A Q&A with Rebecca Davis, one of the directors of the now-showing documentary “Join or Die”
Growing up in a small rural town in Illinois in the 1980s, I accepted civic engagement as a normal way of life. Except I wouldn’t have called it “civic engagement” then. I would have just called it … life in Taylorville. My parents ran the family business on the town square and spent their spare time with their poker or bridge groups, or playing golf and tennis with their regulars crews. They served on the local school board and the boards of various nonprofit or charitable organizations. They went out with friends or hosted them at our house every Saturday night. They voted in every single election, though they refused to tell me who they voted for because, in my dad’s words, “Living in America means I don’t have to tell anyone, including you, who I voted for.”
Maybe this is why I have a bit of a cornball, civic-minded streak in me. It was simply ingrained. I loved writing and can only remember ever wanting to be a writer, but I narrowed that to “journalist” specifically because I had high-minded ideals that journalism was an essential part of a functioning democracy, sunshine being the best disinfectant. And when I decided that I wanted a more active seat at that constitutional table other than writing about it, it was natural to go to law school. Even after I became disillusioned with legal practice as a young lawyer and changed careers, I still believed in this thing.
Well, that was then, as they say. The last eight years have tested us all, even the most civically aspirational (maybe especially the most civically aspirational). Hillary Clinton’s heartbreaking loss, the tyrannical Trump years, the pandemic and public distrust of science, the stay of execution with the Biden years all while knowing we’d only bought ourselves a bit of time, Dobbs, the Supreme Court in general – these are just the lowlights.
But last week three things happened that have me feeling my civic oats in a newly optimistic way.
First, I went to see “Suffs” on Broadway with my mom. As a default, musicals are not my jam, and certainly this one glossed over some of the more problematic parts of the fight for women’s suffrage. But I can’t lie, I freaking loved this show. And it reminded me, through my literal tears, that progress is possible, even if it’s not guaranteed.
Second, I went to a screening of “Join or Die,” a new documentary from sister and brother directors Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis, featuring Harvard professor and social scientist Robert Putnam and building on his now classic 2000 book “Bowling Alone,” which posited that declining civic engagement was a danger to our democracy. With mounds of convincing research, Putnam argues that by joining groups and engaging with our community, we build social capital, which engenders trust and reciprocity with our fellow humans, both of which are necessary ingredients for a healthy democracy. “Join or Die” revisits Putnam and his work and makes a powerful, optimistic case for, well, joining a club. I left the screening feeling invigorated and excited, feeling like while I couldn’t fix the Supreme Court, I could at least take some kind of action by doing what my parents did when I was growing up, but 21st-century and Brooklyn style.
Third, KAMALA. This post isn’t about Kamala, but I have been surfing a tidal wave of adrenaline and outright hope (what a strange feeling!) since Sunday afternoon. I’m loathe to let that feeling fade. ALL IN.
But back to “Join or Die.” I was so taken with the documentary that I reached out to Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis and asked them if they’d be up for a Q&A for We’re A Lot. And they said yes! Below is the transcript (edited for clarity and space) of my conversation with Rebecca (Pete was busy with parenting and unable to join us). I’m so grateful she made time for this discussion.
Enjoy!
So, I saw “Join Or Die” this past weekend, and it was really galvanizing. Purely coincidentally, I had read “Bowling Alone” for the first time about a month ago. I'd been meaning to read it for a while and just finally got around to it. I found it to be, honestly, a little depressing because here we are almost 25 years later and it feels like we’re worse off. But when I saw “Join or Die,” it felt hopeful and inspiring, a call to action. The premise is that joining a club or a group can help save our democracy. Is that right? And can you tell me why, exactly, joining a group will help save democracy?
Sure. Yeah, I realize it's a bold statement. But that is what we try to prove out in the film through Bob's [Robert Putnam’s] data, that there is a very strong connection between civic life and civic participation on the local level and the strength of our democracy. Interestingly, in the film, we were able to go into some of Bob's earlier work that a lot of people in America might not be familiar with. He's most known in the US for “Bowling Alone.” But prior to “Bowling Alone,” he spent years studying democracy and what makes democracies function in Italy. He did a 20-year experiment that became the book “Making Democracy Work” at a moment when Italy was going from a centralized government in Rome and giving power to regional governments. So he had this perfect science experiment to be able to watch them all from day one and see which were successful and which struggled. Somewhat to Bob's surprise – because he went out with some theories about what might make them function well, such as economics or education levels of the population – he ended up finding that it was the areas that had strong civic life, things like choral societies and soccer clubs. Then also other measures of civic participation, like newspaper readership and rates that citizens trusted the government and trusted each other.
And so that influenced his alarm when he started researching the Bowling Alone phenomenon in the US, that we were not participating as much as we used to in all these groups and that this isn't going to be good for our democracy if we're not participating enough in our bowling leagues and our garden clubs. As you mentioned, we are now almost 25 years out from “Bowling Alone,” and those trends, many of them have not turned around. That was why we wanted to revisit this work in a film.
I have an 11-year-old son, and he's really into board games. I've been kind of flirting with the idea of trying to start a neighborhood family board game club.
I love it.
How is that going to save democracy? How is a family board game club going to save democracy?
That is a great example because I think sometimes you'll think the bar can be really high. You know, it is not always easy working with our neighbors, but it can be as easy as saying, “what am I doing alone right now that I could be doing together?” And this board game club sounds like a great example of that. Bob's whole theory of what's going on in our leagues and our potential board game club is the building of his idea of this concept of social capital. The places in our community that are coming together are building trust, building reciprocity. When that happens all over the place on the small scale, that builds up towards a better functioning democracy because then we're practicing democracy in our everyday life, not just every four years that we go to the ballot box to vote. We're practicing it every day in our local organizations, things like how to get people together and run a meeting, how to figure out our differences when we disagree about how the meeting or the club should be run. How to organize people together. When we learn those skills on the small scale organizing a board game club, when something comes up on your street that you don't like – maybe the design of the street is unsafe for children to cross and you want to put in a longer stoplight – suddenly now you have 10 neighbors that you're ready to activate to do something about that, a lot faster than when you're an individual who doesn't know any of your neighbors. You have people ready to activate, and in that strength is our power.
I saw “Join or Die” on Saturday. The next day Joe Biden announced he was giving up his re-election bid and endorsing Kamala Harris. And literally within minutes, my networks were buzzing and jumping to life and ready to take action. So I can see that very clear connection between clubs and groups and democracy. But “saving democracy” isn't necessarily the best sell to get someone to join, say, a book club. What other benefits are there to joining a club? And why should people join clubs, besides saving our republic?
One reason Pete and I liked the title [“Join or Die”] is that it has actually two meanings. Joining is good for our democracy, but it's also good for our health. So if you aren't going to join something for this grandiose reason, there are real individual impacts for you. Bob has this quote in the film that your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group. We're also lucky enough to interview the Surgeon General [Vivek Murthy] who's made isolation and loneliness a hallmark of his time in office, trying to raise those to the level of the campaigns we’ve had around quitting cigarettes. The research shows that not having strong connections with friends and with community is as big of a risk factor to our health, and sometimes a greater risk, as things like smoking, obesity, and other kinds of medical conditions. So, it's also just good for you on the personal level to join. It’s just fun. We need more fun in our life, especially coming out of these hard years of isolation for many of us during the pandemic. Having those moments of levity and joy in our community is what makes our life rich.
For club leaders, we tell them don't just make those meetings boring and sticking to a strict agenda. Make sure there's food, make sure there's chances for people to have a party, dress up in costumes. We tried to bring to life some of the fun of civic organizing, even as some groups were fighting for various very serious things.
We've seen a lot lately about this epidemic of loneliness, especially for men. In the film, you featured a diverse group of clubs and people, including men. But when I look at my own life, I see mostly, but certainly not exclusively, women doing the work of starting, joining, and organizing groups, on top of everything else they're already doing. And at the screening I went to, the audience seemed to be more women than men. I'm curious if you've noticed this as well, why you think this might be, and how we can get more men to be joiners.
We unfortunately don't have [audience] data, so any observations on audience would be anecdotal. What we do have data on is men reporting much lower numbers than women in terms of friendship and confidants. It makes sense then that that would translate to it being harder work to get groups off the ground. We get our confidence from our circle around us. They're the people who nudge us when we're at a coffee shop and you say, I want to start this board game club and that friend gives you that push and says you should do that. When you're isolated, you don't have people to bounce those ideas off and encourage you.
I think we're seeing a resurgence, slowly, of groups that are looking toward giving men a group where they can come together. And certainly, we've seen groups that prey on young lonely men, pulling them into more extreme groups. It's going to be that much more important as we have these growing numbers of loneliness to make sure there are counter groups pulling in lonely men for positive benefits, to talk about emotions in a healthy way and to be an outlet for that outside of their partner.
When I think about joining or starting a club, the first thing I think about is my time, which I think for everyone is just spread so thin. I think modern parenting demands so much of us, especially from women and mothers. This might be kind of a tricky question, but I'm just wondering if the structures and systems of our society, like capitalism and patriarchy, are stacked against us in trying to become more civically engaged?
The short answer I would say to that is yes, they are. But I think that's a good place to start, questioning how are not just our systems but also the design of our lives stacked against us and where can we start to make all those small changes?
Pete and I were trying to make a film not about politics, but about political science.
We wanted everyone to have a framework to start from that makes social capital as big of a marker as economics in looking at community thriving. A lot of our towns have a chamber of commerce looking at how business is thriving in our town. Maybe we need to see more towns have a chamber of community that measures how we're doing on social capital and serves as a central hub bringing all the community groups in town together. We'd love to see more mayors implementing that.
On the statehouse level and eventually the national level, how do we make sure that thriving social capital is at the forefront of our policies. What would policies look like that prioritize social capital? Another example is potentially a four-day work week where the fifth day could be our community day. Instead of just two days on the weekend to rush through everything, maybe we have a third day where we encourage our neighbors, as a culture, to use that day for community life.
And any type of policy that makes care work easier – more affordable childcare, more family leave – is a step in the right direction.
You've mentioned “social capital” a few times. In “Bowling Alone,” Putnam writes “Bonding social capital constitutes a kind of sociological superglue, whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD-40.” Which are we as a society most in need of at the moment, bonding or bridging capital?
These two terms are things we tried to show in the film without telling them. One way we tried to show bonding social capital is with the Black bike club in Atlanta that brought together a Black community of cyclists for rides every weekend. Bonding social capital is with people that have a similar kind of shared experience to you because of their experience in the world, for example from their race or gender or economic class or age.
Bridging social capital would be across those differences. An example in the film of bridging social capital was the Chicago Gig alliance, which organized rideshare workers. Unions are a great example of bridging social capital because usually the only commonality in a workplace is that you work there.
Bob actually did a study on these two types of social capital, and what his study found is that people who have stronger bonding social capital tend to have more bridging social capital as well. There's something from feeling security in having a lot of bonding social capital, of being an active participant maybe in a church group or a women's club, that makes you feel more comfortable to go out and bridge with people unlike you. Whereas, people who reported lower numbers of bonding social capital also reported lower numbers of bridging examples, such as having friends of different races or genders or whatever it might be. Bob is careful to not say one is good and one is bad, but that we need both bridging and bonding social capital. The more we're bonding, the more likely we are to bridge. In the film, we weren't trying to specify a type of group, but trying to tell people to just start getting involved in anything. If the thing they get involved in is an example of bonding social capital, there will be good repercussions from that and more likelihood of getting out there and bridging later on.
I’m thinking about the practicalities of this. For example, I'm actually trying to organize a screening of “Join or Die” for a neighborhood community group I'm part of, and one of our challenges is trying to find a third space (or third place) to actually hold the screening. And if you think about that family board game club, New York City apartments are not exactly set up for multiple tables of Catan playing. What are some practical things you've seen in this attempt to create more third places?
Going back to what we were talking about with care work and parenting, another thing that can take a lift off care work while making more opportunities to build social capital is also just how we design our cities. If we had more safe spaces outside of our apartments, like a closed street outside your apartment where you knew there were no cars and the front street was just a shared patio by all the neighbors on the street, I think parents would be a lot more likely to let their kids run outside their front door. These design questions are huge. On our tour right now, people can see the film outside theaters, but they have to host a community screening to do so. We love that because it's forcing people to poke holes in, you know, is there a space to get people together. These are not easy things because it requires getting people together, and then in our market, pooling funds to potentially buy a third space, or pooling efforts to push our local governments to, for example, preserve our park spaces because those are places we can have an outdoor screening of a film in the summer. Or how do we make sure we require developers of a new apartment building to dedicate, you know, 5% of that to open space that can be used by anyone in the community to host a meeting.
How do we make sure that what few community spaces we do have are staying open to their fullest capacity? Another example is opening up our schools at night to the community for meeting rooms.
But I think that space is a huge part of this conversation, and we need to make sure those go hand in hand with our ability to build social capital.
Last question – what clubs do you belong to?
Over the course of making this film, I was organizing a union with my coworkers at NBC News, and they won that union actually after I had left to work on this film full time. That definitely inspired a lot of our thinking about community. Unions are a great example of practicing democracy in our workplaces.
We're there [at work] every day. For people that don't have unions, I think the workplace is a great area to be building more social capital and practicing democracy. I was also a member and continue to be a member of a professional organization called The Video Consortium. A lot of our professional organizations have sadly moved to just something that's on paper that we might just send money off to once a year. For people who are in a professional organization that's moved in that direction, I encourage them to see about ways they could be meeting up more in person. The Video Consortium was a great example of that for me. Before the pandemic, we would meet up once a month to share work in progress with other filmmakers, and, you know, just share solidarity and the difficulty of the artistic process. They were also a network I could reach out to. It was really important to us that the community groups in the film were filmed by local crews so that we weren't just parachuting in with the crew from New York City. So when we had to shoot in Texas, I was able to write to our message board and say, does anyone know crew in Texas that we can hire? And the Video Consortium was able to help me with that. I think they're also an example of how we use online tools in conjunction with in person. They have a very active Slack group, so when I need crew somewhere or when I need to sell gear, I can post that there. But then we're also always meeting up for these screenings and to celebrate people's work.
[Then we wrapped, and Rebecca kindly offered to help me figure out how we can make a community screening happen for my local neighborhood group. She’s the real deal.]
“Join or Die” is currently on tour, and you can also request to host a community screening.
Now go join a club – our democracy depends on it.
P.S. Doing an interview like this is new for We’re A Lot. I had a lot of fun doing it and stretching a different kind of newsletter muscle. Tell me in the comments if you’d like to see more Q&As like this.