To talk about the The Chronicle paired social scientist Robert Putnam — the celebrated author of Bowling Alone and other analyses of our civic malaise — with Citizen University CEO Eric Liu, who studied with the scholar as a graduate student. (Liu, in fact, was assigned to read draft chapters of Bowling Alone.) Today, Liu, a former speechwriter in the Clinton White House, is a top leader in the movement to rebuild America’s civic strength.
Here’s their full conversation, transcribed from the recording above. Keep up with everything happening in The Commons by signing up for our Philanthropy Today newsletter and joining our Commons LinkedIn group.
DREW LINDSAY, Chronicle senior editor: Hi. I’d like to welcome everyone to this, the first in a series of conversations that the Chronicle of Philanthropy will host over the coming months. We’re launching a new line of coverage that is going to explore the country’s divides and the role of philanthropy in healing those divides.
What’s really most exciting for us about this is that we’re going to try something new. We are going to supplement our usual reporting and journalism with informal conversations like this one, where we’re going to bring together experts, advocates and practitioners.
I want to introduce today our two guests, really terrific people. You may know the name Robert Putnam because he is easily one of the most famous political scientists in America. Indeed, he is really a hero to a lot of folks because he asks and answers really big questions about our country, our culture, and how we live.
Nearly 25 years ago, at the turn of the century, Dr. Putnam documented a significant decline in civic engagement in America, memberships in clubs and civic associations were declining. Social isolation was growing. The country’s many fractures were widening. The book that captured all that research, Bowling Alone became a landmark, in part because it foreshadowed the ways that the country’s social fabric would get torn apart in the coming years.
Everyone knows the title of that book, but its subtitle is pretty important for today, which is “The Collapse and Revival of the American Community.” The word “revival” makes clear that Dr. Putnam is an optimist. He believes that there are solutions to the mess that we are in, and we’ll discuss some of those today.
The word “revival” also brings me to our second guest’s solutions, Eric Liu. Again, you may know him as a writer. He is a regular contributor to The Atlantic and the author of eight books, including You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen. Eric was also a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton.
Importantly for this conversation, Eric is a doer. More than a decade ago, he and a friend co-founded Citizen University, an organization that operates on a really simple, really clear premise that everyone in America has the power to make change happen and that we all have a responsibility as citizens of this country to try to bring about change. Since its founding, Citizen University has created a host of really interesting programs to awaken people to the power that they have, to give them the skills and tools they need, and to inspire them to act.
I’ll say the best part about today is that Eric and Dr. Putnam are good friends. Eric in fact was a one-time student of Dr. Putnam’s. While they’re going to be connected by Zoom today, I can easily imagine this conversation taking place in a coffee shop or a living room.
With that, I’m going to turn it over to Eric to get things started.
ERIC LIU: Thank you, Drew. Bob, it’s so great to be in the room with you, and I wish we were having coffee together. If we were sitting at a table, I would have lugged in my briefcase, this prop here which are these papers I found in my basement today, the syllabus, readings, and weekly writing assignments from a seminar that you taught, and I took a quarter of a century ago in the spring of 1999 on social capital.
ROBERT PUTNAM: I remember it very well.
ERIC LIU: I’ll tell you; I remember it very well for other reasons, including that the readings in that seminar were draft chapters of Bowling Alone. It hadn’t even been published yet. What was most exciting about it was seeing the through-lines. For me, looking back at a quarter century of learning and practice and finding some of these continuities of a concern about social capital and the health of our democracy. For you, that’s literally got to be at least doubled because you’ve been thinking about, writing about and connecting the dots between ideas and practice for many, many decades, even long before Bowling Alone.
In fact, I want to start our conversation today not talking about that book, but about a book that people know less, and that‘s this book here, your prior book, called Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. In some ways, some of the seeds that you planted in that text really sprouted even in an American context in Bowling Alone.
One of the core things that you described in this Making Democracy Work book was the centrality of culture, of civic culture. You compared the cultures of Northern Italy and Southern Italy and the regions and provinces within each. Will you share a note about what you found in the differences between those cultures and what that says to us here in the United States today about the centrality of culture in shaping the health of the democracy?
ROBERT PUTNAM: Thanks Eric. It’s great to see you. It actually feels like we are just resuming a conversation that we ended just yesterday, but it was 25 years ago.
Can I just say, I admire enormously the work that you’ve done ever since you took that course, and in particular, I have learned that I am okay as someone who can diagnose problems. I want to fix them, but that is not my comparative advantage. You have been, probably more than anybody I know, on the front lines of trying to fix many problems, including the problems that I’ve been highlighting.
I want to begin by talking about Making Democracy Work because that is actually the source of almost all of the rest of the work that I’ve done since.
Let me begin this way; if you were a botanist and wanted to study plant development, you might take genetically identical seeds and plant them in different soils and water them differently and see how their growth depended upon their environment, the water and minerals in the soil.
If you’re a political scientist, you don’t have that easy of an experimental frame, but actually, my wife and family and I were in Italy for other reasons. The Italians, in effect, created those experimental conditions because they created a new set of political institutions that had never existed before but were identical on paper, new regional governments sort of like American state governments. They never existed and they were identical, genetically identical, but the soils in which they were planted were very different.
I was worried because America seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket.
That is, if you go up north in Italy around Venice for example, the Veneto or if you go down to the tip of the boot where the football is being kicked by the leg of Italy, to Sicily, those are extremely different places. Veneto is, and was then, one of the most advanced places on Earth economically and deeply Catholic. Sicily was one of the most backwards places. There were even other regions in the south that were even more backwards. Great differences in that aspect of the soils, but also other differences. Venice, Veneto, that area, was one of the most Catholic areas on Earth, but it was right next door to another region that looked similar in economic terms but was controlled by the Catholics. There were different soils, same institutions, watching them grow, and that will allow you to see what the missing ingredients are.
That is what we are coming to. We had lots of different ideas. Actually, I thought it would simply be wealth, wealthier regions would have the capacity to produce more successful regional governments. That would be the secret ingredient in the soil. It was true a little bit, economic advances in the region were somewhat better and more successful in their political institutions than backwards regions, but that was far from the whole story.
Indeed, it wasn’t the most important part of the story. We looked at a million possible vitamins, but the crucial ingredients turned out to be choral societies, singing groups, and football clubs. What I mean is that it was these connections among people. Politically, of course, in the more successful regions, they were more politically involved, but it wasn’t just that, it was in social terms, in family terms, in reading groups and choral societies and so on.
I’ve been trying for 25 years to get people to listen, to join, to trust, but that hasn’t happened.
That’s the history. Stepping way back, what did that mean? I should tell people that it took me 25 years to finish that study. I started in 1970 and didn’t finish until 1995, but in that period, I gradually came to see that it was these cultural differences or what I came to call “social capital,” that is social connections, were the key. Going back to the title of that book, Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, traditions of having choral societies and football clubs and reading groups and so on, or the absence of that, made all the difference. That was the secret ingredient in the soil.
Now fast forward to 1995, the end of the 20th century, I came back to America. I was worried about America, as a citizen. I was not actually an Americanist, but I was worried because America seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket. I then asked myself, “I wonder whether what I’ve just been studying as an academic, namely these social connections, trust and reciprocity, togetherness, in a loose sense, whether that might have something to do with what I thought was going wrong in America.” That’s where Bowling Alone came from, and that’s when you came into the story.
Does that make sense?
ERIC LIU: It makes total sense. There are so many illuminating threads in what you’ve just said. One thread, this relationship between what you might broadly call infrastructure, the existence of those groups and associations and networks, formal and informal, on one hand and on the other hand, the role of values, virtues, habits, traditions, and norms.
The first category, clubs, are inert until and unless people believe, feel or have a practice or a habit or a tradition of showing up. So much of what you described in Bowling Alone was simultaneous decay, in fact they feed each other, of both the containers and the habits and contents of those containers. That’s what allowed Bowling Alone to be such a wake-up call to our country when it came out a quarter century ago.
One simple question from this vantage point. We’re gathered here with our friends from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and so I am mindful of not only literally the community of philanthropists, but more broadly, the ecosystem of people who are in associational life, in the nonprofit sector, in government, trying to connect these dots who might tune into our conversation at the Chronicle.
If you look at the ecosystem today, a quarter century after you wrote Bowling Alone, does that ecosystem look sicker or healthier than what you already thought was hell in a handbasket going into the late ‘90s?
ROBERT PUTNAM: Much sicker.
Going back for one second to the conceptual point that you were making, it is both values, our culture and social structures and they feed on each other. In some sense, the key idea is trust, which is both a cause and an effect of these social structures.
We are always trying to invite people to new kinds of gatherings that can address the social isolation but also the powerlessness that so many Americans feel right now.
The answer is, in one sense, and we’ve done the research, going back 25 years later and saying what about those lines, those declining lines of group membership and trust, family connections, etc., have they gone up or down? Eric, it’s almost a straight line. Nothing has happened, despite my efforts. In a sense, I feel like I’m a failure because I’ve been trying for 25 years to get people to listen, to join, to trust and so on, but you and I both know why that hasn’t happened and why it has gotten worse.
Lots of people in America, if given a choice between the awful state that I described in the year 2000 and the state of America in 2024…
ERIC LIU: Please rewind!
ROBERT PUTNAM: Exactly! Of course, over the years, my thinking has evolved somewhat about causes and effects and what we have to do. I still think actually that at the core of our problems today is social capital, the connections among us.
ERIC LIU: One of the insights that you had in Bowling Alone was making an important distinction between bridging and bonding social capital. You can have trust in both kinds. Bridging social capital like what you might have seen in Northern Italy among people who have weak ties and loose connections, but were able by habit to trust one another versus the kind of trust that occurs in bonding social capital where birds of a feather. You talk about Sicily where people who are tightly wound in clannish environments whether by blood, through networks of organized crime, or whatever it might have been, only trusted a tight circle of people. Trust exists in both of those, but your point was that depending on the form of social capital, if you don’t have enough bridging capital, then everybody retreats and withdraws to the smallest kinds of circles and the ecosystem withers.
ROBERT PUTNAM: That’s right, and they are not mutually exclusive. You could in principle have both bridging and bonding social capital and, in some sense, that’s the ideal. All of us need bonding social capital. When you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup will be your bonding social capital, but in a modern, pluralist democracy, you need to have lots of bridging social capital and that’s what has fallen the fastest.
I was conscious of this when you and I first encountered one another, and it certainly became a dominant theme in my work, and of course in your work. Bonding social capital is fine, but bridging is what we need, and of course, bridging has gotten a lot worse, a lot worse.
One of the reasons why I used bowling leagues as my metaphor was because bowling leagues were bridging capital. People don’t know this, but bowling is actually the most popular sport in America. More people, even now, bowl than vote, but the fact is they bowl alone. That’s where the title comes from. In the old days, people sitting around in the bowling alleys were leagues and teams, and they were not all similar people. They had in common their interest in bowling for sure, but there could be a local doctor and a local shop-store worker, and that did not seem strange in those days. There were certainly lots of Republicans and Democrats on every bowling team in America. Every ethnic group in America bowled. There were Asian-American bowling leagues. There were Asian-Americans on other bowling leagues. More Blacks bowled than whites bowled. I’m not trying to deify bowling, but it would be better if more of us bowled at least now.
The whole point of that was these were lines of love and trust, for sure. They were, as you say, bridging social capital. You can read this morning‘s newspaper and find out how much we distrust each other and indeed, you could almost say hate each other across these various lines, above all across political lines. We can pick up a newspaper and see what we’ve come to as a country.
Upstream of all that the last time was the sense that we are all in this together and we all have a stake in everybody’s success.
ERIC LIU: You just used a word in passing that is so resonant to me. It’s very much at the center of what Citizen University does. You alluded to the fact that the co-founder was a friend. That is true. She is also my wife, Jena Cane. It was not only our love interpersonally, but this worldview that civic love, like trust, is this sine qua non of the kind of healthy ecosystem you’re describing. I know love, compared to a lot of the rigorous and conceptual things that we were just talking about, love feels so squishy, and love feels so abstract. If you think about love, not only “love thy neighbor,” love the stranger, but even as you put it practically, love of bowling. A common object of love, a common pursuit, a common sense of purpose fed in an ecosystem of associations and activities makes possible the kind of pluralistic democracy where people can mix across lines of identity, whether that’s class, race, or region and so forth.
You also said a moment ago, “It would help if we all bowled more,” you’re actually talking about something you name in actually all of your books which is this relationship between supply and demand. If we address the supply side of the equation, if I waved a wand as a philanthropist and said, “I’m going to fund bowling leagues in every town of more than 20,000 people starting tomorrow,” that would do something, but you would point out then, I assume, that the demand side, even feeling that my love of this thing could be actuated this way, my feeling that I’m not alone, my feeling that I should join a thing that is offline with strangers, but the demand side is really where things have cratered.
At Citizens University, we are always trying to invite people to new kinds of gatherings where they can stimulate that demand by addressing the social isolation but also the powerlessness that so many Americans feel right now.
I’m curious, for you, on the demand side in these recent years since Bowling Alone has become part of the landscape, what do you find works to stimulate a demand for joining and a demand for bridging and associating with people unlike yourself?
ROBERT PUTNAM: I want to answer that directly. It goes directly to another part of your wonderful work over the last several decades.
I want to step back. My expertise actually is looking at longer-run trends that evolve over decades, not over weeks and not over months. That is the sense in which I’m going to now answer your question.
Suppose you go back to periods in American history in which we’ve been caught in exactly the same problems. Social and economic changes meant that the older ways of connecting didn’t fit the way we’ve come to live. Bowling leagues may be nice, but they don’t fit the way we’ve come to live. But look back... bowling leagues were invented actually, not just bowling leagues...
If you back to that period, the late 18th century, which you know very well and which I think it deeply rich for lessons for our time now, around 1890, 1900, 1910, that period, America was in a predicament very like the one we are in now, very high inequality, very high political polarization, very high social isolation, and very high self-centeredness. Americans in that period, the culture was very much an “I” culture, not a “we” culture.
And then, in a short period of time, roughly speaking from 1900 to 1920, we turned it around. I don’t mean America became a marvelous place overnight. We never became an idealist place. Above all, we ignored then and now, issues of race. We’re doing a little bit better, but we changed the direction of society from going down every day every decade. It seemed we were becoming more polarized, more unequal, more self-centered, more socially isolated and then we changed the direction, which is what we want to do now. We want to become more of a “we” society. You can have too much of a “we” society, but not where we are now. We are not exclusively a “we” society. They turned it around. What lessons can we learn from that period?
The single most important lesson that my coauthor highlighted in that book, Shaylyn Romney Garrett, was culture. When we looked at the things that turned first that might give us a clue as to what we ought to do now, I was shocked to discover that it was culture, and not just culture, but morality. I’m not talking about sexual morality; I’m talking about the simple Golden Rule. America in the 1880s, let’s say, among other things, very unequal, very polarized, but also and deeply, it was a society in which the culture, the intellectual culture was social Darwinism. Darwin didn’t believe this, but a lot of people said if red and tooth and claw is the way society progresses and animals progress, we ought to focus on “me, me, me.” No!
In the late 18th century, America was in a predicament very much like the one we are in now — very high inequality, very high political polarization.
This is the crucial point here. I know you know this, but maybe our audience doesn’t know. What happened then was what was called the “social gospel.” It was initially a religious movement. I’m not deeply religious. It was an evangelical Protestant movement, and I am for sure not an evangelic Protestant, but I can look at history and see that the social gospel people said, “Look at the darn Sermon on the Mount, it’s not about glorifying rich people. It’s harder for a rich person to get into heaven than for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle.” Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said worry about the least of them. That social gospel changed the attention of some evangelical Protestants towards focusing on society and not just salvation, but it spread very rapidly...
ERIC LIU: This was the period of the birth of settlement houses ... all these associations...
ROBERT PUTNAM: Yes, and the question that I am now suggesting, and I know you know the answer, if that’s where we have to begin... I’m not saying that the other symptoms are not worth worrying about. Inequality, we’ve got to worry about that. Polarization, we’ve got to worry about that. What was upstream of all that the last we fixed it was the sense that we are all in this together and we all have a stake in everybody’s success. A very simple, moral principle.
Therefore, why don’t you talk about the work that you’ve done in that dimension, Civic Saturdays and so on.
ERIC LIU: Absolutely. By the way, the book you just referred to that you and Shaylyn Romney Garrett coauthored is a book called The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. You were speaking exactly about that period that began with the Social Gospel Movement in the Progressive Era and led to not even a renaissance, but the birth of an ecosystem that was far more inclusive than certainly the Colonial United States had seen, or the Reconstruction Era of the United States had seen of that kind of associational life.
In that period, you describe this pendulum swing from an “I”-oriented society more toward a “we”-oriented society. Then of course, Bowling Alone captures the way in which the pendulum swung back toward “I” in much of our lifetimes. I think the invocation of the Social Gospel Movement is relevant because one of the programs that we have at Citizen University is — I should back up to say that your teachings are studded throughout all of our work and one of them is this simple idea that culture precedes structure. Before you get to policy change and structural reform, attending to a culture — if the culture is hyper-individualistic, self-centered, materialistic, nihilistic, memory-less, obsessed with rights, to the exclusion of responsibility, then your room to change structure in any direction is extremely narrow. And so, how do we shift culture?
One program that we have at Citizen University in that vein as you alluded to is called Civic Saturdays. Civic Saturdays are gatherings that are essentially civic analogue to a faith gathering. It’s not church, or synagogue or mosque, but on purpose it has the flow, the arc and the feel of that kind of gathering in which strangers are invited to enter a space, meet one another, talk about common questions that are way past small talk, questions like “Who have you failed lately?” “What is broken in your heart right now?” “What is broken in your neighborhood or your community?” We rise and we sing together. There are texts that are shared that you can think of as civic scripture. Someone will deliver a civic sermon to try to make some sense of these times and this moment. Then people form into civic circles afterwards to say that they have been shifted and moved. They are invited to open up that aperture.
Now what are we going to do? How are we going to look differently at crises like homelessness, displacement, deindustrialization, urban-rural divides, opioid crisis, various things that are hitting all of our towns, to use the title of another one of your books.
Creating these gatherings, we started these in Seattle, where we are based, which happens to be a place that is open to this kind of experiment in social invitation. Then we were asked to bring Civic Saturdays to other places. For a while we ran around the country doing that, but then decided the way to actually do it was to create a civic seminary and to train people from every part of the country, small towns, rural areas, exurbs, suburbs, as well as the big cities to learn how to organize these gatherings and learn how to carry the spirit, hold the space and stimulate this kind of demand. Now there are hundreds of folks around the country leading these gatherings.
ROBERT PUTNAM: I didn’t know that.
ERIC LIU: I say this to say this is the instantiation of what you’re talking about. Civic Saturdays alone are literally a drop in the ocean, but they are part of a tidal shift. You and I are in sync. Drew called you an optimist at the outset. I would say that you and I, we’re not optimists in the sense that we just think everything is going to work out okay. We are hopeful people, in that we think we have the agency to do things, put ideas out there, put new forms of practice out there that could start to shift the currents of civic life.
ROBERT PUTNAM: First of all, the audience now will see that we are in different time zones. You’re on the West Coast and I’m on the East Coast. It’s dark here. You’re still bright, but the sun is setting out there. I need to turn on the lights in this room so the audience will be able to see me. Just give me a second, and then hope and optimism, that’s what I want to talk about.
ERIC LIU: Great, great. That’s a good metaphor, bringing some light into the room even as things seem to get darker. We have the power to re-illuminate.
ROBERT PUTNAM: Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that.
I want to quote here, — it sounds like I’m changing the subject, but I’m not — a man who I was very fortunate enough to know, who may be the most distinguished rabbi in the world over the last half of the 20th century, first part of the 21st century, but also not unrelatedly, he is probably the most important moral philosopher of that same period, a serious moral philosopher. He was the chief rabbi of London, England, Jonathan Sacks, rabbi, doctor, professor. He was a lot of things. He was brilliant in many many respects and above all, he was very focused on what we owe to other people, which is the core of what we’re talking about here. He was also a historian. He made a distinction between hope and optimism, and maybe you’re consciously drawing on Rabbi Sacks’s distinction.
ERIC LIU: Not consciously, but yes.
ROBERT PUTNAM: You used it perfectly. I want to now quote him, not literally because I don’t have his exact text, but what he essentially said was optimism is a passive virtue. It’s looking out there and making a thumbs up or down. Optimistic means thinking things are going in the right direction. Pessimism means thinking things are going in the wrong direction. He said hope is an active virtue. Hope is saying “I don’t know if they’re actually now going up or down, but I can see how they could be going up and I’m going to do all I can actively to make them go in the right direction.”
ERIC LIU: Yes.
ROBERT PUTNAM: I’m often asked whether I am optimistic or pessimistic, and I always say that I could produce right now a really persuasive case that America is never going to pull out of this, that my grandchildren are going to live in a horrible America. It wouldn’t be that hard for me to generate that persuasive case. I can also tell you how it could go in the other direction and my grandchildren could live in a better America. I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but I’m very hopeful. I can see how it could go, and we are both trying our darndest to get it to go in that direction.
ERIC LIU: We are. Though I wasn’t conscious of Rabbi Sacks’ quote, again, it’s evidence of how practice and ideas — he obviously shaped you and you obviously shaped me and here we are in a great virtuous circle of reinforcement.
In your book The Upswing, you describe as a matter of history the way that during the Progressive Era, that 20-to-25-year period, we did change the direction of the country. It swung from “I” to “we,” and associational life rebounded and bloomed. Implicitly you tell that story because you’re trying to tell Americans today that it did happen before in circumstances quite like this, and it could happen again.
ROBERT PUTNAM: And here are the things that we need to do.
ERIC LIU: Yes, here are the things that we need to do. I want to go to that, particularly thinking about people in philanthropy and people in realms that are adjacent to philanthropy. What can people who are part of the Chronicle of Philanthropy family and ecosystem be doing right now to be part of the upswing, to accelerate that upswing? What counsel would you give? Behind you is a picture of you in the Cabinet Room of President Obama. You’ve given counsel at the White House, and you are a deep believer that the “office of citizen,” small “c” citizen, is one where we need counsel as well. What would you counsel people in the world of philanthropy?
ROBERT PUTNAM: I’ll try to answer that succinctly. I’m conscious of the time we have left. I’m very conscious of the importance of that.
I want to begin by saying what you know but maybe our listeners don’t know. I have talked over the last 25 years, since we first encountered one another, to hundreds of groups all over this country from the Rio Grande to Duluth, Minnesota, to the whole East Coast and the whole West Coast, including Seattle. This is bizarre, but I have talked to at least a half million people. I’ve learned a ton. I’m not bragging. I learned a ton from people, which I’m now going to try to synthesize as well as the history that Shaylyn and I put in the book The Upswing.
One, young people. Young people are better at leading revolutions. Old people are better at knowing that we need revolutions. I’m old enough to know. I actually lived through the high point. I know that it doesn’t have to be this way. Kids, even my children, have never lived in a period in which things were getting better. They’ve lived in a period in which things have been getting worse. Old people have the advantage of knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way, but they are not the people who know what to do next. I am not a good advisor for the kinds of connections that will work best and engage people’s hearts in 2040. My grandchildren may be able to do that, so young people. The last time, it was young people who did this. I do not mean, speaking to the philanthropists, I do not mean making sure that you’ve got a young person on your board. That is not it. It means taking young people seriously, not wallpaper. All their answers are not right, but they are more likely to have right answers than older people. Does that make sense?
ERIC LIU: It makes total sense, absolutely.
ROBERT PUTNAM: I am not saying that young people are flawless, and some of their ideas are dumb, but that’s where we have to take them seriously. Listen to them.
Secondly, local. The last time we did this and turned it around, it was not people at Harvard or people, frankly, in the elite places of America. The innovations of the Progressive Era that were really important happened in flyover country and in small towns. It was not a top-down movement, it was a bottom-up movement. It was not mainly a political movement. Of course, politicians were involved, but the politicians then, and now, were the last to get onto it. They were like the French Revolutionary leader who saw a crowd, got in front of it and said, “I’m your leader,” but he didn’t come up with the idea. That’s the way it will be now.
The whole idea that we should find some charismatic leader who will lead the way — nobody thinks Joe Biden will be that charismatic leader. Some people thought that Barack would be a charismatic leader. You and I think the world of him, but he was not a charismatic leader. It’s certainly not going to be the guy who is likely to be the Republican candidate for president this year, who does think that it’s him who is the way, the truth and the light. It’s never been that way.
It’s bottom-up and therefore what philanthropists should be doing is maybe a nationwide program to encourage small groups of people, especially young people in, you know, Peoria. It was Peoria last time. There are a lot of other things they should focus on, for example bridging social capital and so on, but those are the two main things that I would emphasize.
ERIC LIU: Bob, I love those two because they are things that are often said. I can’t tell you how many philanthropic situations and nonprofit settings that I’ve been in where people furrow their brow and say it’s really important to listen to young people and how important it is to root things locally in communities, but still go to a one-size-fits-all type of older-adult-driven agenda. What does it mean to take seriously these two ideas that you’re naming?
Another program that we have at Citizen University because it instantiates what you’re describing, is one in which we’ve taken a page out of the Progressive Era playbook about trying to meat on the bones of the idea of mutual aid. That term got very popular during the pandemic, but it mainly ended up being a lot of online bulletin boards where people were posting what they needed. That’s different from mutual aid. That’s just a want-ad kind of platform.
What we’ve been doing is creating a program called the Civic Collaboratory. It started as a national thing but now is rooted in Lexington, in Phoenix, in Charlotte, and Wichita, in which people form circles and take turns in that circle presenting to the rest of the group some civic project or initiative they’re trying to move at the local level in their neighborhoods in their communities. The rest of the group has to offer not critique or commentary, but rather hard commitments of help, investments of capital of every kind: social, intellectual, institutional, financial. There are funders who can be part of this too. Then what goes around comes around. You make a commitment to someone you may have just met at this meeting because next time it will be your turn in rotation.
To go back to where we started, this is that fusion of both the container, the infrastructure and the virtues, the values of reciprocity and mutuality. I name that because our most successful instantiation of this collaboratory mutual aid format has been with young people. We had a youth collaboratory where high school-aged students around the country are putting these ideas into practice.
To me, you’re absolutely right, you and I have both spent time with the presidents of the United States, and presidents can do only so much good. They can do a lot of harm. They can break a lot of things, but the renewal will only come from the bottom up. That is one of your deepest lessons of your scholarship, one of my deepest lessons from my time working in the other Washington and now this Washington.
Bob, what I want to close with in this last question for you is what you’ve described for making a persuasive case for how we are screwed, your grandkids coming of age in an America that is far more dystopian than even what we might imagine today. Could you, quickly, give me the persuasive case for the opposite? Tell me how it is that your grandkids, when they reach full adulthood, are going to be in a United States that has rediscovered common purpose, that has been able to transcend these differences, that has been able to hold enough of a sense of “we” so that we don’t fly apart centrifugally and have rediscovered a muscle of joining and associating in a way that keeps a democracy strong. Paint that picture for me.
ROBERT PUTNAM: I will, because I think a lot about that. My grandchildren by the way are now in their late 20s. What we’re talking about right now, we talk about in our family all the time. I don’t mean that we are saints, but I do mean that if you’re Bob Putnam’s grandchildren, you couldn’t not think about this.
I’m optimistic. Actually, fundamentally, I am optimistic, not just because of my grandchildren because I can see through their eyes, glimmers, sparks of things that could easily imagine would get better. There are sparks. I’m not talking about 2024, but in the last five years or so, you can see sparks of increasing engagement by young people. For example, the rate of electoral participation. It’s not the only thing by any means, but the rate of election participation in 2020 and 2022, the last national elections was higher than the youth engagement had ever been (wait for it) since 1910, the last time we were coming out of this thing. That’s what it looks like.
I want to name-check one kind of group I’m on the board of, something called the American Exchange Program, which is a group focused only on giving high school seniors one week exchanging and living in the shoes of another group of high school kids living very differently. They take kids from Wellesley, Mass., and they spend a week hanging out with some kids down in the bayous of South Texas, different politically, different racially, different economically. Then the kids from South Texas come up and go to Red Sox games or something.
It’s amazing what that does. It’s only a week, for goodness sakes, but it opens their eyes to a completely different socioeconomic group. They love these kids that they meet. Astonishingly, in a short period of time, it creates a sense of connection, bridging social capital, making real connections with people who are different from them in every possible way.
I’m not trying to name check that group. I’m saying that is what it will look like when we turn it around. It will look like young people who have developed close personal relationships with people who live differently from them, in different places from them, worship different gods or don’t even worship at all in a formal religious sense. That’s why I’m optimistic.
ERIC LIU: Bob, literally everything you say opens up another potential 40-minute conversation. I said that was the last question, but I have to button one more on here because what you just named, and painting that picture of young people who are involved with the American Exchange Project, speaking intergenerationally, founded by a young man named David McCullough III, whose grandfather, the author David McCullough II, of course is one of the great historians and chroniclers of the American story. In that same way, it’s hard to grow up Bob Putnam’s grandkids without thinking about these things, and the same I’m sure in the McCullough Household.
I’m optimistic, because you can see sparks of increasing engagement by young people.
One of the parts of the picture that you are painting in something like the AEP is the way in which this rising generation, not just Gen Z now, but Gen Alpha even has a fundamentally different approach to race and American identity than your generation or my generation. And a lot of the hangups that your generation and my generation had about race, about thinking about it in only binary terms, about thinking about it in a very static way. There is a much greater sense of fluidity, a much greater appreciation, not just saying “we’re all mixed and so everything is okay,” they’re very literate in power in the ways in which color confers advantage or disadvantage in the United States, and yet, this rising generation is so much less obsessed with strictures and performative requirements of identity politics as it has played out on both the left and the right.
I want to ask you to say a word about the picture that you’re painting, a combination of hope and optimism that we could be in an upswing in the United States. What is the role of race and a sense of common Americanness in that picture that you are envisioning?
ROBERT PUTNAM: I am very glad you raised the issue of race. It was something I intended to raise several questions ago but didn’t get to it. It’s crucial. It’s the most important fundamental cleavage in America and has been since our founding, before the so-called Founders. It’s a big deal. It was a problem that the Progressive Era that we both think highly of did not solve. They kicked it down the road. Yes, of course racial issues are important.
Now I’m just going to be personal because it captures what you are saying about this youngest generation. I’m going to describe some of my grandchildren. My daughter went to Costa Rica, met, fell in love with, and married a Costa Rican man, Mario, a wonderful human being. Three of my grandchildren do not look anything like me at all. They are not pink, they are brown. They are wonderful kids. Of course they are wonderful kids. They are thoroughly bi-cultural. They live in Costa Rica sometimes. We just got back from a family reunion in Costa Rica with that part of their cultural heritage, but they also live in America and are very successful. That’s the first thing. I’m not praising my kids. I’m illustrating that in that generation, nobody in the family thinks “he’s brown or he’s pink.” They’re all cousins. That’s not unique to the Putnam Family. That is happening all over America.
Secondly, one of my granddaughters is married to a nonbinary person. I’m having to learn to say “they” rather than “he” or “she.” That’s a real task for someone my age. I love Ronnie, this person, but I can never remember to call them “they.” My grandchildren don’t make any distinction between Ronnie and the rest of the clan at all. I don’t know if I’m conveying this thing. I’m really passionate about this. I’m not saying how great the Putnam Family is. I’m saying the Putnam Family is maybe not perfectly typical, but it’s typical. The youngest generation, our grandchildren represent the diversity of America in sexual identities, in ethnic identities. We’re all pretty liberal. Some of my grandchildren are a little more conservative, but there aren’t any Trump supporters, I have to say, in our family.
This is a melting pot. Forgive me for using that expression. []Our family, they all love each other and that’s typical of this next generation. That is fundamentally the reason for hope. I went on so long and I’m sorry I got so personal.
ERIC LIU: It is exactly the perfect way for us Bob to close this part of our decades long running conversation. We opened talking about when I was in my 20s, the age of your grandkids and you were my teacher. What’s great is the combination that you have always modeled, not just this passion and this commitment and this sense of high enthusiasm for these ideas, but a nimbleness and a limberness and a willingness to change and adapt to times and to adapt your ideas to the times. I don’t think either of us falls in love with our ideas in a way that is rigid. We fall in love with the vision of what our society can be if some of these ideas can be brought to life.
Bob, you’ve been doing that in a way that gives me so much hope and heart. Thank you for spending this time today. Thanks to the Chronicle for gathering us together and giving me this excuse to dig up these papers from my basement from 25 years ago. To be continued...
ROBERT PUTNAM: I hope that the audience enjoyed it. It’s been enormous fun for us.
ERIC LIU: That’s absolutely right. Bob, thank you. To be continued on other platforms.
ROBERT PUTNAM: Yes, thanks a lot, Eric, and thanks to the Chronicle.
