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
The Bulwark Daily · Carol Leonnig and Robert Putnam: Lies and Moral Obligations · 12 Feb 2025
podcast
we and especially our young people, because it was young people then and it's young people now, need to begin thinking that we have obligations to other people. That sounds so simple, but it's really hard. But that's my admonition for America and especially for my grandchildren. This is not me just preaching to other people. And I'm proud of my grandchildren.
They listen to their grandmother, who's, you know, even better social capitalist than I am. They listen to me sometimes. They listen to their parents, who are also really nice. But it's going against the core values that they are currently imbibing. I repeat, this is not about sex. It's about just simple, do we have obligations to other people?
So, I'm sorry, Tim, you didn't ask me to come on as a lecture preacher.
By the way, this pope is exactly the pope we need, because that's exactly what he's doing. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get into Catholicism.
Thanks an awful lot, Tim. I really, it's been a lot of fun for me too.
Well, first of all, bowling is big in America. You may not know this, but more Americans bowl than vote, for example.
Yeah.
Actually, he would say, Bob, I've been over this. There's a really funny New York Times interview in which the New York Times interview was trying to say, I'm New York Times reporter, pretty well connected. I know Robert Putnam. And Barack just says, no, it's Bob.
about 20 years ago, well, maybe not quite that, 15 years ago, maybe, I was trying to run a seminar. I was running a seminar of people. And the idea was to bring people from very, very diverse backgrounds together Once every three months for a couple of years to try to figure out how to solve the problem of social isolation in America and its political consequences. It's not just loneliness.
It's also affects, as you said, and we're going to come back to that, the chances of democracy surviving. We had a big multidimensional matrix. We want to make sure we had enough men and women and blacks and Asians and Latinos and whites. whites and old and young and rich and poor and business and labor, et cetera. You can imagine this multidimensional scheme.
And we got it all filled, but we had one box that we had not yet filled for a young black community organizer. And my son, who had been at Harvard Law School, said, you know, you ought to check out this really bright guy I know who I play basketball with. Because it turns out my son, this is going to make you believe in the conspiracy theory of American life.
My son happened to be on the Harvard Law Review with Barack. And they played basketball together. Wow. He said, well, he's a community organizer out in Chicago. I said, bingo, that sort of fits the right matrix. So we got this guy here. He's one of the youngest people in the group. And he's very ambitious. It's clear he's very ambitious. But he's also cute. He's a little bit like the mascot.
Like a mascot in this group. And so, you know, like in a summer camp, people develop nicknames. And our nickname for him was the governor because we thought, what a joke. This guy's ambitious and he thinks he's going to eventually become governor of Illinois. This is a guy who five years later is the president of the United States. So you weren't wrong. Governor was a joke.
There was something else that's important about him. Yes. You know he's very smart, but he's also, at least he can be very... quiet. So, and this is a group of big eagles. And so the first, you know, we gather on Friday night, Friday night and all day, much of Saturday up until lunch, everybody else was doing what we called station identification.
That is, they were telling us how important they were and why their views were the most important. And Obama kept silent during all of that. And then after lunch, he'd say, you know, I've been listening to this. I've been listening, especially to Susan and to Josh, and they think they disagree. But I think underneath Susan and Josh agree. And they did.
And everybody around the table was open-mouthed. How did he see that? We've been all sitting through the same conversation. And the whole conversation was polarized in many different ways. But he saw a way in which he could frame an issue in ways that would be productive for the whole group going forward. Oh, wow. He's able to see through... All this, you know, all the fighting.
Well, of course, there are reasons to worry about people being lonely. That's indeed the title of this film that's now out and about on Netflix and in theaters. That's Join or Die, yeah. Join or Die. Your chances of dying, well, your chances of dying are high, actually. Sorry to say that, but your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group.
And that is their real serious health effects. And this is controlling for everything you like. It is really social isolation that causes premature death, but it also undermines the foundation for democracy. And that's
Another part of the title, Join or Die, refers to the fact that Benjamin Franklin, at the time of the founding of the American Republic, said, unless we join together, our democracy is going to die. That is, it refers both to the personal effects, which are big, and to the collective effects. And the collective effects, by the way, are not just democracy. Our economy grows more slowly.
Our society becomes more unequal. The political polarization is a big consequence. of the lack of social capital. And Bowling Alone, the book Bowling Alone, first published in about 2000, but most of it was written in the late 90s, said we've been going downhill for a long time in terms of our connections. All sorts of connections.
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