Robert Putnam
speaker
197 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Robert Putnam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We could have a clean system here in which we had all the colleges that could be educated people, you know, vote for the Democrats and all the non-colleges educated people vote for the Republicans. What's wrong with that? Well, there are a lot more of them than of us. We, the Democrats, if we're going to retain power democratically,
We've got to begin appealing, not ignoring race, I'm not saying that, but appealing more to the class-based interests. I want to try to end with three to-dos.
I'm going to try to keep it simple. Not because you guys couldn't understand something more complicated, but because I think we've got to understand in very simple terms. One, go young. It's much more important that we focus on young people, regardless of where they are right now, because they are the future. And I'm now talking as an historian, looking back, not just over the last...
you know, 5, 10, 20, 50 years. I'm looking over the last 125 years. In my last book, which was called The Upswing, I looked over the whole of American history over the last 125 years. And big changes are not the creation of old guys like me. Old guys like me, sometimes we've been around so long that we understand that it doesn't have to be the way it is today.
But we're not the people who have the ideas that will... work to build social capital and save America in the, I don't know, 2050s or something. I'm going to be long gone. So first thing is go young and inspire the young people to come up with the new bowling leagues. It's not going to be bowling leagues.
It's going to be something else, but almost surely will involve something of high tech, but it will involve real personal relations with other people.
Go local. all the times that there've been major social revolutions, they bubbled up from the bottom. And at local levels, people can more easily cooperate across party and other lines because somebody's got to fix the sewers. And so you don't have to have an ideological discussion about how important is, is the environment. Everybody knows that the sewer has got to be fixed.
If we're going to be able to survive in this town or the schools, you know, you can have a national debate about, I don't know, some issue in education, but somebody's got to fix our schools right here. And so sometimes left-wingers are in favor of national solutions.
And for race, we did have to go national because there were whole regions of the country which were, if we went local, we would have stayed segregated forever. So I'm not saying always go local, but if you want to have a major revolution, and this is exactly what MLK did, right? He didn't start with his march on Washington. He started in Montgomery.
What do you think is the most important social reform in the history of America? I'm going to tell you in just a second. The high school. When was the high school invented? The high school was invented in 1910. God did not invent the high school. It was invented in 1910. And where was the high school? By high school, I mean a secondary school, a public high school that everybody could go to.
We'd had private schools, of course, like Eaton or whatever. But I'm talking about public high schools. First place in the world. was in 1910 in flyover country in America. It was not invented in Massachusetts or in Chicago or in LA or what it was invented in small towns in the middle of America. And it went, viral.
And within 20 years, every city in America, every city and town in America had a high public high school. That's viral. 20 years it went from- That's amazing. So what I'm trying to say is the really good ideas, policy ideas, the next time- They spread. And thirdly, and I want to come back now to this issue of religion, go morality. Stick with me.
I'm an academic, but I'm about to start preaching at you, both of I apologize for that. When we look at long run changes, long run changes in political polarization, in economic inequality, in connections and so on, the leading indicator, it turns out that people in any given period and place actually think they have obligations to other people. We need to have a moral reawakening in America.
I'm talking about simple golden rule. Read the Sermon on the Mount. I mean, any religion says worry at least as much about other people as you do about yourself. Religion should be a we phenomenon, not an I phenomenon. So if I had a magic wand... I don't, but maybe somebody listening will have a magic wand.
I try to make the magic wand make young people, remember young, in localities across America think that they have obligations to other people. Is that making sense? I mean, that sounds like, and my basic message is, if we want to fix America, and I desperately want to fix America, it's probably not going to come in my lifetime, but I want to have it come at least in my grandchildren's lifetime.
And we got to get about it now. And that requires mobilizing large numbers of people. large numbers of young people at the local level thinking about their obligations to other people and not just about themselves. Sorry, that's the message.
So you guys are going to, you're going to lead this revolution. Find me up. Let me know how I can join.
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