The news hook for this post is the Supreme Court’s rulings in June, 2022, on guns, religion, and abortion. The connection may not be immediately apparent, but it will emerge.
About two hundred years ago Alexis de Tocqueville argued that it was Americans’ widespread membership in voluntary associations that produced democracy in America. In such groups Americans learned to channel their individualism into common projects, working together peacefully, effectively, and democratically.
Women’s Club, W.Va., 1939 (https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017809462/)
If vibrant associations–religious congregations, lecture societies, quilting guilds, sports teams, and so on–make democracy, then their thriving is a matter of great concern.
In the years after World War II, many observers saw the Nazi takeover of Germany as a cautionary tale of weak associational life: Too many Germans in the 1920s and ’30s, these analysts argued, had been isolates unconnected to civic life, which made them easy to sweep up into an authoritarian mass movement.[1]
Today, many observers similarly explain political extremism in the U.S. as fueled by isolated individuals who, being detached from normal group life, find companionship and identity in fringe militia. (I will return later to the claim about Nazi mobilization.) These analysts worry that associations in the U.S. have been in decline, that we are heading toward a mass society of disconnected individuals, posing a dangerous risk for our democracy. The facts, however, are more complex. But not necessarily reassuring.
The Debate About American Associations
Social scientists have long speculated that modern life weakened individuals’ ties to their local communities. Later, many worried that post-modern life weakened individuals’ ties to the wider civil society by undermining voluntary associations. In the mid-20th century, David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950), for example, made such claims, as did others with more Marxist approaches. Then, in the 1990s, new scholars, notably Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol, revived these worries. They described an America of hollowed-out associations. Unions, PTAs, fraternal societies, and the like were failing and thus failing to knit Americans to one another and to democratic institutions.
Much debate and dueling data-analyses followed.[2] A key rejoinder to the Putnam and Skocpol claims was the argument that Americans remained as involved in associations as before, but in new kinds of associations. Yes, Americans had left behind the older formal associations like the Fraternal Order of Elks, but they had formed newer, less formal groups like the biweekly hiking group.
Such responses focused attention on how we define associations and how we measure membership. Much of the debate has relied on one source of data: the General Social Survey. From 1974 through 1994 (and again in 2004), the GSS asked Americans which, if any, of 15 types of organizations they belonged to. (Other studies have largely replicated this approach.)
The 15 types of organizations that the GSS asked respondents about starting in 1974 ranged from fraternal lodges, service clubs, and veterans’ groups to professional societies, church-affiliated groups, and “any other” the respondents might offer. Initial analyses suggested that fewer Americans belonged to associations as the 20th century drew to a close. Additionally, Skocpol argued, Americans who did belong to associations increasingly did so through simply paying memberships, not by actively participating.
However, several scholars, notably Pamela Paxton and Robyn Rap in 2016 and 2018, pointed out that contemporary Americans belonged to all sorts of groups beyond those on the GSS list. They were in associations, for example, involving health, travel, sports fandom, and emotional support and they also belonged to a wide array of informal, often idiosyncratic groups. Thee critics argued that Americans were not dropping out of groups, but changing groups.
The Bay Area Survey
Here is where I introduce a just-published paper that I wrote with Xavier Durham. We used the UCNets survey which interviewed about 1100 respondents living in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2015 to 2018. Various parts of the survey allowed us to identify the kinds of groups, if any, in which the respondents were involved.[3]
Respondents reported active participation across a wide variety of associations, from organizations with official constitutions to totally informal groups. They included seniors’ clubs, volunteer teams of museum docents and others of dog rescuers, neighborhood associations, mutual support groups such as Narcotics Anonymous and mothers’ clubs, cultural activities such as choirs, spiritual groups such as Tibetan meditation circles, novel hobby groups doing cosplay or RV-ing, political cadres fighting for tenants’ rights and against rape, and recreational sports activities such as martial arts and fly-fishing.
These (and others researchers’) findings imply that the much of the 1990s argument got off on the wrong foot by relying on a survey question that when first used in the mid-1960s may have captured the range of associational life reasonably well, but 30 and more years later misses the many new ways of Americans worked and played together. While this research undermines the claim that American associational life has been in decline, alone it hardly refutes it.
In additional analyses for our paper, we compared information from five surveys that had been conducted between the 1960s and the late 2010s (before the Covid pandemic, of course). Despite somewhat different methods for assessing group activity, the five surveys compared suggest that, on average, Americans were at least as active in groups in the 2010s as they had been six decades earlier, but now in a different mix of groups.
One can see how that mix changed even within the GSS polls themselves. Between 1974 and 2004, respondents became less likely to belong to veterans’ groups, labor unions, fraternal societies, and church groups. With respect to vets, the end of the draft in 1973 meant that there were now simply far fewer veterans.[4] Labor unions in the private sector were beaten down by business interests, political forces, and the courts. Fraternal societies such as Moose and Elk have declined, partly as a matter of changing taste and partly because commercial businesses replaced them as providers of life insurance. On the other hand, GSS respondents became likelier to belong to other organizations, professional societies and hobby groups, for example. And, as I already pointed out, the GSS question does not capture additional types of association, such as ones formed around neighborhood, health, and mutual support.
The most plausible conclusion is that there was, from the 1960s to 2017, no general trend in the level of associational membership per se but a definite broadening in the mix of associations.
However
But this seemingly cheery conclusion needs qualifying in at least three ways.
Churches. Since about 1990, Americans have increasingly declined to identify with an organized religion, a topic I have covered several times in this blog (e.g., here). And there’s been a roughly twenty-point drop in the percentage of Americans who say they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque. The major reason for growing alienation from churches, I and others have argued, has been the growing conviction that organized religion is strongly allied with right-wing attacks on personal freedoms regarding sexuality and other lifestyle choices. The Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade will broaden this disaffection.
Historically, congregations have been the key association for Americans (and congregations have provided the model for secular associations). Thus, defection from churches is critical loss for civil society. Some Americans are trying to create associations around being “spiritual but not religious” (e.g., here), but replacing religious associations and the solidarity they create would be very difficult.
Young Men without a College Degree. Over the last couple of decades, concern has rightly grown about the economic and social conditions of young men lacking a college degree. They seem to have become an increasingly distinct population, unattached to any associations, generally unmoored and at sea.[5]
Associations and Extremism. I noted earlier the concern that people unconnected to normal group life can get swept up in extremist, anti-democratic movements. However, that worry was based on a misinterpretation of the Nazi case. Research over the last quarter-century shows that the Nazis (and other European fascists) actually used active civic associations to draw people to their own groups. Thus, the more people were already involved, the faster the growth of the Nazi movement.[6]
Here, Americans who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were overwhelmingly not isolates joining spontaneously in a fevered outbreak, but were already joined together in local associations that mobilized members for the demonstration and the assault.
Associations and Those Court Decisions
We can see more peaceful versions, as well, of this mobilization through existing associations, for example, in how churches, parent-school associations, and outdoor recreation groups have provided activists for far-right agendas, agendas that are now coming to fruition in the Bush-Trump Supreme Court.
The reversal of Rose v. Wade is the culmination of grassroots organizing, joining together people who were already participants in associational life, particularly in churches, to elect conservative Republicans. Similarly, the campaign for “religious liberty” drew on existing religious associations for its grassroots success. Even campaigners for expanded gun rights were recruited from among members of gun clubs, firing ranges, gun classes, and shooting competitions.
Americans on the right, reacting defensively to the broad shift leftward in the culture, have mobilized existing associational involvements to win key political battles. These churches, hobby clubs, and local chapters are, as Tocqueville argued, places where the skills to run–and to take control of–government are honed (see, e.g., here). Can the pro-abortion, secular, anti-gun left–typically quite elite in its profile–draw on comparable grassroots associations?[7] Can the yoga classes, book clubs, dog rescues, online support chatrooms, meditation circles, hiking groups, and glee clubs of new associational life provide the political volunteers on the left that the old-style organizations have provided on the right?
NOTES —————————————————————————
[1] I refer here to mass society theorists of the 1950s and’60s and the seminal work, The Authoritarian Personality.
[2] Here is a short bibliography: Paxton 1999; Costa and Kahn 2003; Painter and Paxton 2014.
[3] The UCNets survey elicited information about associational and group involvement in a few ways: It used a shorter, modified version of the GSS question, asking respondents about “the kinds of organizations you actively participate in;” asked a question about whether they were active in informal groups; asked specifically about online groups; and discovered more groups in the answers that respondents gave to questions about how they were connected to members of their personal networks–answers such as “He and I are on the same softball team” and “We are in the same book club.”
[4] In 1980, 29 million Americans were vets; in 2018, 18 million were.
[5] I return to the GSS 1974-1994 and 2004 data. The 2004 survey is not quite comparable to the others for methodological reasons, so its results need an asterisk. Nonetheless, the trends for the young, male, less-educated respondents stand out. The graph below compares the proportion of respondents who reported at least one associational membership, by year, for (a) respondents who were men aged 18-39 without a college degree, versus (b) everyone else. One sees a widening gap between these two populations starting around 1990. (Setting aside the 2004 data as unusual, the divide developed in the early 1990s.) In more detailed examination (not shown), the decline in membership for such men is especially marked with respect to unions and veterans groups. Marriage rates, too, show some of this pattern (not shown)–dropping for both populations but dropping more and faster for young men lacking a degree.
[6] See e.g., work by Berman and Satyanath et al. on the Nazis and also by my colleague Dylan Riley on other fascists.
[7] Historically, the Black church has been a great reservoir, but these are not its core issues. Unions have been weakened, and anyway these are not their issues either. College clubs would be a resource for recruitment, especially on abortion, but how well college students can recruit the non-college swing voters is unclear.
MADE IN AMERICA 