Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, published in 2000, documented what many Americans had been experiencing without a vocabulary for it: the systematic decline of civic associational life across the second half of the twentieth century. Membership in voluntary associations — the PTAs, the civic clubs, the labor unions, the fraternal orders, the veterans' organizations, the neighborhood associations, the service clubs — had peaked in the postwar period and declined steadily through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. By the time Putnam completed his analysis, most of the major civic organizations that had formed the backbone of American associational life had lost between a third and two-thirds of their membership over the preceding generation.
The friendship consequences of this decline have not always been at the center of the analysis — Putnam's primary argument was about social capital and civic engagement — but they are fundamental. Civic associations were friendship machines in the same sense that congregations were: they gathered people on a regular schedule, around a shared purpose, with a set of mutual obligations, in a context where repeated contact produced the ambient familiarity that is the substrate for friendship. The member of the Rotary Club, the Knights of Columbus, the local AFL-CIO chapter, or the PTA was embedded in a web of regular contact with fellow members that was automatically renewed every week or month without requiring individual initiative. The friendship did not always become close, but the ground in which close friendship could grow was reliably maintained.
The decline of these associations has removed this infrastructure from the lives of tens of millions of Americans — particularly working-class and middle-class adults who lacked access to the professional networks that partially substitute for civic association among the college-educated. The consequences are visible in the social isolation data: people who are not members of any civic organization report significantly lower rates of close friendship, social support, and sense of community belonging than those who are. The causal direction is complex — people with weaker social orientations may both join associations less and form fewer close friendships — but the organizational ecology matters independently of individual disposition.
What has replaced civic associations is not nothing, but it is weaker. The checkbook organization — where membership consists of an annual donation and no active participation — captures some civic identity but none of the social function. Online advocacy communities capture some of the engagement but none of the repeated physical co-presence. The professional network captures some of the contact but none of the cross-class mixing. The decline of civic association has not been offset. It has produced a social infrastructure gap that is partly responsible for the friendship poverty and community disconnection of contemporary American life.