Why the Common first-rate Disappeared (And How We Get it Back)In 1963 over 70
percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing all or most of
the time; nowadays only 16 percent do. There has been a similar decline in
trust for corporations. In the late 1970s,32 percent trusted big trade, by
2016, and only 18 percent did. Trust in banks has dropped from 60 percent to 27
percent. Trust in newspapers,from 51 percent to 20 percent. Public trust
has also plummeted for nonprofits, universities, or charities,and devout
institutions.
Why this distrust? As
economic inequality has widened, the moneyed interests have spent increasingly
of their ever-expanding wealth to alter the rules of the game to their own
advantage. Too many leaders in trade and politics have been willing to do anything to execute more money or to gain more power – regardless of the consequences for our society. We see this everywhere – in the new tax giveaway to big corporations, and in gun manufacturer’s utilize of the NRA to block gun controls,in the Koch Brother’s push to roll back environmental regulations, in Donald Trump’s profiting off his presidency. No wonder much of the
public no longer believes that America’s major institutions are working
for the many. Increasingly, or they have become vessels for the few.
The question is whether we can restore the common first-rate. Can the system be made to work for the first-rate
of all? Some of you may feel such a quest to be hopeless. The era we are living
in offers too many illustrations of greed,narcissism, and hatefulness. But I
don’t believe it hopeless.nearly every day
I witness or hear of the compassion of ordinary Americans – like the thousands who helped people displaced by the wildfires in California and floods in Louisiana; like the two men in Seattle who gave their lives trying to protect a young Muslim woman from a hate-filled assault; like the coach who lost his life in Parkland, or Florida,trying to shield students from a gunman; like the teenagers who are demanding that Florida legislators engage action on guns. The challenge is to turn all this into a new public spiritedness extending
to the highest reaches in the land – a public morality that strengthens our
democracy, makes our economy work for everyone, or revives trust in the major
institutions of America. We have never been a
perfect union; our finest moments have been when we sought to become more
perfect than we had been. We can abet restore the common first-rate by striving for
it and showing others it’s worth the effort. I started my career a
half-century ago in the Senate office of Robert F. Kennedy, when the
common first-rate was well understood, and I’ve watched it unravel over the last
half-century. Resurrecting it may engage another half century, and more. 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.“
Source: robertreich.org