The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

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  Polls tell us that a majority of today’s Americans worry that the nation is losing its national identity. The core of that identity has never been “we’re better than anyone else” nationalism. Nor has it been the whiteness of our skin or the uniformity of our ethnicity. 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.

  “We’re better than anyone else” nationalism, tinged with racism, typically emerges in countries where demagogues build their base of power by fueling fears of others outside the nation’s borders. The assertion made in 2017 by Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, that the major political contest in today’s world is between globalism and patriotism, was nothing but fear-based nativism. So was 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.”

  But 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. To be sure, at least 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.

  In fact, it is by coming together for the common good that we gain compassion for others beyond a nation’s borders. As 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.” Burke, long a hero to American conservatives, was no nationalist. He devoted most of his career to defending oppressed groups around the world, such as American colonists who were being exploited by his own British compatriots; Irish Catholics, who were being discriminated against; and the masses of India. In so doing, Burke did not base his arguments on universal principles of human rights. He based them on moral precepts underlying Britain’s own laws and unwritten constitution.

  “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.” True patriots, by contrast, are deeply curious about, and open to, the rest of humanity. Their sense of the common good doesn’t end at the nation’s borders. Daniel Fried, who joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1977 and served America with distinction for forty years, said on his retirement in February 2017, “We are not in an ethno-state, with identity rooted in shared blood. The option of a White Man’s Republic ended at Appomattox….We have, imperfectly, and despite detours and retreats along the way, sought to realize a better world for ourselves and for others, for we understood that our prosperity and our values at home depend on that prosperity and those values being secure as far as possible in a sometimes dark world.”

  America’s original sin was not the exclusion of people born outside the nation’s borders from citizenship. It was the exclusion of many people who had lived here even before the start of the Republic—in particular, Native Americans and African Americans. For most of its existence, America found it relatively easy to assimilate foreigners, although there were periods of sharp and even violent tension. By the 1840s, every major seaport teemed with inhabitants from around the globe—“Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians,” and other “wild specimens of the whaling-craft,” as Herman Melville described the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in Moby-Dick. Until the early 1920s, almost anyone could come to America and become a citizen. Yet from its inception, America refused to include Native Americans and African Americans as equal citizens. 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.”

  Dred Scott was overruled, but the fight for equal justice in America—for a more inclusive “We the people”—has continued. That fight, too, is part of the common good. The poems of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and the songs of Woody Guthrie, express loving devotion to America—while turning that love into a demand for justice. “This land is your land, this land is my land” sang Guthrie. “Let America be America again,” pleaded Hughes: “The land that never has been yet— / And yet must be—the land where every man is free. / The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—.”

  Patriotism based on the common good does not pander to divisiveness. True patriots don’t fuel racist or religious or ethnic divisions. They aren’t homophobic or sexist or racist. To the contrary, true patriots confirm the good that we have in common. They seek to strengthen and celebrate the “We” in “We the people.”

  A love of country based on the common good entails obligations to other people, not to national symbols. Instead of demanding displays of respect for the flag and the anthem, it requires that all of us take on a fair share of the burdens of keeping the nation going—that we pay taxes in full rather than seek tax loopholes or squirrel away money abroad, that we volunteer time and energy to improving the community and country, serve on school boards and city councils, refrain from political contributions that corrupt our politics, and blow the whistle on abuses of power even at the risk of losing our jobs. It has sometimes required the supreme sacrifice. We are the descendants of Nathan Hale, soldier and spy for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, who famously declared just before being executed by the British in 1776 that his only regret was having “but one life to lose for my country.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, called upon America’s wellspring of generosity and sacrifice for the good of all. “If I read the temper of our people correctly,” he said,

  we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good.

  This sense of a common good also embraces public education—but not as a personal investment in getting a good job after one’s education is complete. 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. This is fundamental. When education is viewed as a private investment yielding private returns, there is no reason why anyone other than the “investor” should pay for it. But when understood as a public good underlying our democracy, all of us have a responsibility to ensure that it is of high quality, and available to all.

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  Our central obligation as citizens is to preserve, fortify, and protect our democratic form of government—not inundate it with big money and buy off politicians. We must defend the right to vote and ensure that more citizens are heard, not fewer. We can’t hate our government, for it is the means by which we can come together to help solve our common problems. We may not like everything the government does, and we justifiably worry when special interests gain too much power over it, but our obligation is to work to improve government, not undermine it.

  Although Americans have strong disagreements about the size and scope of government, most of us still believe in our system of government. We’re often angry and disappointed at how far it falls short of our ideals, and we can be incensed when the system appears to be rigged against us, but most of us agree with its ideals, and we’re angry at the riggers—not at the system. As citizens, we are committed to the Constitution and the rule of law, to democracy based on the consent of the governed. We’re committed to the Bill of Rights; to an independent judiciary; separation of powers between the executive, the legislature, and the courts; and in checks and balances among those three branches. We believe in federalism, giving states and localities significant responsibilities. We believe in freedom of speech. We are committed to a free and independent press.

  Importantly, most of us believe in political equality. We believe that citizens should have an equal right to vote, and that no one’s vote should count more than anyone else’s. We believe in equality before the law, and that no one should be above the law. We don’t want government to discriminate against racial or ethnic minorities.

  The genius of a system based on political equality is that it doesn’t require us to agree on every issue, but only agree to be bound by decisions that emerge from the system. Some of us may want to prohibit abortions because we believe life begins at conception; others of us believe women should have the right to determine what happens to their bodies. Some of us want stricter environmental protections; others, more lenient. We are free to take any particular position on these and any other issues. But as political equals, we are bound to accept the outcomes even if we dislike them. This requires enough social trust for us to regard the views and interests of those with whom we disagree as equally worthy of consideration to our own. As philosopher John Rawls has written, “Questions of justice and fairness arise when free persons, who have no authority over one another, are participating in their common institutions and among themselves settling or acknowledging the rules which define them and which determine the resulting shares in their benefits and burdens.”

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  Ayn Rand had it completely wrong. Moral choices logically involve duties to others, not just calculations about what’s best for ourselves. When members of a society ask, “What is the right or decent thing to do?,” they necessarily draw upon understandings of these mutual obligations. While our contemporary culture of self-promotion, iPhones, selfies, and personal branding churns out a fair number of narcissists, it is our loyalties and attachments that define who we are.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Origins of the Common Good

  IT IS IMPORTANT not to romanticize the past. As I’ve noted, at America’s founding the common good did not include African Americans or Native Americans. Women and the nonpropertied poor could not vote. The founding fathers nonetheless embraced a set of principles that would eventually lead to a far more inclusive society. They understood that the best way to preserve freedom was through people fiercely committed to it. When they spoke of “virtue,” it was not as we understand the term, involving personal kindness and generosity. For them, virtue meant a concern for the common good. Without a virtuous citizenry, they feared the young republic would succumb to authoritarian rule.

  They didn’t try to create the most efficient system of governance, or one that would generate the most wealth. They wanted a system that would produce the most virtuous people. “Is there no virtue among us?” asked James Madison, rhetorically. “If there be not, no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” In Federalist No. 71, Madison wrote that “it is a just observation that the people commonly INTEND the PUBLIC GOOD” (emphasis in the original), and in Federalist No. 45 he claimed that “the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.”

  Both Madison and Thomas Jefferson were influenced by the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, who defined a “republic” as a self-regulating political society whose mainspring was civic virtue. Edmund Burke likewise noted the connection between a virtuous citizenry and the prevention of tyranny. In his “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” (1770), Burke warned that “when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Almost two centuries later, Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”

  When Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he attributed the strength of America’s young democracy to the “habits of the heart,” as he called them—the “sum of moral and intellectual dispositions” that emerged from Americans’ experience in self-government. It was through governing themselves that Americans learned to put public responsibility over selfish interest. “Citizens who are bound to take part in public affairs must turn from their private interests and occasionally take a look at something other than themselves,” Tocqueville wrote. The New Englander, for example, “invests his ambition and his future” in his town, and “accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.”

  The public-spiritedness of New Englanders was replicated across America in barn-raisings and quilting bees. It can still be observed in neighbors who volunteer as firefighters or help one another during natural disasters, whose generosity erects the local hospital and propels high school achievers to college, and who send their young men and women off to fight wars for the good of all. It is found in America’s tradition of civic improvement, philanthropy, and local boosterism. Popular culture once echoed these sentiments without sounding corny or inauthentic. They could be found in Robert Sherwood’s plays, the novels of John Steinbeck and William Saroyan, Aaron Copland’s music, and Frank Capra’s films. The last scene in It’s a Wonderful Life conveys the lesson: George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, learns that he can count on his neighbors, just as they had always counted on him. They are bound together in the common good.

  The good that emerged from self-government was not mainly about generosity toward those in need. It was about giving others an equal chance to succeed. In 1892, social reformer Jane Addams explained that Hull House, her settlement house in a poor precinct of Chicago, was not a charity. Hull House’s purpose—and, for Addams, a central obligation of American citizenship—was to help America’s less fortunate make the
most of themselves. “To call this effort philanthropy is to use the word unfairly and to underestimate the duties of good citizenship,” she said. Giving others an equal opportunity was an essential aspect of the common good. Martin Luther King, Jr., enunciated the same ideal when he spoke on the National Mall in 1963 about a vision of equal rights “deeply rooted in the American Dream.”

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  Some of our ideas about what we owe each other are also rooted in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. In the earliest days of Christianity, a church father named John Chrysostom (c. 347–407) wrote: “This is the rule of most perfect Christianity, its most exact definition, its highest point, namely, the seeking of the common good…for nothing can so make a person an imitator of Christ as caring for his neighbors.” America began as a nation of religious communities whose members pledged to piety and charity and to the good of each other. The highest goal of the Puritans who landed in New England was to create communities fostering ethical and spiritual values. John Winthrop, elected the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony even before the Puritans left England, delivered on board their ship in Salem Harbor, just before they landed in 1630, a sermon that described the effort on which they were embarking in terms of Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount. “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes…our community as members of the same body.” Winthrop saw freedom not as a license to satisfy selfish wants but to do that “which is good, just and honest.”

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