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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The Bulwark Daily · Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations · 12 Feb 2025 podcast

We're very socially isolated. What was the problem in America around 1900? We were very polarized politically. We were very unequal. We were very self-centered, and we were very socially isolated. I'm not taking any time here to document those facts. That's why the book is 325 pages long. By the way, that book was written jointly with Shailene Romney Garrett.

Got to make sure that she gets full credit. And the advantage of looking at that period is that we can see that the people in America in 1900— faced exactly the same problems that we did today. What are our problems today? We've got this crazy polarization. So did they. We've got this unbelievable level of inequality. So did they.

We've got this great social isolation that is basically the theme of this podcast. So did they. And we're very self-centered. We're very narcissistic. And so were they. But they got out of it. Because if you look at the...

whole period of the 20th to 21st centuries, the last 125 years, what you see is the first half of that period, roughly speaking from 1910 to roughly speaking 1965, roughly speaking, things were going in a good direction. And They were going in the direction that we would like. America was becoming steadily more cooperative politically.

There was a lot of conversation across party and cooperation across party lines. Indeed, most major reforms of that period were passed by majorities of both parties. The New Deal was passed by majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. The Great Society, Lyndon Johnson's, was passed, the majority of it, by both parties together.

Ronald Reagan's deals, you know, the Reaganomics was passed by majorities of, well, not quite a majority of Democrats, but it was passed by definitely bipartisan majorities. It wasn't just Republicans. It wasn't just far right. It was the Democrats too. So what I'm trying to say was in that

you know, roughly speaking from the 1900 till about 1965, and even a little later than that, America, wait for this, when I was in high school in the 1950s, everybody thought the most equal country, people now would think maybe the most equal country in the world was socialist Sweden. Almost right. America, when I was in high school, was tied with Sweden as the most equal country in the world.

Think about it. We are used to America having a huge gap between rich and poor, but when I was in high school, the gap between rich and poor in capitalist America was about the same as the gap between rich and poor in socialist Sweden, and both of them were way ahead of anybody else. We're no longer there.

What I'm trying to say was the first half of the 20th century, roughly speaking, 1910 to 1960, 65, we were moving in the right direction. Less polarization, less inequality, less social isolation, less me, me, me. And that's why I think we need to look at that

The period in American history, which is most like the one we're in now, deep polarization, deep inequality, deep self-centeredness, deep social isolation. I don't know if I've mentioned all four of them, but they got out of it. And that means we could too. If we learn lessons from that period.

I don't know that I have any useful things to say about that. But I do want to say one thing, deriving from the book that you were dismissing.

Was the title of the book How We Can Come Together in 2020? No, it was How We Can Come Together Again. I didn't – careful. You can predict things as long as you don't predict the exact date in which it's going to happen. That's – I think Yogi said that too. This is what I want to say.

One of the things we learned in that book – and I'm going to shock your listeners if they think I'm a – you know, a pretty secular, straight guy. I mean, I am straight, but pretty secular, factual guy.

When you look at all those variables that I looked at, hundreds of variables we looked at, you know, how unequal and how self-centered or not we were, the leading indicator, the thing that had to change first was actually moral. If we had more time here, I'd go through the details. There was a very specific period in American history

history in the late 19th century, in which people re-evaluated their moral obligations. I am not talking sex at all. I'm talking the very simple thing, do we have obligations to—are we a we? Do we have obligations to other people? And that involved, initially, evangelical Protestants saying— Look at the damn Sermon on the Mount.

They probably didn't say damn, but Christianity, they said, is not about helping the rich and dismissing the poor. Every sentence in the Sermon on the Mount, which I could not reproduce here but could come close, is about the place of Christians—this is evangelicals—the place of Christians is beside the poor.

And that same thing, that was evangelicals, but pretty soon it became all Protestants and pretty soon it spread to Catholics and Jews and pretty soon to the whole darn country. And that's the thing that was the first thing that was required.

Before you started making, creating unions or, you know, having new ways of connecting the Boy Scouts and all that, before all of that, people in that era didn't. became convinced, not everybody of course, but there was a switch, you can see it in the data, a switch in which people began to think there are other people in the world more important than me. I have obligations to other people.

Now, you did not think you were going to get an evangelical preacher on this podcast. I didn't.

But that's where I would like to end up because we can talk – I'd love to talk about the details of how we could tweak phones or how we could re-institute unions or how we could narrow the gap between rich people and poor people or even how we could change the administration because we're in a pickle now if you hadn't noticed. But upstream from all of that is –

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