When the political cartoon from which the film Join or Die draws its title was first printed by Benjamin Franklin, it was a call to unite American colonists in the dual purpose of self-protection and the bloody seizure of Indigenous land. It was 1754, the beginning of the French and Indian War, which Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes in her book An Indigenous People’s History of the United States as “mainly a British war against the Indigenous peoples, some of whom formed alliances with the French.” The cartoon is a potent but highly malleable visual symbol that was later adopted by those fighting the British during the American Revolutionary War and, decades on, by both sides of the American Civil War.
The apparent contradiction of a cartoon calling for unity being used by both sides gets at a key point in Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor’s 2024 book Solidarity. Early on, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor are careful to note that the idea they’re exploring is a two-sided coin: “reactionary or counter-solidarity emphasizes given identities (usually racial, religious, class-based, or national identities) and aims to benefit a small group by excluding those who are different, transformative solidarity aspires to create systems that benefit everyone.”
This book and the above documentary pair well, especially at this moment. Both explore critical aspects of what it means to come together at a time when ever more people are feeling deeply isolated and national politics have become fearsomely polarized.
Join or Die is exactly what its tagline promises: “a film about why you should join a club.” But, of course, it’s about much more than that. It’s part of a cresting wave of cultural production circling around the deeply intertwined issues of loneliness, isolation, shame, divisiveness, political intransigence, staggering inequality, mis/disinformation, and the expansion and emboldening of far-right groups motivated by baldly racist, sexist, heteronormative, and xenophobic ideals.
The “die” in the film’s title is not a metaphor. It is a literal invocation of statistics showing that people living in social isolation die earlier than those with stronger social bonds. The film’s pitch is straightforward: get out there and get involved in some kind of club or group. It’s the American way, they tell us using copious historical examples, and it may be the only thing that saves democracy, in addition to saving your life.
The film’s protagonists are two White men who come across as middle or upper class: an elder, bearded professor (Robert Putnam, author of the incredibly influential book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, published in 2000) and his former student, Pete Davis (who directed the film with his sister, Rebecca Davis). The film feels very self-conscious in its attempt to present itself as well-meaning, trying hard to strike a note of apolitical affability whose tone is one of assuring audiences that these men’s earnest desire to be helpful can cause no harm.
I bring up this point not because I think the protagonists’ race or class negates the message, but because there really is no such thing as an apolitical approach to talking about politics. The fact that they believed this strategy was necessary is, in my opinion, tied to the contemporary push for documentary filmmakers tackling difficult topics to be more “approachable” or lighter, to please funders and/or streamers by presenting their work as having a “broad appeal,” which often translates to content that centers White audiences while skewing generic and politically muted in tone. I also raise this point because packaging matters in our consumer-driven culture. It indicates who the filmmakers and their funders consider to be their most important audience, a notable detail when the subject matter is bringing people together. The tactics used to advance these discussions are just as significant as the discussions themselves.
Tactics are, in fact, a huge piece of the interlocked issues this book and film explore. How we talk to each other about thorny topics, and what approaches we do or don’t take, have everything to do with our capacity to successfully form bonds and resolve our problems. A relevant essay on that very subject is Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s “How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?” While ostensibly about political organizing, the essay touches on something the Right seems to be better at publicly acknowledging than the Left: People are afraid to speak, afraid to risk presenting their ideas and feelings publicly, for fear of saying the wrong thing. The Right wraps this point in diatribes against political correctness or “wokeness,” exploiting fears to further divide everyone, but in my experience people on the Left carry their own fears of speaking and sense of isolation.
When I facilitated a consciousness-raising group at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York earlier this year, which was intentionally multiracial, intergenerational, and trans-inclusive, I chose Hayes and Kaba’s text as our initial reading precisely because I worried about how fears and judgment might prevent us from being present and open with one another. Many expressed gratitude that it was our first shared text, a possible indication that they felt some of those anxieties themselves. We humans are primates after all. Our programming is basic — we have deeply held fears about being ostracized, so much so that when we feel we have been rejected socially, it disrupts our overall brain function.
But fears around speaking are not all that keep us apart. Join or Die proves to be a useful update to Putnam’s famous book Bowling Alone because it looks more broadly at the problem. Employing extensive data, the book showed a precipitous decline in community bonds, but it focused primarily on the period from the 1960s to the late 1990s. As the film reveals, if you stretch the period of analysis back to the late 1800s, the so-called “Gilded Age” in the US, when wealth inequality had reached what was then believed to be a peak (hello soon-to-be trillionaires of the 21st century), and thousands upon thousands of immigrants were arriving in the country, you can see the beginning of a massive, decades-long increase in civic and community participation. That dramatic growth precedes the later decline discussed in the original book.
A subtle but notable overlap between Join or Die and Solidarity is the work of the late Jane McAlevey. She appears as an occasional commentator in the film and Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor quote her and dedicate their book to her. A union organizer, scholar, and writer who died just this summer, McAlevey is widely respected for her practice of and writing on “whole-worker organizing,” which acknowledges that workers are also members of communities outside the workplace, and the realities facing those communities need to play a role in union organizing.
McAlevey’s commentary in the film is most salient when the filmmakers explore critiques of Bowling Alone, particularly that Putnam neglected to acknowledge that Americans have been intentionally divided from one another. As McAlevey says in the film: “I believe a deliberate strategy of cultivating individualism begins in the early 1970s, to roll back the gains [of] the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, and the Trade Union Movement, with a strategy of downgrading the concept of the communal and the collective, and elevating the idea that the individual is supreme. People do have less connections. What I try to argue is, it wasn’t accidental.”
Following up on this point, scholar of religion Eddie S. Glaude Jr. notes the ways in which public spaces where people would be inclined to meet new connections have faced deliberate disinvestment and disregard: “After Brown v. Board of Education, and after efforts to desegregate public recreation facilities like pools and parks, you see communities actually abdicate those spaces, they leave them, and then they complain about their tax dollars being used to pay for them.” Heather McGhee’s 2021 book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, clearly articulates how racism and racist policies not only have divided Americans but are actually disadvantaging far more people than just the intended targets — in other words, racism is costing people of all races dearly, from student debt to limited access to decent healthcare; from attacks on voting to limited housing options, and more.
One point that neither the film nor the book acknowledges is how the push toward the individual and away from solidarity among people facing similar issues is intertwined with people feeling personally responsible for their own isolation and loneliness, a painful byproduct of the false idea of meritocracies in which a person is solely responsible for their successes and failures. Our hyper-individualized society propagates the fiction that it’s an individual’s own fault that they’re alone and, accordingly, something is wrong with them. I know this because I’ve felt it, and I know others who have as well. As I’ve written elsewhere, even with all the structural analysis in the world, the feeling of being alone is tough to contend with when our society teaches us that the solution is to either turn inward or to buy stuff, neither of which will solve the problem. One secret to the success of the Right’s current message in the US is the recognition of people’s fears and isolation, offering up countless boogeymen as the cause and solution, rather than attending to the systems that are failing us all. Meanwhile, the Left hasn’t done a great job of offering a collective vision of a path out.
At screenings of my own documentary about US spaces that center LGBTQ+ women, I am often asked by audience members: What groups can I join? Where can I go? The most honest answer is that you have many options, and also very few. In Join or Die, we meet a few men who we later learn are members of an Odd Fellows lodge in Waxahachie, Texas. At the end of the film, we see them laughing, hugging, and working together to improve themselves and their town. It’s precisely the kind of benevolent civic organization that Putnam boosts in his book. But the group has a few assets that a lot of other groups lack: access to a dedicated private space that they own (I cannot overemphasize the importance of this); a stated ethic of mutuality, along with a politic of nonviolence and non-discrimination; and a set of bonding rituals and traditions to embrace and carry on. It’s the kind of group that Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor might define as being engaged in transformative rather than reactionary solidarity.
Many people I meet who are seeking spaces of their own are hoping for communities similar in some ways to the Odd Fellows lodge. The trouble is they often look to consumer-reliant businesses like bars and bookstores to fulfill desires that have little to do with consumption.
I recently came across a series of reading events organized by Reading Rhythms, where people are asked to pay $20 to sit together and read books individually while music plays, and they can later engage in optional conversations. I’m sure these events are well-intentioned, but they illustrate how we often replicate systems that reinforce individualism over collectivity. Ultimately, participants are asked to pay a pretty high price to sit in a room and read on their own, with the possibility but no guarantee of connecting with others. To state the obvious, these events could easily be hosted for free or a nominal cost at venues like public libraries, parks, or community centers.
So why aren’t they? My impression from the Reading Rhythms website is that, in addition to the practical need to pay for spaces and labor, they feel the need to brand themselves and their events in order to garner attention, sponsorships, and additional funding. Branding and an online following may also allow them to offer more desirable “experiences,” but all of this ultimately cultivates a consumer model more than it satisfies a desire for meaningful, sustained connection.
So why aren’t we all pushing for more publicly controlled spaces where events can happen without the high cost and need to “sell” something? Resource- and info-sharing across loosely aligned groups, along with using and advocating for more and better local public spaces, could create avenues for meaningful involvement, civic engagement, and connection beyond handing over some cash and showing up. (An event series similar to the above called Quiet Reading seems to do some of this.)
In the last essay of her collection Belonging: A Culture of Place, bell hooks writes about her rootedness in Kentucky, her family, and the models they provided for her. At one point, hooks says, “Communities of care are sustained by rituals of regard.” I think a lot about that when I’m attending yet another Zoom or in-person event where individuals lack the chance to be present with one another in any meaningful way. A few years ago I was teaching a workshop about artists and payment where I foregrounded the need for information sharing and solidarity, and an attendee asked why he should spend his limited time helping others (a genuine if telling question). Before I could stop myself I said something like: Why should anyone care about you and your work if you don’t care about them?
Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor present a more tactical perspective in Solidarity: “…the twenty-first century has witnessed the biggest protests, and the most popular petitions, in history, yet they have produced comparatively small effects. … What might have happened had a larger fraction of the tens of millions who demonstrated been channeled into member-based organizations to work toward common goals?”
This is where that malleability of the Benjamin Franklin cartoon that inspired the film’s title comes back in. If so many of the events that promise collectivity are consumer-oriented or are protests without clear, ongoing organizing, there really aren’t ways for people to join these efforts beyond showing up, which, on its own, is not enough. And we know well enough at this point that groups engaged in reactionary solidarity are all too ready and willing to provide longterm connection and involvement. Invitations into and ways in which people can find a place for themselves in a group are hugely important, and anyone interested in creating a more livable and welcoming world should be considering them. Whenever I spend time thinking about this topic, the words of bell hooks echo for me: New rituals of regard are needed.
Join or Die is currently streaming on Netflix.
