The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

  Private homeowner associations have spearheaded “citizens’ movements” against state and local taxes because their members see no reason why they should pay to support families outside the gates when members get everything they need inside, through their dues. As a result, poorer children are increasingly bunched together with other poorer children, within schools that have relatively few resources to begin with. The economic secession of upper-middle-class and wealthy families is also leading America back toward racially segregated neighborhoods and classrooms. The probability that a black student will have white classmates has dropped to what it was before 1954, when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared separate schools inherently unequal.

  The same mechanism explains the upsurge of private “parents’ foundations” in the wake of court decisions requiring richer school districts to subsidize poorer ones. Rather than pay the extra taxes, upscale parents have quietly shifted their support to these charities so they can keep more of their money in the schools their kids attend. Residents of Malibu, California—more solidly affluent than the residents of neighboring Santa Monica, which shares the same school district—want to keep their donations in Malibu schools. Craig Foster, a Malibu resident and former managing director at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, told The New York Times that parents who donate their money deserve to benefit from the fruits of their donations. A parent should have “the opportunity to put your money where your heart is,” he said. “It has to be an emotional appeal, and it has to be for the benefit of the donor.” Benefit of the donor? What happened to 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.

  Rather than see this for what it is—economic winners seceding from the common good—some commentators condemn the losers for lacking initiative. In his 2012 book Coming Apart, sociologist Charles Murray, the darling of conservative intellectuals, attributed the demise of America’s white working class to what Murray described as their loss of traditional values of diligence and hard work. He argued they brought their problems on themselves by becoming addicted to drugs, failing to marry, giving birth out of wedlock, dropping out of high school, and remaining jobless for long periods of time. Government has aided and abetted their decline, he argued, by providing help that encourages these social pathologies.

  Murray and others of his stripe seem not to have noticed that, as I’ve said, the wages of the white working class have stagnated or declined for the past forty years, steady jobs once available to them have disappeared, the economic base of their communities has deteriorated, and their share of the nation’s income and wealth has dramatically shrunk. It seems far more likely that these are the underlying source of the social pathologies Murray chronicles, and that the drug addiction, out-of-wedlock births, lack of education, and unemployment are its symptoms rather than the other way around. This logic is inconvenient, however, because it suggests that any real solution requires reversing the widening inequities that have hit the old working class especially hard, and embracing a more inclusive view of the common good.

  Many commentators embrace a kind of social Darwinism in which struggling whites, like poor blacks, are assumed to be unfit to survive. During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, National Review columnist Kevin Williamson wrote that “these dysfunctional, downscale communities…deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns….The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” In a similar vein, during the congressional fight over repealing the Affordable Care Act in the spring of 2017, Alabama congressman Mo Brooks argued that repeal would reduce “the cost to those people who lead good lives. They’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy.” Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, conceded that while people who “get cancer” should have some sort of safety net, he was quick to add “that doesn’t mean we should take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly, and gets diabetes.”

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  America’s political and economic leaders paid little heed when, in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, highly paid bankers pocketed huge sums while exposing most Americans to extraordinary economic risks. The people who subsequently lost their jobs, savings, and homes, though, were understandably outraged—especially when these same bankers suffered no consequences. Within a few years of the financial crisis, most of the bankers returned to pocketing vast fortunes, but most other Americans were still living with the consequences. Their anger began to engulf American politics on both sides of the aisle. In the 2016 Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders said, “This type of rigged economy is not what America is supposed to be about.” At the start of her campaign, Hillary Clinton conceded that the “deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.” Candidate Donald Trump proclaimed, “The system is rigged against the citizens,” and that he was the only candidate “who cannot be bought”—a refrain he repeated all the way to the White House.

  The left has focused its ire on corporations and Wall Street; the right, on government. In fact the two were—are—inextricably related. Trump’s antiestablishment authoritarian populism overlapped with Sanders’s antiestablishment democratic populism in condemning elites that made off with almost all the gains. “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land,” said Trump in his inaugural speech.

  Some individuals, like Martin Shkreli and others I’ve mentioned, have directly abused the public’s trust. Most of America’s political and economic elites—in Washington’s corridors of power, within the executive suites of large corporations, and on Wall Street—have been guilty of simply playing along. They have averted their eyes from the disintegration of the common good. They have failed to insist on major reforms. They have denied, rationalized, and told themselves the disintegration was inevitable.

  Yet the arbitrariness and unfairness is widely felt. In a 2001 Gallup poll, 76 percent of Americans were satisfied with opportunities to get ahead by working hard, and only 22 percent were dissatisfied. By 2014, only 54 percent were satisfied, with 45 percent dissatisfied. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who felt that most people who want to get ahead could do so through hard work dropped by 14 points between 2000 and 2014.

  Aristotle warned that excessive inequality can bring political instability. You can see and feel the anger even in mundane situations. As first-class sections of airplanes have become more spacious, they seem to be triggering more incidents of air rage among passengers seated in the back. Researchers Katherine DeCelles of the University of Toronto and Michael Norton of Harvard Business School analyzed “disruptive passenger incidents” in an airline’s database of millions of domestic and international airline flights. They found that flights with a first-class section were nearly four times more likely to have incidents of “belligerent behavior” or “
emotional outbursts” in their economy class. Such incidents were even more likely when economy passengers had to walk through the first-class section to get to their seats than when they entered through the middle of the plane and bypassed the first-class section.

  This sort of anger can attach itself to any convenient scapegoat—to immigrants, foreigners, Latinos, African Americans, women, particular religious groups, opposing political parties. It’s an open invitation to demagogues to sow division as a political tactic, and build political power based on bigotry and resentment. As I’ve noted, democracies require sufficient social cohesion that citizens regard the interests and views of those with whom they disagree as being worthy of equal consideration to their own. Unfortunately, the percentage of Americans who regard the other party as a fundamental threat has been growing steadily. By 2014—before the acrimony of the 2016 presidential campaign and the divisiveness of the Trump presidency—35 percent of Republicans saw the Democratic Party as a “threat to the nation’s well-being” and 27 percent of Democrats regarded Republicans the same way, according to Pew.

  Under these circumstances, people can become susceptible to demagogues who tell them not to believe researchers, scientists, journalists, and other fact-finders who don’t support the demagogues’ views. As a result, truth itself is imperiled as a common good. Republican senator Jeff Flake wrote of the 2016 electorate, “Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.”

  Can we restore the common good? Can the system be made to work for the good of all?

  * The following graphs are based on polling data from the Gallup organization.

  PART III

  Can the Common Good Be Restored?

  CHAPTER 7

  Leadership as Trusteeship

  WHAT CHOICE DO WE HAVE other than to try to restore a commitment to the common good? Without it, we are no longer a functioning society. Yet given the serious depletion of the pool of trust on which our society depends, reversing the whatever-it-takes forces that have eroded the common good during the past half century poses a daunting challenge. They can’t be reversed through better laws or wiser policies, because in order to make such laws and policies there must first be a strong consensus that they’re necessary, as well as the political power to get them enacted and to enforce them in ways they cannot be circumvented. No such consensus exists and no such power is readily available. So we have to go deeper, back to the attitudes and understandings that shape public morality, in the hopes of possibly strengthening them.

  One place to begin is with leadership. I’m talking about people vested with formal authority to run major businesses, government, universities, charities, unions, and faith-based institutions. All of them carry around in their heads a definition of what it means to be successful. These days that definition is usually focused on accumulating for themselves and their organizations more power or wealth—whatever it takes. But this definition is profoundly inadequate. Leaders must see that part of their responsibility is to rebuild public trust in the institutions they oversee.

  Leadership must entail trusteeship. Leaders are stewards of the unwritten rules we once took for granted, that constituted the common good. As I’ve shown, CEOs half a century ago understood that corporations were not just for shareholders but also for employees, communities, customers, and the public as a whole. Banks existed not to make wild bets with other people’s money but to protect depositors’ and investors’ savings and to prudently lend them. Health insurers existed to provide coverage to everyone who needed it, not to make big money by cherry-picking the healthiest. Political parties existed to organize and inform voters, not to corrupt our democracy with giant campaign contributions and negative ads. Over time, these institutions and their leaders seem to have forgotten that their legitimacy depends on them advancing the common good, and that leadership is a public trust.

  Trusteeship should be baked into our understanding of successful leadership. Political victories that undermine trust in politics shouldn’t be considered victories; they’re net losses for society. Record corporate profits achieved by eroding the public’s trust in business aren’t successes; they’re derelictions of duty. Lobbying and campaign donations that result in laws and regulations favoring the lobbyists and donors aren’t triumphs if they weaken public confidence in our democracy; they, too, are abject failures of leadership.

  But how can leaders buck the pressures to do whatever it takes to win when not doing so allows their political or economic competitors to prevail, and puts them out of a job? This has become the standard justification for whatever-it-takes leadership. Yet it’s based on a fallacy. It assumes that the backers who put such people into positions of leadership—voters, investors, members of various organizations—intend for them to do whatever it takes to win.

  Many of these backers, however, do not want leaders to do whatever it takes, because they understand their own obligations to the common good, and how such strategies harm everyone over the longer term. True leaders must help more people to understand this. One example: On the eve of the Senate’s final vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act in July 2017, Senator John McCain returned to Washington from his home in Arizona, where he was being treated for brain cancer, to cast the deciding vote against repeal. But that was not the most important thing he did. He took to the Senate floor to condemn the whatever-it-takes politics that had overtaken Washington. McCain began by saluting a former generation of senators for whom the common good was more important than winning any particular legislative contest. “I’ve known and admired men and women in the Senate who played much more than a small role in our history, true statesmen, giants of American politics,” he said.

  They came from both parties, and from various backgrounds. Their ambitions were frequently in conflict. They held different views on the issues of the day. And they often had very serious disagreements about how best to serve the national interest. But they knew that however sharp and heartfelt their disputes, however keen their ambitions, they had an obligation to work collaboratively to ensure the Senate discharged its constitutional responsibilities effectively….That principled mindset, and the service of our predecessors who possessed it, come to mind when I hear the Senate referred to as the world’s greatest deliberative body.

  McCain then admonished his present colleagues for eroding the common good, with words aimed as much at voters as at the senators. “Our deliberations today…are more partisan, more tribal, more of the time than any other time I remember,” he said. He reminded them that winning was not as important as upholding and strengthening the institutions of governing.

  Our system doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections, and gives an order to our individual strivings that has helped make ours the most powerful and prosperous society on earth. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than “winning.” Even when we must give a little to get a little. Even when our efforts manage just three yards and a cloud of dust, while critics on both sides denounce us for timidity, for our failure to “triumph.”

  This wasn’t the first time McCain refused to pander to the worst in current American politics, even though pandering might have been an easier path to victory. One of my fondest memories of McCain occurred in the 2008 presidential campaign, at a town hall event in Minnesota when he responded to a supporter who said he was “scared” at the prospect of an Obama presidency. “I have to tell you,” McCain said, “Senator Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States.” At this, the Republican crowd booed. “Come on, John!” one audience member yelled out. Others shouted that Obama wa
s a “liar” and a “terrorist.” A woman holding a microphone said, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him and he’s not, he’s not uh—he’s an Arab. He’s not…” At that moment McCain snapped the microphone from her hand and replied, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about. He’s not [an Arab].”

  Our best chance of reversing whatever-it-takes politics is through political leaders like John McCain who demand that politicians attend to the common good rather than win by undermining it—and who help educate the public about the importance of doing exactly this. This is the essence of political leadership.

  In 2017, Arizona senator Jeff Flake demonstrated similar leadership (what is it about Arizona?) when he castigated his fellow Republicans for their failure to stand up to Trump. To carry on “as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial,” Flake wrote. “If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones.” Flake reminded Americans that politics must be about strengthening the institutions of self-government. He went on: “If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?” Flake warned that conservatives had taken the institutions of government for granted “as we have engaged in one of the more reckless periods of politics in our history. In 2017, we seem to have lost our appreciation for just how hard won and vulnerable those institutions are.”