Speaking at a Republican fundraiser Wednesday in Missouri, President Donald Trump criticized Japan for unfair trade practices, and offered this example:
“It’s called the bowling ball test; do you know what that is? That’s where they take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and they drop it on the hood of the car. And if the hood dents, then the car doesn’t qualify. Well, guess what, the roof dented a little bit, and they said, nope, this car doesn’t qualify. It’s horrible, the way we’re treated. It’s horrible.”
No one familiar with Japanese trade practices or the auto industry seemed to know what the president was talking about. My colleague Michael Warren found video of a David Letterman gag from a couple decades ago, which involved dropping a bowling ball onto a car from the roof of a building. Perhaps President Trump conflated an episode on a late night variety show with international economic policy?
Why not? In any case, it’s not news that Donald Trump is something of a fantasist—though there remains a debate as to whether he knows he’s making things up or not. Is he a con man or delusional?
But let’s leave this interesting question aside. Let’s instead focus for a minute on Trump’s bowling ball parable. Trump’s riff reminded me of a much-discussed book of the pre-Trump era, Robert Putnam’s 2000 work Bowling Alone. In it, the Harvard social scientist argued that Americans had become increasingly atomized—disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social institutions in general. One such institution is—or was—the bowling league. More Americans were bowling in 2000 than ever before, Putnam claimed, but they weren’t bowling together in leagues, but were rather bowling alone.
Such was the claim, and Putnam marshaled a lot of data to support the argument that Alexis de Tocqueville’s fear about American society—that individualism could lead to isolation and atomization—could be coming true.
Now, almost two decades later, one might see in the rise of Donald Trump—and much else besides—the unwelcome political consequences of the unfortunate social developments Putnam chronicled. Any response to those consequences will require thinking seriously about these underlying social and cultural trends, and about how to mitigate and even reverse them.
Which brings us back to Trump and his bowling ball fantasies: In order to come to grips with the realities of the 21st century we first have to acknowledge that reality exists, which means vigorously rejecting the fantasists and con men who gain by saying otherwise. Visions of Japanese dropping bowling balls on cars aren’t merely distractions; they stand in the way of a sober discussion of what happens to a society when its members no long bowl together, but alone. Or, to put it differently, dealing with the problem of Trump is the necessary if not sufficient condition for deploying the solutions of Tocqueville.
