Since Bowling Alone was published in 2000, Putnam has expanded his focus beyond the decline of civic organizations to explore the deeper causes of America’s social and political disintegration. And after decades of studying these problems, he’s convinced that the current crisis of social trust can’t be explained solely by political or economic factors. The key, according to Putnam, is morality.

“I know this sounds really mushy — and I didn’t always believe this — but the data and the history have convinced us that the leading indicator [for societal change] is a sense of morality,” says Putnam when I call him at his home in Cambridge, Mass. “We need a moral reawakening of America. That’s upstream from political choices.”

In Putnam’s mind, that fact is — believe it or not — an enduring source of hope. Although the empirical measurements of social and political trust are continuing to decline, Putnam says, he finds hope in the arguments of young political activists like David Hogg and Greta Thunberg, whose visions of political change are premised on a broader moral transformation of society.

“I don’t know if I’m optimistic, but I’m hopeful,” Putnam says. “As an empirical prediction, I can see things getting worse and worse and worse. But I can also see things going in a different direction. I can see how it could happen.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ian Ward: From our vantage point in 2023, it seems like the erosion of social capital that you’ve spent your career documenting has not only continued but actually accelerated. Is the United States approaching a state of complete social bankruptcy?

Robert Putnam: Is social capital going down? Yes, it certainly is still going down. But this is not a case in which Americans are going to go into hell in a handbasket forever.

We know that the decline in social capital, in trust and in trustworthiness all began in the middle of the 1960s. But we also know now — and I didn’t know this when I first wrote Bowling Alone — that the 1960s was the end of a 60-year upswing in social capital. Around the turn of the 20th century, America was also in the pits: very unequal, very polarized, very self-centered, very low social capital and presumably very low levels of trust. Then, from the first decade or so of the 20th century until the 1960s, things were on an upswing.

So the question is, Are we headed for another upswing? I certainly don’t think that’s a given. This is not a cyclical theory of history in which every 70 years you get another turn. But on the other hand, the episode at the turn of the 20th century proves that it’s possible to reverse these declines.

Ward: Many of the trends that you first identified in Bowling Alone — like rising deaths of despair, declining marriage rates and family formation, rising rates of anxiety and depression, declining religiosity — have become touchstones of resurgent populist movements in the United States, both on left and the right. Are you at all surprised by the way that those ideas have been politicized in the past 20 years?

Putnam: If I could correct the question, it’s not just that they’ve been politicized — it’s that they ramified, in the sense that more and more features of our life turned out to be influenced by the decline of bowling leagues. That’s the bizarre thing about it. Am I surprised that the trends have continued? Yeah, a little bit. Some people will give me credit for having picked it out a long time ago, but it’s clear that I was right — not that that’s any consolation, because I was right about things getting worse.

Now, am I surprised this has been picked up by politicians? Well, I can’t say I’m actually surprised by it, because essentially the first thing that happened when I published the original article called Bowling Alone [in 1995] was that I got a call from the White House and was invited to come to Camp David. That was a real shock.

But by now, I’m no longer surprised. People all across the political spectrum are still getting in touch with me — and in very different ways. There are some people on the far left of the political spectrum — people for whom I have a lot of respect and in many cases a lot of sympathy — who have picked it up. But then there’s Sen. Mike Lee, who’s about as conservative a guy as there is, who has also picked it up. That’s a little bit more of a surprise.

Ward: You wrote an article for the New York Times in 2013 about your hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio, which you called “a poster child for [the] changes that have engulfed America.” There’s a common political narrative that says that towns like Port Clinton have been betrayed by political and economic elites who either don’t care about the well-being of the town or who have turned a blind eye toward the suffering that’s taking place there. As a political scientist, what do you make of that narrative as an explanation for the decline of social capital in places like your hometown?

Putnam: It’s clear that decisions were made in the ’60s — and I’m using the passive voice for the moment — that harmed the Port Clinton economy and the economy of the Rust Belt more generally. But if that’s so, then those trends got embedded in the social and economic structure in a much deeper way. After all, it’s now been at least a half-century since the factories in Port Clinton started closing, and it’s continued to go downhill.

[In that piece,] I was not blaming Port Clinton. I loved Port Clinton, and I still do. But it was an exemplar of trends that were happening [in 2013]. And you can see the underlying trends that I’m talking about all over America — the splitting apart of the country, rising polarization, rising inequality. It’s much more visible in a place like Port Clinton than it is in a place like Boston, but there’s still a growing gap between rich and poor and between whites and non-whites in Boston.

So when it comes to the broader trend, it’s too simple-minded to explain that in terms of a couple of greedy people. No doubt, there are greedy people, but it’s just too simplistic a story. We’ve got to do much deeper things to change America and point it in the right direction.

Ward: Your more recent work has also addressed America’s declining trust in their political institutions. How does that decline relate to the more general decline in trust between individuals?

Putnam: The first thing to say is that although the trends in trust and government and the trends in social trust in other people look like they’re the same trend — they’re both declining, and they both started declining in the 1960s — that is an optical illusion. They’re both going down, but they’re going down in very different ways.

If you decompose that graph that everyone has seen about trust in government, the decline in trust in government occurs in two very short periods of time: the 12 months after the 1964 election and the 12 months after the 1972 election. In other words, after Lyndon Johnson says, “We’re not going to send American boys to do the job of Asian boys in Vietnam” and then immediately after the election sends hundreds of thousands of American boys to Vietnam; and then again in the 12 months after Nixon’s election in 1972, meaning the 12 months of the Watergate scandal, when it became clear that Nixon had betrayed the country.

Then there is one more factor, which is how the economy is doing. When the economy’s doing well, other things being equal, people trust the government more. When the economy’s doing badly, then trust goes down. In three-quarters of a century, all the ups and downs in trust in government can be explained by three factors: the Vietnam War, Watergate, and how the economy is doing. It’s amazing.

Ward: So what I hear you saying is that decline in public trust in government is tied very closely to discrete acts of betrayal on the part of political leaders, as opposed to being a function of the generalized decline in trust in other people. Is that right?

Putnam: Yup — and there’s a whole lot of ancillary evidence that I could cite. For instance, the same trend does not apply to states and local governments, because, of course, you wouldn’t expect them all to be betraying their citizens at exactly the same moment.

Ward: How does that compare to the decline in general social trust?

Putnam: Generally speaking, your level of trust in other people — do you trust the generic person walking down the street? — that’s more or less set and unchanging after you reach adulthood, around age 21.

So if you were born in the ’40s and came of age in the ’60s, you had very high trust in other people, and in general, you still do. The Boomers — people born in the ’50s and ’60s who came of age in the ’70s and ’80s — have significantly less trust than that earlier generation, and it just keeps going now. [In Bowling Alone, Putnam attributes this generational decline in trust to a host of factors related to demographic changes, shifts in Americans’ work and leisure habits and evolving gender dynamics.] What age are you now?

Ward: I’m 25.

Putnam: Well, I’m sure you’re a very nice person, but on average, people in your generation are now — and forever will be — much less trusting than Millennials or Boomers or the other generations that came before.

Ward: I’m not even totally convinced you’re Robert Putnam, if I’m being honest.

Putnam: [Laughs] Right — this is an AI person or something.

But this story, which is undergirded by a lot of research, has some very important implications. Because this process happens by generational replacement, the way the level of trust in other people changes over time is just by people dying. When my generation is all gone and we’re replaced by your generation, trust is going to keep going down and down and down. Even if tomorrow, everybody in America suddenly decided to be nice to everybody else, it will still be decades before the average level of trust rises.

But if Biden keeps his word and the economy rises over the next couple of years, that’s going to give a big upward boost to trust in government. So I can easily imagine that by 2025, trust in government is moving up, but I can’t imagine trust in other people moving up for 50 years. They look like the same trend, both going down, but underneath, they’re completely different.

Ward: That seems important in terms of possible solutions to those problems. For instance, your most recent book looks back at the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era as a model for the sort of political and social transformations that could repair trust both in our institutions and in each other. Certainly, there are parallels to be drawn between the political situations in those two eras — widening economic inequality, extreme polarization, declining social capital — but there are also some pretty major differences, right? The early 20th century was a period of rapid industrialization, whereas ours is a period of de-industrialization. What lessons can we learn from that era despite those differences?

Putnam: Well, we’ve got to compare like with like. We want to be comparing the Gilded Age — the period roughly between 1870 to 1890s — with now. That’s where we think the parallel is. And there were a lot of ups and downs economically in that period, but because of changing technology, the basic level of economic growth was rising. And today, the rate of economic growth is very unsteady, but it’s still basically up. But the major thing was that there was a huge level of inequality then, and the same thing is true now.

Your readers should know that at the peak of the most recent upswing in the 1960s, America wasn’t just a little bit more equal and a little bit more trustworthy. Most people in America trusted other people — about 70 percent. But it’s gone from roughly 70 percent to something like 20 percent between my generation and yours. And in terms of inequality, America in the 1960s was the most economically equal country in the world. We were Sweden. We had gotten from the Gilded Age to that point. How did that happen? It wasn’t technological change that did that. It was political action.

Ward: So let’s get into that political action. The Progressive reforms that you mention in your latest book, The Upswing, fell into three broad categories: reforms to create more economic equality, like the personal income tax, reforms to increase citizens’ stake in government, like the adoption of popular primaries and the direct election of senators, and reforms that allowed the government to actually improve the daily lives of people, like health and safety regulations. What would reforms of that scope look like today?

Putnam: I will try to answer that question, but I need to say one more thing about that earlier period [between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era] before we get to this period. My research partner and I looked really hard for a leading indicator [of societal change], and our working theory was that the leading indicator must be economics. That’s a standard social science view: economics drives everything, and then policies and everything else follows.

The one thing we’re sure of is that that story is not true. To me, the astonishing fact was that the leading indicator was actually cultural and moral factors. The first thing that changed was that ordinary Americans became convinced — some through religion, others not — that they had a moral duty to worry about other people, and their morality changed from an “I” morality to a “we” morality. Conversely, the first thing that turned in the other direction [in the 1960s] was actually our sense of moral obligation orders. We went from a “we” society to an “I” society.

Follow that through for a minute, because that’s a very different causal story. This is a narrative in which first of all, people change their hearts. I know this sounds really mushy — and I didn’t always believe this — but the data and the history have convinced us that the leading indicator is a sense of morality. We need a moral reawakening of America. That’s upstream from political choices. It’s only when people begin to think, “Oh, I have an obligation to other people,” that they begin to support parties and policies that actually do close the economic gap.

Ward: Isn’t it possible that debate over desirable policies is part of the moral transformation you’re talking about? Doesn’t a society figure out what it cares about by figuring out what sort of policies it should adopt? I would wager that that’s actually an important part of the process.

Putnam: It’s not about wagers. It’s about evidence. Tell me what the evidence is. I’ve shown you what my evidence is, so now you tell me about your evidence.

Ward: Fair enough. To rephrase my original question, then: If America underwent the sort of moral transformation that you’re calling for, what sort of policies would it adopt?

Putnam: Later this evening, I’m going to a gun violence rally about 10 minutes from where I live in Harvard Yard, and I’m going to meet David Hogg, who was a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I’m not saying he’s a saint — I don’t know if he’s a saint — but he illustrates how people younger people are making moral arguments that have resonance, and in Florida, that did have policy consequences.

Another example is Greta Thunberg. Her argument about global warming is very powerful, not least because it’s a moral argument. She is not saying, “Oh, let’s have a couple of fewer gas guzzlers, and that’ll have microscopic long-term effects on the climate.” She’s making a simple moral argument: “You guys — the older generation — are screwing up our lives, and that’s just not fair.” That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That youth moralizing movement has had a real effect on real policies.

Ward: It’s a bit ironic that Bowling Alone has become a sort of cultural shorthand for America’s civic decline, and yet you seem remarkably hopeful about America’s future. What’s the source of your optimism about the future?

Putnam: You used two words — hopeful and optimistic — that are thought to be synonyms. But I want to invoke the thoughts of the foremost Jewish moral philosopher of the 21st century, Jonathan Sacks, who distinguished between hope and optimism. Optimism, he said, is a passive virtue. Optimism says that I’m sitting here looking out at the world and believing that things are going better. Hope, he said, is an active virtue, because hope means I can see how things could change and I’m going to do everything I can to make it happen.

Now, if you allow me that distinction, I don’t know if I’m optimistic, but I’m hopeful. As an empirical prediction, I can see things getting worse and worse and worse. But I can also see things going in a different direction. I can see how it could happen — indeed, I described to you how it could happen, and I’m working my tail off to try to make it happen. So in that sense, I’m hopeful.

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