Documentary Review. Join or Die
America’s crumbling civic soul gets a hard look in Join or Die, a documentary riffing on Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000). It’s a 100-minute dirge for the death of social capital, that invisible glue of community that once held this nation together.
But for all its otherwise-excellent hand-wringing, the film misses the real villain, and it’s not just folks choosing Netflix over the lodge hall (though that’s part of it).
It’s the long, meddling arm of the State. Accounting for the disappearance of community without mentioning Washington, DC is like trying to account for all the undead without mentioning Dracula.
The great sociologist, Robert Nisbet, explained in the early 1950s that government and social capital stand athwart one another like Leonidas and Xerxes. When the reach of government swells, communities shrink.
The federal government, with its distant alphabet-soup agencies and top-down fixes, particularly sucks the air out of local problem-solving.
Why form a volunteer fire brigade when Uncle Sam’s got a grant for that? Why lean on your neighbors when a bureaucrat’s check is in the mail? Nisbet knew that communities—those voluntary, messy, face-to-face gangs of doers—thrive only when they’re needed. Carry a man’s load for 75 years, sure, but don’t be shocked when his legs forget how to work. There’s a reason Russia didn’t have a shred of social fabric left by the time the USSR collapsed, and it ain’t because everyone was streaming Squid Game.
Nearly 50 years after Nisbet issued his warnings, after decades of explosive growth in the federal government’s reach (Ike’s expressways through LBJ’s (not so) Great Society to Obamacare) and a corresponding collapse in community involvement, Harvard’s Robert Putnam used an army of students, statistics, and spreadsheets to prove that the collapse was real.
Putnam’s work is invaluable but it smacks of the lecherous husband who figures out after 50 years, and after he’s spread a lot of pain (and gonorrhea), that he should’ve just been loyal to his wife all along. We shouldn’t have needed someone like Putnam to prove what someone like Nisbet warned about before it happened.
Join or Die’s filmmaker, Pete Davis, is a well-meaning sort. His Lost Prophets podcast is a gem, skewering the cult of “bigness”—big tech, big biz, big everything—yet I’ve never heard the podcast finger the biggest culprit: big government. It’s a blind spot wide enough to park the federal budget in.
This documentary’s the same. It’s a love letter to bowling leagues and Rotary clubs, but it’s spiked with a dash of left-hemisphere poison: the impulse that worships efficiency and results, and dismisses the traditional and unquantifiable. Iain McGilchrist could’ve told Davis why social capital’s gone to seed: the left hemisphere can’t grasp the fuzzy math of community. The left hemisphere wants programs, not potlucks . . . national initiatives, not town halls.
Instead of Nisbet’s pepper or McGilchrist’s salt, Join or Die serves up Beltway darlings like Hillary Clinton and Pete Buttigieg in a sustained paean to that damnable slogan, “Think globally, act locally,” ‘cept here, it’s “Think nationally, act locally.”
At its core, the film is ironically a betrayal of the local and a perversion of the small. Why join the Elks? Not for the joy of a shared beer or a handshake, but because it might nudge the needle in the 2028 election. Why cherish your town? Because it’s a cog in the national machine. It’s like telling a man to cherish his wife so other women will see what a great guy he is and have sex with him. It’s T.S. Eliot’s greatest treason: doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
Davis is so close to the truth, you want to grab him by the lapels and shake him. He’s knocking on the door of real, rooted, tactile life—Main Street, not K Street—but he can’t help dragging it all back to the abstract swamp of national politics. It’s like a drunk going to church because he heard they’re serving hooch at communion.
Redemption so close, goes the cliché, yet so far.
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Eric Scheske
