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Democracy Works was joined by Shaylyn Romney Garrett, coauthor with Robert Putnam of The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, to talk about the need to re-establish a sense of we in our democracy and what we can learn from history about getting there.
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From economic inequality to racial injustice and political polarization, the deck seems to be stacked against rebuilding America s social fabric. Our guest this week draws from history to offer the motivation necessary todo the hard work of democracy.
Shaylyn Romney Garrett is a writer, speaker and changemaker pursuing connection, community, and healing in a fragmented world. She is the co-author with Robert Putnam of The UpSwing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, which charts what the authors describe as the I-We-I curve in American democratic engagement and civic life.
T
HE PLACE that is now known as George Floyd Square is these days blocked to cars, creating an effective memorial. Walk in from the Powderhorn Park end and you see posters giving advice about proper behaviour, rather like those signs outside a church advising that shorts and flash-photography are forbidden. A few doors down from the Cup Foods grocery store, the last place that Mr Floyd entered before he was murdered, an arts centre has been converted into a museum for all the protest signs that were waved on the street outside. Within the arts centre there is discussion of the importance of protest gardening. In a park nearby stand around 150 white plastic headstones, each of them marked with the name of an African-American killed by the police, their dates, a fist that was the emblem of the Black Panther party and the words “Rest in Power”. The combination of hippydom with symbols that are drawn from black radicalism gives the place something of the feel of the 1960s.
by Robert Putnam. Swift Press, 2020. 571 pages
Robert Putnam earned deserved fame two decades ago for writing
Bowling Alone, in which he charted the decline in community and social capital which had occurred in America in the latter half of the 20th century.
Since then, he has written other interesting books on related issues including his most recent work The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again which came out in late 2020.
Putnam and his collaborator Shaylyn Romney Garrett cover familiar ground here in their focus on community and draw a parallel between America’s current social and economic divisions and the situation which existed there at the close of the “Gilded Age” more than a century ago.