By Robert Reich
Searching for what should be celebrated at our 250th anniversary
Friends,
As we prepare to mark the nation’s 250th birthday, I hope you’ll forgive me if I fill part of your inbox today with some thoughts about what’s worth celebrating — the American common good.
America’s common good consists of our shared values about what we owe one another as citizens bound together in the same society — the norms we voluntarily abide by, and the ideals we seek to achieve. It is a way of thinking quite opposite to that of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and several other of today’s more notorious business and political leaders.
A concern for our common good is a moral attitude. It recognizes that we’re all in it together.
Unlike many other nations with millennia of common history, culture, language, and heritage — we’re united by a common good. “To be an American is an idea, while to be a Frenchman is a fact,” as political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich put it. If there is no common good, there is no America.
Anyone who lived through the first half of the 20th century experienced our common good through depression and war. After World War II, we financed all sorts of public goods — schools and universities, a national highway system, and healthcare for the aged and poor (Medicare and Medicaid). We rebuilt war-torn Europe. We sought to guarantee the civil rights and voting rights of Black Americans. We opened doors of opportunity to women.
Not only does the American common good exist, but it is essential for America to function. Without adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be America, at least not the America most of us care about.
I. The common good in how we deal with our disagreements
Americans sharply disagree about exactly what we want for ourselves and for the nation. But we must agree on how we deal with our disagreements.
We depend, for example, on people’s widespread and voluntary willingness to abide by laws, even if they disagree with them. Consider what would happen if everyone behaved like Trump — not voluntarily obeying the law without first calculating what they could gain by violating it. We’d be living in bedlam.
If everyone behaved like Trump, much of our time and attention would have to be devoted to outwitting or protecting ourselves from others. We would have to assume everyone else was out to exploit us, if they could. Every interaction would need to be carefully hedged. Penalties would need to rise and police enforcement to increase, in order to prevent the Trumps among us from calculating they might have more to gain by violating the law and risking the penalty.
And because laws can’t possibly predict and prevent every potential wrong, they would have to become ever more detailed and exacting in order to prevent the Trumps among us from circumventing them.
Even then we’d be in trouble. We couldn’t rely on legislators to block or close every small loophole because the Trumps among us would bribe legislators to keep the loopholes open, and Trumpian legislators would be open to taking such bribes. Even if we managed to close every loophole, we couldn’t rely on police to enforce the laws because the Trumps among us would bribe the police not to, and Trumpian police would accept the bribes.
Those who glorify the “free market” and denigrate “government” are fooling themselves if they think the “free market” gets them off this Trumpian hook. The market is itself a human creation — a set of laws and rules that define what can be owned and traded, and how. Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market. Government officials — legislators, judges, administrators, and regulators — 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. But if Trumps were making and enforcing such laws, they’d be based on whatever it took for these Trumpian officials to gain personal wealth and power. The “free market” would be a sham, and most people would lose out in it. (Something close to this is in fact occurring.)
II. Truth as part of America’s common good
Truth itself is a common good. Through history, one of the first things tyrants do 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.”
Yet in a world populated by people like Trump, we could not trust anyone to be truthful if they could do better for themselves by lying. We couldn’t count on any claim by sellers of any product or service. Internet-based “reputational ratings” would be of little value because Trumpian raters would be bribed. Transparency would be impossible because the Trumps among us would hide the truth and mess with all indicators of it.
Journalists would shade their reports for their own selfish advantage, taking bribes from advertisers or currying favor with politicians. Teachers would offer lessons to satisfy wealthy or powerful patrons. Historians would alter history if by doing so they gained wealth or power. Scientists would doctor evidence for similar selfish motives. The truth would degenerate into a cacophony of competing factual claims.
We couldn’t trust doctors or pharmacists to give us the right medications. We couldn’t trust bankers and accountants not to fleece us, restaurants not to poison us, lawyers not to hoodwink us. All ratings would be gamed. Professional ethics would be meaningless. If we couldn’t believe anything we heard, we would find ourselves in a permanent state of bewilderment.
America’s common good is especially imperiled when a president of the United States alleges that millions of unauthorized immigrants vote illegally, when there’s no evidence they do, and that his journalistic critics peddle “fake news,” without evidence of such duplicity.
Such baseless claims mislead and confuse the public. They erode trust. They fuel conspiracy theories. They can lead to a vicious cycle in which opportunists use the prevailing distrust to propagate more lies, for their own purposes. Alex Jones, best known for suggesting that 9/11 was an inside job and that 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.
III. Trust as part of America’s common good
The American 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.
As James Madison put it when advocating the Bill of Rights, the mere knowledge of its existence would “extinguish from the bosom of every member of the community any apprehensions, that there are those among his countrymen who wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled.”
History has shown that the more commitment to the common good, the more willing are people to accept disruptions that inevitably accompany new ideas, technologies, opportunities, trade, and immigration. That’s because people are more likely to trust that the disruptions won’t unfairly burden them and that they stand to gain more than lose by them.
This sort of virtuous circle has been an important feature of America, at least until recently, because our commitments to political equality and equal opportunity. People who have an equal voice in setting the rules and an equal chance to get ahead naturally feel more assured that their concerns will be addressed and that economic changes can work to their advantage.
But when that trust is undermined — as has happened in recent years — any disruptive economic change, such as AI, 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 turn open societies into closed and autocratic ones. Where a sense of common good is lacking, demagogues use the anger and fear accompanying disruptive change to turn people against one another. Sound familiar?
Polls tell us that a majority of today’s Americans worry that the nation is losing its national identity. Why is that? The core of our 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 religion or ethnicity. It has not been white male Christian nationalism.
Our core identity — the most precious legacy we have been given by 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 common good.
IV. World leadership and America’s common good
“We’re better than anyone else” nationalism tinged with racism emerges in countries where demagogues build their base of power by fueling fears of others outside the nation’s borders. Fear-based nativism was behind 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. Fear-based nativism is behind much of what Trump and his lackey Stephen Miller have promoted.
Trump’s “America First” rallying cries in the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections echoed earlier nativist calls in America (in the 1850s, 1890s, and 1920s) for the nation to shut itself off to the rest of the world.
Fear-based nativism is the opposite of John F. Kennedy’s call to put selfishness aside and invest in the world’s common good. JFK called for American leadership in the world — relying on our “soft” power and generosity.
Trump calls 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 first 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. America’s 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, and led the world to lower tariffs so that we all prospered together.
America’s 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, America’s common good is about inclusion — joining together to achieve common goals.
“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 American 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 40 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 from citizenship of people born outside the nation’s borders. It was the exclusion of many people who had lived here even before the start of the Republic — in particular, Native Americans and Black Americans.
For most of its existence, America found it easy to assimilate foreigners. 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 from around the world could come to America and become a citizen.
Yet from its inception, America refused to include Native Americans and Black Americans as equal citizens. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) a majority of the Supreme Court shamefully held that Black Americans could not become the fellow citizens of white Americans because they were “an altogether inferior race fit for nothing but chattel slavery.”
Dred Scott was overruled, but the fight for equal justice in America — for a more inclusive “We the People”— has continued.
V. Understanding what we owe each other as essential to America’s common good
It is possible — in fact, necessary — to acknowledge America’s faults and yet still love the country and commit oneself to making it better.
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 everyone 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 American patriots confirm the good we have in common. They seek to strengthen and celebrate the “We” in “We the people.”
A love of America based on the common good entails obligations to each other, 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 job.
This duty to each other 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 each other. “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 good of the 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 an American common good embraces public education — not as a personal investment in getting a good job after the education is complete, but as a public good that builds the capacity of America to wisely govern itself.
Democracy depends on citizens who are able to discern 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, the common good cannot even be discerned. This is fundamental. When education is viewed as a private investment yielding private returns, there’s 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.
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 must be 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; to separation of powers among the executive, legislature, and courts; and to 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.
VI. Political equality as central to America’s common good
Most fundamentally, we must be committed to political equality. Citizens should have an equal right to vote and 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 to 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.
When Americans ask, “What is the right or decent thing to do?” they necessarily draw upon understandings of our mutual obligations. While our Trumpian 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.
Those loyalties and attachments — the duties we owe to each other — are at the core of the American common good. Trump, Musk, and other prominent Americans today may disagree, but these mutual obligations have been essential to the greatness of this nation.
