Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, retired from his full-time teaching role at UC Berkeley two years ago, but he still hopes to educate America.
In recent years, aided by his son, Sam (CEO of Dropout), the 79-year-old has developed an impressive social media following, warning of the perils of an unfettered oligarchy and rampant inequality.
And for reading audiences, he has now written a book, “Coming Up Short,” that’s a mix of memoir, history, and political analysis; the book recounts how the 4-foot-11-inch Reich (he was born with Fairbank’s Syndrome) spent much of his early life dealing with bullies and how it taught him why it’s important to stand up for the little guy in politics, too.
Reich spoke recently by video. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Did you set out to write a memoir and flesh it out, or did you set out to write about bullying and Ayn Randian greed and personalize it with your story?
You’re crediting me with more of a rational process than I deserve. It was probably both, in a subconscious way. I wanted to explain the rise of Trump, and it was impossible to do it without looking at the last 50 years, and I thought, “Well, I lived a lot of this and was right in the middle of it.”
I did have to take out a bunch of stuff that I wrote originally from my early years to focus it more on the central themes of brutality and bullying.
Q. You’ve talked about how inequality in income and wealth creates a host of other inequalities – in healthcare, housing, education.
It’s incumbent on all of us who are trying to describe what is happening today to, at least on occasion, take a 30,000-foot view and show people the relationship between one thing and another, connect the dots.
Unless you do that, people are more vulnerable than ever, particularly working-class people, poor people. They just don’t know what’s happening, and they don’t know why it’s happening. Sometimes they take it personally and feel like they have failed when, in fact, the system is failing them.
Q. Not surprisingly, you’re quite critical of Republicans, but you also spend time taking your own party to task. Why was that equally important?
Coming out of the Second World War, the Democratic Party had a powerful tradition of being on the side of the little guy. I take the Democratic Party to task because you have all of these working-class people in the United States – today, 40% of American adults have a college degree – and they’ve been floundering. The Republicans at least gave these people reasons, even if they were wrong – they’ve blamed immigrants and the deep state and communists and socialists and everybody else.
When I left the Clinton administration, I felt guilty that I had not done as good a job as I could have done in arguing my side of the case, but as I got more distance from it, I began to see that there were much greater forces at work, like Wall Street and big corporations.
The Democrats refused repeatedly to talk about the real causes, the abuse of power by big corporations and the wealthy, in terms of rigging the market.
Bernie Sanders has talked about it, AOC has talked about it, but the Democratic Party did not want to bite the hands that feed it, and that’s a core violation of the social contract and a core problem if we ever want to get out of the quagmire we’re in.
Q. You write about both side-isms and the responsibility of journalism. What is the media’s responsibility as far as being fair but also being true and not being bullied by corporate interests?
The ultimate responsibility is not only to tell the truth, but also to be clear that choices are involved, inevitably, in what stories are covered, and how they’re covered. The choice is no longer Republican versus Democrat, the old left versus the old right; the transcendent choice today is really democracy, small “d,” or totalitarianism, and we are sliding toward tyranny.
Under these circumstances, the media and journalists have a moral responsibility to warn people of what’s happening – the gerrymandering that just happened in Texas is a good example of that. Donald Trump telling [Texas Governor] Greg Abbott, “I want five more seats,” and Abbott then getting them from the legislature is a direct assault on our democracy, and how can it be described in any other way? Therefore, every other story flows from that knowledge and from the knowledge of what has happened as power becomes more and more centralized in Trump’s hands.
Q. You’re still writing books, but you’re also a social media star. Is that more important for building change from the ground up with younger people?
Well, I don’t call myself a social media star. And I’m not so grandiose as to think my videos are going to in any way change America. But I do think of myself as a teacher, and these videos are an extension of my classrooms. If I’m successful getting through to young people, they begin to connect dots and see the world differently.
Q. How important are the specific policies you lay out, like ending the carried interest loophole or profit sharing?
People love specific ideas, so I wanted to give some. Big companies do profit sharing with their top executives and with their talent, but why not with everybody? But my bigger point really is that if we understand our collective interest, we can end this crippling oligarchy and have a democracy that is truly buoyant and strong.
My generation felt a sense of agency because of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, in which we – and I’m speaking for an entire generation, which I shouldn’t do – felt that we had changed America. The younger generation doesn’t have that sense of agency. But they could, and they will be able to change America. That’s where my faith lies.
Q. So you have some hope for the future?
I’m hopeful about people like AOC and Zohran Mamdani, and many other young politicians who are telling the truth and have the ability to tell the truth and break through the media and have a certain charisma and dedication.
But it’s also young people today in their 20s and early 30s – I’m excited and optimistic by their dedication and enthusiasm, their commitment to social justice, their willingness to really work for it. When all is said and done, they are the heroes of tomorrow. They’re going to inherit this mess and they’re ready for it.