The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

our civic life—as citizens in our democracy, participants in our economy, managers or employees of companies, and members or leaders of organizations—seems to have sharply deteriorated.

from the “Greatest Generation” to the “Me Generation,” from “we’re all in it together” to “you’re on your own.”

The past five decades have also been marked by growing cynicism and distrust toward all of the basic institutions of American society—government, the media, corporations, big banks, police, universities, charities, religious institutions, the professions.

A growing number of Americans feel neglected and powerless. Some are poor, or black or Latino; others are white and have been on a downward economic escalator for years. Many in the middle also feel stressed and voiceless. Whether we call ourselves Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, we share many of the same anxieties and feel much of the same distrust.

We have nonetheless been cleaved into warring ideological tribes, and tribes within those tribes. Some of us have even been seduced by demagogues and conspiracy theorists.

I should clarify from the start what this book is not. It is not about communism or socialism, although in this fractious era I wouldn’t be surprised if the word “common” in the title causes some people to assume it is.

Others in Trump’s circle were influenced by Rand. Atlas Shrugged was said to be the favorite book of Rex Tillerson, Trump’s secretary of state. Rand also had a major influence on Mike Pompeo, Trump’s CIA chief. Trump’s first nominee for secretary of labor, Andrew Puzder, said he spent much of his free time reading Rand. The Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, required his staff to read Rand.

Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman and political thinker who is the philosophical founder of modern conservatism, saw the common good as “the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.” It is the source of civic virtue.

To take the most basic example, we depend on people’s widespread and voluntary willingness to abide by laws—not just the literal letter of laws but also the spirit and intent behind them. Consider what would happen if no one voluntarily obeyed the law without first calculating what they could gain by violating it as compared with the odds of the violation being discovered multiplied by the size of the likely penalty.

Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market.

Government officials—legislators, administrators, regulators, judges, and heads of state—must decide on and enforce such laws and rules in order for a market to exist. Without norms for the common good, officials have no way to make these decisions other than their own selfish interests.

Truth itself is a common good. Through history, one of the first things tyrants have done is attack independent truth-tellers—philosophers (Plato), scientists (Galileo), and the free and independent press—thereby confusing the public and substituting their own “facts.” Without a shared truth, democratic deliberation is hobbled. “Alternative facts” are an open invitation to what George Orwell described as “doublethink,” in which the public is so confused it cannot recall the past, assess the present, or contemplate the future.

As poet and philosopher Václav Havel put it, “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.”

the common good depends on people trusting that most others in society will also adhere to the common good, rather than lie or otherwise take advantage of them. In this way, civic trust is self-enforcing and self-perpetuating.

History has shown that the more commitment to the common good there is within a society, the more willing are its inhabitants to accept disruptions that inevitably accompany new ideas, technologies, opportunities, trade, and immigration. That’s because these inhabitants are more likely to trust that the disruptions won’t unfairly burden them, and that they stand to gain more than lose by them.

when that trust is undermined or was never there to begin with, disruptive change can generate widespread anger and fear, and even political upheaval. Under these circumstances, virtuous circles can reverse themselves and become vicious cycles. If those who feel left behind view the system as rigged against them, they can push open societies into becoming closed and autocratic.

Where a sense of common good is lacking, demagogues can use the anger and fear accompanying disruptive change to turn people against one another rather than address the traumas that made them angry in the first place.

Societies experiencing economic stresses and widening inequalities are particularly vulnerable to tyrants intent on undermining democratic institutions by lying repeatedly, accusing critics of conspiring against “the people,” fuelin...

Our core identity—the most precious legacy we have been given by the generations who came before us—is the ideals we share, the good we hold in common. If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing our sense of the common good.

Donald Trump’s “America First” rallying cry in the 2016 presidential election, which echoed earlier nativist calls in America (in the 1850s, 1890s, and 1920s) for the nation to shut itself off from the rest of the world. In contrast to John F. Kennedy’s call to put selfishness aside and invest more of ourselves in the common good, Trump called on Americans to prevent the rest of the world from encroaching on us. “We will…not allow other countries to take advantage of us like they’ve been doing to a level that’s hard to believe,” he said in his surly inauguration speech. “Nobody—nobody—can beat us. Nobody. We are Americans, and the future belongs to us.” Early in his administration, Trump’s foreign policy team flatly rejected the idea that the world is a “global community,” in favor of the zero-sum fallacy that the world is “an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”

we are not in a zero-sum game with the rest of the world. Our common good is inextricably bound up in the good of the rest of the planet. America understood this explicitly in the decades after World War II when we helped rebuild war-torn Europe and Japan.

since the end of World War II, America has sought to be the world’s leading superpower. But not until Trump has an administration viewed other nations’ gains as our losses, and vice versa. The common good has nothing whatever to do with the United States being “the best.” It’s not about securing borders, erecting walls, and keeping others out. It is not xenophobic. It doesn’t focus on exclusion at all. To the contrary, the common good is about inclusion—joining together to achieve common goals.

Edmund Burke put it, “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.”

“We’re better than anyone else” nationalists typically don’t know or care about the rest of the world. As George Orwell dryly observed, a nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, is typically uninterested in what happens in the real world.”