Inclusive Citizenship: A Film Review

Source: Delevan Street Films, with permission

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

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

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

What had caused the turnaround and how long would it last? Among the factors Putnam held as responsible was the national crisis tied to the attacks on September 11, 2011. Putnam saw “no evidence of any change in religiosity or in reported church attendance” over the following year, but he did find “unmistakable evidence of change in American civic life.”

The broader implications of Putnam’s data for civic engagement are the subject of an award-winning new documentary, Join or Die (Abramorama Entertainment, 2024), from filmmakers Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis, which was released for screening at select theaters earlier this month.

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

“Not really a joiner”

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

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

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

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

Additional contributors to the film include Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and influential scholars Eddie Glaude Jr., Raj Chetty, Shaylyn Romney Garrett, and Priya Parker.

While civic engagement is shown to be crucial if democracies are to succeed, a good outcome is neither pre-made nor guaranteed. Just as important, success requires absorbing lessons from the past without repeating them as misplaced nostalgia. As Putnam underlines: “Look, America doesn’t have to be the kind of America you’ve lived in your whole life.... I want America to change. I want America to get better.”

“It’s not you, it’s all of us”

Source: Delevan Street Films, with permission

In the film, the remedy to the generalized malaise is social participation and, in particular, membership in groups and organizations. Other factors pointing to social health include how often Americans have friends over, how often they get together elsewhere, whether they worship (if they worship) together or alone, and how serious they are about voting in elections.

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Some of the damage to civic engagement may be due to lives that are, if anything, even more overstretched than they were in the 1990s. Glenn Loury, an economist and former student of Putnam’s, adds that Bowling Alone was “a story also about racial inequality and social inequality.” Accordingly, the states and their many diverse communities need to integrate more effectively. To be more inclusive is to strengthen the democracy overall, to the benefit of all.

“Being together differently”

Source: Delevan Street Films, with permission

Another reason for strengthening social trust and community ties? Both have been shown significantly to increase the odds of living longer. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a social psychologist who studies mortality, death rates, and health outcomes found that “the physiological effects of being socially connected ... were a significant predictor of survival and length of survival.”

Social connectedness, she determined, was “associated with a 50 percent increase in odds of survival,” particularly if gathering indoors included steps to ventilate, clean the air, and mask to reduce the spread of airborne pathogens. In the words of director Pete Davis, “You should join a club—or other opportunity to gather—because it’s good for you.”

“Gathering is a craft”

“When you’re trying to grow and sustain a multiracial democracy,” notes author Priya Parker, “part of what you’re trying to sort through is how do we belong to a larger project—to a community—without all having to be the same?”

Source: Delevan Street Films, with permission

A good example in the film, encapsuling the “generalized reciprocity” that binds a community on the move—is “Red Bike and Green,” a monthly community bike ride across Atlanta. As Zahra Alabanza, the organizer of a now-regular, decade-long tradition puts it, “The ride is about us being together so we’re not leaving anyone behind. The beauty of seeing other people want and need this kind of community is unmatched.”

To political scientist Hahrie Han, the social and political benefits are greater still: “People in their guts understand that the ways in which we’re connected to each other really makes a difference for what we can accomplish together, for what we can do together, in our civic life, in our political life, in our democracy.” At the same time, as part of that equation, “American democracy is only as strong as what the people are willing to give to it.”

Fast-paced, entertaining, accessible, and thought-provoking,” Join or Die is highly recommended for group screenings and as a resource for classroom and seminar discussion from high school to college and university. At 92 minutes, a screening can be paused at the one-hour mark, as the focus shifts after that to events and attitudes since 2020.

Join or Die underlines the importance of civic engagement to our communities and each other. It shows us what is possible when people and communities pull together. It underlines why participating in our democracy—centrally, by voting in elections—is critical to its well-being and all the lives within it.