the civic, political and economic systems that would bring us into that future.”
Those young progressives, she said, were interested in the power of association and connection, people like Paul Harris, who grew up in a small New England town before moving to Chicago to open a law practice. He was lonely, so he invited three other professionals to lunch.
“Out of that grew an association that became the Rotary Club, and over time, it was like, ‘Oh, we not only can assuage our own loneliness, we can begin to be a force for good in the world,” she said.
For another upswing to happen, Romney-Garrett said people have to re-emphasize connections, looking at problems on their own doorstep and coming together to solve them.
“Eventually, the best ideas went viral, and then bubbled up and became models for federal programs that changed the face of the country, but they didn’t start at the federal level,” she said. “They started in places just like this.”
Romney-Garrett did provide one note of caution, that the circle of concern from the Progressive Era did not extend to people of color, or women to an extent, out of a belief that they could include everyone later.
“The lesson from this mistake is that much of the structural racism that is built into our nation today is the legacy of not doing the work then to make the ‘we’ we were building toward fully inclusive,” she said. “We cannot make that mistake again.”
Romney-Garrett closed with a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901: “The fundamental rule of our national life – the rule which underlies all others – is that on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.”
Romney-Garrett said if there was one message she and Putnam wanted to impart, it was that “We’ve been here before. We fixed it. We did it once before and we can do it again, but we have to start in places that might be unfamiliar, places of the heart, places of connection, places of relationship.”