Offline with Jon Favreau - Robert Putnam on Barack Obama, Taylor Swift, and Making America Social Again

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

Robert Putnam, renowned political scientist and author of Bowling Alone and The Upswing, joins Offline to explain why bowling alone and scrolling alone are two sides of the same coin. Putnam has spent his life deciphering why social capital—our connection to each other and our communities—has been withering away for the last 50 years. The consequences of this trend are the focus of a new documentary, “Join or Die,” which explores the importance of civic engagement in America. Bob and Jon talk about the film, why social capital undergirds democracy, and why the internet is no substitute for joining an in-person club.  Join or Die is the inaugural film of the IRL Movie Club - a new initiative for Americans to gather in art house cinemas, watch documentaries in the public interest and then talk about them. To learn more, visit https://www.irlmovieclub.org/  For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

What the data say is we're not going to fix all these problems we have today. Polarization, inequality, self-centeredness, social isolation. We're not going to fix that until we begin to worry about other people more than ourselves. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey everyone, you just heard from today's guest, the renowned political scientist and bowling alone author who's the subject of the new documentary, Join or Die, Robert Putnam. I have to start by just nerding out here. Dr. Putnam is a political science legend, and I've wanted to meet him for a long time. So many of the topics we've covered on this show

have been inspired by his work, which I first studied in college, social isolation, the collapse of American civic life, our growing distrust in institutions. And Bowling Alone hasn't just been an inspiration for our little show. It's one of the most influential pieces of political science ever published. It shaped the thinking of presidents and become a cultural phenomenon that has left its mark with millions of people who aren't poli-sci nerds. Putnam argued in Bowling Alone that Americans were becoming increasingly disconnected from one another, that the social structures that were once an integral part of American society, PTAs, bowling leagues, clubs of all kinds, were collapsing, and that the result

of these weakened communal ties and trust would erode the foundation of American democracy. 24 years later, we are living in the future Putnam warned us about. And the question we're left with is whether we can change course, not just by electing new leaders or passing new laws, but by reconnecting and rebuilding the social bonds that make democracies work. So we talked about that. We also talked about the role that social media and the internet have played in fueling the collapse of American civic life, what role that collapse has had in the rise of

Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, and what we can do to become better joiners and better citizens. As a note, we're getting straight into the interview. Max will be back with us next week. Here's Robert Putnam. Professor Robert Putnam, welcome to Offline. Thanks very much, John. And of course, call me Bob. If I get a phone call and somebody says they want to speak to Robert, I hang up because anybody who knows me actually knows it's Bob. All right, Bob, it is. Well, I just want to start by saying what a huge fan I am. I read Bowling Alone 25 years ago as a

freshman in college. It had an enormous impact on my political worldview. It's a big reason I went on to major in political science and sociology, influenced the speeches I wrote for President Obama, who I know you know well. And an essential theme of this podcast is that our fraying social connections make the work of democracy that much harder. This is all to say thank you. And to start with a question for listeners who might not be as familiar with your work. What is social capital and why is it important to democracy? Well, social capital simply refers to social networks, our connections with other people, our neighbors, our family, our community organizations, the people I know in my bowling league, for example. And that's where the title of that book comes from. And those networks typically generate a sense of obligation to other people, and that generates reciprocity. That is, I'll do this for you because down the road you'll do something for me, or even I'll do this for you

now because down the road you'll do something for somebody else and they'll do something for me. That network of reciprocal obligations and trust makes life in a million different ways easier. That's the core idea of social capital. It turns out to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. That is to say, the more connections you have, the longer you'll live. I mean, your chances of dying are pretty high, but your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group. So there are big effects of social networks, social capital, on us personally. But what makes those networks even more important is that our connections affect other people in the community. So a couple of quick examples. If you live in a neighborhood and you're worried about crime, you might do one of two things. You might spend more on the cops or you might get to know your

neighbors a little bit better so you could call them by their first name. There's no question. The latter is the more effective way. I'm not saying we don't need cops. I am saying in an ideal world, it's you and your fellow neighbors who are deterring crime because you're looking out for one another. I'm not a big fan of jargon,

but that's a convenient word to say social capital. And the more social capital there is in a community or a country, the better democracy works. That's the huge bottom line here. And so let's go quickly to today. I don't know about you. I'm really worried about American democracy. You know, you have a lot of different things you can imagine doing. Let's, you know, have a different electoral system or better politicians or whatever. But actually, in the long run, the best way to have a better functioning American democracy in the long run is to have people more connected with one another. of our time, and it has been for quite some time now, is what has happened to those social bonds that we once had with each other. Your work, and you talked about this in a new documentary about your work, Join or Die. You talk about how your work on social capital and democracy actually

started in Italy, which I found fascinating to just sort of talk about that experiment and sort of the social science behind it, because you were really able to test this out in a unique way. Let's go back. Suppose you're a botanist and you're trying to study plant growth, and you wanted to know how much is the growth of a plant, a tree, or a shrub, or whatever, dependent upon the external environment. And so what you might do is to take genetically identical seeds, but you plant them in different pots of soil, and you water them differently, and then you watch and see what happens. And, you know, if it worked out, you'd be able to see some of these plants flourishing and some of them dying, and then you'd do a soil analysis to find out what it is. Was it the water, or was it too much iron, or not enough, you know, phosphorus, or what? No. Who knows? Now, political science normally is not an experimental science. While

I was in Italy, I mean, this is a long time ago, 1970, as you know, the Italians happened to set the conditions for exactly that kind of unbelievable experiment. That is to say, they created a new set of institutions, regional governments. You can think of them as state governments, all across Italy, from the top down to the boot. So, same organizations. On paper, they looked identical. They had lots of powers and they had lots of money in principle, but the soils into which they were introduced were very different. I mean, southern Italy, when we went there, I saw peasants in the fields harvesting grain exactly the same way that peasants in those same fields had harvested the grain 2,000

years ago. I mean, this was a really backward part of Italy, but you go up to the north and it was one of the most post-industrial parts of the globe. So big differences in economic development, big differences in culture, because some of the regions of Italy were deeply communist, and right next door were other regions that were deeply Catholic. So in other words, we had lots of different cross-cutting things, and we could trace them. We did over, well, in the end, over 20, 25 years, we could see

which ones were flourishing and which ones were faltering. So we, now we had the measurement, as you would do in a botanical experiment, and then we checked the soils and we had many different ideas. We thought it might be wealth, because maybe wealthier regions could afford, you know, more computers or whatever. We thought it might be education. That's a conceit of educators. We think what we do matters. So maybe it was better educated regions. Maybe we thought it could be Catholics versus communists, etc. Well, all those things had a little bit of effect. With what you controlled for those, the big thing turned out to be choral societies and football clubs. In some of the regions, people all the time, you know,

they were playing football, Italian football and pickup games. I mean, I'm not talking about professional leagues. Or they were, you know, singing in the town choir or whatever. In other places, they weren't. And that turned out to be the secret ingredient in the soil. So that's the background. The short version of that book, which was called Making Democracy Work, what makes democracy work? Social capital. I've now

summarized 25 years of work in one sentence. I thought that was, that's pretty, pretty concise. And so then after Italy, you came home to the United States and you sort of saw the same thing as happening here. And I think one of the trickier questions to answer about the decline of social capital and social bonds and the ties between us has been, why? What has caused us to stop joining over the years? And maybe you can walk through some of the most compelling explanations and then talk about what you think are the driving forces today. The first thing that the book Bowling Alone showed was astonishingly every measurable form of social capital was going downhill, not just bowling leagues, but also not rotary clubs and, you know, and garden clubs. They were all going downhill.

But also things like picnics. I was lucky enough to stumble upon the National Picnic Archive, and it turned out there had been a 60% decline in picnics over the previous. I mean, that's astonishing. And, you know, so, and the connections that people had with their neighbors, often the frequency with which they went to town meetings, and I don't mean a big formal town meeting. I mean, just hanging out with other people to talk about, you know, the schools or the sewer system or whatever.

All those things were going down. And we could see some things had an effect. We could see that suburbanization had had an effect, for example. That is to say, as we move out from cities into suburban and even non-suburban areas, people are actually physically less close to their neighbors and more where they're spending more time in a car. I think I said that was sort of 10% of the problem. A big part of it, it turned out, was television, or at least that's what I thought at the time. Television gave you the illusion of connecting with other people. You're looking at

friends, and you think those are your friends. That's the illusion, but actually they're not your friends, and you don't have any friends because you're spending all the time watching friends rather than having friends. So I thought that was a big part of the story. Much more recently, only in the last five, roughly speak, last five or 10 years, I've now taken a much bigger, broader look at this over a much longer period of time. And I've now concluded that not that television was irrelevant, but that it was just a small part of a much bigger change that was going on. And if you want to, we can talk about that bigger change. Yeah, let's do that.

Boney Mullen says, looks at the world from roughly speaking 1970 or 65 or 70 to roughly speaking 2000. So the last quarter of the 20th century, that's the data I had at that point. But this last book I wrote, my wife insisted will be my last book. It will is called the upswing. And here's the way in which the upswing differs from bowling alone. First of all, it's looking not just at the, you know, the way in which the upswing differs from Bowling Alone. First of all,

it's looking not just at the last 25 years or so, it looks at the whole of the 20th and 21st centuries. Then I'm looking at trends, long run trends from about 1890, roughly speaking, until now. So in round numbers, it's looking at the last 125 years. And moreover, it doesn't just look at social capital. It looks at long-run trends in four things, one of which is social capital, but then it also looks at politics and the degree to which we're polarized or not polarized politically.

And there are big differences in that over the last 125 years. And the third is economic inequality. To what extent are we, you know, are we basically a middle class society or to what extent do we have huge gaps between rich and poor? And lastly, an interesting variable, which is what I sort of call culture, by which I mean, do we feel at any given point in time that we're all in this together? Or that we're not all in this together? It's every man and woman for himself, and we're all

fighting. In other words, the upswing looks at the degree over time in which we think of ourselves as we, or we think of ourselves as I. We know that today, I mean, I think probably everybody listening knows today, we are incredibly socially isolated, probably as socially isolated as Americans have been ever in our history. That is low social capital. We know that today, America is extremely polarized. When you look at the data,

probably the only time in our history in which we've been more politically polarized, that is the gap between our two parties, was the five years between 1860 and 1865, when we were pretty damn polarized. We were fighting that for those five years. We're extremely unequal in America today. That is, the gap between rich and poor is huge, and probably the only time in which the gap between rich Americans and poor Americans has been that great was in the Gilded Age, 125 years ago. And we're also very self-centered. I'm not just talking about the former president, Trump. I'm talking about basically all of us are focused on me, me, me. So that's where we are now.

And it turns out that 125 years ago, we were in the same situation. In the 1890s, big, huge gap between rich and poor. 1890s, politics was very tribal. That is no cross-party collaboration at all. 1890s, America had very low social capital. People had just moved to the cities and they didn't know their neighbors and they left their family and friends behind in the sticks, whether the sticks was in Iowa or the sticks was in southern Italy or Quebec, to take an example you may be familiar with. And we were also very self-focused. Okay, now I just want to describe

one curve and then we can talk about the substance. The one curve is this. It's a big upside down U-curve. In 1890, we were very low in equality, big gap between rich and poor first guild of the age then we become very equal and by the peak America is the most equal country in the world, it's astonishing in the 1960s

America looks like Sweden for goodness sakes in terms of the gap between rich and poor and then we turn back around and now we're back in an extreme gap between rich and poor. That's the economics. Politics, the same story. Then we were, back in the day, back at the end of the 19th century, we were very polarized in political terms.

Then over the course of the next 60 to 70 years, we became much less polarized, much more cross-party collaboration. Most of the New Deal, most of the Great Society, and most of Reagan's work was all was done by cross-party collaboration. It was both Republicans and, well, we know what that looks like now when you go to congress and there's essentially zero collaboration so another big upside down curve very polarized very unpolarized and and now very polarized again i know i want what i really want to say is in that picture tv couldn't explain that whole curve you see what i'm trying to say it might have something to do with technology maybe it does maybe it doesn't but it's something else is going on that's that's the bottom line i know i have some ideas about what it is but this latest work unlike bowling alone looks at four different variables looks at it over a big period of time and among other things says it's probably not tv

although media may play a role. Way more than you wanted to know. No, it's exactly what I wanted to know. And not to continue getting too wonky about it, but I feel like there's a group of people who are more economically determinist who might say, policies that reduced wealth inequality then political polarization declined and then you know social bonds increased and social ties increased and we had more social capital and they would say that it was sort of the economic forces that drove the changes um john first of all we gotta assure your your listeners and viewers we did not set this up. That's exactly the question I wanted you to ask. Okay, so we have really good data. And therefore, we can see which is the leading indicator. That is, which turned first, because if we find out which turned first, that would give

us an insight into what's going causally going on. And just as you suggested, most people, I even, I thought, well, okay, it's probably pretty obvious, it must be the economics is turning first, that that's the leading variable, and if we could fix that, then the other stuff would follow. And the one thing I can say for certain is that's not true. It's just false. The data are unambiguous. It can't be because the economic variable in this set of equations always is the lagging variable. And unless you believe that a cause can occur after the effect, which is weird, it can't be that. Now, I could go a little further to say, okay, so what is the... But remember, these curves are all the same,

so it's a little hard. It's like when you're looking at a flock of gulls at the shore and they all turn at the same time. You can't tell who's the leader because they're all turning at the same time. That's true here. But you can make some efforts. And it looks like this is astonishing.

To me, I was shocked at this. It looks like the leading variable is culture i mean which is namby-pamby rough cultures i was like or even morality that's what it looks like is the leading variable astonishingly so let's go back it's the late 19th century and for a while in the late 19th century, the leading intellectual framework for Americans was something called social Darwinism. Darwin had just come on the scene and said, you know, the natural world is red in tooth and claw, and you know, it's a zero-sum game. He didn't use

zero-sum game because that didn't exist, but it's, we're all fighting all against all, and that's good, he said. I have to say, Darwin himself did not believe social Darwinism, which is the extension of this to society, but lots of other people did, and they said, that's the way the world, society should work, and in fact

we'll all be better off if we redistribute wealth from the poor people who obviously have poor genes to the rich, who obviously have poor genes, to the rich people, who obviously have good genes. And it's hard to believe. It's hard to say with the straight faces, this is what people believe. But they did. In the book, I cite chapter and verse, they said, America would be better off if we just, I mean, come on, are you serious? But then along came a very different group of people, evangelical Protestants of all people,

who in the late 19th century said, read the damn Sermon on the Mount. I mean, just read it. Does that sound like Jesus is saying, we ought to help the rich? No, it's harder for the rich to get into heaven than for an account to go through the eye of a needle. And so that called American, first of all, evangelical Protestantism, and then all Protestantism, and then the same thing happened among Catholics.

There was a very similar movement that it's a responsibility of the church and of church people, of religious people, to worry about other folks, not just yourself. There was, as a result of all those changes, and it spread actually beyond just religious folks, there came to be a moral reawakening in America, and people actually change their moral views. I'm going to pause over that because you can see where I'm headed. That's what you do now. Now, okay, suddenly the guy you're talking to has moved from being this rather boring

academic nerd. He's now preaching at you. But I mean, I really want to be, I don't want to be a preacher, but what the data say is we're not going to fix all these problems we have today. Polarization, inequality, self-centeredness, social isolation. We're not going to fix that until we begin to worry about

other people more than ourselves. I mean, this is not rocket science at all. This is an olden rule, right? I know. I mean, look, it's very descriptive of sort of the journey that I took because I was raised Catholic in like a suburb of Boston. But then when I went to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, it's a Jesuit institution, right? And same thing, Jesuits, emphasis on social justice, the community. And so my sort of political views were shaped both by the college and sort of the spiritual surroundings of that and sort of the emphasis on not just staying at

the college, but going out into the community and actually doing service. And I think that's sort of why I ended up with these views. I know that when I started working for Barack Obama, his views similarly were shaped by both the church he belonged to in Chicago and the organizing work he did on the streets of Chicago, which was, again, you've got to care about other people and work with other people, right? And so that's how sort of these social bonds were created. This show is about sort of the internet and social media and what they have done to make the work of democracy harder. What do you think? And I remember when I first started thinking about this, I thought about

bowling alone and thought about sort of the role of television. And I wondered if social media, or at least the way it's become, is like television on steroids in terms of what it's done to us. But how do you think about that? Facebook was not invented until six years after the book was published so i couldn't possibly have figured out i mean guessed but it turns out i did talk a little bit about it and i was more or less right you wouldn't believe people thought this was on but the whole world was going to change and it was going to be wonderful and everybody in the world was going to love everybody because the world had become flat and blah blah blah yeah uh and but meanwhile also among academics there was a lot of research going on and the world was going to love everybody because the world had become flat and blah, blah, blah. But meanwhile, also among academics, there was a lot of research going on about whether bowling leagues were better or worse than Facebook.

You see what I'm trying to say? Is face-to-face better than social media or, or is it the same? And pretty soon, actually, the research, by 2010, that's a long time ago, the academic research had begun to say, no, it's certainly not better. That is, Facebook is not better than bowling leagues, but maybe it's worse. And there's a lot of debate about that. And then suddenly, we had a natural experiment.

Because with the pandemic, none of us were actually doing face-to-face. I mean, a few of us were in little groups, but basically, we were all cut off. And I can tell you when public opinion on that issue changed, and it completely swamped all the pro-social media people. And that was on, let me get this right, November 25th, 2020, because that was Thanksgiving.

And it was totally clear all across America that Zooming with Grandma was not the same thing as hugging Grandma. And believe me, since I've got seven grandchildren, seeing these little face, you know, little postage stamp-sized faces of all my grandchildren, it was not the same thing as hugging them. It's now perfectly clear that all the good things that I earlier in this podcast told you came from real face to faceness. And I was right. Don't come from screens. Yeah. Go back to Bowling Alone. Bowling Alone said a lot of this was caused by television screens, right?

People today, in addition to all the stuff that people are doing, scanning the web and talking to folks or maybe talking to bots or something on the Internet, we still watch more television than we used to. More TV, ordinary TV. So screens, it's screens all the way down. And screens are not the same as face-to-face. So I want to say one more thing about the Internet and social media. This whole conversation has framed this issue as if we had two different kinds of connections. Networks, that's social capital had two different kinds of connections, networks, that's social capital, right?

Two different kinds of them. The real ones, face-to-face, that I have with my wife, who's sitting in the other room, and media. But that's simply factually false. Almost all the people that we know in person, we also know, I mean... We're texting each other all the time, and yeah. Texting is a little bit for my wife and me but she's sitting she's sitting in the other room now sort of 50 feet

from me but often and including just two minutes ago she sent me a text asking me through here okay so what so all i'm trying to say is most of our social networks today are are alloys that is their combinations of real and face-to-face. That's just what I said. My connections with, I mean, fortunately, I mean, I would love to get together sometime with you face-to-face. At the moment, ours are mostly just virtual, but they don't have to be. So all of our networks are alloys. Alloys have different properties. We could create very productive alloys, by which I mean we could think about ways in which we could use virtual ties to reinforce face-to-face ties. Nextdoor is a way of using virtual connections to tighten your ties with

your actual real nextdoor neighbors. So that's a positive alloy. That is, with that alloy, the amp next door, you strengthen both your real face-to-face ties with the other people who actually will loan you a rake or a snowblower, but you do it more efficiently because you don't have to be constantly running over there to say, do you have a spare snowblower? I'm trying to use a very specific example to make a broader point.

We could today, we know how to use alloys, that is mixtures of face-to-face and real, to make things way better, both for us and for the for the rest of the community yeah and last point i i don't want to i don't want you to get sued over this i want to be sued myself face facebook knows how to do this yeah they do know how to do it but their algorithm which is linked to their bottom line, doesn't encourage this. And the contrary, the Facebook algorithm encourages polarization. It encourages people to fight with one another. The algorithm itself does.

That's not a technological fact. That's an economic fact. Okay, if I say much more than this, I will get sued by Meta or whatever the Facebook label is now. But that's my take on the internet and social media. Yeah, no, I mean, it's certainly, I mean, this is, you know, my guess on this, and I've talked to a lot of guests that there's research that's backed this up, but that even if it's not the central cause,

it certainly fueled the polarization division and especially social isolation. I want to read you a quote from a speech at this year's Democratic National Convention. Quote, we chase the approval of strangers on our phones. We build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves and then wonder why we feel so alone. We don't trust each other as much because we don't take the time to know each other. And in that space between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other and troll each other and fear each other. And that was from someone who once participated in one of your seminars, Barack Obama. And it's funny because

I have been thinking about that passage in light of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance spreading this viral conspiracy about Haitian immigrants eating pets that's's happening in Springfield is another example of the consequences of declining social capital? I think the answer is yes and yes. When we don't know each other well, we – and probably this is always true. We don't know each other well. We kind of are a little suspicious of the other. This probably goes back way into our history, prehistorically, that if you didn't know somebody, you better be careful. Historically, Americans were unusually trusting compared to every place else for a long time, not now, but for a long time. Americans were distinctively, I mean, Americans, you know, there's this debate about is America unique or not.

Well, not every way, but we were distinctively nice to each other. We connected with each other and we trusted one another. Not perfectly, of course, but more than most other people. But that's changed. It's changed in part or maybe almost entirely for the reasons that I've already laid out in my books and in this place. And another, I've also written on this, when new folks come to town, especially new folks that don't look like us, that makes everybody hunger down.

And I just, in that sentence, I summarized three years of very quantitative research. New strangers in town causes all to hunger down. Therefore, think of the pre-existing residents of Springfield. They are an amazing group of people, amazing group of people. I mean, we ought not to be laughing in springfield. We say, this is astonishing, this poor little benighted community out in, you know, I can say it because I'm from a small town in Ohio too, this benighted part of the country. Those folks are, on average, been extremely welcoming against what you might call their natural instincts. So it drives me up the wall.

I mean, really, this morning I was thinking about this. This is crazy. We should be thinking those are saints. And I'm not talking about the... I mean, there is nobody who's ever seen anybody, as far as I can tell, seen a Haitian eating a pet. That really is crazy. But quite the contrary, the Haitians, I mean, it's hard to get to know new neighbors.

That's what my research showed. But they're doing a bang up job over there. So, yes, I think that's, I summarize that by saying yes. Yeah, well, it made me think of your distinction between bonding capital and bridging capital. Right. And how bonding capital, bonding social capital is about our connections with the people we know, and bridging social capital is about our connections with people we don't know and who aren't necessarily like us. And it seems like in a multiracial, multiethnic democracy that bridging social capital is both more important and more challenging

to build. What are some ways to make building, bridging social capital easier? Find something that bonds you to the people on the other side. That sounds like I was being glib, so now I'll be glib in a different way. A very good example is sports. I think you might have a passing acquaintance with my favorite sports team, which is now on a down. I'm speaking, of course, of the Red Sox. Of course, yes. You've heard of the Red Sox, right?

I have. And you and I don't know each other, but when this podcast is over, we could have a heck of a conversation about what happened this year and whether the owner of the red sox actually is willing to invest any money there and so that's i'm not that's what i just said it's true i just think it's maybe the rookies are coming along maybe the you know down the farm team the magnificent four but we can have that conversation even though we don't know each other and even though we're in some respects different

because, this is a substantive point, we can bond along the Red Sox theme and therefore bridge the other differences. The short answer to the question is, how do you do bridging? You do it by finding something else, some cross-cutting um bonding that enables you to say i mean you know what i mean in a way what it says is you know who the magnificent four

in the in the minor leagues of the red socks are and i do and if somebody knows that they can't be all bad even even a french canadian can't be that bad okay you recognize i'm joking but what i'm trying to see the settler point is if you have bonding along some dimension, that enables you to stay in the shoes of the person who otherwise you'd think was different. Two quick housekeeping notes. We're excited to share that the first two episodes of Empire City, the untold origin story of the NYPD are out now. From Wondery, Crooked Media, and Push Black, this official Tribeca selection reveals the complicated and largely invisible history of the largest police force in the world.

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politics and the polarization of it all, it brings to mind like a critique I sometimes hear from activists on the left, particularly those who spend a lot of time on social media. And that is that politics and organizing shouldn't be about trying to help everyone get along. It should be about building power to achieve your vision of the kind of country you want to live in. So what's important is to build social capital with people who share that vision and then win the debate with the people who don't. What do you think about that? Maybe in this particular political situation this year, that's valuable.

But even then, it isn't. It isn't. If we're going to win this thing, and certainly if we're going to win the country, I mean, now, I pride myself on being, speaking of all sides in the debates, but of course, I don't want this dumpster to win the election.

And we're going to be better off in winning the election, and we're certainly going to be better off after the election. And we're going to be better off in winning the election, and we're certainly going to be better off after the election, if we can build a little bridging social capital to revert now entirely. What does bridging social capital mean? It means trying our best to understand the views of the people on the other side. Personal note, I grew up in this little town in northern, on Lake Erie in Ohio, and it is classic Trump country. When I was growing up there in the 50s, it was very prosperous, part of greener Detroit, lots of factories and unions, the UAW was in town

and so on. But then the Rust Belt times came in the 70s and 80s. It's classic Trump country, and it's now the folks I went to high school with, well, most of them are now dead, but the people, their kids, are almost overwhelmingly Trump now. It wasn't that way before. So I'm now talking to those kids.

I've got to put myself in their shoes. From one point of view, it isn't that different because they went to high school in Portland. They went to PCHS and I went to PCHS and so on. So I look for things like that. But it's hard to put yourself in the shoes of people who have had a completely different life experience. But that's what we have to do, A, in order to win this election. We've got to convince some of those people that we actually do understand them. We won't convince most of them. We will not convince because we're trying to tell them to act against their own lived

experience of being out of work and losing their home and all that kind of stuff that and we had to do that to win the election but mostly we got to do it to win the country i mean after this whole thing is over it's going to be the same we're all going to be here save that country yeah no you didn't know i i think about this all the time because i also think that the maga movement represents a very specific threat, which is, and it, and it goes right to what you spent your life studying, right? Which is, it is sort of the, um, it is the opposite of bridging social capital. Um, it is the idea that we're not going to just, uh, isolate ourselves from people who aren't like us, but that we're actually going to demonize the people who aren't like us, right? And so then the question becomes, how do you approach people in that movement? And what is

the best way to sort of, you know, take the pinch out of it, right? And actually sort of drain the power and the appeal of the MAGA movement. And that has sort of been an ongoing debate on the left. And I'm going to take a hard swerve here into something that is just a cultural thing that you may or may not have been following. But there was a lot of social media drama because a lot of liberals were upset with Taylor Swift because she's been very friendly at sporting events with Brittany Mahomes, who has dropped hints that she might support Trump. And of course, for people that don't know, Brittany's husband, Patrick, is the chief's quarterback and a teammate and a close friend of Taylor's boyfriend, Travis Kelsey. So why? I know all this. You know all, okay, good. I'm glad you followed this. I'm glad you followed this. So one would think, and I think most people around the country would think this, right? That being friendly with teammates and their partners as you travel to different places and different games is like a healthy form of building

social capital, even if it's with people who have political views you oppose or even political views you find abhorrent, right? But it's not how it was perceived by a lot of people and a lot of liberals. What do you make of that? And how do you sort of reconcile the like, okay, this movement is sort of a threat to democracy, the foundations of civic society, and yet the people in it, we have to live with in this civic society if we want to be a democracy.

Yeah, well, I mean, I feel actually, you know perfectly well what I'm going to say. But I did not know that there were liberals who were upset about that because it's just so nuts. I mean, it's nuts because, of course, A, of course people who are on the same football team and their spouses or partners are going to know each other. Of course they are. And that's good, not bad. I mean, nuts. I mean, come on.

Yeah. Of course they are. And that's good. Not bad. I mean, nuts. I mean, come on. the joiners in politics, but also don't necessarily always have a good idea of what the rest of the people in the country who aren't as into politics are thinking, which becomes a problem when you're trying to shape a political system that is functional, where people are actually building social capital and disagreeing and trying to debate each other even fiercely, but then at the end of the day have an election, have trust in government, and move on and live together. And I think that's tricky. No, no, I don't know how much time we have, but at some point I would like to talk about social isolation. And it's linked to political violence, especially political violence by young men. And I think that might turn out to be relevant to a lot of stuff we've been talking about.

But I don't mean to take over your job, which is to have us move forward with your agenda. No, it's been, I've been thinking about in the context of this election and just politics writ large about sort of what's been, and we've talked about on the show quite a few times about what's happening with young men, social isolation, the rabbit holes they're falling down in the internet, the gender gap that is now opening up between Kamala Harris and Trump, not just between men and women of all ages, but especially younger men. Yeah. I'm going to try to do a little history here, but I promise I'll come back to today. Sure. Around 1900, remember, that's back in the bad old days when I gave that,

a long time ago in our conversation, I gave gave that upside down U-curve and talked about at the end of the 19th century everything was going bad, we were polarized we were unequal we were self-centered and socially isolated an important part of that at the time

and I'm going to use the language they used then, was what was called the boy problem that was the label for it, and I'm going to use the language they used then, was what was called the boy problem. That was the label for it. And what was the boy problem? It was that a lot of unattached kids, unattached because they'd just been through this, that is, their parents had been through this enormous transition from living on the farm to living in the city, and they didn't have new friends in the city, and their parents didn't, and their parents were working two jobs to stay afloat.

It was a very, you know, it was an awful time for the working class, and these working class guys, kids, boys, were often left alone and isolated and they created havoc they they raised the crime rate and it wasn't just a fictitious raise like the one that the republicans are talking about it was a big deal raise a big deal increase in in the crime rate they were constantly fighting with each other but mostly not with each other mostly they were they became street thugs but now let's fast forward and we're today at the way at the other side of that of that big u-curve and the same thing is true now richard reeve has a book uh boys and men i don't think i don't know that richard knows about the boy problem back then but he he certainly knows it about now, and he's describing exactly the same thing.

He says, I think completely independently from that history, he says, today's problem is that boys are just losing out to girls. Who has more education today? By far, young women have more education than men, and that's growing rapidly. Who has a brighter job future, for goodness sakes? Young women, not young men. Now, I don't mean to say that all young men are, I mean, I've got five grandsons and two granddaughters, and the grandsons are going to do fine, but they're not typical of Americans, of American young men, and especially working class young American working class men, that is boys,

are at a disadvantage in every possible way. Their health is poor, their education is poor, their, well, I'm just quoting Richard Reeves, back then, 125 years ago, we had a boy problem, and now we have a boy problem. So what did they do about it? It turns out that between 1905 and 1910, virtually all of the major youth-serving organizations in America were invented. The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts and Boys Clubs, as they were invented. The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts and Boys Clubs, as they were called, and Big Brother,

and also later on Big Sister and so on. And I could keep going, but they were all created, invented in that period between 1905 and 1910. Why? Because of the boy problem i mean everything were done now think about the boy scouts the boy scouts as an institution first of all it's fun it's it's not spinach and if there's anything that i worry about in the whole social capital dialogue about connecting with other people it should not you don't want to

connect with other people because it's good for you or everybody else. You want to do it because it's fun. I mean, you're not going to get, I know that I lecture a lot, but actually people are only going to get out and connect with their neighbors or do whatever they do. If it's fun, if it's a picnic, not just because Putnam says it'd be better if you knew your neighbors.

And so, got to be fun and that's what scouts had there, right? You get merit badges for hiking or knowing birds or whatever. I mean, actually, I was a Boy Scout. Not now, but I was back in the day. And I wasn't a very good one. I was certainly not an Eagle Scout, but I got my merit badges and so on.

So, it was fun. But it was also character formation. It was also character formation. It was serious. So I haven't done this, I think, for 70 years. Actually, 75 years. But I'm going to try to do it now. A Boy Scout is, and your listeners are not going to see, my fingers are raised in a Boy Scout salute. A Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient,

cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. I did it, I think. You did it. I don't think I made it to Boy Scouts, but I was a Cub Scout, so I do remember that. I remember the Pinewood Derby. That was fun. You built cars.

Hold on just a second. Let's step back a little bit. How about those virtues? Trustworthy. That's not old-fashioned. That sounds like we'd like our young people, especially our young men, our boys, to be trustworthy, helpful, loyal, helpful,

friendly, courteous, kind. So far, so good. Obedient sounds a little Victorian. Brave, that's not bad. Clean, I don't know. Thrifty, I gave it a little bit of that, you know, Victorian thing. And reverent. Okay, so bottom line here.

They had a boys' problem. A serious boys' problem, just like ours. And they went about fixing it by inventing new ways of connecting that combined fun and character education. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to say all we need to do is to reinvigorate the Boy Scouts. Maybe we do, maybe we don't.

That's not my point. My point is that our task, and here I am deadly serious, we need to find some for the 21st century, not for my grandchildren, not for my grandsons who are now in their 20s, but for my great-grandsons. We assume there will be some. We're working on that. We're not working on it, but we're hoping. It will be fun for that will nevertheless be serious and form character.

Something I've thought about a lot just as a sort of political person, but I have two boys myself. Yeah. Four and eight months. And as my four-year-old is starting to, uh, look at screens more and get more, you know, I, I do start thinking about, okay, what are the, what are the social ties he has? What is school going to be like? What are his friends going to be like? How to, how to guide that. And so, um, not just as someone who wants to save democracy, but someone who wants to raise good boys. Uh, I think about this issue all the time. So you, John, you have the whole responsibility for the fate of the nation on your

shoulders. I hope you realize that. I don't think that's a good idea, but I'll do my best. I'll do my part. Speaking of which, last, last question, uh, president Obama, uh, always talked about his presidency as, as just trying to write his paragraph in history. Um, you have had this wonderful body of work and career. Um, what do you want your paragraph to say? Actually, I'm so old and I haven't even thought about that. The first thing it must say is he was so lucky that he had a fantastic wife. And you think that's pablum. That is not pablum. If any of your listeners see the movie, Join or Die, they will see Rosemary Putnam is an absolutely full partner she certainly is the co-star of my

professional life i've written roughly i counted up roughly a million words over the over the this i've you know i've written a lot and she's read every one of them um and she still does she's sitting out there with a draft email that I just sent trying to decide how I should change it. And she's raised two great kids and seven great grandchildren, and we're hoping, as I said, for more. And she's a real social capitalist. I talk about social capital, but she's a real...

Okay, I'm making her sound like a saint, and that isn't quite right, but it's close to being true. So I look back at my life. I haven't fixed America, which is what I thought I was going to do when I first heard John Kennedy speaking. Okay, I haven't, but it was a tough job, and it took longer than I thought it was going to take, and we haven't gotten there, but maybe we're getting a little closer and maybe I've helped inspire some other people who will help us get closer like you and, and others. I think it's an important answer to that question,

which is it for all the work you've done, um, sort of the, the, the social capital you built, uh, with the most important person in your life is, uh,

is, is what's most important to you. Um, look, the movie is fantastic the documentary is fantastic join or die everyone should see that if you haven't read bowling alone you should absolutely read that and the upswing as well um uh bob it was such a pleasure to talk to you thank you so much for um joining us on offline and thank you again for for inspiring me appreciate it john thanks very much you probably can tell I had a lot of fun with this. So keep up the good work. I'm counting on you.

Thank you. I won't let you down. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illick-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor. Charlotte Landis is our engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reed Cherlin, and Adrian Hill for production support.

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