The Moral Equivalent of War

A Review of The Upswing by Robert Putnam

I wanted to dip my feet in the waters of journal writing again after reading a fantastic book, The Upswing, by Robert Putnam. The book is essentially a long version of what James Fallows has been harping about since my days at California Forward. Fallows’ contention was so strikingly similar to the thesis of this book that I can’t help but imagine that Putnam was influenced by Fallows either directly or as a reader of his columns in The Atlantic. Political polarization, economic inequality, extreme nativism, and social dislocation are often in such confluence that they are difficult to parse. Instead, perceptive observers slap the term “Gilded Age” to describe a particular moment in time that satisfies this precise combination of features. Today, the combined economic, political, and social crises such that economic affluence, increasingly taking on a regional character due to the agglomeration of corporate human capital, breeds political influence leading to angry populist rebellion in parts of the country that are not in on the party fits the Gilded Age metaphor to the T.

What this book does extraordinarily well is answer the question that I asked when I first engaged with Fallows’ writing as a senior in college. Why is it that, historically, all these bad things always go together? Putnam and Romney-Garrett take a negative route to answer this question, exhaustively considering all potential causations discussed in the literature. Namely, they rule out the strongest candidate that economic inequality unleashes a Pandora’s Box of social ills. In the previous introductory paragraph, my suggestion that the social effects are secondary to economic affluence that corrodes democracy falls victim to a similar materialist bias. Yet this suspicion we share is not merely speculative. It is based in a body of sociological scholarship dating back to William Julius Wilson on the social dysfunctions that fall on cities when work disappears. But at the level of macro-history, Putnam concludes that economic inequality is a lagging indicator, not the driver of social dysfunctions.

Instead, they point to a fourth, arguably fundamental, crisis in American life that is often neglected because it is not easily operationalized, the decline of communitarian ethos in favor of atomistic individualism. The authors admirably support this claim by introducing ngram analysis, but it seems so apparent to anybody with even passing familiarity or experience with America in the 21st century that charts are not strictly necessary once the nature of the problem is clearly articulated.

There is no statement that articulates their idea better than Barbara Jordan’s DNC convention speech in the shadow of the nation’s bicentennial. She went beyond the usual laundry list of problems typical of convention speeches, and diagnosed a more pressing concern relating to this country’s general orientation. It is worth quoting Jordan’s prescient warning at length, for her fear is now reality:

Let us heed the voice of the people and recognize their common sense. If we do not, we not only blaspheme our political heritage, we ignore the common ties that bind all Americans… Many seek to satisfy their private work—wants, to satisfy their private interests. But this is the great danger this country faces —that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups; city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual, each seeking to satisfy private wants. If that happens, who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good?

I’m deeply disturbed by this speech because a civic revival—an upswing—such as that which flowered in many “laboratories of democracy” during the Progressive Era requires some discussion and fulfillment of “first principles” essential for democratic liberty. Averting the downward “drift” of Gilded Age dysfunction is no guarantee, it requires the “mastery” of an engaged democratic citizenry, which Progressive activists profiled in the book, from Frances Perkins to the founder of the Rotary Club eagerly filled. The concern, and perhaps challenge, to the optimistic tenor of the book is that the interest group formation that Jordan identifies, then only at a nascent stage, would advance to such a degree that the very notion of the American public has unraveled, making the discovery of common good impossible.

The nature of this concern is similar to my previous question on the Rubicon moment of the industrial working class when it completes its transformation to a postindustrial precariat. On a similar level, I worry that American society has been so thoroughly suburbanized that citizens are not even exactly sure where to find public forums, and have little idea on how to restore regular social intercourse the Founders believed was necessary for self-government to flourish.

The economic model is certainly partially to blame. In an excellent new book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, on Amazon’s impact on accelerating America’s trajectory to a regional winner-take-all economy, the journalist Alec MacGinnis notes that Amazon workers cannot leave the warehouses fast enough because these workplaces are so alienated they are often unware of the human being working 30 feet away from them, quite unlike the auto manufacturers and steel mills these warehouses replaced. Whether these elements of the postindustrial working class existence are by Amazon’s design is a point of contention, but the practical effect cannot be denied. It provides workers with fewer opportunities to coalesce, making the courageous union organizing efforts in Bessemer, Alabama all the more remarkable.

I also have a more fundamental concern with the book, which the authors addressed in only one meager paragraph toward the end on climate. Climate change may make historical metaphors that suggest the “I” trajectory since the 1960’s has ran its course less than useful. Following their logic for how America was able to match the scientific and engineering marvels of Gilded Age expansions with the rights revolutions in gender and race is important to clarify my challenge.

They argue that both in the case of racial minorities and for women that a substantial amount of progress was made during the “we”/upswing period over the entire course of the first half of the 20th century and the 1960’s was the sea-change catharsis when these historical trends turned into full-fledged social movements. The period prior to the 1960’s where women became better educated and dramatically narrowed the gender pay gap and African Americans had similar opportunities for limited advancement as they migrated from the Jim Crow South, could be separated into distinct “evolutionary” phases hidden to the historian examining mass movements and political officeholding. But the trajectory away from complete marginalization is nonetheless unmistakable. In historical analyses of the rights revolutions, Claudia Goldin writes that students are often fixated on the revolutionary tip of the iceberg where the shift away from marginalization is decisive (if still unfinished) while neglecting everything underneath. Echoing Goldin’s similar argument with respect to expanding public education and Hacker and Pierson argument with respect to government’s increasing role in the economy following the Progressive Era, Putnam claims that, contrary to the conventional view of mid-20th century Americas as the apex of American communitarian virtues tainted by persistent racial exclusion, the rights revolutions would have been impossible if it were not for the fact the era that immediately preceded them became consistently more oriented to the “we” of American public life.

I may be naïve in ways that I cannot fully understand in this moment, and it may be the case that 2021 is an “evolutionary” phase of climate progress. Future historians may very well devise clever statistics to show that Americans are making real, absolute progress with respect to stabilizing the climate system. But what I currently see as an observer is a far cry from that. Climate activist Bill McKibben wrote in a recent New Yorker column that Costco is expanding its popular gas stations, a decision that seems head-scratching if the corporate world really intends to entirely decarbonize the U.S. economy over the next two decades. To paraphrase that column, if everything must change, some things have to change NOW. If we truly were in the evolutionary phase, we would expect some things to be changing with some impact, however limited, on emissions. Likewise, Greta Thunberg shared on her Twitter that in spite of savvy public relations statements on the importance of being responsible stakeholders when it comes to climate, the financial giants poured billions into the fossil fuel industry during the pandemic year. The fossil fuel companies themselves are still actively engaged in cover-ups of the extent to which they have degraded the planet, even going to such lengths as identifying adversaries and pursuing quasi-extrajudicial means to create an entire new category of human rights violation suited to the diminution of the neoliberal state—the corporate political prisoner.

I would like to be a believer in the optimistic message this book intends to deliver. But I am not sure it is warranted. My hesitation is not related to their interpretation of history, which is suburb and erudite, but its application to the current moment under the long shadow of climate change. The changes to human systems necessary to put the climate system into equilibrium are so all-encompassing I’m not sure a historical analogy exists to achieve them, save for William James’ “The Moral Equivalent of War”. Americans certainly don’t have the luxury of the long Progressive Era, muddling through the detour of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II, to achieve its cumulative effect.

The model for how we might achieve it is similar in kind the activism of the other rights revolutions in that both involve a reconsideration of the value systems that structure human societies. But even in the revolutionary phases of the race and gender movements of the 1960’s, those social movements at best altered the underlying value frameworks. If Ian Morris’ anthropological hypothesis that values systems reflect the quantity and types of energy societies produce is taken at face value, the revolution of values needed to address the climate emergency will have to be a thorough transformation that acculturates societies everywhere at once to communitarian ethos that has been shown to engender more balanced human flourishing without extreme inequality, tribal partisan conflict, and nativism. There simply is no time to waste. We must urgently reclaim the “we”.