Robert Reich: What Unites Us – OpEd

After a horrifying week — horrifying not just because of a politically motivated assassination but also the brutish and angry response from people who should be pulling the nation together rather than adding fuel to its divisions — many of you are understandably worried about America’s future. 

As I travel around the United States, I hear concerns that America is losing its identity. 

But what is that identity? If you examine our history, you’ll see that the core of that identity has not been the whiteness of our skin, or the uniformity of our ethnicity, or agreement on religion, or like-mindedness about sexual preference or orientation.

The core of our national identity has been the ideals we share: our commitments to the rule of law, to democratic institutions of government, to truth, to tolerance of our differences, to equal political rights, and to equal opportunity. 

We have not always achieved these ideals, to be sure, but most of us have been committed to seeking to achieve them. Indeed, generations of Americans have been willing to sacrifice their lives for these ideals. 

These shared commitments inform our judgments about right and wrong. They constitute America. Without them, there is no “we” in We the People. 

Trump and his lackeys want us to forget these shared commitments. He is using every tool at his disposal — even this past week’s heinous murder — to subvert them. 

But We the People will not — must not — let him.

• This article was published at Robert Reich’s Substack

About Robert Reich

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, and writes at robertreich.substack.com. Reich served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.

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