The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

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.

Education is a public good that builds the capacity of a nation to wisely govern itself, and promotes equal opportunity. Democracy depends on citizens who are able to recognize the truth, analyze and weigh alternatives, and civilly debate their future, just as it depends on citizens who have an equal voice and equal stake in it. Without an educated populace, a common good cannot even be discerned.

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

These measures had nothing whatever to do with the central problems facing the nation nor with the deep unease at economic exclusion and vulnerability much of his core base experienced. They served only to advance a narrow political agenda at the expense of the common good.

The extreme economic rewards available to those who make it compared to the economic perils facing those who don’t have caused many parents to become hyper-competitive. They worry that if they don’t get their children into good preschools that lead to good primary and secondary schools, and then into good colleges, their offspring will fall backward economically or, alternatively, lose their chance to become well-off. So they’re less generous when it comes to sending their tax dollars and donations to schools and children from lower economic classes. As these parents become increasingly efficient at passing their economic status on to their children, they create an ever more rigid class division in America.

While many Americans harbored anti-immigrant feelings before Trump, they kept those feelings to themselves. Perhaps they didn’t even allow them to rise to full consciousness. That’s because such sentiments were assumed to be wrong—to violate the common good. But Trump’s election legitimized those sentiments because it suggested that millions of others shared them. After Trump, bigotry became more acceptable.