re: #190 CuriousLurker

I don’t see anything on that page that proves or even attempts to explain a correlation between Americans’ impulse to move away from group membership and towards increased partisanship.

As a matter of fact, now that I think of it:

less willingness to join groups = increased tribalism

Seems highly unlikely logically speaking, but I’m not a social scientist, so what do I know? The entire 2004 report can be downloaded as a PDF from here, but… meh, I’m not really interested in spending a portion of my Sunday on that.

He explains that in his article….
tomnichols.net

In 1995, Putnam wrote a seminal article (later a 2000 book called Bowling Alone) in which he noted that the social fabric of America was sustained by a nation of “joiners” who interacted with each other in social organizations like bowling leagues, the Elks, the American Legion, and other voluntary “horizontal” associations that spread across social groups. Putnam raised the alarm that we were no longer that kind of nation, increasingly retreating into our own homes rather than interact with each other.

I think that explains a lot. If you live on your own little island, surrounded by an electronic (or real) moat, you have less social interaction, and certainly less with people whom you don’t like or with whom you disagree. I can remember my parents being members of a lot of organizations, and while they were (like our little town) mostly white, they were full of Republicans and Democrats who argued with each other — oh, boy, did they argue — while sitting around the picnic tables. People just don’t join those groups anymore, and those arguments are now conducted among ill-tempered strangers from behind the anonymity of keyboards.