[ 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.]
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FROM BOWLING ALONE TO POSTING ALONE  
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Anton Jäger
December 5, 2022
Jacobin
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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. _

, George Wylesol

 

Last year, the Survey Center on American Life published a study
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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.”

Loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain
marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday
experience.

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
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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.

Back in 2000, Putnam had already presaged that the internet would
reinforce antisocial tendencies and offer a poor substitute for those
old associations.

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
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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.

Instead of mass membership organizations, voluntary associations
increasingly turned to a nonprofit model to organize advocacy in
Washington.

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
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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.

Social scientists have claimed that voters in flyover states have gone
from bowling alone to ‘golfing with Trump.’

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.

A homeowner’s convention is no John Birch Society chapter, much like
Bolsonaro’s WhatsApp groups are not Benito Mussolini’s squadristi.

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
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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
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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
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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
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while anti-fascist in chief Madeleine Albright published Fascism: A
Warning
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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
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“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.”

There is now ample research showing positive correlations between
declining civic commitment and broadband access.

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
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“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
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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
[[link removed]] 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 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.

The most unsettling fact about MAGA Republicanism is, as Robin
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]“donations,+booty+or+bequests.”&source=bl&ots=cCvk5kNKiR&sig=ACfU3U0oBl7mMQucR9NGKdsPuEEvi5dCzQ&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=“donations%2C%20booty%20or%20bequests.”&f=false]
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.

Anton Jäger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Catholic University
of Leuven in Belgium.

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