[3] According to Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, evidence from a broad variety of sources, including many rigorous social-scientific studies, has uncovered what might be termed two successive trends\u2014first, an \u201cupswing\u201d from 1900 to the 1960s, then a \u201cdownswing\u201d from the 1960s to the present.\u00a0 These slopes are preceded by roughly the same slopes in the 19th century, suggesting something like a recurrent pattern in American history\u2014and the possibility of a new \u201cupswing\u201d during the next fifty years.<\/p>\n
[4] What these slopes measure is the rising and falling of community-centeredness to individualism and back again, or what they dub the \u201cWe-I-We\u201d oscillation.\u00a0 A first community-oriented upswing occurred when Abraham Lincoln initiated an era of restoring the Union following the Civil War.\u00a0 Then a number of trends signaled a downswing into the Gilded Age, with its unbridled individualism and inequality.\u00a0 At the end of the 19th<\/sup> Century, the Progressive Era launched another upswing towards collaborative, non-partisan politics. That upswing dramatically lost steam in the 1960s, plunging into a dispiriting individualist downswing that has played out for the past fifty years.\u00a0\u00a0 If these oscillations were reliably periodic, they suggest we are due for another upswing into collaborative, community-oriented politics.<\/p>\n [5] Putnam and Garrett measure these trends up and down in four broad domains.\u00a0 Chapter 2 addresses \u201ceconomics\u201d, where they chart rising economic equality from the Progressive Era into the 1960s (the \u201cGreat Convergence\u201d), and then the steep decline into inequality from the 1960s on (\u201cThe Great Divergence\u201d).\u00a0 Chapter 3 focuses on \u201cpolitics\u201d, narrating the rise and fall of collaboration in Congress as rounded out by quantitative measures of polarization, alienation, cynicism, and the like.\u00a0 Chapter 4 attends to \u201csociety\u201d, engaging Putnam\u2019s lifelong work on social institutions and social trust.\u00a0 Chapter 5 charts \u201cculture,\u201d the changing beliefs, values and norms which undergird the tensions between individualism and isolation, on the one hand, and community and solidarity on the other.<\/p>\n [6] Each chapter has its own methodological emphasis, ranging from the charting of dry statistics (Chapter 2) to compact retellings of history over the last century (Chapter 5).\u00a0 Indeed, Putnam and Garrett regard their work as an exercise in \u2018metahistory\u2019\u2014looking for patterns in the flow of singular actions and events, with further support provided by quantitative measures of all kinds.\u00a0 The text is densely packed with data, but in a surprisingly readable presentation (for which Putnam gives ample credit to Garrett). \u00a0The book demonstrates that data from social scientific measurement need not be deadweight impeding narrative flow.<\/p>\n [8] Still, the book centers on hope, for the authors make no secret of their own political hope that the past century of history will generate the confidence needed to upend the current trough of inequality and isolation.\u00a0 \u201cToday we find ourselves living in an extremely polarized, extremely unequal, extremely fragmented, and extremely self-centered nation, a fact of which we are all painfully aware\u2026.But we successfully weathered that storm once, and we can do it again.\u00a0 If ever there were a historical moment whose lessons we as a nation need to learn, then, it is the moment when the first American Gilded Age turned into the Progressive Era, a moment which set in motion a sea change that helped us reclaim our nation\u2019s promise\u2026.\u201d (16, 19)<\/p>\n [9] The authors want to introduce \u201ca new, evidence-based narrative that encompasses the ups and downs of an entire century, thereby setting a clearer agenda for choice going forward.\u201d(314)\u00a0\u00a0 They want a new Progressive Era, when \u201csociety experienced measurable and near-simultaneous upswings toward equality, inclusion, comity, connection and altruism\u2026\u201d(316)\u00a0 So they devote the last chapter to narrating the stories of several mostly forgotten heroes of the Progressive Era. The message is clear: any new upswing will be the result of sustained, grassroots coordinated effort, not the unfurling of some mindless historical inevitability.<\/p>\n [10] A skeptical social scientist or historian might wonder whether their political hope has distorted their argument, squandering the objectivity which serves as the usual anchor of scholarly authority.\u00a0 I leave this question to others, although as a picky lay reader I will admit to being annoyed by the absence of any measure attached to the y-axis of the mountain.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 In any case, the authors do not attempt political neutrality in the broad sense.\u00a0 Their hope involves no false moral equivalence between downswing and the upswing, between the assertion of individualism over against the rebuilding of community.\u00a0 Rather they hope for a productive tension: sustaining gains in individual liberty while not compromising on equality and inclusion. (339-340)<\/p>\n [11] However their argument is evaluated by social scientists and historians, I think they escape the condemnation of Dante.\u00a0 Their heads, after all, are pointed forward to the future and they make no brash prediction that the needed upswing will occur.\u00a0\u00a0 Any new \u201cGreat Convergence\u201d is going to take the engagement of reform-minded citizens and residents at every level of politics and governance.\u00a0 Putnam and Garrett provide the most comprehensively data-driven argument imaginable in favor of such involvement.<\/p>\n [12] As a result, The Upswing<\/em> should be welcome news to members of the ELCA. The 2019 Churchwide Assembly resolutely embraced \u2018civic engagement\u2019 in politics.\u00a0 A Task Force was appointed to define a Lutheran vision of politics under the messy conditions of democratic self-governance.\u00a0 Already a \u2018social message\u2019 has sketched elements of a chastened but sturdy hope in government as God\u2019s gift, a hope anchored in the close connections between God\u2019s two ways of governing.[3]<\/a> \u00a0The hope articulated in The Upswing<\/em> fits this relatively non-partisan agenda like a proverbial hand-in-glove.\u00a0 After all, democratic self-governance works only when those who are thereby ruled invest their energy in making it work.\u00a0 And this text arrives just at a fresh new moment when such civic engagement seems like it might generate meaningful reforms.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Inferno<\/em>, Canto XX.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Footnote 4 on p. 352 fails to offer an intelligible explanation of why\u00a0 the x-axis of the mountain remains unlabeled as to what it measures.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> https:\/\/download.elca.org\/ELCA%20Resource%20Repository\/Government_and_Civic_Engagement_Social_Message.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [1] Where do you pin your hope for the future of democratic self-governance in the US, particularly in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol?\u00a0 Hope is indispensable to faithful living and enjoys a primary role in Lutheran theology.\u00a0 Yet in these broken times, any hope about the future of American democracy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/I\/51zXl4DCUZL.jpg\")
[7] The argument is heartening, in that it imposes a plausible and easily grasped pattern on the bewildering complexity of U.S. history over the past 120 years.\u00a0 Indeed, the argument reduces neatly to a symbol–a graph depicting upswing and downswing as a surprisingly and pleasingly symmetrical mountain.\u00a0 But the slopes of the mountain are not really that smooth.\u00a0 Mindful of an overemphasis upon white males, Putnam and Garrett devote a detailed chapter to Black people (Chapter 6) and another to women (Chapter 7).\u00a0 While women were largely included in the \u201cGreat Convergence\u201d or upswing kindled by the Progressives, Black people were not.\u00a0 For them, the national growth towards community meant exclusion through Jim Crow, in a complex and dispiriting history.\u00a0 The conclusion is not surprising, but it is helpfully supported by copious data lest the reader have doubts about the persistence of deeply engrained inequality of outcomes for White people and Black people.\u00a0 The up-and-down mountain, it seems, is deeply fissured by gorges and crevasses.<\/p>\n