Publications by Author: Putnam, Robert D.

2015
Putnam, Robert D. 2015. “Growing Up Alone.” The Atlantic. Publisher's Version
Putnam, Robert D. 2015. “‘Our Kids,’ by Robert D. Putnam.” New York Times Sunday Review. Publisher's Version
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
Putnam, Robert D. 2015. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster. Publisher's Version Abstract

A groundbreaking examination of the growing inequality gap from the bestselling author of Bowling Alone: why fewer Americans today have the opportunity for upward mobility.

It’s the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in—a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last twenty-five years we have seen a disturbing “opportunity gap” emerge. Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of their family background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life. Now, this central tenet of the American dream seems no longer true or at the least, much less true than it was.

Robert Putnam—about whom The Economist said, “his scholarship is wide-ranging, his intelligence luminous, his tone modest, his prose unpretentious and frequently funny”—offers a personal but also authoritative look at this new American crisis. Putnam begins with his high school class of 1959 in Port Clinton, Ohio. By and large the vast majority of those students—“our kids”—went on to lives better than those of their parents. But their children and grandchildren have had harder lives amid diminishing prospects. Putnam tells the tale of lessening opportunity through poignant life stories of rich and poor kids from cities and suburbs across the country, drawing on a formidable body of research done especially for this book.

Our Kids is a rare combination of individual testimony and rigorous evidence. Putnam provides a disturbing account of the American dream that should initiate a deep examination of the future of our country.

2012
Putnam, Robert D. 2012. “What's So Darned Special about Church Friends?” Altruism, Morality & Social Solidarity Forum, American Sociological Association, 2nd ed., 3: 1,19-21. DASH Repository
Download Paper
Putnam, Robert D, and David E Campbell. 2012. “God and Ceasar in America”. Publisher's Version
2011
Campbell, David E, and Robert D Putnam. 2011. “Crashing the Tea Party”. Publisher's Version Abstract

Given how much sway the Tea Party has among Republicans in Congress and those seeking the Republican presidential nomination, one might think the Tea Party is redefining mainstream American politics.

But in fact the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic. To embrace the Tea Party carries great political risk for Republicans, but perhaps not for the reason you might think.

Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.

Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about—lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

The strange thing is that over the last five years, Americans have moved in an economically conservative direction: they are more likely to favor smaller government, to oppose redistribution of income and to favor private charities over government to aid the poor. While none of these opinions are held by a majority of Americans, the trends would seem to favor the Tea Party. So why are its negatives so high? To find out, we need to examine what kinds of people actually support it.

Beginning in 2006 we interviewed a representative sample of 3,000 Americans as part of our continuing research into national political attitudes, and we returned to interview many of the same people again this summer. As a result, we can look at what people told us, long before there was a Tea Party, to predict who would become a Tea Party supporter five years later. We can also account for multiple influences simultaneously—isolating the impact of one factor while holding others constant.

Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.

What’s more, contrary to some accounts, the Tea Party is not a creature of the Great Recession. Many Americans have suffered in the last four years, but they are no more likely than anyone else to support the Tea Party. And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006—opposing abortion, for example—and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Their appeal to Tea Partiers lies less in what they say about the budget or taxes, and more in their overt use of religious language and imagery, including Mrs. Bachmann’s lengthy prayers at campaign stops and Mr. Perry’s prayer rally in Houston.

Yet it is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose. While over the last five years Americans have become slightly more conservative economically, they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics. It thus makes sense that the Tea Party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.

On everything but the size of government, Tea Party supporters are increasingly out of step with most Americans, even many Republicans. Indeed, at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, today’s Tea Party parallels the anti-Vietnam War movement which rallied behind George S. McGovern in 1972. The McGovernite activists brought energy, but also stridency, to the Democratic Party—repelling moderate voters and damaging the Democratic brand for a generation. By embracing the Tea Party, Republicans risk repeating history.

2010
Putnam, Robert D, and Chaeyoon Lim. 2010. “Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction.” American Sociological Review 75 (6): 914-933. DASH Repository DOI Abstract
Although the positive association between religiosity and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how religion actually shapes life satisfaction. Using a new panel dataset, this study offers strong evidence for social and participatory mechanisms shaping religion’s impact on life satisfaction. Our findings suggest that religious people are more satisfied with their lives because they regularly attend religious services and build social networks in their congregations. The effect of within-congregation friendship is contingent, however, on the presence of a strong religious identity. We find little evidence that other private or subjective aspects of religiosity affect life satisfaction independent of attendance and congregational friendship.
Download Paper
American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us
Putnam, Robert D, and David E Campbell. 2010. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. Simon & Schuster. Publisher's Version Abstract

American Grace is a major achievement, a fascinating look at religion in today’s America. Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse and remarkably tolerant.  But in recent decades, the nation’s religious landscape has been reshaped.

America has experienced three seismic shocks, say Robert Putnam and David Campbell. In the 1960s religious observance plummeted.  Then, in the 1970s and 1980s a conservative reaction produced the rise of evangelicalism and the Religious Right.  Since the 1990s, however, young people, turned off by that linkage between faith and conservative politics, have abandoned organized religion entirely.  The result:  growing polarization. The ranks of religious conservatives and secular liberals have swelled, leaving a dwindling group of religious moderates in between. At the same time, personal interfaith ties are strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased, while religious identities are increasingly fluid. Putnam and Campbell show how this denser web of personal ties brings surprising interfaith tolerance, notwithstanding the so-called “culture wars.”

American Grace is based on two of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America. It includes a dozen in-depth profiles of diverse congregations across the country, which illuminate the trends described by Putnam and Campbell in the lives of real Americans.

Nearly every chapter of American Grace contains a surprise about American religious life.

2009
Putnam, Robert D, and Thomas H Sander. 2009. “How Joblessness Hurts Us All”. Publisher's Version Abstract

The unemployment rate has topped 10% for the first time in a quarter-century. More than one in six adults are unemployed or underemployed, the most since the Great Depression. By any measure this is troubling, but the long-term effects of unemployment are more devastating than most Americans grasp. Economists warn that high unemployment may persist for years.

Misery, it turns out, doesn't love company. Distressing new research shows that unemployment fosters social isolation not just for the unemployed but also for their still-employed neighbors. Moreover, the negative consequences last much longer than the unemployment itself. Policymakers have focused on short-term help for the jobless, but they must address these longer-term community effects, too.

Impact studied

Recent studies confirm the results of research during the Great Depression— unemployment badly frays a person's ties with his community, sometimes permanently. After careful analysis of 20 years of monthly surveys tracking Americans' social and political habits, our colleague Chaeyoon Lim of the University of Wisconsin has found that unemployed Americans are significantly less involved in their communities than their employed demographic twins. The jobless are less likely to vote, petition, march, write letters to editors, or even volunteer. They attend fewer meetings and serve less frequently as leaders in local organizations. Moreover, sociologist Cristobal Young's research finds that the unemployed spend most of their increased free time alone.

These negative social consequences outlast the unemployment itself. Tracking Wisconsin 1957 high school graduates, sociologists Jennie Brand and Sarah Burgard found that in contrast to comparable classmates who were never unemployed, graduates who lost jobs, even briefly and early in their careers, joined community groups less and volunteered considerably less over their entire lives. And economist Andrew Clark, psychologist Richard Lucas and others found that, unlike almost any other traumatic life event, joblessness results in permanently lower levels of life satisfaction, even if the jobless later find jobs.

Equally disturbing, high unemployment rates reduce the social and civic involvement even of those still employed. Lim has found that Americans with jobs who live in states with high unemployment are less civically engaged than workers elsewhere. In fact, most of the civic decay in hard-hit communities is likely due not to the jobless dropping out, but to their still-employed neighbors dropping out.

Moreover, beyond civic disengagement, places with higher joblessness have more pervasive violence and crimes against property. They have more fragile families with harsher parenting, and higher rates of mental disorder and psychological distress among both the unemployed and the employed. These social consequences are a powerful aftershock to communities already reeling economically.

What might explain the civic withdrawal during recessions? The jobless shun socializing, shamed that their work was deemed expendable. Economic depression breeds psychological depression. The unemployed may feel that their employer has broken an implicit social contract, deflating any impulse to help others. Where unemployment is high, those still hanging onto their jobs might work harder for fear of further layoffs, thus crowding out time for civic engagement. Above all, in afflicted communities, the contagion of psychic depression and social isolation spreads more rapidly than joblessness itself.

What to do?

The lasting social consequences of unemployment demand remedy. President Obama has extended individual unemployment benefits.These new findings call for special aid to communities with high and persistent unemployment. Government and business should ensure that unemployment is a last cost-cutting move, not the first.

Millions of employed Americans are silently thankful that the sword of Damocles has not yet fallen on them. Meanwhile, they and their leaders overlook the fact that unemployment is causing long-run social disintegration in their communities. Albert Camus was right: “Without work, all life goes rotten.”


Thomas H. Sander is executive director of the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America, at Harvard Kennedy School. Robert D. Putnam is Peter & Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and co-author of the forthcoming American Grace: The Changing Role of Religion in America.
2008

In the mushrooming procedural debate about Democratic superdelegates and the uncontested Florida and Michigan primaries, more is at stake than the identity of the presidential nominee or even the Democrats' chances of victory in November. Primaries and caucuses coast to coast in the last two months have evinced the sharpest increase in civic engagement among American youth in at least a half-century, portending a remarkable revitalization of American democracy. But that rebirth of American civic life would be aborted if the decision rendered by millions of ordinary Americans could be overturned by a backroom deal among political insiders. The issue is not public jurisprudence or obscure party regulations or the alleged "wisdom" of party elders, but simple playground notions of fairness.

Throughout the last four decades of the 20th century, young people's engagement in American civic life declined year after year with depressing regularity. In fall 1966, well before the full flowering of Vietnam War protests, a UCLA poll of college freshmen nationwide found that "keeping up with politics" was a "very important" goal in their lives for fully 60 percent.

Thirty-four years later that figure had plummeted to 28 percent. In 1972, when the vote was first extended to 18-year-olds, turnout in the presidential election among 18- to 24-year-olds was a disappointing 52 percent. But even beginning at that modest level, rates of voting in presidential elections by young people steadily fell throughout the '70s, '80s, and '90s, reaching barely 36 percent in 2000. National commissions bemoaned the seemingly inexorable increase in youthful apathy and incivism. The National Commission on Civic Renewal said, "When we assess our country's civic and moral condition, we are deeply troubled... We are in danger of becoming a nation of spectators."

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a national tragedy, but also a vivid reminder that we are all in this together. Civic seismometers across the land showed a sharp spike in virtually every measure of community-mindedness. It was, I wrote at the time, not only a tragedy, but also the sort of opportunity for civic revival that comes along once or twice a century. Just as Pearl Harbor had spawned the civic-minded "Greatest Generation," so too Sept. 11 might turn out to produce a more civically engaged generation of young people.

For most Americans the half-life of the civic boomlet after the attacks was barely six months. Within a year measures of civic engagement had returned to the previous levels, from which they have barely budged since. Except among young people.

Among the cohort of Americans caught by 9/11 in their formative years, the effects of the attacks on their civic consciousness were more enduring. The annual UCLA chart of interest in politics jumped upward in 2001 for the first time in decades and has kept rising every year since.

Last month the UCLA researchers reported that "For today's freshmen, discussing politics is more prevalent now than at any point in the past 41 years." This and other evidence led us and other observers to speak hopefully of a 9/11 generation, perhaps even a "new Greatest Generation." In the 2004 and 2006 elections, turnout among young people began at last to climb after decades of decline, reaching the highest point in 20 years in 2006. As we approached the presidential season of 2008, young Americans were, in effect, coiled for civic action, not because of their stage of life, but because of the lingering effects of the unifying national crisis they had experienced in their formative years.

The exceptionally lively presidential nominating contests of this year—and, it must be said, the extraordinary candidacy of Barack Obama—have sparked into white hot flame a pile of youthful kindling that had been stacked and ready to flare for more than six years. The 18-year-olds first eligible to vote in 2008 were in sixth grade when the twin towers fell, and their older sisters and brothers who were college seniors in September 2001 are now 28 or 29. It is precisely this group, above all others in America, that has pushed participation rates in this spring's caucuses and primaries to record levels. Turnout in this spring's electoral contests so far has generally been higher than in previous presidential nominating contests, but for twenty-somethings the rise has been truly phenomenal—turnout often three or four times greater than ever before measured.

The 2008 elections are thus the coming-out party of this new Greatest Generation. Their grandparents of the original Greatest Generation were the civic pillars of American democracy for more than a half-century, and at long last, just as that generation is leaving the scene, reinforcements are arriving. Americans of every political persuasion should rejoice at this epochal swing of the generational pendulum, for it portends precisely the sort of civic renaissance for which Jeremiahs have been calling for many years.

This, then, is what is at stake in the otherwise inside-baseball controversies about superdelegates and pledged delegates and the uncontested Florida and Michigan primaries—controversies now roiling Democratic party leaders. If the results of the caucuses and primaries are, despite record-breaking rates of popular participation, overturned by unelected (though officially legitimate) superdelegates or by delegates from states that all candidates had previously agreed not to contest, the lesson for the young civic stalwarts would be unmistakable—democratic politics is a sham. Politics is actually controlled by party bosses behind the scenes. Civic engagement is for suckers.

From Little League to student council races, we all learn to accept defeats we have lost fair and square. But losing in a contest in which the rules can be rigged teaches that the game is not worth the candle. Who can honestly doubt that if the Democratic presidential candidate preferred by a majority of the delegates elected in this spring's competitive contests (and by the overwhelming majority of young voters) were to be rejected solely by the power of unelected delegates (or those "elected" without any serious competition), the unmistakable civics lesson would be catastrophic for this incipient cadre of super citizens?

So as the superdelegates, the two campaigns, and Democratic Party leaders contemplate how to resolve the procedural issues before them - what to do about Michigan and Florida, and how superdelegates should vote—let's hope that they weigh the consequences not merely for their own candidates this year, and not merely for the Democratic prospects in the fall, but for the future vitality of American democracy.

Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and Better Together: Restoring the American Community.

2007
Ashbrook, Tom, and Robert D Putnam. 2007. “Diversity and Community”. Publisher's Version Abstract

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam is a self-described full-on liberal who worries a lot about community in America.

He made his name in the 1990s with his finding that hordes of Americans were, in his famous phrase, "bowling alone"—living without the traditional community ties of bowling leagues and Moose clubs that bound people together.

Then he set out on a huge project to find out why. The answer looks like a liberal's nightmare: diversity. Diverse communities, Putnam found, show dysfunction. At least for a while.

This hour On Point: Robert Putnam, Pat Buchanan and Lani Guinier on diversity and community in America.

To listen to this conversation go to:
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2007/08/20070809_b_main.asp

Robert Putnam is a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center and Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy.

2006

Larry Summers's experience says much about what Harvard—and any great university—should look for in a president.

Summers was not forced out by a radical segment of the faculty of arts and sciences. He was not forced out because bold visions threatened a complacent faculty. Most faculty in arts and sciences are eager to reinvigorate undergraduate education, strengthen cutting-edge science, internationalize the university, develop the Allston campus, and encourage collaboration among the schools. Any president of Harvard at this time would have essentially the same goals.

Achieving such goals requires raw intelligence, which Summers has in abundance. But more crucial to leadership than IQ is the ability to inspire others with your vision and to help them come to see it as their vision, too. You must understand the culture of an institution even as you try to change it. Business Week wrote: “Summers joins the ranks of recent leaders brought in to generate change in organizations only to misfire and fail, [such as] Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard.”

Giving orders goes only so far. As the late Richard Neustadt, America's premier student of the US presidency, put it: Presidential power is the power to persuade.

During his presidency, Summers planned the Allston campus and rationalized the budget, but failed to make progress toward his central academic goals. He came in with much political capital, but frittered it away on battles he did not need to fight. He alienated even those—from all disciplinary and ideological backgrounds—most committed to his goals and to Harvard.

Take one of Summers's highest priorities—reforming the undergraduate curriculum. Successful curricular reform requires that hundreds of instructors change their behavior in hundreds of classrooms that cannot be policed. The hard part about curricular reform is not finding the right answer, because there is no single right answer. The hard part is inspiring and persuading.

Harvard's justly famed (though now outdated) Core Curriculum of the 1970s succeeded not because of its rationale or rules, but because the process of reform itself reinvigorated an entire generation of instructors who (for several decades) then took teaching more seriously. Most Harvard faculty agree that our undergraduate education needs change, perhaps even radical change. But to forge a consensus out of many creative but discordant ideas requires deft leadership. That was what Derek Bok brought to the task then. That is the quality Harvard should seek now in its next president.

Bold statements and a forceful personality are not enough. Indeed, clumsily applied, boldness and forcefulness can lead to weakness. What was most dispiriting about Summers's final year to those who shared his values was that he relinquished the capacity to say no, even to bad ideas. “Superman is surrounded by kryptonite,” said one irrepressible colleague. “Now is the time to move.” Political correctness was not the root of the problem, and politically correct decisions could not solve it.

One especially misguided idea is that deans and presidents should be chosen by faculty. Harvard is already unduly decentralized, and faculty-chosen executive leadership is a recipe for blandness. Larry Summers understood that perfectly well, but having squandered political capital through four arrogant years, he acquiesced in unwise limits on presidential discretion. Harvard's next leader must have sufficient emotional and social intelligence to preserve the ability to say no.

Above all, the power to persuade depends on the capacity to maintain trust. Colleagues need to believe that leaders will not only act honorably but speak truthfully. Once a faculty comes to believe that their president is “less than truthful” (as a former dean reportedly said of this president), the basis for leadership of any kind has vanished.

Harvard is a strong university. Its faculties, including its Faculty of Arts and Sciences, want bold change. Professors do not agree on exactly what the changes should be. That is the nature of a great faculty—the more creative, the more likely to disagree. But Harvard faculty have followed strong leaders in the past, and they will follow them in the future. What Harvard needs now is a boldly reformist leader, but one who actually knows how to make reform happen.

Robert D. Putnam is the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and a member of the Executive Committee of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

2003

Five years ago, Haven Acres—a largely African American neighborhood of Tupelo, Miss.—showed familiar signs of urban decay: gangs, drugs, trash, dilapidated housing, for-sale signs, distrust and hopelessness. Haven Acres was so dangerous that armed cops were afraid to enter the neighborhood unless they had backup.

But last month I walked at dusk through a miraculously transformed Haven Acres. Crime rates have fallen by 86%, and the drug dealers and for-sale signs are gone. Larry Otis, the white Republican mayor of Tupelo, understandably brags about this grass-roots accomplishment as the proudest success of the city during his tenure.

At the heart of this change is the community center that houses a booming Boys and Girls Club, created to give the kids of Haven Acres a positive alternative to gang life.

Ron Green, who grew up in Haven Acres and now runs the Boys and Girls Clubs of northern Mississippi, says the mentors at the Haven Acres club served 260 kids each day this summer, saving them from drugs, crime and maybe even death as they learned self-esteem and civic virtue.

Youths whom he would not have trusted with the keys to his office six months ago now stay there late to clean up, proud of the community they are creating.

And then Green's face falls. More than half of the mentors at Haven Acres were supported by the AmeriCorps program, which offers young people a modest living allowance and a promise of help toward college expenses in return for a year of full-time community service.

Cutbacks in AmeriCorps have forced him to fire all those mentors and slash his services to Haven Acres children.

Haven Acres is not alone. Federal politicking has forced AmeriCorps to renege on its commitments to community service programs across the country. In the three-state Mississippi Delta, the nation's poorest region, AmeriCorps' support for programs has been chopped by 90%. And thousands of other programs from coast to coast have been similarly cut.

Like Green, the harried leaders of those programs have been forced to eliminate positions for volunteers—nationally, 20,000 such AmeriCorps slots have been cut, nearly half the total planned for this year.

During the closing decades of the 20th century, as I wrote three years ago in "Bowling Alone," Americans became steadily less connected with one another and with collective life. We voted less, joined less, gave less, trusted less, invested less time in public affairs and disengaged from friends and neighbors and even from our own families. Our "we" steadily shriveled.

In this context, the attacks of 9/11 represented not just a national tragedy but also an extraordinary opportunity for civic renewal. After these decades of disengagement from our communities, Americans surprised themselves in their post-9/11 solidarity.

Many people recognized that this was a "teachable moment." If we caught that moment to build the foundation for a new culture of service and civic engagement, we could create a new "greatest generation." President Bush articulated this national yearning in his 2002 State of the Union address.

The president proposed a substantial expansion of the federal government's support for national and community service through AmeriCorps.

The program was already a proven success at helping young people from all walks of life—not just the wealthy who can afford full-time volunteering—invest a year of their lives in community service. Now it would be expanded to 75,000 posts a year.

Bush's call to action caught the imagination of the nation's youth. Applications to AmeriCorps jumped, and organizations in thousands of communities worked to absorb and direct these new energies. But now Washington is betraying the hopes of these idealistic youngsters.

Despite support for AmeriCorps from 44 governors, 79 senators, 250 corporate leaders and the vast majority of the American public, right-wing ideologues in the House have blocked the funding needed to keep the program even close to the growth path that the president laid out nearly two years ago. The House and Senate appropriation committees recently proposed allocating $340 million to $345 million to AmeriCorps for next year, but this initiative does nothing to forestall the draconian cuts facing its programs this year.

The president has so far remained above the fray, seemingly reluctant to commit himself to defending his own promise. Discussing his call to service two days after the 2002 State of the Union address, Bush told volunteers in Daytona Beach: "I'm one of these accountability guys. I understand sometimes in political process all you hear are words. I like to back them up with action. It's one thing to lay it out; it's another thing to follow up. I'm a follow-up guy."

Mr. President, now's the time for you personally to follow up.

The nation's young people responded enthusiastically to your leadership two years ago, and now's the time to make good on your commitments to them. Now's the time for you to persuade the House to act.

This is indeed a "teachable moment," and American youth—in Haven Acres and across the country—are listening. What civics lesson will you teach?

President Bush used three main arguments to justify sending American troops into Iraq. The first tied Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, but the evidence that was presented publicly remained thin. Public opinion polls show that many Americans accepted the administration's word on the connection, but overseas responses were more skeptical.

The second argument was that replacing Saddam Hussein with a democratic regime was a way to transform the politics of the Middle East.

A number of neo-conservative members of the administration had urged this before taking office but were unable to turn it into policy during the first eight months of the administration.

After Sept. 11, however, they quickly moved through the window of opportunity (even though North Korea posed a more imminent danger). President Bush spoke often of regime change.

The plausibility of this argument was debated at home and abroad, and the merits probably lie somewhere between the proponents and skeptics.

Our dedication to the broad values of democracy and human rights is part of our ''soft'' or attractive power and an essential part of our foreign policy.

But democracy is a fragile plant that requires carefully cultivated soil. It is not easily transplanted. Of the places where the United States has sent troops in the last half-century, only a minority of the interventions resulted in democratic governments.

Optimists cite the role of American military occupation in the democratization of Germany and Japan after World War II.

But conditions in the Middle East today are not like Germany and Japan in 1945. Both of those countries had large middle classes, prior experience with democracy, and a prolonged and largely unopposed American military presence.

Given its history and internal divisions, postwar Iraq is unlikely to look like democracy as we know it, but it will be a better and more pluralistic regime than now exists.

American military success may lead Iran and Syria to temper their policies, but if President Bush is unable to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to reach a compromise acceptable to the Palestinians, the map of the region may change less dramatically than the optimists hope.

The third argument was the clearest and most widely accepted. It focused on preventing Saddam Hussein from possessing weapons of mass destruction.

Most countries agreed that Saddam had defied UN Security Council resolutions for a dozen years.

Moreover, Resolution 1441 unanimously put the burden of proof on him to demonstrate what had happened to weapons that UN inspectors had been concerned about before they left Iraq in 1998.

If President Bush had focused on this third argument and been willing to work out a compromise along the lines suggested by Canada, he could have built a far broader coalition for the war (Canada, and later Britain, suggested an agreement to give the UN inspectors more time in return for clear benchmarks and a date certain to declare the end of the process.)

I believe France might have gone along, but even if it had used its veto, American actions would have been legitimized by a majority in the Security Council similar to that we enjoyed when we intervened in Kosovo in 1999.

Unfortunately, the administration sent mixed messages. The more the unilateralists in the administration talked about regime change and going ahead no matter what the UN did, the more other countries became convinced we were not serious about cooperation, and the more the issue became the legitimacy of American power rather than the transgressions of Saddam Hussein.

The result is the right war at the wrong time, but the point is now moot.

Those of us who are critical of the clumsy handling and timing of the war must admit that indefinite containment was unlikely to succeed.

Saddam Hussein had a record of taking high risks, a clear intention to develop weapons of mass destruction, and a proven willingness to use them.

Enforcing Security Council Resolutions 687 and 1441 is better than returning to the evasive politics of the 1990s when Saddam Hussein successfully defied a divided United Nations.

We multilateralists must now hope that the war is brief, that the Iraqi people will visibly welcome the removal of a tyrant, and that the reconstruction of Iraq will involve many countries and a United Nations role.

Perhaps that will allow us to recover some of the legitimacy after the fact that the administration squandered before the war.

2001

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The America of six decades ago now seems achingly familiar. The attack on Pearl Harbor, like the attacks of Sept. 11, evoked feelings of pride and citizenship - as well as anxiety and helplessness - in every American. In the days and weeks following Dec. 7, 1941, Americans sought meaning and comfort in their communities, just as we do now. And we can find inspiration in the very institutions and practices they created 60 years ago.

A durable community cannot be built on mere images of disaster, however vivid or memorable. It arises from countless individual acts of concern and solidarity. Television images of ash-covered firefighters cannot create community bonds any more than radio reports of burning battleships could.

What created the civic community in the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor? The victory gardens in nearly everyone's backyard, the Boy Scouts at filling stations collecting floor mats for scrap rubber, the affordable war bonds, the practice of giving rides to hitchhiking soldiers and war workers - all these taught "the greatest generation" an enduring lesson in civic involvement.

Their involvement was as varied as it was deep. The Civilian Defense Corps grew to 12 million Americans in mid-1943, from 1.2 million in 1942. In Chicago, 16,000 block captains in the corps took an oath of allegiance in a mass ceremony; they practiced first aid, supervised blackouts and planned gas decontamination. Nationwide, Red Cross volunteers swelled to 7.5 million in 1945, from 1.1 million in 1940. By 1943, volunteers at 4,300 civilian-defense volunteer offices were fixing school lunches, providing day care and organizing scrap drives.

All these endeavors represented cooperation between the federal government and civic society. Sometimes the government merely offered encouragement and approval, as it did with the victory gardens. Often it played an active role, or even the prime role. The United States financed the war effort in part through small-denomination war bonds sold to the general public, not because it was economically efficient - Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau conceded it wasn't - but because of the importance of weaving the actions of millions of Americans together in pursuit of larger national goals.

America's young people, especially, were taught practical civic lessons. Over a two-year period, the historian Richard Lingeman writes in his book "Don't You Know There's a War On?" eighth graders in Gary, Ind., were especially busy. They sold an average of $40,000 worth of war stamps a month. They campaigned against buying black-market goods. They took auxiliary fire- and police-training courses. They held tin-can drives. And this was just in one medium-sized Midwestern city.

Such sacrifice was reinforced by popular culture from radio shows to comic strips. All Americans felt they had to do their share, thereby enhancing each American's sense that her commitment and contribution mattered. As one said later in an oral history of the home front: "You just felt that the stranger sitting next to you in a restaurant, or someplace, felt the same way you did about the basic issues."

Society is different now, of course, as is the war we are fighting. Americans have become more transient, and involvement in civic institutions is in decline. The war itself involves far fewer Americans in battle; it creates few material hardships; the enemy is largely invisible. Nonetheless, we can take action to ensure that this resurgence of community involvement continues.

Since Sept. 11, we Americans have surprised ourselves in our solidarity. Roughly a quarter of all Americans, and more than a third of all New Yorkers, report giving blood in the aftermath of the attacks. Financial donations for the victims and their rescuers have reached almost $1 billion. Attendance at places of worship has increased.

Still, underneath all this mutual concern lies an unsettling question: Will this new mood last?

I believe it can. Even 60 years ago, civic involvement took hold and flourished only with government support. It was not all spontaneous. This is both instructive and reassuring; instructive because it shows that the most selfless civic duties cannot be performed without government help, reassuring because it shows us a path toward a more civil society today.

President Bush's recent call to America's children and teenagers to wash cars or rake yards to earn money to benefit the children of Afghanistan was well-intentioned. But government can do more. It should urge America's religious congregations to plan interfaith services over Thanksgiving weekend. It should also expand national service programs like AmeriCorps. And just as those Boy Scouts at filling stations learned firsthand the value of civic life, this new period of crisis can make real to us and our children the value of deeper community connections.

1999

Failure to cooperate for mutual benefit does not necessarily signal ignorance or irrationality or even malevolence, as philosophers since Hobbes have underscored. Social scientists have lately analyzed this fundamental predicament in a variety of guises: the tragedy of the commons; the logic of collective action; public goods; the prisoners' dilemma. In all these situations everyone would be better off if everyone could cooperate. In the absence of coordination and credible mutual commitment, however, everyone defects, ruefully but rationally, confirming one another's melancholy expectations.