Join a club, it’s good for democracy
For our Econ Extra Credit segment this month, we’re exploring the documentary, “Join or Die: A Film About Why You Should Join a Club.”
The film chronicles what it calls the “unraveling” of the country’s social fabric and seeks to answer the question: “What makes a democracy work and what can I do to help?”
So what does joining a club have to do with American democracy? “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio spoke with the film’s co-producers and siblings Rebecca and Pete Davis for more. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: Let me start with a public admission: I’m not a cry-ee guy, but I did tear up a few times watching this doc about public policy that the two of you made. Did you realize you’re gonna make a two handkerchief weepy here?
Rebecca Davis: I think we’d be lying if we weren’t saying we’re hoping for some tears. But you know, I think not just for, you know, reasons of wanting to elicit emotions from the big screen, but because we really wanted to get at how deep this issue is in all of our lives. And I think we knew, if we were successful at that, there hopefully would be some strong emotions as people kind of reflected on the importance of community and connectedness.
Brancaccio: Well, Pete, right, we’re yearning for something that’s missing. We really are and after pandemic, all the more so. I think that’s one of the reasons that I found it so moving, thinking about a way forward from this isolation so many people feel.
Pete Davis: Yeah, you know, this is a movie that’s about really big questions, like the fate of our democracy. You know, the tagline of our film is, “This is a film about why you should join a club and why the fate of our democracy depends on it,” but it’s also a really personal story in all of us. Our favorite type of feedback that we get about the film is not that I learned something from the film — though we’re happy people can learn some social science facts from the film — it’s that someone comes up to us and they say, “Well, it made me think about my own town,” or “It made me think about my own club life, and the wheel started turning in my mind about how I can be more involved.” And that’s our real hope. We wanted this film to be in the second person. It’s about you, the viewer, and what you’re gonna do after the credits roll.
Brancaccio: Right at this juncture, I should explain. I mean, the “join” is clear — get out, off your duff, from your couch and do something through an organization of any sort where different people kind of come together. But what’s the “or die” proposition here?
Rebecca Davis: Yeah, I mean, on its surface level, it’s a reference to the famous Ben Franklin political cartoon that came out in kind of the early days of our democracy, as we’re kind of just getting off the ground. It’s the snake kind of cut in pieces as the colonies are kind of struggling to unite and come together. We grasped on that both for its historic reference, but to us, it kind of functions in two ways. You know one, joining is good for our democracy — that the work of Robert Putnam, the protagonist of our film, kind of proves out in his research. And then it’s also important on a health level, you know, and we have people like the surgeon general coming on to speak to the health implications of our loneliness and isolation crisis that we’re living through right now. Some people have said that, you know, the title rubs them the wrong way, it’s a little provocative, but we really do feel the stakes are that high right now — both for our personal health and for our democracy.
Brancaccio: What kind of club works?
Pete Davis: Well, one of the wonderful things about Putnam’s research is that any type of social interaction, even what is apparently on the surface a goofy type of social interaction, like a bowling league or a pickleball game, is doing really serious work. So when we use the term club in this film, we’re using it kind of as a shtick to run the gamut of all types of ways that people come together. So it can be just around hobbies and things you love, like bowling, pickleball, you know, pottery, all the way to religious congregations, to labor unions, to activist groups coming together, to neighborhood associations. And what Putnam has shown through his research is that in all of those settings, even the ones that are not explicitly about politics or good government, social capital, bonds of trust and relationship is being built up, and that can be converted into a bunch of good things: better public health, more economic growth, more economic equality, better functioning government institutions and overall satisfaction among people about how things are going. And so we mean club in the broadest sense of the term.
Brancaccio: This is very exciting when my better self is interacting with this, but there’s another piece of me that gets a little nervous. Sometimes human beings are unpleasant to be around, and I sometimes worry that we’ve lost our skills that allow us to work together in the presence of each other. You know, some of these PTA meetings. I mean, in PTA as a club, it should help. But, you know, some of those descend into fisticuffs.
Rebecca Davis: Absolutely. I mean, I think one of our famous lines in the film, which, you know, was on the chopping block for a little bit, but we ended up keeping it in, is the great labor organizer Jane McAlevey, who says “democracy is a pain in the ass.” And you know, we wanted to acknowledge that head on. It’s hard going to meetings, it’s hard working across difference, and, you know, it is a skill that we have to practice and work at so when we have those hard nights, you know, we know how to get through them. And I think the increasing, you know, videos we’re all seeing in our social media and in the news of things going to blows very quickly, I think, is a symptom of the fact that we’ve got to be working those muscles a lot more so that we know how to work together.
Pete Davis: One of the things we tried to get across in the film is that civic life and democracy and community is both a skill and a craft. It’s a skill in that individuals need to learn the art of being in community together, how to give a speech, how to run a meeting, what food brings people to your meeting, how to recruit people, how to deal with difference inside of your group. It’s also a craft, which is that the way that we design our clubs can do better or worse at what we’re trying to achieve. You can run a bad meeting, you can have an unpleasant location, or you can run a good meeting, or build a cool clubhouse. And we have to develop, as a people, both our skills individually and our craft collectively in civic life.
Brancaccio: Yeah. Now, Pete, back in the day, you know, when dinosaurs ruled the earth back then, you were one of Professor Putnam’s students, and what you were sitting there those years ago and thought, this is a story that needs to be told?
Pete Davis: Yeah, you know, I was a young politico. I was, like, obsessed with presidential elections. I came into school, I majored in political science, and what I thought politics was about before I took professor Putnam’s class was about things going on in Washington. You know, it was about the Supreme Court and Congress and presidential elections. And what Bob’s class was this before-and-after moment where he said, “Actually, the center of gravity of American democracy and politics is actually not in Washington. It’s in your own neighborhood. It’s in the ordinary neighborhood bonds that we build up and the ordinary civic associations that we grow, and they are all upstream from the quality of what’s going on in Washington.” And that was like a night-and-day light bulb moment for me. And one of our goals for this film is to have more people be able to have that light bulb moment if they didn’t get to take Bob’s class. And so we tried to kind of put the spirit of his class on the screen in this film.
Brancaccio: The film has, if I remember right, a cold open. Boom, you’re meeting a fellow who looks like he could take care of himself if things got ugly at the local tavern. I think it was Tommy. Is that who
it is?
Rebecca Davis: Yep, Tommy Wright of Waxahachie 80 — The Odd Fellows Lodge down in Waxahachie, Texas.
Brancaccio: And he’s seen some things in his life, and he himself seems to be yearning for something. Tell us a little bit about his story.
Rebecca Davis: Yeah, I think, you know, finding the groups even that we were going to follow for this film was kind of a big challenge, because how do you wrap your arms around the concept as big as community in America? And we feature six community groups, and we happened upon just a small article about this Odd Fellows Lodge that was bucking trends in that, you know, many of the Odd Fellows and Lions Clubs and these kind of older federated societies are losing membership, but they were actually, you know, moving counter to that, getting a lot of younger folks to join. And so that kind of drew us to that club, because we want to see, you know, what’s going on down there and Waxahachie, you know.
And then when I flew down there to meet with Tommy, even before we were gonna film with him, and saw this kind of beautiful old clubhouse that was over 100 years old, where they had kind of photos on the walls from decades and decades of members. And it felt like Tommy was, you know, opening a door and bringing us back in time, to a way that we used to organize our lives differently, organize them around our associational life, and not just around kind of our home and nuclear family as they’re increasingly organized in that way. And I think we knew, even as we were filming him that, you know, this was kind of going to be a special part of the film, and potentially open it up. Because, you know, and then what we hope in that hour and a half that follows is that we’re kind of transporting people into another world of existence.
Brancaccio: Because Tommy joins the local Odd Fellows Lodge. I’m from the state of Maine, and we had Odd Fellows lodges there. And he gets a lot of energy from it, in the end, doesn’t he?
Pete Davis: Yeah, in many ways, he was a stand in for how we’re all feeling in America today. Right in that opening few minutes of the movie, he says, you know, his brother had passed away before he joined the lodge, and he was feeling like a loss of brotherhood in his life. And so many people in America today are feeling so lonely, especially after the pandemic, where we’re feeling so isolated and lonely; there’s a real sense of grief in the country right now. I think there’s a lot of people that are throwing false silver bullet antidotes at that that are not actually going to lead us to where we need to go in response to that grief. And one of the messages of this film is actually the response may be this really deep and simple one that was right in front of us the whole time, which is joining together with each other. And so that’s what Tommy did by joining the Odd Fellows. It totally transformed his life and so many of his brothers at the Odd Fellows. And it’s the whole message of the film that your life can be transformed too by joining up with others locally.
Brancaccio: Now it’s convenient to watch this as of now. Netflix has just started streaming it, but if you like it and you’d like to actually connect with other people around this film, there’s an additional venue after you watch it on Netflix. You’ve already been doing this for quite some time with the film. How does it work?
Rebecca Davis: Yeah, so we are running a community tour of the film. We’ve done probably about 250 community screenings so far this year, most of those for groups of 25 people or less. So we’re showing the film in, you know, church basements and backyard screenings, and you know, all the way up to larger conference centers. We will be running that tour well into next year. So if you go to joinordiefilm.com, there’s a button right there that says “host a screening,” where you can get in touch with us to host a community screening. And that remains our preference, even though it’s, you know, easily accessible and you can now watch it at home. We hope, if you watch it and like it, that you’ll want to, you know, reach out to your club, reach out to your 10 neighbors and get in touch with us about hosting a community screening.
Pete Davis: The big question we want everyone asking is, “What are you doing alone that you could be doing together?” And there’s all different aspects, you know, are you entertaining yourself alone? You could be entertaining together. Are you staying healthy alone? You could stay healthy together by joining an exercise group. Are you celebrating alone? You could celebrate together. So that’s one of the big questions we’re trying to ask with this.
You can watch the film “Join or Die” on Netflix starting Friday. Or you can arrange to see it in person as a group and host a community film screening.
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