The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

  Gianforte’s attack on Jacobs was shameful enough. Almost as shameful was Gianforte’s press release about what occurred, which blamed Jacobs. “It’s unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer BBQ.” It was a blatant lie, as evinced by the Fox News team and the charge against Gianforte. Under Trump, though, blatant lying has become the new normal, and a “liberal journalist” the enemy. Gianforte was elected and allowed to take his seat in Congress. He is now known as “the honorable” Greg Gianforte, but there is nothing honorable about his behavior. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said that Trump “has contributed to a climate of discourse consistent with assaulting a reporter for asking an inconvenient question.” Whether you agree or disagree with Donald Trump’s policies, all of us must stand up against this. It is the road to despotism.

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  Even had there been no disparaging comments or threats by Trump and other politicians, the media would still need to rebuild public trust. Print and broadcast news outlets must demonstrate to the public that their news stories are produced accurately and intelligently. They need codes of ethics with clearly stated processes for checking facts and correcting errors, and ways to ensure that the public is made aware of such corrections. They must clearly separate facts and analysis from opinions and advocacy, and inform readers and viewers of any news or news-gathering that is funded by organizations with a stake in what’s reported. They need ombudsmen to investigate public complaints about their coverage, along with public editors who serve as paid in-house critics. These steps are necessary not only to rebuild public trust, but also to restore the media to its rightful place in our democracy and protect the truth as a common good.

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  At one time I believed that social media would democratize the news—enabling more people to become truth-tellers, give more of us access to a greater range of stories and perspectives, and provide a useful alternative to corporate media. I was wrong. Instead, social media has enshrouded all of us in cocoons of our own making. We are too easily tyrannized by algorithms that feed us only the facts, analyses, and opinions we already favor. We no longer live in a common reality but, rather, a reality shared only with those who already agree with us. (We’re also clustering geographically, choosing to live around people who share our values. In 2016, eight out of ten U.S. counties voted overwhelmingly for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.)

  I believe it is our responsibility to break out of these self-generated bubbles. We need to seek alternative sources of news and information that don’t merely confirm our biases and preconceptions, and test our views by seeking out people with different views and opinions. I’m sure I still remain largely in my own bubble, but I make an effort to break out. I read daily editorials and comments in The Wall Street Journal as well as The New York Times; the National Review as well as The American Prospect; The Weekly Standard and The Nation. I try to make a point of exchanging views with conservatives and Republicans. I almost always accept speaking invitations from universities in red states. I still have a long way to go. But I sincerely believe—and I tell my students—that the best way to learn anything is to talk with someone who disagrees with you.

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  The ease with which just about anyone can post anything on the Internet and gain a following poses another danger to the truth. All you need is a smartphone to photograph or video in real time, and you can create your own fake virtual newsroom. With a bit more effort you can spread lies to millions of people by using algorithm-friendly headlines and search-optimized “keyword bombs.” You can deploy millions of bots to move a fake news article to the top of Facebook Trending Topics or Google search. If you can afford it, you can hire a data-mining firm to discover and aggregate personal information on tens of millions of people—uncovering their concerns and biases—thereby enabling you to give them custom-tailored “news” and ads designed to exploit these emotions. In this new world, truth can be doctored to meet anyone’s needs. According to BuzzFeed, during the final three months of the 2016 presidential campaign the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and NBC News.

  The dilemma is how to police against this, and whom to trust with the policing. Should we give Facebook, Google, and giant servers like Cloudflare the responsibility? Or should we expect the government to assume this role? In a free society, where exactly is the border between fake news and dissent, and who should decide? I don’t have any simple answers to these questions, but here, too, I think each of us has a critical role to play. We have a responsibility to educate ourselves and others about how to find the truth, and how to assess the news we receive thoughtfully and critically. We need to learn better how to recognize lies so we can refrain from sharing them and warn others. We need to demand that the leaders of news-gathering organizations—not just print and broadcast media, but also giant tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter—understand their role as trustees of the common good, and take appropriate steps to guard the truth. As I’ve said, we should honor truth-tellers—whistle-blowers, investigative reporters, and courageous public servants who tell us what we need to know rather than what we want to know. And we should shame the liars and truth-suppressors—those who use their wealth, power, and positions of authority to mislead the public.

  We should also prevent data-mining bots from exploiting our private biases and concerns—as revealed on the Internet—to flood us with custom-tailored news and ads. The way to do this is to make our personal information private. There is no good reason why data about everything we view or buy on the Internet, as well as everything we read or see and where we travel, should be available to anyone other than ourselves. This information is not a common good. To the contrary, it is private. But to make it private, we will need a law that prevents Facebook, Google, data-mining firms, and other potential aggregators of personal information from using it. As citizens, I believe we have an obligation to push for such a law.

  CHAPTER 10

  Civic Education for All

  FINALLY, AND NOT LEAST, restoring the common good requires a new commitment to civic education—as part of the formal education of children and young people, as well as the ongoing education of us all. Our children need to understand themselves not just as individuals seeking self-expression and lucrative careers but also as citizens responsible for upholding our core common values. They need to learn to respect but also reform the major institutions of our society. They should be equipped to deliberate with others over what is best for our society and the world, and to civilly and respectfully disagree.

  When I heard John F. Kennedy’s adjuration that we ask what we can do for our nation, I was attending a small public high school in upstate New York. Part of the required curriculum was called “citizenship education.” It involved a series of courses on history and government. As in most schools, some were well taught while others were taught abysmally. I remember one teacher who often pointed to a world map showing the Soviet Union, China, and most of Eastern Europe in bright red, with surrounding nations in pink. Her ongoing civics lesson was that communism was spreading like an infectious disease. If we weren’t careful, what remained of the free world would catch it. Civic education in the 1950s reflected many of the prejudices of the day. Yet it at least engaged us, day after day, in the practice of thinking about the well-being of our society and the world. The ongoing examination of history and our system of government had a cumulative effect: Regardless of our politics, we began to see ourselves as the inheritors of an important legacy. That legacy was far from perfect, but it was profoundly important. We had an obligation to become responsible citizens.

>   Civic education was long ago eliminated from the standard high school curriculum. In its place has come a narrowed focus on English and math, along with an avalanche of tests. At the same time, higher education has become ever more vocational. Students crowd into courses on economics and business, or computer engineering. All told, education is now viewed mainly as a private investment rather than a public good.

  This is understandable. As I’ve noted, with inequalities of income and wealth wider than they have been in over a century, parents and their children face the daunting possibilities of unprecedented riches for those with the “right” education, or squalor for those on the losing track. What you learn is what you’ll earn, as the popular saying goes. Over his or her lifetime the typical high school dropout will accumulate no more than half the earnings of a high school graduate, while the typical college graduate will earn twice as much as someone with only a high school degree. Yet if education is simply a private investment yielding private returns, there is no reason why anyone other than the “investor” should pay for it. No wonder increasing numbers of parents resist paying for the education of other children, especially those who are poorer or require extra teacher time and resources. The same attitude extends to legislatures that have been cutting funding for public universities. If a university degree is a private investment offering a good return to the individual, they argue, why should taxpayers bear the cost? It would seem more appropriate for students and their parents to take out loans to cover it, just as people borrow for all sorts of other worthwhile investments, such as a new home or business.

  Education, though, is not just a private investment. It is also a public good. America’s founding fathers understood that our democracy depends on it. As historian Alan Taylor has observed, they knew emperors and kings could easily mislead uneducated publics. The survival of the founders’ new republic necessitated a public wise enough to keep power within bounds. It required citizens capable of resolving the tension between private interests and the common good—people imbued, in the language of the time, with civic virtue.

  At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a woman was said to have asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government the delegates had created for the people. He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” What did “keeping it” require? More than anything else, education. “Ignorance and despotism seem made for each other,” Jefferson warned. But if the new nation could “enlighten the people generally…tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” During the colonial era a few towns ran public grammar schools—but only for a few weeks in the winter when family farms didn’t require their children’s labor. Other towns relied on private tuition. After the Revolution, reformers pushed for free public education. Jedediah Peck of upstate New York typified the reform movement. “In all countries where education is confined to a few people,” he warned, “we always find arbitrary governments and abject slavery.” Peck persuaded the New York legislature to create a comprehensive system of public education.

  The person most credited with founding American public schooling, Massachusetts educator Horace Mann, also linked public education to democracy. “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people,” he wrote, “must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.” Mann believed it important that public schools educate all children together, “in common.” The mix of ethnicities, races, and social classes in the same schools would help children learn the habits and attitudes of citizenship. (His project was not without fault: It emphasized Protestantism over Catholicism, for example, which was one reason Catholics created their own private schools.) The goal of inculcating public morality extended through higher education as well. Charles W. Eliot, who became president of Harvard in 1869, believed “the best solution to the problem of national order lay in the education of individuals to the ideals of service, stewardship, and cooperation.”

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  If the common good is to be restored, education must be reconnected to these public moral roots. We must stop thinking about it solely as a private investment that may lead to a good-paying job, and revive the founders’ understanding of it as a public good that helps train young people in responsible citizenship. This requires that schools focus not just on building skills but also on teaching civic obligations. For starters, every child should gain an understanding of our political system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. They must understand the meaning and importance of the rule of law, and why no one should be above it, and they need to know where these legacies came from, and why they continue to be important. This is what we demand of people who want to become naturalized citizens: Immigrants have to pass a civics test covering the organization of the U.S. government and American history. When I served as secretary of labor I had the privilege of administering the Pledge of Allegiance to some of those who had passed that test, and witnessed their pride and gratitude in being welcomed into citizenship.

  Every child must also understand the difference between how our system should work and how it actually works, and why we all have an obligation to seek to bridge that gap. Which means they must grasp the meaning and importance of justice—of equal political rights and equal economic opportunity, and how these two goals are related. They need to see how the economy is organized, how its rules are made, and what groups and interests have the most influence in making those rules. They must learn to be open to new thoughts and ideas, and practice tolerance toward different beliefs, ethnicities, races, and religions. They need to learn about basic human rights, and America’s responsibilities in the world. As political philosopher Martha Nussbaum has suggested, students should learn not only that citizens of India have equal basic human rights, for example, but also about the problems of hunger and pollution in India and the implications of these problems for the larger issues of global hunger and global ecology.

  Civic education must instill in young people a passion for truth. It should enable them to think critically, be skeptical (but not cynical) about what they hear and read, find reliable sources of information, apply basic logic and analysis, and know enough about history and the physical world to differentiate fact from fiction. They need to understand how important the truth is to democracy, and to our capacity to deliberate together about the common good.

  Such an education must, finally, encourage civic virtue. It should explain and illustrate the profound differences between doing whatever it takes to win and acting for the common good; between getting as much as one can get for oneself and giving back to society; between assuming everyone is in it for themselves and understanding that we’re all in it together; between seeking personal celebrity, wealth, or power and helping to build a better society for all. An education in civic virtue should explain why the latter choices are morally necessary.

  Such an education must also urge and equip young people to communicate with others who do not share their views. It should teach them how to listen, to open their minds to the possibility that their own views and preconceptions may be wrong, and to discover why people with opposing views believe what they do. It should enable them to work with others to separate facts and logic from values and beliefs, and help them find facts and apply logic together even if their values and beliefs differ.

  These lessons cannot be learned only in the classroom. A true civic education also requires learning by doing. Young people must develop the “habits of the heart,” as Tocqueville called them, by taking on responsibilities in their communities—working in homeless shelters and soup kitchens, tutoring, mentoring, coaching kids’ sports teams, helping the elderly and infirm. Young people need to move out of their bubbles of class, race, religion, and ideology, and to go to places and engage in activities where people look differe
nt from themselves, and have different beliefs and outlooks from their own. They must learn to communicate with them. They need to learn how to learn from them.

  Two years of required public service would give young people an opportunity to learn civic responsibility by serving the common good directly. It should be a duty of citizenship. This is how we once regarded military service. From World War II until the final days of the Vietnam War, in January 1973, nearly every young man in America faced the prospect of being drafted. Sure, many children of the rich found means to stay out of harm’s way, but the draft at least spread responsibility and heightened the public’s sensitivity to the human costs of war. Richard Nixon officially ended the draft and created a paid military mainly to take the wind out of the sails of the antiwar movement, and he succeeded.

  Since then, the United States has had what’s called an “all-volunteer” army—“volunteer” only in the sense that for some young people these jobs are the best they can get. Today’s military is composed of fewer young people from rich families than the population as a whole. When compared with other groups of the same age, the military also has more Southerners and a higher percentage of African Americans. Most come from the same kind of blue-collar households whose incomes have gone nowhere for four decades. It’s easy to support a war that you don’t have to fight in. A 2004 survey showed that the majority of young people supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq but only a small minority were themselves willing to fight in that war.