The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

Whether we call ourselves Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, we share many of the same anxieties and feel much of the same distrust.

Say what you want about him, Trump has at least brought us back to first principles. Some presidents, like Ronald Reagan, got us talking about the size and role of government. Trump has got us talking about democracy versus tyranny.

My goal is not that we all agree on the common good. It is that we get into the habit and practice of thinking and talking about it, and hearing one another’s views about it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear.

THE COMMON GOOD consists of our shared values about what we owe one another as citizens who are bound together in the same society—the norms we voluntarily abide by, and the ideals we seek to achieve.

If there is no common good, there is no society.

Alex Jones, best known for suggesting 9/11 was an inside job and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was “completely fake,” has said, “The public doesn’t have any trust in the system. They believe the social contract is broken”—which is exactly what has enabled people like Jones to gain influence.

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.

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.

In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), a majority of the Supreme Court shamefully held that African Americans could not become the fellow citizens of white Americans because they were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race.”

Education is a public good that builds the capacity of a nation to wisely govern itself, and promotes equal opportunity.

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”

for nothing can so make a person an imitator of Christ as caring for his neighbors.”

freedom not as a license to satisfy selfish wants but to do that “which is good, just and honest.”

“The American trick,” political philosopher Benjamin Barber has noted, “was to use the fierce attachments of patriotic sentiment to bond a people to high ideals.”

“What is it to be an American? Is it to have drawn the first breath in Maine, in Pennsylvania, in Florida, or in Missouri? Pshaw! Hence with such paltry, pettifogging calculations of nativities! They are Americans who have complied with the constitutional regulations of the United States…wed the principles of America’s declaration to their hearts and render the duties of American citizens practically to their lives.”

In any social system it’s possible to extract benefits by being among the first to break widely accepted unwritten rules.

Several years ago political scientist James Q. Wilson noted that a broken window in a poor community, left unattended, signals that no one cares if windows are broken there. Because nobody is concerned enough to enforce the norm against breaking windows, the broken window becomes a kind of invitation to throw more stones and break more windows. As more windows shatter, other aspects of community life also start unraveling. The unspoken norm becomes: Do whatever you want here because everyone else is doing it. The “broken window” theory has led to such picayune and arbitrary law enforcement that it has failed many poor communities. Meanwhile, law enforcers have often disregarded the largest windows in our society that have been shattered by the most prominent stone throwers.

2003 Dot-com bubble scandals. After the “dot-com bubble” bursts, the SEC finds that every major U.S. investment bank assisted in efforts to defraud investors, such as urging them to buy shares in dot-com companies that the banks’ own analysts were privately describing as junk. All leading public accounting firms admit negligence in executing their duties, and pay fines.

2014 General Motors ignition scandal. The company recalls nearly thirty million cars worldwide due to faulty ignition switches. The problem was known to GM for at least a decade prior to the recall, but GM had done nothing to remedy it. At least 124 deaths and 275 injuries result.

The Watergate scandal began an era of whatever-it-takes-to-win politics.

Nixon added, “If the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

It was scorched-earth ideological warfare so personal and mean-spirited that it generated a new verb: “to Bork,” meaning to systematically defame and vilify someone in public life.

During the whole of the 1970s there were only 13 hostile takeovers of big companies valued at $1 billion or more. During the 1980s, there were 150. Between 1979 and 1989, financial entrepreneurs mounted more than two thousand leveraged buyouts, in which they bought out shareholders with borrowed money, each buyout exceeding $250 million. As a result, CEOs across America, facing the possibility of being replaced by a CEO who would maximize shareholder value, began to view their responsibilities differently.

CEO pay soared from an average of 20 times that of the typical worker in the 1960s to almost 300 times by 2017.

As a practical matter, shareholders are not the only parties who invest in corporations and bear some of the risk that the value of their investments might drop. Workers who have been with a firm for years often develop skills and knowledge unique to it. Others may have moved their families to take a job with the firm, buying homes in the community. The community itself may have invested in roads and other infrastructure to accommodate the corporation.

Jared Kushner’s real estate company uses arrest warrants to collect debts owed by low-income tenants, often tacking on thousands of dollars in legal fees, because of its “fiduciary obligation” to investors—the largest of which are Jared Kushner and his family.

When asked to justify such tactics, the Kushner Companies’ chief financial officer told The New York Times that the company had a “fiduciary obligation” to collect as much revenue as possible. One means of making sure tenants paid their rent on time and did not break their leases early was to instill in them a sense of fear about violating a lease.

Powell’s memo unleashed corporate money into politics, growing into the largest force in Washington and most state capitals.

In 1980, the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans provided 10 percent of contributions to federal elections. By 2012, they provided 40 percent.

After Trump’s charitable foundation made a $25,000 contribution to a campaign organization linked to Florida’s attorney general, she decided not to open a fraud investigation of Trump University that her office had been considering.

After examining 1,799 policy issues in detail, two eminent researchers, Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, concluded that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

We have the most expensive and slowest broadband of any industrialized nation,

By 2016, the typical American household had a net worth 14 percent lower than the typical household in 1984,

Between 1972 and 2016 the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent, adjusted for inflation, although the American economy nearly doubled in size.

Whereas 90 percent of American adults born in the early 1940s were earning more than their parents by the time they reached their prime earning years, this proportion has steadily declined; only half of adults born in the mid-1980s are earning more than their parents by their prime earning years.

The gap in life expectancy between the nation’s most affluent and everyone else is widening as well.

Death rates have been rising for Americans with high school degrees or less, due to suicides, chronic liver cirrhosis, and poisonings, including drug overdoses.

In 1963 over 60 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing all or most of the time; nowadays only 16 percent do. In 1964 more than 60 percent thought government was “run for the benefit of all the people,” while just 29 percent said government was “pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” Nowadays the numbers are almost reversed, with 76 percent believing government is run “by a few big interests” and just 19 percent saying government is run “for the benefit of all.”

Public schools in exclusive communities are “public” in name only because tuition payments are disguised within high home prices, local property taxes, and parental donations. Parents are intent on policing the boundaries, lest a child whose parents haven’t paid the same price reap the same advantages as their own child.

In November 2016, school officials in Orinda, California, determined that a seven-year-old named Vivian, whose single mother worked as a live-in nanny for a family in Orinda, did not “reside” in the district and should not be allowed to attend the elementary school she was already attending there. Vivian is Latina and poor, and Orinda is white and wealthy.

The probability that a black student will have white classmates has dropped to what it was before 1954, when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared separate schools inherently unequal.

Rather than see this for what it is—economic winners seceding from the common good—some commentators condemn the losers for lacking initiative. In his 2012 book Coming Apart, sociologist Charles Murray, the darling of conservative intellectuals, attributed the demise of America’s white working class to what Murray described as their loss of traditional values of diligence and hard work. He argued they brought their problems on themselves by becoming addicted to drugs, failing to marry, giving birth out of wedlock, dropping out of high school, and remaining jobless for long periods of time. Government has aided and abetted their decline, he argued, by providing help that encourages these social pathologies.

Many commentators embrace a kind of social Darwinism in which struggling whites, like poor blacks, are assumed to be unfit to survive. During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, National Review columnist Kevin Williamson wrote that “these dysfunctional, downscale communities…deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.

Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, conceded that while people who “get cancer” should have some sort of safety net, he was quick to add “that doesn’t mean we should take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly, and gets diabetes.”

The left has focused its ire on corporations and Wall Street; the right, on government. In fact the two were—are—inextricably related.

Aristotle warned that excessive inequality can bring political instability. You can see and feel the anger even in mundane situations. As first-class sections of airplanes have become more spacious, they seem to be triggering more incidents of air rage among passengers seated in the back. Researchers Katherine DeCelles of the University of Toronto and Michael Norton of Harvard Business School analyzed “disruptive passenger incidents” in an airline’s database of millions of domestic and international airline flights. They found that flights with a first-class section were nearly four times more likely to have incidents of “belligerent behavior” or “emotional outbursts” in their economy class. Such incidents were even more likely when economy passengers had to walk through the first-class section to get to their seats than when they entered through the middle of the plane and bypassed the first-class section.

Leaders must see that part of their responsibility is to rebuild public trust in the institutions they oversee.

Political victories that undermine trust in politics shouldn’t be considered victories; they’re net losses for society.

We often honor people who haven’t advanced the common good but have merely achieved notoriety or celebrity, or amassed great wealth or power.