American mass associations collapsed across the board in the 1980s-1990s

Evidence

Putnam’s argument opened with its titular observation. More and more Americans took up bowling toward the end of the twentieth century, but they increasingly undertook this activity alone. The sharp decline of bowling leagues was the clearest symptom. Where once these had involved regular evenings and tightly knit groups with their own rituals and rules, leagues were now shutting down. The drop-off was by no means limited to alley leaderboards. Churches, trade unions, shooting clubs, and Masonic lodges all saw membership contract dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s. When the remaining members left or died, these associations began to disband. They left behind a wasteland of sociability, visible in the dilapidated case del popolo in Italian city centers and abandoned workingmen’s clubs on the Liverpool docks. Previously, proletarians could play cards, watch a movie, or listen to a lecture in these establishments; now, these “third places”—designed neither for work nor for consumption, as Putnam would have it—lay vacant. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 93

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Civic organizations across America faded dramatically in the late twentieth century. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 22; Americans widely perceived community bonds weakening by the 1990s. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 59