bowling alone essay

• Journal of Democracy

Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital

• Robert D. Putnam
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• Volume 6, Number 1, January 1995
• 10.1353/jod.1995.0002
• View Citation

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“Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam Essay (Critical Writing)

Society has always been a fundamental institution influencing the development of states. Communicating in groups, people share values, views, and responses to a particular phenomenon. Interaction in communities or clubs cultivates a public attitude to multiple events, forms a lifestyle, and influences politics. For this reason, the changes in civic life are significant for states. Putnam, in his essay “Bowling Alone,” also emphasizes this idea, saying that the social life of the USA collapses, and it is difficult to predict the results of this process. Active engagement in social processes has always been one of the major features peculiar to the country, but the situation has changed. Putnam says that “tens of millions of Americans had forsaken their parents’ habitual readiness to engage in the simplest act of citizenship” (67). It means that people have started to alter their lifestyles, shifting towards isolation and detachment, which is not typical for U.S. society.

Furthermore, traditional organizations, such as clubs, are replaced by new mass membership organizations. Putnam says they have more political importance and might impact the country; however, they do not promote civic engagement. “For the vast majority of their members, the only act of membership consists in writing a check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter” (Putnam 70). This line shows that Putnam is worried about the continuous process of disconnecting community members, who become divided and disengaged. From a long-term perspective, it might result in the collapse of civic life. The results cannot be predicted as the USA has always been a state with strong community relations. That is why Putnam says that if nothing changes, we will bowl alone, isolated from others.

Putnam, Robert. “Bowling Alone.” Journal of Democracy , vol. 6, no. 1, 1995, pp. 65-78.

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The Power of Independent Thinking

Robert Putnam’s 1995 essay on civic disengagement in the United States (“Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6 [January 1995]: 65–78) piqued the interest of conservatives and neoliberals alike en route to becoming perhaps the most discussed social science article of the twentieth century. Conservatives read Putnam’s essay as a demonstration of the crowding out of private civic and humanitarian organizations by the rising tide of government social programs. Neoliberals, in contrast, saw an opportunity to advance public welfare by using government to promote programs geared toward rebuilding the social-capital infrastructure in the United States, which Putnam argued had depreciated during the last third of the twentieth century.

Conservatives are unlikely to be persuaded by the data and arguments Putnam has marshaled in this book-length version of the essay, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community . Neoliberals, on the other hand, will find reasons to rejoice, not only because of the book’s new material and policy prescriptions but also because attempts to meet the challenges Putnam has posed would revitalize the flagging communitarian social program. Whether or not scholars and policy analysts accept Putnam’s analysis and conclusions, they must be prepared to deal with the points Putnam has raised because his book promises to have cachet in policy circles for a long time.

The book’s central theme is simply stated: “For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century” (p. 27). The ebb and flow to which Putnam alludes pertains to the shifting dimensions of “social capital,” which he clarifies as follows:

Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals, social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networking and the norm of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense, social capital is closely related to what some have called “civic virtue.” The difference is that “social capital” calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital. (p. 19)

Putnam concludes that “social capital is a cause , not merely an effect , of contemporary social circumstances [i.e., social malaise]” (p. 294, emphasis in original).

The book is organized in four major sections. In the first, Putnam describes trends in civic disengagement that he claims have dissipated social capital in recent years. “[T]he broad picture is one of declining membership in community organizations. During the last third of the twentieth century formal membership in organizations in general has edged downward by perhaps 10–20 percent. Most important, active involvement in clubs and other voluntary associations has collapsed at an astonishing rate, more than halving most indexes of participation within barely a few decades” (p. 63).

In the book’s second section, Putnam identifies the perceived causes of this deterioration—causes that he argues have left “Americans today feel[ing] vaguely and uncomfortably disconnected,” a conclusion based in part on social surveys showing that “we wish to live in a more civil, more trustworthy, more collectively caring community” (p. 402).

One cause of the deterioration is said to be Americans’ love affair with television entertainment, which Putnam claims “is not merely a significant predictor of civic disengagement... . It is the single most consistent predictor that I have discovered” (p. 231, emphasis in original). A second “single most important cause of our current plight is a pervasive and continuing generational decline in almost all forms of civic engagement” (p. 404). “In speculating about explanations for this sharp generational discontinuity,” Putnam is “led to the conclusion that the dynamics of civic engagement in the last several decades have been shaped in part by social habits and values influenced in turn by the great mid-century global cataclysm” (p. 294). He identifies this cataclysm collectively as the Great Depression and Second World War. (The closely related and, according to many scholars, equally devastating consequences of New Deal policies and their pervasive aftermath are not similarly characterized as cataclysmic.)1 The two remaining causes of civic disengagement and declining social capital, according to Putnam, are the pressures of time and money along with mobility and sprawl. Putnam aligns himself with Walter Lippmann’s view that “we have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves” (p. 402).

In the book’s third section, Putnam identifies the negative consequences of America’s declining social capital for education and children’s welfare, safe and productive neighborhoods, economic prosperity, health and happiness, and democracy. He admits that too much and the wrong kind of social capital also can have deleterious consequences—“too much fraternity is bad for liberty and equality” (p. 351), leading, for example, to an increase of organized crime—but he believes that on balance the benefits of copious social capital broadly outweigh those costs.

Putnam concludes the book by recounting the social movements that characterized the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era—political epochs that gave rise to the stock of social capital that Putnam argues dissipated during the last third of the twentieth century. His concluding message is that “we desperately need an era of civic inventiveness to create a renewed set of institutions and channels for a reinvigorated social life that will fit the way we have come to live... . We need to be as ready to experiment as the Progressives” (p. 401). We need, for example, “to rethink how to reward firms that act ‘responsibly’ toward their employees’ family and community commitments and how to encourage other employers to follow their example” (p. 406). To this end, Putnam poses some broad challenges for the United States in the twenty-first century:

Let us act to ensure that by 2010 Americans will spend less time traveling and more time connecting with our neighbors than we do today, that we will live in more integrated and pedestrian-friendly areas, and that the design of our communities and the availability of public space will encourage more casual socializing with friends and neighbors. (p. 408, footnote omitted) ...Let us act to ensure that by 2010 Americans will participate in (not merely consume or “appreciate”) cultural activities from group dancing to songfests to community theater to rap festivals. Let us discover new ways to use the arts as vehicles for convening diverse groups of fellow citizens. (p. 411)

Putnam acknowledges that the realization of this utopian social vision cannot be left to individual action based on private self-interest, not only because self-interest is failing to produce the desired result but also because problems of externalities and collective action require Pigouvian taxes, moral suasion, and other forms of government action: “Government may be responsible for some small portion of the declines in social capital I have traced in this volume [the crowding-out problem that conservative thinkers have identified], and it cannot be the sole solution, but it is hard to imagine that we can meet the challenges I have set for America in 2010 without using government” (p. 413). Putnam believes that “we should do [these things] not, ironically, because it will be good for America—though it will be—but because it will be good for us” (p. 414).

The book, however, offers no systematic demonstration that the benefits of its utopian agenda would outweigh the costs of “using government” to bring it into being. Any attempt to establish that conclusion almost certainly would fail: universal happiness and well-being have yet to flow from utopian social policies. The fact that private and public life presents a series of trade-offs fully escapes Putnam’s purview: his policy prescription has superficial appeal (to the extent that it appeals at all) because he almost entirely ignores the costs of bringing it about. Consequently, no offhand proposal is too outlandish. For example, “why not [require] employer-provided space and time for civic discussion groups and service clubs?” (p. 407). The correct answer to questions of this sort is widely known, though not frequently acknowledged: because the market process resolves such issues in toto far more efficiently than does legislative fiat.

Putnam fails to recognize the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in his analysis and policy prescriptions. He proposes an enormous extension of social control over the lives of private individuals, which, if undertaken, would bring about massive growth of government bureaucracy and statutory law. From that growth would unavoidably arise increases of coercion, taxation, fraud, and abuses of state power—increases that have accompanied every extension of social control since the New Deal. Yet Putnam expresses bewilderment at the explosive growth in the number of lawyers and the correlative decrease of trust that similar social programs have produced during the past thirty years (p. 146).

In an earlier work on the civic traditions of modern Italy ( Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993]), Putnam noted a correlation between civic participation and “good government,” from which he hypothesized that “membership in horizontally ordered groups (like sports clubs, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, cultural associations, and voluntary unions) should be positively associated with good government.” Conversely, “membership rates in hierarchically ordered organizations (like the Mafia or the institutional Catholic Church) should be negatively associated with good government” (p. 175). Government itself, however, is a hierarchical organization, indistinguishable in many respects from organized crime. Putnam thus hypothesized (correctly) that reliance on government for civic virtue (strengthened political ties) is deleterious to good government, whereas cooperative social activities (strengthened social ties) are conducive to it. That hypothesis is broadly and consistently supported by work in Public Choice,2 and it flatly contradicts the premises underlying Putnam’s present support of utopian social arrangements brought about through state action.

Economic theory teaches that individuals seek to maximize the expected utility they can derive from their environment. “Social organization” is merely a composite view of individuals interacting in ways that enhance their separate private utilities. Coercing individuals to live and interact differently through the compulsions of law, as Putnam proposes, cannot increase aggregate social welfare; doing so would merely move most individuals away from their revealed optima while increasing the far-reaching disutility that is an unavoidable cost of coercive public policy. Putnam’s proposals ultimately rest on the weakest and most potentially dangerous implication of the Standard Social Science Model:3 that an omnipotent state pursuing normative policy ends can and indeed ought to treat individuals like sheep.

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Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community: Robert D. Putnam; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000, 541 pages

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Bowling Alone

54 pages • 1 hour read

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

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Section 3, Chapters 10-15

Section 4, Chapters 16-22

Section 5, Chapters 23-24

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Discussion Questions

What evidence does Putnam use to make the case that social capital has declined in the last third of the 20th century? How convincing is his case? Are there any weaknesses or exceptions?

What are Putnam’s concerns and hopes for the Internet, as he writes at the dawn of this medium’s era? Given the state of the Internet and online culture in the early 2020s, how accurate were Putnam’s concerns and/or hopes?

Compare and contrast the old and new types of civic organizations. Why are the latter poor in social capital? While the old forms contributed to social capital , did they have any drawbacks?

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Bowling Alone at Twenty

Alexandra hudson.

Two decades ago, Robert Putnam published a book that provoked a small cottage industry's worth of responses from pundits and scholars alike. Bowling Alone , based on an essay of the same title Putnam had written for the Journal of Democracy five years earlier, made a claim that cut to the quick of American identity: Americans just aren't doing things together anymore. By choosing to engage in activities individually rather than communally, he asserted, we were putting at risk America's capacity to build social capital and undermining our national character.

It is difficult to overstate the influence of Putnam's thesis. His argument and evidence understandably caused much concern. A subgenre of books followed in Putnam's footsteps, decrying America's civic decline as well as its social fragmentation. Charles Murray's Coming Apart , J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy , Ben Sasse's Them , and Tim Carney's Alienated America are among the most recent and best known of this genre, but they represent just a few of the many civil society "declinists" that are so vocal today.

During the two decades following Bowling Alone 's publication, America has witnessed major changes that have fundamentally altered our social and communal lives. This makes revisiting Putnam's original investigation into American civic health a worthy exercise.

Today, the evidence on the health of civil society is in many ways just as distressing as it was 20 years ago. Not everything has gone as Putnam expected, however; some trends that have emerged since 2000 suggest forms of trouble he did not anticipate. And even in Bowling Alone , Putnam recognized a few trends that ran counter to his declinist thesis — some of which are still gravitating that way today.

Two decades on, the condition of American civil society is more complex than a modern reader of Bowling Alone might imagine. Yet the book's core insights remain essential for understanding our society's prospects. American civic life — as measured by a variety of metrics at earlier points in American history, at the time of Putnam's writing, and today — has endured ebbs and flows, dissipation and re-invention, offering reason to have faith in the resilience of America's civic tradition. In short, we have always been, and in our own way still are, the "nation of joiners" that historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., and Alexis de Tocqueville before him, praised. For all its troubles, our civic life is still full of the potential for renewal.

POLITICAL AND CIVIC LIFE

The first touchstone of civic health that Putnam took up in Bowling Alone was political participation — particularly voting rates. For Putnam, voter participation was important because it demonstrated the political interest and knowledge that served as a necessary precondition for other forms of civic involvement. The data he assessed showed voting to be in decline, and Putnam assumed that decline would continue. Surprisingly, though, it hasn't.

Putnam relayed that while 62.8% of the voting-age population turned out to vote in the 1960 presidential election, only 48.9% had done so in 1996. But the trend Putnam identified had begun to reverse even before Bowling Alone went to press. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, turnout in the 1996 election had sunk to a three-decade low and has since recovered about half the ground lost over those years. In 2000, turnout reached 54.7%. In 2004, the voting rate rose to 58.3%. And in 2008, it was 58.2%. Turnout has declined a bit since then, though it is still above 1996 levels: In 2012, 56.5% of the voting-age population cast votes, and in 2016, turnout was 56.0%.

The unexpected increase in voter participation in the 21st century is at least in part a function of increasing political polarization and a growing sense that a great deal hangs on each election. These are not necessarily indicators of civic health. But if voter engagement is a mark of civic energy, then turnout trends suggest that not all indicators continue to point in one direction.

Of course, though political participation is an important indicator of the civic health of any citizen-oriented political arrangement, it does not represent the totality of it. In the 1830s, Tocqueville noted that American involvement in politics is far from America's most distinctive feature:

In the United States, political associations are only one small part of the immense number of different types of associations found there. Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types — religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute....Nothing, in my view, more deserves attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.

In line with this observation, Putnam examined a second touchstone of civic health: American associational life. This, he lamented, was rapidly collapsing.

In drawing this conclusion, Putnam looked at data on non-profits, which he viewed as essential building blocks of associational life. At first glance, the situation did not appear so dire. According to data from the Encyclopedia of Associations , between 1968 and 1997, the number of national non-profits in America roughly doubled — from 10,299 to 22,901. That rapid growth has only accelerated: From 2005 to 2015, the number of non-profits registered with the Internal Revenue Service increased by 10.4%, from 1.41 million to 1.56 million. If anything, these numbers actually understate the size and growth of the non-profit sector, since not all civic organizations are required to register with the government.

Yet Putnam, drawing on the work of sociologist David Horton Smith, observed that over half of those non-profits did not have any individual members. In Putnam's words, "[t]he organizational eruption between the 1960s and the 1990s represented a proliferation of letterheads, not a boom of grassroots participation."

As in the case of voting, however, there is some evidence of an increase in civic engagement since Putnam wrote. According to the American Time Use Survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the amount of time Americans spent volunteering has remained remarkably steady over the past 17 years. Princeton social scientist Robert Wuthnow argues that new, more innovative forms of civic engagement are replacing more formal ones. Rather than declining, then, American associational life may simply be transforming as people experiment with looser, more sporadic forms of volunteering.

When it comes to both political and civic engagement, it appears some of the trends that Putnam expected to continue declining have at least slowed, if not reversed, their fall.

CHURCH AND WORK

Along with concerns about the trajectory of civil society, Putnam lamented the decline in church membership and attendance. Religious institutions of all faith backgrounds, he argued, are crucial to the health of civil society: They serve as incubators for civic skills, promote community norms and interests, and offer a means of civic recruitment. Indeed, high religiosity rivals high educational attainment as a powerful correlate to civic engagement. Church attendance and membership are key predictors of both volunteering and giving. Religious communities are also particularly central to the social capital and civic engagement of many African Americans; as one leading analyst cited in Bowling Alone noted, "[t]he Black church functioned as the institutional center of the modern civil rights movement."

Putnam was rightfully concerned by trends indicating a decline in church attendance and religiosity in general. And those trends have largely persisted. When Putnam wrote Bowling Alone , American religious engagement had been declining for decades. The portion of Americans who said they ascribed to "no religion" in 1967 was just 2%. By 1990, that number had jumped to 11%. Today, there are so many religiously unaffiliated people that social scientists have coined a name for them: religious "nones." Contemporary survey data indicate that the percentage of Americans who identify as nones is about the same as that of Americans who identify as evangelical or Catholic — about 23% of Americans in 2019, according to Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University.

Putnam wrote at the time that the decline in church participation and affiliation was largely explained by generational differences: Younger generations are generally less observant than their parents and grandparents are. This explanation still applies, as today's older generations report religious affiliation at much higher rates than younger ones.

But those generational differences mask an underlying downward trend. It's not simply the case that Americans are less religious in their youth and then become more religious as they grow older. Consider the Baby Boomer generation: In 1980, 13% of 16-34-year-old Boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — expressed no religious preference. When members of Generation X — those born between 1965 and 1980 — were the same age, they were markedly less religious: In 1998, 20% of 18-33-year-old Gen-Xers expressed no religious preference. In 2018, between 34% and 36% of 18-34-year-old Millennials — those born between 1981 and 1996 — said the same.

As Putnam wrote, "When they were in their twenties (in the 1960s and 1970s), boomers were more disaffected from religious institutions than their predecessors had been in their twenties....Even now, in their forties and fifties...boomers remain less religiously involved than middle-aged people were a generation ago." In short, Boomers disaffected by religion found church later and in fewer numbers than previous generations had, thus failing to close the gap as they aged. This suggests that members of today's rising generations, who are even less attached to traditional religious institutions, will persist in that disaffiliation. As a result, the portion of the American public that identifies with traditional religion will continue to dwindle.

The rise of the religious nones does not necessarily mean that Americans are growing more secular. It does mean, however, that we are becoming less attached to religious communities . Americans, it seems, are praying alone. And while this may be better than not praying at all, it does bode poorly for our society.

A similar trend can be perceived in the world of work. In Bowling Alone , Putnam observed that work associations and unions — which were an important venue for developing sustained social ties — peaked in the 1950s, when 32.5% of American workers were union members. This percentage plateaued and then endured a sharp, sustained decline during the last third of the century, ultimately cratering at 14.1%. The downward trend in membership was evident not just in traditional labor unions, but in all professional associations, from the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and more. From 1977 to 1998, the number of registered nurses doubled (from 1 million to 2 million), yet the American Nurses Association membership fell so steeply that its "market share" of nurses fell by half, from 18% to just 9%.

Putnam suggested several reasons for the sharp decline in work-association membership. One possible explanation was the excessive dues and stale programs of traditional work associations, coupled with competing local and more specialized associations entering the mix. The more general rise of the "cult of the individual," with its diminished interest in solidarity and the collective good, may have also played a role.

Still another account of what caused these trends involves the rise of work insecurity. Even during economic booms, the business cycles of the 1980s and 1990s led to mass layoffs; one study found that nearly half of firms in America laid off workers — on average up to 10% of each company's workforce — between 1993 and 1994. What's more, technological advances made virtually all jobs contingent and susceptible to automation and displacement — a pattern we are all too familiar with today. Putnam surmised that these developments had led to a shift in how people viewed work and damaged workplace social ties. In short, people stopped expecting to make a lifelong commitment to a vocation.

Work associations have not recovered from the declines Putnam identified two decades ago, and additional changes in workplace dynamics that have occurred in the intervening years have only made matters worse. The rise of the "gig" economy, along with significant growth in the number of non-standard jobs — part-time employees, temp workers, independent contractors, and more — during the first two decades of the 21st century have only doubled down on the trends Putnam observed. In fact, 94% of net jobs created from 2005 to 2015 were these sorts of impermanent jobs. When focusing on both primary and secondary employment using a separate Federal Reserve survey conducted in 2015 and 2016, economists Anat Bracha and Mary Burke found much higher rates of informal work — estimating that a third of adults are engaged in some form of non-standard work today. Similarly, a 2018 Federal Reserve study found that roughly 30% of Americans perform gig work outside of their traditional job, and a recent examination of income-tax data found that "approximately 11 percent of the working adult population in the U.S. are working primarily as full-time independent contractors in the gig economy."

What do modern trends in the workplace reveal about connectedness and social capital in America today? Perhaps the most obvious is the fact that, as in other areas of modern life, Americans have become further atomized in the workplace. For many, this has led to a decline in social ties and increased economic anxiety.

But the news here may not be all bad. Some observers suggest that Americans are simply finding professional satisfaction in different ways now than they did when Putnam wrote Bowling Alone . As such, it is worth noting the upsides to the evolution of workplace dynamics in recent decades — among them greater independence, flatter hierarchies, and more reward for merit and productivity.

Though the primary reason Americans give for taking on a non-standard job is to supplement income, a recent report from the Harvard Business Review explored the motivations of a growing number of what the authors call "harmonic careerists." These are typically younger people who have opted out of taking on a single, monolithic career because they find it draining or unfulfilling. Instead, they construct their working lives by combining multiple non-standard jobs. While they may earn less money and have less stability than their peers who adopt a traditional career path, they gain greater flexibility and meaning. As one Gallup study concluded, "for this generation, a job is about more than a paycheck — it's about a purpose."

In this sense, then, straightforward social trends don't tell a simple story. Putnam's method, which might be summarized as assessing how America had changed since the early 1960s, tells a story of decline only if the American workplace of the 1960s was the ideal. But social changes involve tradeoffs, and in the world of work in particular, it is easy to overlook the advantages of newer arrangements.

VOLUNTEERING AND SOCIALIZING

Charitable and social activities are crucial to building a strong civic backbone in any society. In Bowling Alone , Putnam noted:

When philosophers speak in exalted tones of "civic engagement" and "democratic deliberation," we are inclined to think of community associations and public life as the higher form of social involvement, but in everyday life, friendship and other informal types of sociability provide crucial social support.

In keeping with this observation, Putnam divided builders of social capital into two categories using the Yiddish terms machers and schmoozers . Machers are those involved in formal, institutional civic engagement: They follow current events, attend church and club gatherings, donate blood, give speeches, and frequent local meetings. By contrast, schmoozers are less structured in their social activity. The domain of the schmoozer lies in socializing and communicating — attending or hosting social events, visiting with friends or relatives, and sending greeting cards. The presence of both machers and schmoozers is key to a well-functioning society. Unfortunately, Putnam noted that both were on the decline in America by the end of the 20th century.

In terms of macher activities, Putnam pointed to data on a key civic-health proxy measure: philanthropy. As with voting rates and the proliferation of non-profits, the evidence regarding rates of charitable activity among Americans appeared promising on paper. In 1977, Americans gave $142.4 billion to charity. That number reached $326.9 billion in 2000. By 2017, total private giving from individuals, foundations, and businesses totaled over $410 billion. Even in these inflation-adjusted terms, Americans appear to be more generous than ever.

Yet in Bowling Alone , Putnam drew an important distinction between two forms of charity: the "doing for" form and the "doing with" form. "Doing for" involves giving money or otherwise providing assistance at a distance, while "doing with" involves interpersonal engagement on behalf of people in need. Putnam noted a strong decline in rates of "doing with" in favor of "doing for" — a trend that has only intensified since 2000. In the late 1990s, nearly half of Americans undertook some volunteering behavior. Today, according to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, only an estimated 25.1% of American adults volunteer on a regular basis. Breaking this down along age cohorts, we find that Generation X had a volunteer rate of 28.9%, followed by Baby Boomers at 25.7%. Only 21.9% of Millennials regularly volunteer.

Even if Americans are giving more in terms of dollars, then, a decline in engagement with others has coincided with a decline in voluntary commitments of time for charitable causes. We may not be becoming a less generous nation, but we are becoming less social when engaging in charitable efforts.

And we have become less trusting of one another as well. Putnam relayed that from 1952 to 1998, the number of Americans who thought their fellow citizens led good and honest lives fell from 50% to less than 30%. Similarly, the number of people who agreed with the statement "most people can be trusted" declined from 55% in 1960 to around 35% in the 1980s and '90s, with high-school students being the group with the lowest reported generalized trust at 25%.

More recent data on the measures Putnam used to support his conclusion of a decline in trust — survey data about public perception of general trustworthiness, rates of return for U.S. Census forms, civility as measured by driving habits, and crime rates — are relatively mixed; some metrics have continued declining, while others have not. None, however, have indicated a dramatic reversal of the trends Putnam identified two decades ago. In fact, according to 2017 Gallup data, the decline in generalized trust has only grown more intense. Fully 81% of those polled say the state of moral values in America today is "only fair" or "poor." Meanwhile, 77% say the state of moral values is getting worse.

The evidence Putnam compiled on macher activities told a troubling story of fragmentation and decline — a story that has persisted in the past two decades. However, the recent evidence on some schmoozing trends — including socializing and sending greeting cards — may signal reason for hope.

To be sure, more formal forms of schmoozing may be on the decline. According to the DDB Needham Life Style archive cited by Putnam, in the 1970s, the average American entertained friends at home 15 times a year. By the late 1990s, that number had fallen to eight times annually. More recent data suggest this trend has persisted: A 2017 study found that only "half of Americans entertain guests in their homes at least once a month."

Meanwhile, results from the BLS American Time Use Survey show that the average American aged 15 years and older socialized for 0.72 hours per day in 2013. The 2019 survey found that Americans did so for 0.64 hours. Though these numbers represent a decline, the drop is not dramatic, especially when considering the margin of error. Moreover, these data do not capture all forms of entertaining in the home. The 2019 American Time Use Survey, for instance, indicates that informal, face-to-face socializing and communicating was the second-most common leisure activity for Americans. This suggests that while more formal forms of socializing have declined, looser schmoozing activity has remained at relatively constant levels since the time Putnam wrote.

Rates of communal drinking and dining — the bread and butter of good schmoozers  — were also falling when Bowling Alone was published. Putnam cited three independent studies showing that, from the mid-1970s to the 1990s, the frequency with which Americans, both married and single, went out to such venues as bars and taverns declined between 40% and 50%. This trend, too, has persisted: Americans are going out to eat and drink less often, and those who do are more likely to do so alone. In fact, Americans in general eat more than half of their meals by themselves.

Part of this trend can be explained by a cultural shift from a society that eats designated meals at designated times to one that eats on demand. Meal-delivery services like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Seamless have made it easier for people to eat at their desks during the workday instead of going out to eat with co-workers. Similar services enable people to spend less time on home-cooked meals — in 2017, a quarter of American adults purchased meal-delivery kits like Blue Apron, Purple Carrot, and HelloFresh, which deliver apportioned ingredients with recipes and cooking instructions right to people's homes. Theoretically, having to spend less time shopping for and preparing food could allow more time for togetherness. But for many people, these innovations appear to be enabling them to continue eating meals by themselves.

The coronavirus pandemic, however, may be starting to reverse that trend. Recent survey data suggest that, during the months of lockdowns and physical distancing, Americans have been eating at home — and families have been dining together — more often than they had before the virus. While it's too early to tell whether these changes will be permanent, such evidence offers some reason for hope.

Putnam also looked at another key schmoozer activity — the practice of sending greeting cards — and found that card-writing among all generations was in decline by the turn of the century. The rise of social media in the years following Bowling Alone might lead one to assume this trend has become more pronounced. Yet surprisingly, the decline Putnam observed has slowed in recent years. Americans may be sending far less mail than they used to (according to the U.S. Postal Service, the volume of mail in the United States has dropped 43% since 2001), but revenue for greeting cards is slightly on the rise.

Experts say that the relative success of online greeting-card companies like Minted, Etsy, and Shutterfly suggests that Millennials are driving much of this growth. Data from Hallmark support this theory: Millennials' spending on greeting cards is growing faster than that of any other generation. According to focus groups convened by the company, 72% of Millennials enjoy giving greeting cards, and a similar percentage save the cards they receive. Many cited social-media fatigue, the ephemeral nature of online communication, and the desire for interactions that had a personal touch as motivators for sending cards.

In some sense, then, Americans are becoming less social. Yet Americans' social lives, like their vocational lives, have undergone dramatic transformations in recent decades. The results of these transformations may suggest that, rather than withdrawing from society, Americans are simply exchanging more structured social activities for less structured ones. In other words, the balance may have simply tilted away from maching and in favor of schmoozing . Studies on one of the primary drivers of this trend — technological innovation — suggest that this may not be a wholly negative development.

SOCIAL CAPITAL IN THE INFORMATION AGE

In addition to the evidence supporting his thesis of American civic decline, in Bowling Alone , Putnam looked at trends that ran counter to his argument, including advances in telecommunications that have led to the rise of social movements.

He claimed, for instance, that while the telephone reduced face-to-face socializing, it also reduced loneliness. The same can be said more recently of the internet. Both the telephone and the internet have liberated us from the constraints of physical space, thereby helping us foster a sense of psychological neighborliness. Indeed, Putnam found the telephone tended to reinforce, rather than replace, existing personal networks; after all, one cannot meet new friends via the telephone alone.

Today, and increasingly in the years since Putnam's writing, people do meet new friends on the internet — through social media, chat rooms, online dating, and many other means. In fact the internet, far more than the telephone, has the potential to act as a substitute, and not just a supplement, for traditional socialization.

This new way of communicating does have its costs, as some aspects of online communication create barriers to building relationships. Molly Crockett, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University who studies altruism and human decision-making, hypothesizes that social-media interactions depersonalize interlocutors, rendering us less likely to feel empathy for others and making it easier for us to shame opponents. She has also written about the relatively low transaction costs of expressing moral outrage online. As our very idea of what social engagement means comes to be shaped by a medium that emphasizes expression over time spent together in person, it is important to be wary of these drawbacks and to mitigate them where possible.

But internet-enabled communication does have its advantages, too. Some forms of organizing, activism, socializing, and mutual aid are greatly enabled by online interaction. In fact, there are examples of digital communication building social capital and promoting democratic ideals in unprecedented ways.

Take the story of Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi woman whose life changed dramatically after she posted a video of herself driving — in defiance of a de facto ban on female drivers in Saudi Arabia — on YouTube. Her video went viral immediately, but it wasn't until she was released from jail as a result of her video that she realized its full impact. The free world lauded al-Sharif as the "Saudi Rosa Parks"; she was overwhelmed at the outpouring of support from strangers on Twitter and Facebook. Her act inspired other women to do the same, and drew attention to other human-rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. Al-Sharif is even credited with the ultimate end of the ban, which occurred six years after she posted her video.

As Putnam rightly noted in Bowling Alone , the most important question left to answer is not what the internet will do to us, but what we will do with it. How can we use the potential of computer-mediated communication to make our investments in social capital more productive? How can we harness this promising technology to thicken our community ties and relationships? How can we develop the technology to enhance social presence, social feedback, and social cues? These questions and others are among the most relevant in our hyper-connected digital era, and they remain unanswered; after all, we are still in the early years of the digital age.

OPEN QUESTIONS

Bowling Alone has made its way into the pantheon of modern social science for good reason: It sheds light on some crucial truths about modern American society. Its arguments have so thoroughly penetrated our self-understanding that we naturally assume they have grown more true over time.

But the reality of American social life is not quite so simple or so dark. The data reveal a much more nuanced picture of traditional means of building and deploying social capital today. If we avoid treating the America of the mid-20th century as the norm and instead look at both the condition of long-standing social and civic institutions and the emergence of new ones, we would find that American society never stops innovating and experimenting with new forms of common action.

This "civic churn" — a term that describes the creative destruction of American civic institutions and activity — is nothing new. When Tocqueville traversed America examining our norms, institutions, and culture, the national benevolent associations and temperance societies he encountered were relatively new developments. Responding to social and demographic changes related to the increasing integration of the country as a single nation, these groups replaced older civic assemblies like craft guilds and town meetings. Labor unions also began to emerge over the course of the following hundred years as the American economy became more industrialized. Urban missions and settlement houses, which began in England in the 1880s and gradually moved into America, were relatively unknown until the expansion of cities, and it was only at the end of the 19th century that they were seen as an obvious form of civic involvement.

Many areas of associational life remain under-studied or could use the kind of book-length treatment that Putnam devoted to the associations of the mid- to late-20th century. Book clubs are not new, but they appear to be playing a community-building role — perhaps particularly in the upper-middle class — that has yet to be studied. The role of coffee shops in urban areas may be taking on the role that bars and pubs once did, yet there is little formal data on such communal watering holes. Community libraries offer a similar story, as there is limited data on their role as a point of civic and social engagement. The role of youth sports is also an important and under-studied area. Unfortunately, as they have become politicized in the era of Title IX, social scientists have tended to avoid them, leaving crucial questions unanswered.

There is also far too little data on civic and social life among minority communities. Jack and Jill organizations, groups affiliated with churches, and black sororities and fraternity groups that engage in service activities all call for greater attention from scholars. Another under-studied area is the rise and endurance of "giving circles" among minorities and women that serve as a democratizing influence on philanthropy and provide a source of social capital and trust.

Some ebb and flow in American social and civic life is both inevitable and natural. As in Putnam's time, the evidence of American civic health is often mixed. Social, demographic, and technological changes have all put stress on older forms of socializing, but they may also drive the evolution of new ones that are better suited to modern times.

Whatever challenges our social institutions may confront, mankind's underlying hunger for engagement and community can never be eradicated. The fact that such hunger exists does not mean we will succeed in addressing it, but it does mean we are likely to keep trying. In fact, it may be that the alarmism following Putnam's original proclamation of civic atrophy deserves some credit for subsequent bursts of civic renewal. Americans in recent decades may have taken it upon themselves to create new ways of being there for one another. All who are engaged in that effort today owe Putnam a debt of gratitude.

Alexandra Hudson is a former policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education and a current Novak Fellow writing a book on civility and American civic renewal for St. Martin’s Press.

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From Bowling Alone to Posting Alone

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Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone chronicled the growing loneliness and isolation of wealthy societies. Twenty years later, the problem is far worse than he could have imagined.

Illustration by George Wylesol

Last year, the Survey Center on American Life published a study tracking friendship patterns in the United States. The report was anything but heartening. Registering a “friendship recession,” the report noted how Americans were increasingly lonely and isolated: 12 percent of them now say they do not have close friendships, compared to 3 percent in 1990, and almost 50 percent said they lost contact with friends during the COVID-19 pandemic. The psychosomatic fallout was dire: heart disease, sleep disruptions, increased risk of Alzheimer’s. The friendship recession has had potentially lethal effects.

The center’s study offered a miniaturized model of a much broader process that has overtaken countries beyond the United States in the last thirty years. As the quintessential voluntary association, friendship circles stand in for other institutions in our collective life — unions, parties, clubs. In his memoirs, French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa said that one of the most disconcerting moments of his childhood was the day he discovered that there were people in the village who were not members of the Communist Party. “That seemed unimaginable,” he recalled, as if those people “lived outside of society.” Not coincidentally, in May 1968, French students sometimes compared the relationship of workers to the Communist Party with that of Christians to the church. The Christians yearned for God, and the workers for revolution. Instead, “the Christians got the church, and the working class got the party.”

The son of communist parents, Michéa saw the party as an extension of a more primary social unit. Friendship patterns have always served as a useful indicator for broader social trends, and writers at Vox were quick to apply the data to political analysis. The researchers invoked Hannah Arendt’s dictum that friendship was the best antidote for authoritarianism. At the end of 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism , Arendt postulated that a new form of loneliness had overtaken Westerners in the twentieth century, leading them to join new secular cults to remedy their perdition. “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” she claimed, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.” The conclusions were clear. As Americans become lonelier and more isolated in the new century, the same totalitarian temptation now lurks.

Putnam’s Warning

To social scientists, this refrain must sound tiredly familiar: it is the stock-in-trade of one of the classics of early twenty-first-century political science, Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community . That book noted a curious pattern: more and more Americans took up bowling toward the end of the twentieth century, but they increasingly undertook the activity alone , with the sudden decline of many bowling leagues the clearest explanation. Such a crisis was by no means limited to sports clubs. From churches to trade unions to shooting establishments to Masonic lodges, all experienced a dramatic contraction of membership in the 1980s and 1990s and began to disband. What remained was a wasteland of sociability.

Putnam surveyed a variety of causes for this great disengagement. The luring of the middle class from city centers to exurbs in the 1960s encouraged privacy. Removed from American cities, citizens ended up in suburbs designed mainly for motorists and without footpaths. Consumption was democratized in the postwar boom. People spent more time in their cars, a mobile privatization of public space. Corner stores were bulldozed in favor of shopping malls, and train tracks lost out to highways. With the steady entry of women into the labor market, voluntary associations lost a central base of support. Employees began working longer hours than their parents had and found little time for volunteering. Television locked citizens at home in the evening: the tombstone of postwar loneliness.

Putnam also debunked some powerful misconceptions about the crisis of civil society. The first was that the welfare state was the real culprit. The transfer of social services from the community to the state level, the argument ran, would threaten citizens’ self-reliance. Putnam was skeptical: both strong (Scandinavia) and weak (United States) welfare states had seen a decline in civic capacity. In France and Belgium, a “red” civil society was even allowed to manage part of the social security budget. Battles over integration also proved an insufficient explanation: both black and white Americans withdrew from clubs, while overall distrust between racial groups was declining.

Putnam had no use for panaceas either. Back in 2000, he had already presaged that the internet would offer a poor substitute for those old associations and reinforce antisocial tendencies. In 2020, holed up in his New Hampshire home during the pandemic, the social scientist added an afterword to a new edition of Bowling Alone . Its tone was characteristically melancholic: there was no “correlation between internet usage and civic engagement,” while “cyberbalkanization” and not “digital democracy” was the future. The stock of “social capital” had not been replenished.

Testing Time

The weaknesses in this approach were already plain to see by the early 2000s. For one, Bowling Alone spent too little time investigating the structural transformation of its civil society — the rise of new NGOs as substitutes for mass membership organizations, the ascent of new sporting clubs, the revival of association in evangelical megachurches and schools.

Putnam also deployed a highly dubious notion of social capital. In this aspect, the book spoke to the market-friendly sensibilities of the late 1990s: civic ties were useful as a means for social mobility, not as expressions of collective power. They could adorn college applications or help people land trainee programs, not change nations or make revolutions.

Such economism also explained a glaring gap in Putnam’s book — the aggressive drop in union strength at the close of the century. In a book of more than five hundred pages, there was no index entry for “deindustrialization.” With limited discussions of labor as well, Bowling Alone had little to say about how capital’s offensive contributed to the decline of civil society — and how representative worker power was for civic life as a whole. The dwindling of union membership not only had dramatic consequences on the Left but also disoriented the Right — a side of the story that barely appears in Bowling Alone .

Despite these evident faults, however, Putnam’s book has stood the test of time. Statistics still point to a steady decline for many secular membership organizations. Despite growing public approval for union efforts, the US unionization rate declined by 0.5 percentage points to a mere 10.3 percent in 2021, returning to its 2019 rate. The political developments of the last decade, from COVID-19 lockdowns to the escalating downsizing of classical parties, also validated Putnam’s intuition. More than that, his book has now been used to explain the uncertainty of the Donald Trump years, in which the controlled demolition of the public sphere in the 1980s and 1990s drove a new form of resentment politics.

The hyperpolitics of the 2010s also hardly falsified Putnam’s thesis. While the interactive internet has largely replaced the monological television set, the general crisis of belonging and place that the new media inaugurated has not abated. Even in a society ever more heavily politicized and riven by partisan conflict, the levers for collective action, from states to unions to community groups, remain brittle. Despite surges of militancy in some sectors, the “great resignation” ushered in by COVID’s tight labor markets has not led to a politics of collective voice but rather to one of individual “exit,” as Daniel Zamora put it. European unions have suffered a similar fate, losing members to self-employment. While Putnam noted the upswing in voter turnout in the 2020 election, this was “voting alone,” vastly different from the organized bands that found their way to the ballot box in the nineteenth century.

There are both push and pull factors involved here. Since the 1980s, citizens have been actively ejected from associations through anti-union legislation or globalized labor markets. At the same time, passive alternatives to union and party power — cheap credit, self-help, cryptocurrency, online forums — have multiplied. The result is an increasingly capsular world where, as commentator Matthew Yglesias warned, our home has become an ever-greater source of comfort, allowing citizens to interact without ever leaving their house. “Sitting at home alone has become a lot less boring,” he claims, ushering in a world where we could all “stream alone.” The civic results will be dire.

Putnam From the Left

Here, then, was the rational core of the Putnam thesis: far beyond the bowling alley, social life in the West had indeed become increasingly atomistic over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. The economic rationale for this restructuring was evident, and a Marxist interpretation proved a useful supplement to the Putnamite view: individualization was an imperative for capital, and collective life had to be diminished in order for the market to find new avenues for accumulation. By 1980, states could either cut ties with existing civil society organizations and let go of the inflationary threat or face ballooning public debt.

This heavily conditioned the responses to the 2008 financial crash. Behind the short-term chaos of the credit crisis stood a much longer process: the slow but steady decline of party democracy since the 1973 slump. Parties also remain the paradigmatic victim of Putnam’s disengagement. As fortresses built between individuals and their states, these institutions secured people’s hold on the state throughout the twentieth century. The Austrian social democratic party in the 1930s hosted a theater club, a child welfare committee, a cremation society, a cycling club, workers’ radio and athletic clubs, and even a rabbit breeders’ association.

On the conservative side, this legacy was bemoaned as a dangerous drive toward politicization that would ideologically supervise individuals from cradle to grave. Still, left-wing intellectuals like Gáspár Miklós Tamás saw the new parties as an essential part of not just socialist politics but of modernity itself. They comprised

a counter-power of working-class trade unions and parties, with their own savings banks, health and pension funds, newspapers, extramural popular academies, workingmen’s clubs, libraries, choirs, brass bands, engagé intellectuals, songs, novels, philosophical treatises, learned journals, pamphlets, well-entrenched local governments, temperance societies — all with their own mores, manners and style.

As “total organizations,” Tamás’s parties were predictably described as modern institutions par excellence. Unlike medieval guilds, membership in a party was not obligatory — it was a free association, in which members could join and defend their interests. As Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had it, the party thereby served as the modern equivalent of the Machiavellian prince, who could manage complex situations with tact and insight; here, parties worked from the top down, but also from the bottom up.

In the past thirty years, these pillars of party democracy have gradually eroded and been hollowed out. Two trends remain symptomatic of this process. The first is the declining membership of parties across the board, coupled with the increasing median ages of their members. On the Left, the German Social Democratic Party went from one million members in 1986 to 660,000 in 2003; the Dutch Socialists went from 90,000 to 57,000. The French Communist Party tumbled from 632,000 members in 1978 to 210,000 in 1998; its Italian sister party went from 1,753,323 to 621,670 in the same period. The British Labour Party counted 675,906 members in 1978, falling to 200,000 in 2005.

While the trend remains more marked for the classical left — which has always relied more squarely on mass mobilization — it is no less striking on the Right. The British Conservatives lost one million members between 1973 and 1994, while the French Gaullists dropped from 760,000 to 80,000. The Tories — the first mass party in European history — now receive more donations from dead members than from living ones, excluding their (now rebuffed) Russian oligarchs.

The United States has often served as a natural outlier to these European cases. Americans never had any true mass parties after 1896, the last major examples being the antislavery agitation of the 1850s and the rise of the original Populist and Socialist movement in the 1880s and 1890s. After the People’s Party’s defeat — in the South with stuffed ballot boxes and guns, in the North by electoral inertia — America’s bipartisan elites constructed a system that essentially neutered any third-party challengers. American parties nonetheless had a variety of bases and roots within society. These organizations effectively made, for example, the New Deal Democratic Party a mass party by proxy, tied to a hinterland of labor, union, and civil organizations that represented popular sectors. On both the Left and the Right, workers, employers, and shop owners have defended their interests in local clubs, committees, trade guilds, and syndicates.

This infrastructure was also a key launching pad for the revolts that detonated the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Detroit labor leader Walter Reuther marched with Martin Luther King Jr in the early 1960s, while one of the foremost supporters of the 1963 March on Washington was A. Philip Randolph, the union radical who had begun by organizing workers under Jim Crow. The relation of these forces to the Democratic Party was always complicated and stepmotherly. Overall, however, they ensured that the party remained a “party of workers” without ever becoming a workers’ party.

From the 1970s onward, this same landscape began to desiccate, both passively and actively. The Tocquevillian utopia portrayed by generations of European visitors to North America was replaced by the reality of bowling alone. Instead of mass membership organizations, voluntary associations increasingly turned to a nonprofit model to organize advocacy in Washington.

The shift to the nonprofit drastically changed the composition of these advocacy groups. Instead of relying on dues-paying members, they reached out to wealthy donors to fill their coffers. In a United States in which the government was increasingly giving up its redistributive role, this move created a natural constituency from new welfare recipients. The logic was self-evident: associations that practically operated as businesses but did not want to fulfill their tax obligations to the state saw an opportunity in the nonprofit model. The American political scientist Theda Skocpol casts them as “advocates without members”: nonprofit organizations functioning as the lawyers of a mute defendant.

The Populist Moment

The abandonment of mass parties and the growing alienation between politicians and citizens can only be temporarily averted by television commercials and marketing stunts. By 2010, it was clear that both classical PR and protest politics were falling short of their promises. Austerity was decimating pensions and public sectors across the Global South. Public debt, itself channeled by private debt, was rising. In March 2013, a group of leftist academics energized by the Indignados movement began to meet at Madrid’s Complutense University. One year later, they ran for office in the European election as Podemos and won seats. La France Insoumise’s organizers would reach for the same playbook in late 2016, looking at the Spanish example.

For socialists, the transition from mass to cartel parties was shot through with ambiguity. On one hand, it generated real opportunities for radicals to appeal to disaffected voters who could no longer voice discontent within parties. The Left could politicize the prevailing antiestablishment mood, turning anti-politics into politics.

Yet it also heavily constrained the space in which left-wing politics itself could operate. The social landscape sculpted by the neoliberal reforms meant not just an estrangement from traditional parties but a retreat from the public sphere as such, only weakly compensated for by the new medium of the internet. Left populists had to mobilize profoundly demobilized societies.

The first signal of this populist shift was audible in the rhetoric of these forces themselves. From 2012 onwards, the subject of “the people” became a central referent for left-wing parties, both old and new. The adoption of a cross-class language was not a novelty for the Left. The theorists most strongly associated with it — thinkers such as Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau and Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe — had drafted their theses decades before. In the world of bowling alone, they finally found an application.

Yet Laclau and Mouffe’s populism also took a highly specific organizational form in the 2010s, both in Europe and the United States, including the coalition of groups it tried to tie together. Instead of the mass parties of the twentieth century, leftists had to face a profoundly disorganized civil society that had driven civilians out of politics altogether and rendered relations between elites and average citizens highly volatile. The crises of the 2010s thus confronted the Left with a twin set of dilemmas: one of substance and one of form.

The first concerned the question of what the natural base for a left-wing program was — where it lay and how it could be assembled. This puzzle always assumed a particular shape for twentieth-century social democrats. As Polish political scientist Adam Przeworski saw it, there was a clear threshold beyond which left-wing parties would trade talk of the working class with that of “the people.”

The famous dilemma ran as follows. On the one hand, social democrats hoped that the expansion of industry would usher in a working-class majority, which would allow them to capture political office and reform their route to socialism. On the other, the continuing stagnation and eventual shrinkage of that class created a quandary. Broadening the base would require concessions to middle-class constituencies, who had to remain the fiscal providers to the welfare state and use the same public services as lower classes. On the other hand, the more benefits were granted to the middle classes in terms of consumption goods, the less breathing room domestic industry would have, and the material bases of proletarian strength and support would wither. Hence the bitter choice laid out by Przeworski.

Przeworski’s dilemma received a shifting set of answers across the history of social democracy. For German Social Democratic Party theorist Karl Kautsky, it implied a promise of land redistribution to appease peasants. For a reformist like Eduard Bernstein, it meant a tactical alliance between the new middle classes and the working classes — a bridge built from office to factory. For Gramsci, it meant reaching out to Italy’s peasantry, held in check by the fascist state and mainly situated in the South. For French thinkers such as Serge Mallet and André Gorz, in turn, it meant a focus on the student class rather than the industrial proletariat of yesterday. All these options already exhibited a populist temptation, trading the working class for the people.

In the 2010s, left parties again had to solder together an older working class and a middle class squeezed by the financial crisis. Most left populists moved to the former by starting with the latter, generating several predicaments along the way. Yet the makeup of those groups was also vastly different from the working and middle classes socialists encountered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, driven out of not only the factory but the public arena itself. Here, then, was the real result of Putnam’s bowling alone, the second and even more vexing dilemma for the populists. How was the Left to respond to the secular impoverishment of political life since the 1970s, and what opportunities, if any, could it offer?

This in turn acted as a multiplier on the puzzle that had troubled social democracy from the start. While socialists classically had an industrial working class and middle class to rely on, left populists could assume the support of neither of these two groups. Instead, the 1980s’ deindustrialization and ensuing crisis of civil society opened a void between citizens and states, radically decoupling elites from their societies. This void dislocated the boundaries of left-wing politics in an even more disorienting way — in a world in which politics itself was in crisis, the Left’s goals appeared tenuous at best, and actively unrealistic at worst. Hence the resort to a populist strategy from within the Left: to rethink mobilization for an age of demobilization — or how to stop people from bowling alone.

This was no undemanding task, and in the end, such an option put leftists in a crippling double bind. They could go full populist, soliciting the wider base of citizens driven out from traditional politics and disaffected by social democracy. But this approach risked emptying out the Left’s historic commitments, condemning people to “posting alone.” Eschewing this left strategy also meant a heavily digital and top-down approach to coalition building. Moreover, such a strategy might not grant the Left enough organizational heft to face the forces of capital on their own terrain.

On the other hand, falling back on a classical left-wing identity could also scare off voters whose loyalty to the traditional left was now fading. Partly through the latter’s participation in the Third Way and the demands of the post-2008 austerity program, a return to this tradition had become a liability. Once again, the trade-off between the middle and working classes that had troubled social democracy from the beginning now found a new manifestation in the compromise between a populist and a socialist approach. Reshuffling the first, the second dilemma was intimately tied to the crisis of political engagement so specific to the twenty-first century.

As the sociologist Dylan John Riley noted in 2012, “the contemporary politics of the advanced-capitalist world bears scant resemblance to that of the interwar period.” At the time, “populations organized themselves into mass parties of the left and right,” not an era of “a crisis of politics as a form of human activity,” where it was “unlikely that either Bernstein or Lenin can offer lessons directly applicable.”

Debating Fascism

A view of today’s politics as a direct productof the 2010s thus necessitates an emancipation from a series of frames we have inherited from an older age — and chief among them is a vision that sees our age as one of fascist resurgence. In the six years since Donald Trump’s election, a waspish debate on whether he should be classified as a fascist has overtaken American and European academia. The January 6 riots proved shocking and unsurprising to these observers.

Putnam had already warned that social capital was never an unqualified good, and subsequent writers have regularly spoken about “Bowling for Fascism” as an adequate description of Nazi strength in the 1930s. As Putnam himself noted: “It was social capital, for example, that enabled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh’s network of friends, bound together by a norm of reciprocity, enabled him to do what he could not have done alone.”

Ever since this warning, readings of Trumpism as heralding a new age of association have multiplied. In a recent paper , three social scientists have claimed that voters in flyover states have gone from bowling alone to “golfing with Trump,” arguing that “the rise in votes for Trump has been the result of long-term economic and population decline in areas with strong social capital.” The conclusion seems inescapable: since Germans and Italians first went bowling for fascism in the 1930s, Trump is now deserving of the same term.

This reading has appeared in both prudent and imprudent versions. For academics such as historian Timothy Snyder or philosopher Jason Stanley, Trump and Jair Bolsonaro appear in perfect continuity with the strongmen of the 1930s, with the former president as “the original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism so far.” This was still “pre-fascism” to Snyder, and “for a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. . . . Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this.” Journalists like Paul Mason and Sarah Kendzior have drafted texts instructing us in “ how to stop fascism ,” while anti-fascist in chief Madeleine Albright published Fascism: A Warning .

More subtle versions of this thesis are available. Writers Gabriel Winant and Alberto Toscano, for instance, have proposed a frame of “racial fascism” to read Trumpism on a broader timeline. In their view, white identity politics and fascism have always been interlinked. As Winant notes , “The primary factor of social cohesion in Tocqueville’s America was nothing other than white supremacy. Given that this structure has endured . . . it makes little sense to imagine our society as formerly rich with association, but now bereft of it.” Although “the gun-waving McCloskeys in St. Louis are presumably not members of the same kind of fraternal organizations that were popular in the 19th century … they are members of a homeowners’ association,” and they rely on “whiteness [as] a kind of inchoate associational gel, out of which a variety of more specific associations may grow in a given historical conjuncture.”

Hence, if Trump looks like a racial fascist, swims like a racial fascist, and quacks like a racial fascist, then he probably is a racial fascist. Voices in high quarters have recently joined Winant on this point. In a September 1 speech, President Joe Biden castigated Trumpist Republicans as a “threat to the republic” and saw them tending toward “semi-fascism.”

This reading now faces its own chorus of critics. To scholars like Riley and Corey Robin, Trumpism is better theorized as a form of Bonapartism that shares little with the “superpoliticized” fascisms of the interwar period. Above all, the two crucial preconditions for any fascist movement remain lacking: a prerevolutionary working class on the verge of power and a population’s shared experience of total war, which would create a mass body. Fascism in power, they claim, has a hegemonic character and is not content to meddle on the margins. Just like pagans in a Christian world, they would have little purchase in the new order.

One of the most recurrent responses to this critique points at asymmetries between Left and Right. While the 1980s and ’90s saw a dramatic decline in left-wing civic life, the Right has weathered Putnam’s era fairly better, with police unions and neighborhood defense clubs surviving the neoliberal onslaught. Fascism, after all, is the mentality of rank-and-file police elevated to state policy, a type of countermobilization for a militant working class. It’s no surprise that Marine Le Pen has received overwhelming support from French policemen.

A similar argument has been made for the British Conservative Party. This outfit has supposedly retained its bastions of strength across society in private schools, Oxbridge, and sporting clubs. As political scientist R. W. Johnson noted in 2015, “the atomisation and dispersal of the Labour vote” has led to “whole chunks falling off the side to the SNP and Ukip,” while “the institutional base of the Tory Party — private schools, the Anglican Church, wealthy housing districts, the expanded private sector and even home ownership in general — is as healthy as ever.” The result was “a one-sided decay of the class cleavage, with the Tories holding onto their old hinterland far better than Labour has.” From Oxford’s Bullingdon Club to the City guilds, conservative parties have managed to preserve their elite incubators and retain deeper pools of personnel.

It is difficult to see how such statements invalidate Putnam’s original hypothesis, however. The metrics for social capital used by anti-Putnamites are, for instance, curiously indeterminate. Collapsing NGOs and homeowner associations into the same category as parties and unions tells us little about the relative strength of civil society institutions. Rather than civic fortresses, NGOs function as heads without bodies — finding it easier to attract donors than members.

Even if Trump and other nationalists did rely on high associational density, this would not detract from the overall context of demobilization in which they operate. As islands in a minoritarian political system, they can only retain power by exploiting the Constitution’s most anti-majoritarian features. This is worlds removed from the anti-constitutionalism of the Nazis, who saw the Weimar Republic as born with socialist birthmarks. Fascist parties were hardly card-playing clubs, and golfing with Trump is a pallid replacement for fascist boot camps.

What about the Right’s other reserve institutions, from “white-ness” to homeownership? It is indeed true that many right-wing institutions have fared better in the neoliberal age. Yet an argument such as Winant’s makes it unclear how we should distinguish between being white and being a member of the Ku Klux Klan, just like being an employer is not the same as paying dues to an employer’s organization. In an age in which legal segregation has been abolished, racial status is not the guarantee of civic inclusion that it used to be under the Jim Crow regime. And a homeowner’s convention is no John Birch Society chapter, much like Bolsonaro’s WhatsApp groups are not Benito Mussolini’s squadristi .

The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations might well count as the first properly fascist organizations in history. But as institutions, they have been on the wane for decades, and they do not supply the shock troops for white supremacy that they did in the past. Militias like the Proud Boys and the boogaloo movement instead thrive as “individualized commandos,” as Adam Tooze put it, far removed from the veterans that populated the Freikorps or the Black and Tans in the early 1920s. These were highly disciplined formations with direct experience of combat, not lumpen loners who drove out to protect car dealerships.

The same holds true in European cases. Giorgia Meloni’s post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia has grown precipitously in the last year and now presides over one hundred thousand members and leads a governing coalition. Still, it will not equal the 230,000 members that its predecessor MSI had in the early 1960s, leading to a fascism with “no squads, uniforms or baseball bats.” Both numerically and qualitatively, the hard right remains a shadow of its former self —  as does the center right.

The Tory Primrose League was disbanded in 2004, and visitors to the British Isles will quickly be struck by the fading colors of the “Conservative Club” placards in thecountry’s rural towns. Like the old Workingmen’s Associations, these clubs scarcely function as mass mobilizers anymore, often appearing more like retirement homes (the median age of the Conservative Party membership is now estimated at seventy-two). As New Left Review ’s Tariq Ali has noted, this self-immolation was itself a product of the neoliberal 1980s. Margaret Thatcher’s market reforms led to “the decimation of the Tories’ provincial base of local gentry, bank managers and businessmen through the waves of trans-Atlantic acquisitions and privatizations she unleashed.”

There are exceptions to this rule, of course — the anti-Obama Tea Party activists who met up in basements in the early 2010s, the Hindu youth clubs run by Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or the anti-immigrant “defense leagues” organized by the Scandinavian far right. In general, however, the civic pattern looks as disarticulated on the Right as it does on the Left.

Perfecting Oligarchy

Why, then, has the Right nonetheless done better than the Left in the age of Putnam? The reasons are unsurprising: the Right has always grown organically out of capitalist society and relies on the default forms of association that capital generates. As Friedrich Engels pointed out in a report to British trade unionists in 1881:

Capitalists are always organized. They need in most cases no formal union, no rules, officers, etc. Their small number, as compared with that of the workman, the fact of their forming a separate class, their constant social and commercial intercourse stand them in lieu of that. . . . On the other hand, the workpeople from the very beginning cannot do without a strong organization, well-defined by rules and delegating its authority to officers and committees.

The crisis of civil society, in the latter sense, poses more of a problem on the Left than on the Right because the benchmarks of any successful socialist politics are always higher. To the Right, the stabilization or preservation of property relations is mostly enough. Inertia and resignation, more than militancy, remain its great assets. Nonetheless, homeowner associations, QAnon groups, and golf clubs are no durable replacement for this older civic infrastructure.

Clear parallels between the current day and the 1930s need not be minimized, of course. Like Adolf Hitler and Mussolini, Trump was an eminently lazy regent, happy to leave his policies to specialists and high-ranking officials, while, like a digital Napoleon Bonaparte, he dabbles with the crowds. And like those leaders, Trump owes his power mainly to that group of compliant conservatives in the Republican Party who seek to deploy the far right as a wedge against rival oligarchs.

After that, the analogies quickly weaken. Trump built on the executive power unbound by presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Nor do Republicans owe their power to a mass movement in a tightly organized party. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell regularly complains of slacking parliamentary discipline in the Majorie Taylor Greenes of the party. The Republicans thereby prefer to derive power from preexisting posts in the US state, which always exhibited aggressively elitist traits since the eighteenth century. Corey Robin rightly speaks of “gonzo constitutionalism”: a merciless deployment of the most antidemocratic features of the US political order.

The most unsettling fact about MAGA Republicanism is, as Robin writes, that it does not depend “upon these bogeymen of democracy — not on demagoguery, populism, or the masses — but upon the constitutional mainstays we learned about in high-school civics.” Only in 2004 did the GOP win the presidential election with a popular majority, when Bush Jr took a narrow 50.7 percent of the vote. Otherwise, the Republican Party strengthened its grip on the state apparatus mainly through minority mechanisms: appointing judges to the Supreme Court, gerrymandering, and filibustering.

Rather than a fascist threat, the party offers a pared-down oligarchy — the wielding of the last anti-majoritarian levers in the American ancien régime. “Nationalizing our elections is just a multi-decade Democratic Party goal in constant search of a justification,” McConnell stated in Congress last year, openly admitting that low voter turnout is a boon to his party. “Semi-fascism” might be a rhetorically grateful term for this behavior — but at the end of the day, not everything that is bad is the same.

Online and Offline

In the past ten years, pundits across the political spectrum have scouted for technical fixes for Putnam’s crisis. Undoubtedly the most appealing of these has been the new online world. This is an old story: two decades ago, when Putnam published his book, theorists were already wondering whether the internet’s new global connectivity, conceived in the bosom of the American security state, could remake society. Today, the children of the internet retain little faith in Twitter or TikTok’s capacity for good, much like Putnam doubted that online engagement could replace older civic mores.

This skepticism is mirrored by a confusion about the internet’s supposed political potential. If the Scylla of social media analysis was the naive utopianism of the early 2000s, its Charybdis is our current digital pessimism, which sees so much of the world’s problems — from political polarization to sexual impotence to declining literacy rates — as both the causes and consequences of being “too online.”

Clearly, the internet only becomes comprehensible in the world of the lonely bowler. Online culture thrives on the atomization that the neoliberal offensive has inflicted on society — there is now ample research showing positive correlation between declining civic commitment and broadband access. At the same time, the internet accelerates and entrenches social atomization. The exit and entry costs of this new, simulated civil society are extremely low, and the stigma of leaving a Facebook group or a Twitter subculture is incomparable to being forced to move out of a neighborhood because a worker scabbed during a strike.

The extreme marketization of Putnam’s 1980s and 1990s also made the world vulnerable to the perils of social media. The dissolution of voluntary organizations, the decline of Fordist job stability, the death of religious life, the evaporation of amateur athletic associations, the “dissolution of the masses,” and the rise of a multitudinous crowd of individuals were all forces that generated the demand for social media long before there was a product like Facebook or Instagram. Social media could only grow in a void that was not of its own making.

Disorganizing Capital

The internet is thus best read as a Pharmakon — a Greek noun that denotes both a means of remedy and a poison, a supposed antidote that can only exacerbate the disease. This also poses sensitive issues for the Right, particularly as capital itself had become increasingly divided in the preceding decades. As Paul Heideman has noted about the GOP in Catalyst , the assault on working-class organizations of the 1980s removed the external sources of discipline that once grouped capitalists together and imposed a common policy agenda.

Without this opponent, internal fractures are likely to widen. With the compounding “weakening of the parties since the 1970s, and the political disorganization of corporate America since the 1980s,” it is, as the academic Cathie Jo Martin has argued, “much harder for U.S. employers to think about their collective long-term interests.” And rather than a process of realignment in which Republicans have seized working-class votes, it is the ruthless march of “dealignment” that drives our age of political tumult.

Capital’s disorganization provides a much more rewarding frame for the “populist explosion” than ahistorical references to the authoritarianism of the 1930s. The German author Heinrich Geiselberger has noted how, without “the enemies of socialism,” the Right “can only invoke its spectre.” Geiselberger, together with Tamás, prefers to speak of post-fascism: an attempt to make citizenship less universal and confine it to national borders, but without the organizational clout that fascists demonstrated in the twentieth century. The new right is therefore “atomised, volatile, swarm-like, with porous borders between gravity and earnestness, sincerity and irony.”

Above all, the new politics is consistently informal. The mob that expressed unconditional support for Trump on January 6 does not even have membership lists. QAnon and the anti-lockdown movement are a subculture that thrives mostly on blogs, Instagram, and Facebook groups. There are, of course, more and less prominent QAnon figures — influencers, so to speak. Yet their leadership is not official or mandated by votes. Rather than a militarily drilled mass, we see a roving swarm, incited by a clique of self-selected activists.

This informality also manifests itself economically. In the past year, Trump extorted thousands of dollars from his followers and continued to rake in funds, without ever building a clear party structure. As early as 1920, sociologist Max Weber noted how charismatic leaders did not pay their followers and backers with fixed salaries, but rather worked through “donations, booty or bequests.” Unsurprisingly, charismatic leadership was also a thoroughly unstable mode of rule: succession to the throne could not simply be guaranteed for the mob, which would now have to look for its next redeemer.

What would a viable alternative to this fascist frame look like? As Riley suggests, a far more powerful precedent for our situation can be found in Karl Marx’s account of the 1848 revolution. At the revolution’s close, instead of giving in to this unrest, Napoleon III gathered an apathetic peasant population and ordered them to quell the revolution. Marx described these French peasants as a “sack of potatoes” for whom the “identity of their interests fosters no community spirit, no national association and no political organization.” And since the peasants could not represent themselves, “they must be represented” — in this case by a king.

Rather than a politics pitting workers against bosses, structured by the capital-labor opposition, Bonaparte’s was a politics of debtors and creditors — another shared feature with the 2010s, in which private debts transferred onto public accounts fueled the American and European debt crises. Bonaparte’s peasants focused on circulation and taxes rather than on production. Instead of peering aimlessly at the 1930s, we would have to look at a much older, primal age of democracy for suitable parallels with our populist era.

Yet the fascist frame also carries an even graver risk: an overestimation of socialist strength. Fascism implies a popular front and strategic alliances with liberalism, including no-strike pledges. Rather than force focus, the fascist frame will distract and confuse us from the crisis of political engagement so typical of the twenty-first century.

Putnam was right, but for the wrong reasons: associationalism matters for democracy, but it hardly matters to capital — and might even threaten it. For those contemplating a 2024 Bernie Sanders run, the question of the legacy the campaign leaves behind seems of even greater importance than what it accomplishes, let alone whether it will allow Bernie to ascend to the presidency. Only in that case will we see a true test of constitutional loyalty for capital, and only then can we gauge money’s alignment with liberal democracy. In the absence of this threat, both on left and right, we will keep on bowling alone.

More From Forbes

Surgeon general vivek murthy’s landmark initiative on loneliness and social isolation.

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Surgeon General Vivek Murthy today announced a ground-breaking new initiative to address social ... [+] isolation and loneliness.

Just a few days ago we learned that cigarette smoking in the United States dropped to a historic low . That’s news to celebrate. It’s also worth acknowledging that one of the reasons we reached this milestone is that for more than half a century, U.S. surgeons generals have led a protracted fight against big tobacco. Continuing this line of work, this week, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy today unveiled his plans to take on an even more daunting opponent: loneliness.

His effort is bold and timely, and will likely be viewed by future generations the way we look at past efforts to curb smoking.

Moreover, just as health practitioners took to the frontlines of the anti-smoking war, they must again take up arms in the fight against loneliness, and acknowledge from the start that it is a multi-front war that, as I’ve discovered, it will be equally hard-fought.

Bowling Alone

The movement to address loneliness and social isolation has been simmering for decades. Harvard’s Robert Putnam first identified the impending crisis 25 years ago in a landmark essay titled “Bowling Alone.” In the essay, which later yielded a popular book of the same name, he pointed a spotlight on institutional, technological and societal changes that diminished Americans’ social connectedness in the late ‘60s and after.

Putnam also surfaced a few prescriptions for addressing the problem, including things like service-learning programs, more interactive cultural and artistic endeavors, and technologies that reinforce face-to-face interaction. (The latter idea actually served as the inspiration for Meetup.com .)

Notably, Putnam also prescribed more tight-knit connections at work . I’ll return to that one in a moment, in the context of healthcare

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Best health insurance companies of 2022.

Harvard Professor Robert Putnam was awarded the National Medal of the Humanities for his pioneering ... [+] work on social isolation and loneliness.

Loneliness as a Health Problem

I was lucky enough to study under Putnam in college in his very first seminar on the topic, and I very much took his teachings to heart. Later, when I became a physician, I discovered that in addition to what I’d learned from Professor Putnam, I also began to understand that loneliness often forms a pernicious ecosystem within which chronic illnesses can flourish.

Socially-isolated patients miss appointments more frequently. They skip medications more often. They rely heavily on unhealthy coping mechanisms like smoking, alcohol or drug abuse. Many of them report that without loving connections to family or friends, they simply grow less interested in living life, so why would they invest themselves in everything that’s needed to stay healthy?

Despite all the above, medical systems were slow to do anything meaningful to address the growing epidemic of loneliness. So when I was appointed the leader of CareMore Health (a division of Elevance), which delivers care to seniors with chronic illnesses, I created the industry’s first Chief Togetherness Officer to lead the company’s response. Our Chief Togetherness Officer reported straight to me, and she had a significant budget and staff that rivaled other clinical divisions in the company.

Among that team’s duties: work with clinical staff to identify socially-isolated seniors. The program’s staff or - even better - volunteers within the company called socially isolated members each week just to talk and sometimes visit them inside their home. The results were legendary inside the company, with some seniors (and employees) reporting that their interaction with the program wasn’t just the highlight of the week - it led to more socializing with others and, as they often put it, gave them more reason to live.

Notably, the callers and visitors often spoke about their health to the clinical team, alerting them to situations like mental or physical decline, that led to life-saving visits from our doctors. This video with one of our earliest members, Virta—tells the story better than I ever could.

I helped establish a similar program at the company I now lead, SCAN Group, which serves seniors across several western states. We, too, have a Chief Togetherness Officer and our program is staffed largely by our Peer Advocates, who themselves are older adults as well as SCAN employees. Data shows that talking to peers with whom they can relate and share common experiences has benefited SCAN members. The program also includes virtual “learning communities,” where people with shared interests gather and connect, be it for help writing their autobiography or to discuss challenging topics like grief and loss.

A New Social Compact

As proud as I am of such measures, they’re ultimately Band-Aids on a badly fractured culture. We need nothing short of a new social compact in this nation. This became clearer than ever during the height of the COVID19 pandemic—when we were literally forced into isolation.

How many of us know our neighbors, let alone have brought them a gift or a meal, or simply checked in with them? How many of us do the same with parents or other family members? How many of us take the chance to peek into the next cubicle (remember those?) and ask a new colleague how their work is going, and maybe even discuss it over lunch.

Putnam pointed out that such gestures are anything but empty; rather, they can generate social capital and thereby lead us to a feeling of greater responsibility to one another and to our surrounding communities.

I can hear skeptics seizing on that word - responsibility - as if anyone needs another thing to feel responsible for these days.

I’d argue that social connectedness is far from a burden, though. It’s actually a liberating force. Ask any volunteer how they feel after they’ve given their time and sweat to an effort that by design makes other people happier: almost always they feel like they’ve gained much more than the experience cost them.

We have a nation of healthcare workers who are disenfranchised and lost.

Health Workers

Importantly, when it comes to all the above prescriptions, they’re especially critical for healthcare workers and their leaders.

The reason is simple. In the effort to help Americans quit smoking in the 1960s, our doctors played a key role in leading by example. They quit cigarettes at a much faster rate than the general public, and they did it publicly, with their patients, families and friends quickly getting the message that the health hazards were real.

Our nation’s health practitioners must be supported well enough by industry leaders to do the same when it comes to loneliness. Especially as we emerge from the pandemic, physicians, nurses and other frontline medical professionals have been overworked, underappreciated and often insufficiently compensated, to the point where many of them simply feel undervalued or unseen.

If there’s fertile ground for loneliness, it’s a situation where people feel unseen .

Healthcare leaders must commit to not just preach about loneliness among patients, but to take concrete steps to alleviate the problem in our own workforce. It can take the form of employee affinity groups, or budget for out-of-office celebrations and activities, or simply having managers visibly and sincerely checking in on their staff members. We must reverse the “line worker” mentality that has invaded the management model and parlance of many healthcare institutions—and stopped seeing healthcare workers as people who do sacred, emotionally taxing and complicated work.

Whatever it is, leaders must hold themselves accountable for measuring and reducing their staff’s feelings of social isolation. We can talk about the problem until we’re blue in the face, but until we show our patients and colleagues that it’s a problem worth solving, they’ll pay little attention.

The Surgeon General has certainly thought of many of these elements as he’s designed his ground-breaking new anti-loneliness initiative. But this initiative will no doubt evolve, and every one of us needs to be all in for the entire battle.

The more we can lean into his solutions and add our own, the faster we can get to a healthier society.

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• Architecture News

IND Architects to Renovate Historic Water Tower in Moscow

• Written by Kaley Overstreet
• Published on May 05, 2018

IND Architects has plans to transform the symbolic Shcherbinka water tower in Moscow, Russia into a revitalized area for residents to socialize. Since the water tower has been only slightly altered over time with the overall form and silhouette remaining the same, the design team has decided to create a place that will both aim to recall old memories and create new ones.

To activate the historical interior space of the water tower, IND Architects created a number of spaces including areas where exhibitions can be on display, meetings and conferences can be held, and other events can occur in flexible, multipurpose rooms. The program also includes a café, a co-working area, and a large hall that features an opening façade to the landscape space. In the warmer seasons, concerts and sports events can be organized here.

The design of the water tower also placed a strong emphasis on how visitors will move through the volume and be able to experience all of the different areas. They will first enter the elevator and be taken to the top floor, and circulate down the stairs, passing and observing each program.

The water tower is lined with glass, allowing plenty of light to flow in and connect the visitors back to the landscape. At night, the tower will radiate a soft glow, showing the interesting programs and events happening inside.

News via: IND Architects .

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