Pooh-poohing the grand poohba: progressive social change ended when liberals gave up on the Moose Lodge.

• Author: Silverstein, Gordon
• Position: Book Review: DIMINISHED DEMOCRACY: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life - Book Review

DIMINISHED DEMOCRACY: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life by Theda Skocpol University of Oklahoma Press, $29.95

BEFORE THE UNITED STATES CAN hope to export a vibrant democratic system to Iraq, it might pay to pause and try to figure out just what it is that brings about vibrant democratic systems in the first place--and what it takes to keep them going. Our own democracy, after all, seems to have lost a good deal of its vibrancy of late. Relatively few of us vote and fewer still run for office, while public policy increasingly is a professional endeavor engaged in not by citizen-voters but by paid advocates, lawyers, and lobbyists.

For years, academics have tried to understand how America turned from a nation of joiners, doers, and citizens into a nation of passive contributors whose interaction with public affairs is largely limited to responding to direct mail and cheering (or howling) at cable-TV programs. And Robert Putnam's influential 2000 book Bowling Alone has largely framed this debate. Arguing that we have become a nation of isolated individuals who have lost the personal interaction and social cooperation that builds the trust that ultimately creates community, Putnam called for a kind of civic renaissance--one launched from the individual level, one citizen-volunteer at a time. Putnam's ideas were extraordinarily influential, uniting social critics on both the left and right, from William Galston and Michael Sandel to William Schambra and George F. Will.

But Theda Skocpol, Putnam's Harvard colleague, rejects this approach. In Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, Skocpol persuasively argues that a vibrant democratic system requires institutions, leadership, networks, and national organization. In contrast to Putnam's model--which hinges on the claim that individual trust and interaction built from the bottom up uniquely generates the social capital that builds community--Skocpol emphasizes the importance of mass-membership groups that were built from the top down in a highly organized, complex federal network with national headquarters, regional offices, state units and then, finally, local lodges or clubs. They were consciously and carefully constructed by extraordinarily dedicated and creative national-policy entrepreneurs who created pathways to national power and influence for themselves and their members. These were what turned a nation of joiners into a nation of...