Why the Common Good
Disappeared (And How We Get it Back)
To watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t8in5n4cps
In 1963 over 70 percent of
Americans trusted government to do the right thing all or most of the time;
nowadays only 16 percent do.
There has been a similar decline in trust for
corporations. In the late 1970s, 32 percent trusted big business, by 2016, only
18 percent did.
Trust in banks has dropped from 60 percent to
27 percent. Trust in newspapers, from 51 percent to 20 percent. Public trust
has also plummeted for nonprofits, universities, charities, and religious
institutions.
Why this distrust? As economic
inequality has widened, the moneyed interests have spent more and more of their
ever-expanding wealth to alter the rules of the game to their own
advantage.
Too many leaders in business and politics have been willing to do anything to make more money or to gain more power – regardless of the consequences for our society.
We see this everywhere – in the new tax
giveaway to big corporations, in gun manufacturer’s use of the NRA to block gun
controls, in the Koch Brother’s push to roll back environmental regulations, in
Donald Trump’s profiting off his presidency.
No wonder much of the public no longer
believes that America’s major institutions are working for the many.
Increasingly, they have become vessels for the few.
The question is whether we can restore the
common good. Can the system be made to work for the good of all?
Some of you may feel such a quest to be
hopeless. The era we are living in offers too many illustrations of greed,
narcissism, and hatefulness. But I don’t believe it hopeless.
Almost every day I witness or hear of the
compassion of ordinary Americans – like the thousands who helped people
displaced by the wildfires in California and floods in Louisiana; like the two
men in Seattle who gave their lives trying to protect a young Muslim woman from
a hate-filled assault; like the coach who lost his life in Parkland, Florida,
trying to shield students from a gunman; like the teenagers who are demanding
that Florida legislators take action on guns.
The challenge is to turn all this into a new
public spiritedness extending to the highest reaches in the land – a public
morality that strengthens our democracy, makes our economy work for everyone,
and revives trust in the major institutions of America.
We have never been a perfect union; our finest
moments have been when we sought to become more perfect than we had been. We
can help restore the common good by striving for it and showing others it’s
worth the effort.
I started my career a half-century ago in the
Senate office of Robert F. Kennedy, when the common good was well
understood, and I’ve watched it unravel over the last half-century.
Resurrecting it may take another half century,
or more. But as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, “Nothing that is
worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by
hope.“
Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's
Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and
Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as
Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named
him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century.
He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock",
"The Work of Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most
recent, "Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the
American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary,
"Inequality For All." Reich's newest book is "The Common
Good." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving
Capitalism," which is streaming now.