Quotes from Robert B Reich

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. He might have added that everyone is entitled to their own interpretations but not their own logic. When we accept lies as facts, or illogic as logic, we lose the shared reality necessary to tackle our common problems. We become powerless.

Our core identity—the most precious legacy we have been given by the generations who came before us—is the ideals we share, the good we hold in common. If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing our sense of the common good.

Patriotism based on the common good does not pander to divisiveness. True patriots don't fuel racist or religious or ethnic divisions. They aren't homophobic or sexist or racist. To the contrary, true patriots confirm the good that we have in common. They seek to strengthen and celebrate the "We" in "We the people.

It is a central obligation of politicians as well as journalists, researchers, scientists, and academicians to inform the public of the truth, and to identify lies without fear of retribution. It is the civic responsibility of all of us to check the facts we read or hear, to find and depend upon reliable sources, to share the truth with others, and hold accountable those who lie to us or suppress the truth.

Democracy depends on citizens who are able to recognize the truth, analyze and weigh alternatives, and civilly debate their future, just as it depends on citizens who have an equal voice and equal stake in it. Without an educated populace, a common good cannot even be discerned. This is fundamental.

Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

We can help restore the common good by striving for it and showing others it's worth the effort.

But in modern America we often shame the wrong people. Instead of deterring behavior that undermines the common good, shame is too often deployed against people who don't fit in—to ostracize them even further.

Is there no virtue among us?" asked James Madison, rhetorically. "If there be not, no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.

Our compact is not just with those who are alive today. It's also with those who have come before us and those yet to be born. To the founding fathers, the Constitution and our system of government established a moral bond connecting generations. "There seems…to be some foundation in the nature of things, in the relation which one generation bears to another, for the descent of obligations from one to another

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.

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. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history.

them. In this way, civic trust is self-enforcing and self-perpetuating. As James Madison put it when advocating the Bill of Rights, the mere knowledge of its existence would "extinguish from the bosom of every member of the community any apprehensions, that there are those among his countrymen who wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled.

America's original sin was not the exclusion of people born outside the nation's borders from citizenship. It was the exclusion of many people who had lived here even before the start of the Republic—in particular, Native Americans and African Americans. For most of its existence, America found it relatively easy to assimilate foreigners, although there were periods of sharp and even violent tension.

Carl Friedrich captured the distinction in 1935: "To be an American is an ideal, while to be a Frenchman is a fact.

Once norms are broken without consequence, further breakage ensues.

As more windows shatter, other aspects of community life also start unraveling. The unspoken norm becomes: Do whatever you want here because everyone else is doing it.

In 1980, the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans provided 10 percent of contributions to federal elections. By 2012, they provided 40 percent. The Supreme Court has made all this worse through a series of decisions holding that money is speech under the First Amendment and corporations are people.

After examining 1,799 policy issues in detail, two eminent researchers, Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, concluded that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

By 2016, the typical American household had a net worth 14 percent lower than the typical household in 1984, while the richest one-tenth of 1 percent owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. Income has become almost as unequal as wealth: Between 1972 and 2016 the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent, adjusted for inflation, although the American economy nearly doubled in size. Most of the income gains went to the top.

Nearly one out of every five is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck. Along with pay, employment benefits have been shriveling. The gap in life expectancy between the nation's most affluent and everyone else is widening as well.

Rather than come together for the common good, we come together to get the best possible deal. We're clustering by income—attracting members who can contribute the most while excluding those who are more costly.

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 idea of "the common good" was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for "We the people" seeking to "promote the general welfare"—not for "me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.