The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

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.”