The former UK prime minister and renowned researcher said the work of strengthening democracy starts with rebuilding community for the smartphone age
Former United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam called on young people to lead efforts to rebuild community ties and strengthen civic life, warning at a USC event that growing social isolation is weakening democracy everywhere.
“Democracy doesn’t work when we’re not connected with other people,” said Putnam, whose seminal 2000 book Bowling Alone captured the stark decades-long collapse of community and civic engagement in the United States.
Brown chairs the Center for Civic Society at the USC Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy & Government Service. He and Putnam discussed ways to rebuild societal bonds during the event at the USC Capital Campus last week that was attended by 160 people, half of them students.
Renewing civic life, Brown and Putnam agreed, starts with bringing together people of different backgrounds through community groups, sports and other local organizations. At a time when many younger people especially feel disconnected from society, this will require an urgent, conscious effort to put aside smartphones and foster in-person engagement.
“It’s going to just be downhill always, unless you decide to fix the problem” that older generations created, Putnam told students.
“You’ve got to persuade people to take action,” said Brown, who also holds the Ronald L. Steel Chair in Foreign Policy and International Affairs at USC, in addition to his roles as a UK Special Reviewer, Special Envoy to the United Nations for Global Education, and Global Health Ambassador to the World Health Organization.
Connection to democracy
People today have fewer friends, belong to fewer organizations and are less involved in their communities, compared to previous generation. While Putnam said research shows smartphones and TV are a “big part of the problem,” there are other societal factors that are driving successive generations to prefer isolation.
“We’re spending more and more of our time alone, utterly alone, not in the presence of any other human being,” Putnam said. “The data on that are just breathtaking.”
Research from Putnam and others shows how nationalist populist movements thrive when people feel socially isolated and abandoned by elites. New global research from the Center for Civic Society, which was established last year to study and promote democratic values, suggests civic participation can help counter this trend.
According to center’s survey of nearly 32,000 adults in 20 democracies and other recent research, people involved in a civic activity who meet with others across religious, ethnic and ideological divides are more likely to resist populist nationalism and support international cooperation.
“The people who are involved in their own communities—the people who are actually meeting people across divides—they say: Yes, we’ve got to do that because it’s the only way that we can have peace, it’s the only way we can have prosperity,” Brown said.
The survey findings, while still preliminary, are a strong indication of how connections built at the local level can help restore commitment to the national and global good, Brown said.
Historical precedent
Over time, Putnam said, Americans have lost a sense of obligation to one another. Rediscovering a shared commitment to the collective well-being is the only way to break the cycle of civic decline, he said.
In his most recent book, The Upswing, Putnam traces how Americans previously overcame social isolation. The Gilded Age in the late 19th century was a similarly turbulent era marked by intense partisan division, high economic inequality and technological disruption. In the aftermath of this period, a host of youth-serving organizations still in existence today were created, including the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and 4-H.
“People were looking around: What do we do to fix this problem? And they were smart enough to realize it had to be fun, but they realized it had to be creating moral education,” Putnam said.
The lessons for today are the same, even if it’s hard to imagine a similarly broad effort taking hold. Sports, which have surpassed religion as the most common form of communal activity, may offer a compelling platform for developing new civic organizations, Brown said.
“You build out of something that people want to do,” Brown said.
Modern tools like social media, which have the power to inflame and divide, can also be part of the solution when used to bring people together in person, Brown said.
“You can’t rewrite history and ban social media,” Brown said. “What you can do is say, ‘Is there anything positive that can come out of this for the future?’”
Youth movement
The conversation, co-hosted by the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, was part of a new Schaeffer Leadership Series bringing together government officials, prominent researchers and private-sector leaders for discussions on strengthening democracy. Although Brown and Putnam said they could offer ideas for rebuilding civic life, they said it’s ultimately up to young people to decide on the future they want.
“I can tell you exactly what life was like in 1950—I was there,” Putnam said. “Well, I can’t tell you what it should be like in 2050.”
Putnam said it would give him “enormous hope” if 10% of undergraduate students at USC and other universities got involved in some form of community activity.
“That’s a big ask, but look—you could change American history,” Putnam said. “I mean that. That’s a big deal.”