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Political scientist Robert D. Putnam argued the election of U.S. President Donald Trump was not a landslide victory, but a “symptom” of worsening social isolation at an Institute of Politics Forum on Wednesday.

Putnam, who retired from teaching as a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2018, became famous for his 2000 book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” where he argued Americans were becoming less connected to each other and national institutions. On Wednesday, he argued those problems had since gotten worse.

“Even if everybody in Washington simply vanished, we would still have the same problem because the underlying cause of it, which is partly growing social isolation and partly a class gap about social isolation,” Putnam said, adding that less educated Americans were becoming especially separated.

“That’s why Trump won, and unless we fix it, we’re going to get more and more Trumps forever,” he said.

The event, moderated by professor of Political Economy David T. Ellwood, was a discussion about the value of Putnam’s theories of isolation in the current political climate. Putnam argued that part of the Trump campaign strategy relied on how vulnerable isolated groups had become to “a kind of a populist, authoritarian appeal.”

“America is, in fact, in deep trouble,” Putnam said.

To demonstrate this point, Putnam displayed graphs based on political polarization, economic inequality, social isolation, and cultural self centeredness data collected for his 2020 book, “The Upswing” at the forum. All four measures followed the same trends — after a low point in the early 20th century, they each peaked in the 50s and 60s before dropping to present historic lows.

​​”By the second half of the 20th century, after a 60 year climb, we were really all in this together. We cooperate politically, we’re relatively equal — very equal, economically — and we’re connected with each other. We all trust one another,” Putnam said. “But then it collapses.”

“Now is probably the most polarized political period in American history, with a possible exception of one five year period that you will have heard of between 1860 and 1865,” he added. “That’s the Civil War.”

He attributes these downward trends to a weak sense of “we,” class-based social isolation, and what Putnam described as lack of societal respect for those without college degrees, who make up about two thirds of Americans.

“It’s not just about economics. They — the two-thirds of American society — are not just unhappy about the fact that they don’t have good income or great chances of public mobility,” he said. “They don’t think we respect them, and we don’t.”

Putnam has spent the last three decades studying division and isolation. He has written 15 books on politics, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal — considered the highest honor for contributions to humanity — by President Barack Obama for “deepening our understanding of community in America.” He began teaching at Harvard in 1979.

At the Wednesday event, Putnam emphasized the importance of youth engagement, arguing that the biggest drivers of social change in the last century have been “young people who were driven by a sense of moral outrage — not the way they were being treated, but the way other people were being treated.”

In an interview with The Crimson following the forum, Putnam said “the future of America, or at least of American democracy, rests in the young people.”

“You didn’t cause this problem,” he added, “but it won’t be fixed unless an adequate number of people of your generation are unselfish.”