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
They said, effectively, as I said in the book, but I wasn't doing it, You have all these isolated people. They're ripe for having a kind of populist come to power and say, you're all unhappy and isolated. Trust me, I'm the one. Does that sound familiar? Does that sound like he's the guy?
Well, that's what Bowling Alone said, and I didn't act on it. Maybe I should have. Maybe I could have been president. You could have been president. President Bob Putnam. Yeah. And J.D. Vance has said something very similar to this. There's lots of empirical evidence. I won't bore you with all the data.
There's lots of data that's saying the strongest predictor, actually, of support for Donald Trump, of places that support Donald Trump and people that support Donald Trump is social isolation. Now we're not just talking hypothetically, oh, it'd be nice to have more people joining clubs. We're saying the pickle that we're in as a country is precisely due to the fact that we're
I'm not trying to say we ought to reconstruct bowling leagues, but it's got to be something that brings us face to face. Is that making sense, Trevor?
Yeah. I thought he was a former.
Or is that even necessary? Well, yes, I think it is necessary. There are different kinds of social capital, different kinds of networks. And one important distinction is between what I call bridging social capital, that is ties that link you to people unlike yourself. And bonding social capital. Bonding social capital are the ties that link you to people just like yourself.
So my bonding social capital are my friends with other elderly, white, male, Jewish professors. That's my bonding social capital. And my bridging social capital are my ties to people of a different generation. I have a little bit of bridging that I rely on heavily across generations because I've got my grandchildren.
And I'm not saying, this is important, bridging good, bonding bad, because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to reflect your bonding social capital. That's a little bit what Christiana was earlier saying, the people who would really take care of her, who would bring her chicken soup or the equivalent would be Bonding social capital.
I'm saying bonding social capital is not necessarily bad, but bridging social capital is crucial for a modern, diverse society like ours. Bridging across racial, across age, across gender, across party and so on. So far, so good. Right, right, right. But bridging is harder to build than bonding social capital. My grandmother knew that.
My grandmother said to me, Bobby, birds of a feather flock together. Right. She didn't think I'd understand. What she meant was, Bobby, bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. But she didn't think I'd understand that, which is why she used the avian metaphor about birds. But that's the basic point. So here's the challenge.
Much of Trump's support, it draws from different kinds of demographic groups, of course, but it's bonded heavily on politics and not bridging at all. And so now I'm back at the question, why isn't Putnam saying he wants lots of Ku Klux Klan? And the answer is, I don't want lots of Ku Klux Klan because it's bonding and I want a lot of more bridging. Does that make sense to what I'm saying?
So this is, sorry, you didn't invite me on here to cite all my books, but I'm going to cite yet another book.
Okay, I want to talk about The Growing Gap Between Rich Folks and Poor Folks in America. And the book was called Our Kids. The book was focused on a whole series of charts and graphs that showed the gap between rich kids and poor kids growing. And I'll say more about what I meant by that. But in particular, by rich, I didn't mean literally having lots of money. The book is based on
The upper third of American society, which is basically college-educated folks.
And the lower two-thirds of America, which is basically people who didn't graduate from four years of college. And what that book showed is a growing gap also among their parents. Those two groups are increasingly... They don't marry one another. It used to be that there were people would marry across these class lines, but they don't now.
They used to be that they would live in the same neighborhood, but they were increasingly living in not racially segregated, but class segregated homes. And what I'm trying to say is that class lens... was when I wrote the book, at least as important as the racial lens. And it's becoming, relatively speaking, the class lens is becoming more important
Relative to the racial lens, the plight facing working class whites is the same as the plight facing working class blacks. That's what Bernie Sanders noticed. He was talking about everybody. It's down, not at the bottom, meaning the poorest of the poor, but the lower two thirds of the country. Right. And.
I think that the Democratic Party, this may be controversial, I think the Democratic Party has got to start focusing more on those class differences and less exclusively on the racial or other identity issues. Now, it sounds like I'm saying let's forget about black folks, and I'm not saying that.
I'm saying let's really focus on working class black folks because they're the ones who are falling further and further behind.
Yes. And there's certainly... Much more likely to be socially isolated. I mean, they've got at least two strikes against them. Well, maybe three. A, they're more socially isolated. Okay. And B, they're poorer financially. And C, they have got less education. So all those folks are... in a pickle. And what that means is it's important to just understand the math. This is simple, simple arithmetic.
Showing 161–180 of 197 · page 9 of 10
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