Political science professor Robert Reich makes a case for America recentering its politics, economics, and culture on the concept of the common good. The past fifty years have been a story of win-at-all-costs politics and business strategies that is leaving the country’s social fabric threadbare. The Common Good is a both conciliatory and bracing exhortation to return to responsibility and trust-building.

What is the common good? The common good consists of those shared values that unite people in a society. These become the norms by which we agree to live, and the ideals we desire to pursue. To care about the common good is a moral stance, one that recognizes that we’re in this together. If nothing is held in common, there is no society.

To be sure, Americans on an individual scale continue to be kind people, ready to do one another a good turn. The first responders and firemen in New York City on 9/11 were nothing short of heroic. The same goes for the men and women who serve in our military. Those who risk life and career to report abuses of politicians and corporate executives also show great bravery. The two strangers who came to the defense of a young Muslim woman in Portland in 2017 stood for what was right.

While these are kind and noble deeds, the common good is something different. It is a regard for civic institutions. The phrase has become a hoary banality to many, dismissed as a euphemism for socialism and government control. There is a growing cynicism toward cornerstones of American life, like government, the courts, the police, universities, charitable organizations, and the media.

Evidence of a breakdown in not only our trust, but our willingness to support and contribute to these institutions has been around since the 1970s. JFK famously exhorted the nation to, “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” We’ve flipped the script in the past several decades, and we’ve paid the price.

Think of big pharma CEOs like Mark Shkreli, who raised the price of a pill called Daraprim from 13 dollars to 750 dollars. He wanted to maximize investor shares. But for people who needed this pill to treat a rare parasitic infection, the price gouging became a crippling burden. Then there are the athletes who dope, the doctors who recommend superfluous procedures to make extra money, the bankers who bamboozle investors on a scale that rocks the economic order, the police officers who disregard the rights of Latinos and blacks, and the dirty old schmucks in Hollywood who have been mistreating women for decades. These developments show a growing disregard for the common good. The election of Trump is not the cause of this, but the most recent indication that the common good has been replaced with self-aggrandizement.

What good do we hold in common?

The notion of the common good has come under attack by some thinkers, and the seeds they’ve sown have fallen on fertile soil in the past five decades. These writers and philosophers argue that the term is too vague and readily exploited by tyrants, that individual liberties are inevitably quashed or severely constricted. Ayn Rand, for example (author of Atlas Shrugged), advocated for an ethical egoism, for autonomous, self-interested individuals. She railed against anything that smacked of coercive or manipulative altruism. For Rand, there was no need to form common bonds beyond those which united friends and family—and those kept at the discretion of individuals.

Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick also submitted the view that a society is comprised of nothing more than a collection of different individuals, and that to speak in terms of a general social good would be to obscure the individual. These criticisms have gained currency, as has supplanting the common good with the “virtue of selfishness.”

Interestingly, Trump considers Rand one of his favorite writers.  Paul Ryan makes Rand required reading for his staff. Trump’s secretary of state has called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book. Rand’s ideas have taken hold of the imaginations of many in the upper political echelons  as well as in corporate circles.

What these thinkers are proposing is dangerous. A society will not only fail to flourish, but fail to function without a sense of responsibility for upholding the common good.

Think of the common good as a reservoir of trust. This reservoir grows and is sustained across generations through shared fundamental values. This makes a society safer and easier to navigate. This social fabric is extremely valuable and is maintained voluntarily, but it is also readily exploited.

The small town may not think to lock their doors because there is an implicit understanding that no one steals here. But to the person who does want to steal this also creates a first-mover advantage. The homes are prime targets for easy thieving. The people in the town will eventually start locking their doors, spending money on security systems, and have a more suspicious attitude towards strangers. In short, the social and economic cost for violating these implicit rules of conduct is high.

In the same way, when lawyers and Wall Street wizards exploit loopholes that are not technically (explicitly) condemned to make extra money, they break trust, thereby diminishing the common good. The growing tangle of red tape and increasingly specific laws and tax codes are results of people taking advantage of the social trust that society holds. Things that were implicitly understood as simply wrong now have to be enumerated in new laws and amendments.

This tends to have domino effect. One political scientist developed a broken window political theory, drawing from the observation that a broken window in a poor community tends to be seen as an invitation to break even more windows in that property. It’s no longer seen as wrong because everyone else is doing it, too. There’s a long list of trust-breaking scandals and power plays over the last 50 years. At the root of each is an individual or group pursuing selfish gain at the expense of the common good.

Practices that used to be considered exploitative and unethical are now just part of the game. Three structural breakdowns have worked against the common good in catastrophic ways: whatever-it-takes-to-win politics, whatever-it-takes-to-maximize-profits business strategies, and whatever-it-takes-to-rig collusion.

In the early 1970s, five men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters and acquired classified documents. Nixon and his administration not only knew about the operation but covered it up. News of the scandal rocked the nation and shattered the public’s trust in the government. Nixon resigned. Congress ratified a variety of reforms (much like robbed townspeople would buy locks and security), but it ushered in a new paradigm of whatever-it-takes-to-win politics. The first window was broken, and many more would be broken thereafter. This was evident in 1987 when liberal groups went to great lengths to defame Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork. The vicious, systematic personal attacks led to the coining of a new word to describe the tactic: “to Bork.” Bork was ultimately rejected, so it was a “win” for the liberal mudslingers, but a loss for the common good. It used to go without saying that the Supreme Court judge selection process is to be carried out with civility toward people and respect for the institution, but this no longer holds true. Clarence Thomas got “Borked” just a few years later. Systematic defamation has become a common acceptable tactic.

The whatever-it-takes-to-win attitude toward politics bled into the corporate sector, where businesses increasingly engaged in unethical practices to maximize profits. In the 1980s, there were corporate raiders like Michael Milken who introduced the strategy of high-risk “junk” bonds to take over corporations. This new strategy changed the way that corporations operated. Higher returns became not only the chief end, but the only end worth considering—even if it came at the cost of communities in shambles because factories shut down and went overseas,  employees being fired, their pay reduced, or the introduction of machinery that could accomplish the same tasks. Raiders would galvanize shareholders into kicking out CEOs who weren’t willing to maximize profit at the cost of ruining people’s lives to replace them with CEOs who would.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield was originally a non-profit designed by Baylor University Medical Center in the 1920s. Everyone was accepted and the premium was a small, flat fee, regardless of age. Within a few decades of its creation, Blue Cross and Blue Shield provided 50 million Americans with health insurance. In the 1970s and 80s, some people saw ways to rake in a windfall. They delivered health insurance, but adopted a for-profit model. By accepting only the young and healthy, they kept premiums low. Blue Cross and Blue Shield had no way to compete and were forced to drift from their charity-oriented moorings, capitulating to the for-profit mold in 1994.

The whatever-it-takes-to-win politics combined with the whatever-it-takes-to-maximize-profit corporate stratagems catalyzed a third structural rupture: whatever-it-takes-to-rig collusion. Politicians and corporate heads exchanged favors and altered economic norms and expectations to suit their political and fiscal ends. The game is increasingly rigged to benefit the wealthy elite—at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Big banks and auto manufacturers got bailed out in the recent financial crash—on the taxpayer dime. The risks for failure don’t fall on corporations or politicians, but on the average citizen.

So structural breakdowns have depleted the common good. Trust has been broken in numerous ways, leaving the American people cynical and discouraged. This, however, need not be the end of the story. But it will require things from the American people. Those who set up our government understood that freedom comes at the cost of vigilance and responsibility.

One step that is essential to the revitalization of the common good is a renewed commitment to the truth. Truth is imperative.  We rely on reporters, think tanks, and professors to faithfully disseminate facts that relate to the public’s well being. The whatever-it-takes-to-win mentality is gaining a strong foothold. Media outlets will sometimes opt for what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness” instead of the plain facts. Sometimes outlets fear publishing stories that might mean losing advertisers or generate repercussions for impinging on government agendas. The competition for readership has encouraged sensationalized, entertaining stories when what the public needs is the truth on issues of import. The press must also clearly delineate news stories from analysis. These categories have become blurred, unfortunately. The stories must be intelligently written and as free from bias as possible.

Honor and shame are not words that we commonly use anymore, but they provide orientation for us. They are important elements of any functioning society. From a young age, we learn from parents, siblings, teachers, and neighbors what is good behavior and what is not. Additional sources have been sacred texts like the Bible, fictional moral stories, songs, and movies. These all inculcate a sense of what is praiseworthy and what brings disgrace.

In the United States, our metrics of honor and shame have stopped revolving around the common good. The people we honor are those who manage to become famous (or infamous)—either through acquiring money and power or popularity more generally. The people we shame are the nonconformists, those people who aren’t cool or fashionable, who hold opinions that are not popular, who spend time with the “wrong” crowd.

What would happen if we praised or shamed people based on their care for the common good, whether they build or deplete social trust? The wrong people are often getting our attention. In tribal regions and many countries in Asia, this is still common: those who fail to put the common good before personal gain are shamed.

During the drafting of the Constitution, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin exactly what kind of government the founders had in mind. Franklin’s reply was, “A republic…if you can keep it.” In order to maintain democracy, our surest defense is civic education. Thomas Jefferson rightly observed that ignorance and despotism tend to go hand-in-hand.

Civic education is another aspect of American life that needs to be revitalized if we hope to restore the common good. This education historically has included a deep passion to know the truth, the ability to exercise logic and critical thinking skills, and acts of service.  Even half a century ago, courses on history and American government were mainstays of high school education. The time given to such subjects has been reduced (or altogether removed) from most high school curricula. More English and math courses and a deluge of standardized exams have filled the void.

Courses are becoming increasingly vocational in focus, preparing students for work and career. Education is viewed as an entirely private investment of time, energy, and money that will pay off in a secure job. With a growing gap between rich and poor, this is an understandable inclination, but education used to be viewed not only as a private commodity, but a public good— way of preparing students for citizenship. A great emphasis was placed on values like stewardship, responsibility, and service.

When French diplomat and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in the mid-1800s, he was impressed with what he called the Americans' “habits of the heart.” Volunteer work must once again become part of the educational experience, where students are pushed outside their bubbles, exposed to different ethnicities, languages, and ways of life in the context of service. Isolated acts of charity are one thing—a disposition of care for the common good is another.