The Common Good

Robert B. Reich opens by recalling how, at age 14, he heard John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural call to national service. That moment, and his later work as a summer intern in Robert F. Kennedy's Senate office, shaped his belief that citizens owe something to the society they share. Writing more than 50 years later, Reich acknowledges that while American life has grown more convenient and more inclusive, civic life has sharply deteriorated. A cultural shift beginning in the late 1970s replaced collective purpose with self-aggrandizement. Trust in every major American institution has plummeted. Reich frames Donald Trump not as the cause of this decline but as its consequence, the product of decades of eroding trust and widening anxiety. The book asks what Americans owe one another as members of the same society.

Reich begins with a case study. Martin Shkreli, born in Brooklyn to Albanian immigrant janitors, rose through intellectual talent and entrepreneurial drive. In 2015, as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Shkreli purchased the U.S. rights to Daraprim, the only approved treatment for toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease dangerous to cancer patients and people with AIDS, and raised its price over 5,000 percent. Called before Congress, he invoked the Fifth Amendment and tweeted that the members were "imbeciles." He was later convicted of fraud in a separate scheme involving his hedge fund investors. Reich uses Shkreli to illustrate a broader pattern: someone willing to do whatever it takes to win, who believes norms do not apply to him and shows contempt for institutional authority. He draws a similar conclusion about John Stumpf, the former CEO of Wells Fargo Bank, whose company admitted to massive consumer fraud, creating millions of unauthorized accounts, while Stumpf's stock holdings rose approximately $200 million.

Having established the problem, Reich defines the common good as shared values about mutual obligations that citizens voluntarily observe, the norms and ideals that hold a society together. He addresses the critique of Ayn Rand, the Russian-born novelist and philosopher whose father's business was confiscated during the Russian Revolution. Rand called the common good "an undefined and undefinable concept" and argued that forced redistribution leads to tyranny. Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick formalized similar views in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Reich traces Rand's influence on contemporary conservatism, noting that Trump, members of his administration, and House Speaker Paul Ryan all identified with her philosophy. Reich contends that without voluntary adherence to common notions of right and wrong, life would be a jungle of pure self-interest. Citizens must agree on basic principles, including the importance of democratic institutions, obligations to the law, and respect for truth.

Reich identifies truth itself as a common good and argues that civic trust is self-reinforcing: Societies with strong commitment to the common good more willingly accept change because citizens trust they will not be unfairly burdened. He distinguishes the common good from nationalism, arguing that America's core identity rests on shared ideals rather than ethnicity, and identifies the nation's "original sin" as the exclusion of Native Americans and African Americans from equal citizenship. He traces the historical roots of the common good through the founders' understanding of civic virtue, James Madison's writings in The Federalist Papers, Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that American democracy drew strength from "habits of the heart" cultivated through self-governance, and legal traditions stretching from the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi to the U.S. Constitution. He connects these ideas to American traditions of barn-raisings, volunteer firefighting, and civic improvement, and to religious roots including John Winthrop's 1630 sermon urging Puritans to "delight in each other, make others' conditions our own." Reich summarizes the common good as commitments to the rule of law, democratic institutions, truth, tolerance, equal rights and opportunity, civic participation, and sacrifice. These are not rights citizens possess but obligations they owe one another.

The book's middle section examines what happened to the common good. Reich likens it to a pool of trust that can be exploited by those seeking selfish gain: The first person to break unwritten rules enjoys a huge advantage, but once others catch on, everyone bears the costs of new precautions, and competitive pressures erode standards further. He presents a timeline of breakdowns from 1964 to 2017, from the Gulf of Tonkin deception and Watergate to the 2008 financial crisis and the Wells Fargo fraud. Invoking Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's concept of "defining deviancy down," Reich contends that conduct once considered wrong has become normalized.

Reich identifies three chain reactions behind this erosion. The first is whatever-it-takes politics, traced from Watergate through the scorched-earth tactics surrounding Robert Bork's 1987 Supreme Court nomination, Newt Gingrich's transformation of the House in the 1990s into an arena of obstruction, and the escalating cycle of executive overreach under subsequent presidents. The second is the pursuit of profit at any cost. In the 1980s, corporate raiders forced CEOs to focus exclusively on short-term shareholder value, displacing an earlier model in which executives balanced obligations to shareholders, employees, customers, and the public. CEO pay soared from 20 times the typical worker's wage in the 1960s to nearly 300 times by 2017, while the profit-maximization ethos spread into health care and banking, contributing to the 2008 crash. The third is the rigging of economic rules through political spending, which Reich traces to Lewis Powell's 1971 memo urging the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to mobilize business politically. The number of corporate Political Action Committees (PACs) mushroomed from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by 1980. The consequences included Wall Street deregulation, concentrated corporate power, and tax reductions favoring the wealthy. A study by political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that the preferences of average Americans had a "near-zero" impact on public policy.

Reich documents the cumulative damage. By 2016, the typical household's net worth was 14 percent lower than in 1984. Between 1972 and 2016, the typical worker's pay dropped two percent after inflation even as the economy nearly doubled. Only half of adults born in the mid-1980s were earning more than their parents, compared to 90 percent of those born in the early 1940s. Trust in government fell from over 60 percent in 1963 to 16 percent. Americans increasingly joined together not for shared civic purpose but to purchase services in exclusive communities, effectively seceding by income. Reich rejects sociologist Charles Murray's argument that the white working class brought its problems on itself, arguing instead that stagnant wages and disappearing jobs are the cause, not the symptom, of social breakdown.

The book's final section asks whether the common good can be restored. Reich argues that better laws alone are insufficient because no consensus for them exists; restoration must begin with the attitudes that shape public morality. He proposes four strategies. First, leadership must be redefined as trusteeship: Leaders of institutions must prioritize rebuilding public trust over accumulating wealth or power. He cites Senator John McCain's 2017 return to Washington, while being treated for brain cancer, to vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act, and extends the argument to CEOs, noting the example of Arthur T. Demoulas of the New England supermarket chain Market Basket, who prioritized employees and customers over short-term profits.

Second, honor and shame must be reconnected to the common good. Reich criticizes the practice of bestowing honors on wealthy donors without examining how their wealth was obtained and proposes honoring whistle-blowers, civil servants, teachers, and first responders instead. Third, truth must be actively defended against suppression by wealthy interests, government officials, and media organizations that prioritize profits over public service. He proposes reforms including codes of ethics, editorial independence, and laws preventing data-mining firms from exploiting personal information. Fourth, civic education must be renewed. Reich traces the founders' understanding of education as essential to democracy, citing Thomas Jefferson's warning that "ignorance and despotism seem made for each other" and the vision of Horace Mann, widely credited as the founder of American public schooling, who believed schools should educate all children together. Reich calls for two years of required public service, analogous to the military draft, through an expanded Peace Corps, Teach For America, or nonprofit service work.

Reich concludes by restating that America's national identity rests on shared ideals, not ethnicity, and that the sense of common good can be recovered through trusteeship, honor, truth, and education. He invokes theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope."