Inclusive Citizenship: A Film Review

Inclusive Citizenship: A Film Review

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In the “closing decades of the twentieth century,” the Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam observed in 2002, Americans grew “ever less connected with one another and with collective life. We voted less, gave less, trusted less, and engaged less with our friends, our neighbors, and even our families. Our ‘we’ steadily shriveled.”

Renowned for his runaway bestseller Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), Putnam was describing a brief but significant turnaround in 2002, when national surveys of attitudes and behaviors found that trust in government, community, and neighbors was “substantially higher” than twelve months before.

Between October 2000 and November 2001, Americans’ trust in national government increased by 44 percent, with trust in local government up by 19 percent. Trust in “people running my community” had grown by 8 percent, and trust in one’s neighbors by 10 percent.

What had caused the turnaround, and would it last? Among the factors Putnam held as responsible: the national crisis tied to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Putnam saw “no evidence of any change in religiosity or in reported church attendance” over the following year, but he did find “unmistakable evidence of change in American civic life.”

The broader implications of Putnam’s data for civic engagement are the subject of a multiple award-winning new documentary, Join or Die (Abramorama Entertainment, 2024), from filmmakers Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis, which began screening at select theaters last month and will be in theaters nationwide from September 15.

While focused on the findings and reception of Putnam’s bestseller, including the televised conversations it generated from the East Room of the Clinton White House, Join or Die also tracks trends and beliefs in the years since. The fraying of social ties that began in the 1990s is shown to deteriorate in the late 2010s and to worsen further in 2020, due in large part to the pandemic and division over how to end it.

“Not really a joiner”

The film’s backward glance in its first half details still-current trends. It spotlights why trust in government fell from a high of more than 70 percent in the 1960s to less than 25 percent by the 1990s. “In barely two decades,” Putnam determines, “half of all the civic infrastructure in America [had] simply vanished.”

Among those interviewed in the film are Hillary Clinton, who calls Bowling Alone “an early warning that things were breaking apart.” To Jane McAlevey, an author and labor organizer focused also on root causes, Putnam “started a really important discussion about how have we gone from being so solitaristic to being so individualistic.”

The downgrading of civic engagement across America wasn’t accidental, McAleley contends:

I believe that a deliberate strategy of cultivating individualism begins in the early 1970s, to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Movement, and the Trade Union movement, with a strategy of downgrading the concept of the communal and the collective, and elevating the idea that the individual is supreme.

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