Coming up Short

Robert B. Reich, an economist, professor, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor, traces nearly eight decades of American life to argue that widening economic inequality and the corruption of democracy by corporate money created the conditions for Donald Trump's rise. Born in 1946, within weeks of Trump, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, Reich frames his life as a sustained effort to stop bullies, from schoolyard toughs to powerful economic and political actors. He traces a shift that began in the late 1970s: Most Americans' incomes flattened even as the economy grew, with roughly $50 trillion transferred from the bottom 90 percent to the richest one percent over subsequent decades. Trump, Reich argues, exploited the resulting anger by directing it at scapegoats while doing nothing to address the underlying corruption.

Reich grew up in South Salem, New York, the son of Ed Reich, a World War II medic who returned home to run a women's clothing shop. On Labor Day 1947, a delegation of older men informed the family that South Salem was "a Christian community," a coded warning that Jews were unwelcome; Ed threw them out and resolved to stay permanently. A liberal Republican, Ed detested political bullies, particularly Senator Joseph McCarthy. Reich connects McCarthy's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, directly to Trump: Cohn reinvented himself as a New York power broker who mentored the young real estate developer, bequeathing to him "a penchant for ruthless bullying, profane braggadocio, opportunistic bigotry, lying, and more lying" (20).

Reich's childhood was shaped by relentless bullying over his short stature, caused by Fairbank's disease, a rare condition that left him at four feet eleven inches. Classmates at Lewisboro Elementary School dragged him to mock courts and threatened him. A turning point came when his third-grade teacher, Alice Camp, wrote "AMBITIOUS" on the blackboard to describe him, the first time he felt successful at anything. During childhood summers in upstate New York, Reich met Mickey, a kind teenager who shielded him from bullies. Years later, at Dartmouth College in 1964, Reich learned that Mickey, whose full name was Michael Schwerner, had been beaten and murdered by Ku Klux Klan members in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, a voter registration campaign. The murder transformed Reich: he began to see bullying on a systemic scale, recognizing patterns of racial, economic, and gendered oppression.

At Dartmouth, Reich was elected class president and helped recruit college students for Eugene McCarthy's antiwar presidential campaign. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968 devastated him. That fall, he met Bill Clinton on a ship crossing the Atlantic; both were Rhodes Scholars, recipients of a prestigious scholarship to study at Oxford. Clinton brought chicken soup to the seasick Reich. At Oxford, both wrestled with the Vietnam draft. Reich was declared unfit for military service because of his height, and he recognized the class divide between those who served, mostly without college degrees, and those who avoided it.

At Yale Law School, Reich introduced Clinton to Hillary Rodham, a fellow law student, and took Robert Bork's antitrust seminar, challenging Bork's narrow view that antitrust law should serve only to lower consumer prices. Reich identifies a pivotal 1971 memo from attorney Lewis Powell, later a Supreme Court justice, urging the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to mobilize corporations politically. The memo galvanized corporate America: Political action committees grew from fewer than 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by 1980, and by the 1990s corporations employed roughly 61,000 lobbyists. Reich traces the consequences: Antitrust laws were defanged, worker protections diluted, Wall Street deregulated, and taxes on the wealthy slashed. He contrasts Powell's memo with philosopher John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, published the same year, which argued that a just society would be one designed under a "veil of ignorance" about one's own position. Rawls's theory, Reich argues, proved no match for Powell's invitation to legalized bribery.

At the Federal Trade Commission under Jimmy Carter, Reich watched corporate lobbyists shut down the agency's funding. After Ronald Reagan fired all Carter appointees, Reich joined the Harvard faculty and befriended the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, his most important intellectual mentor. Galbraith believed corrective forces within capitalism would restore balance; Reich argues that a vicious cycle took hold instead, with growing corporate power siphoning ever more wealth upward. In the 1980s, corporate raiders transformed corporations from entities serving workers and communities into vehicles for maximizing shareholder returns, hollowing out entire regions and fueling working-class anger.

When Clinton won the presidency in 1992, Reich headed the economic transition team and became Secretary of Labor. A defining tension emerged with Robert Rubin, Clinton's chief economic adviser and former Goldman Sachs co-chairman. Rubin argued that reducing the federal deficit would win Wall Street's confidence; Reich countered that public investments in education and healthcare would generate greater growth. Clinton repeatedly sided with Rubin. At Rubin's urging, Clinton pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and deregulated the derivatives market—a market for complex financial instruments used to speculate on underlying assets—overriding warnings from Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Clinton also repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law separating commercial from investment banking. Rubin then joined Citigroup, the megabank created in anticipation of the repeal. These decisions directly contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

As labor secretary, Reich pushed a minimum wage increase through a Republican Congress, giving 10 million workers a raise. But after Republicans led by Newt Gingrich won both chambers in 1994, the political environment grew nastier. Congressman David Obey warned Reich that working-class men felt "emasculated" by factory closings and stagnant wages. Reich left the administration after the 1996 election, prompted by his younger son Sam's request to "just know you're here with us." He remained proud of specific achievements but haunted by the sense that the administration had hastened widening inequality and political corruption.

Reich argues that the Democratic failure to embrace economic populism left a void that Republican cultural populism filled. Roger Ailes built Fox News on anti-liberal mockery, channeling economic resentment into cultural grievance. The contested 2000 election, decided by a partisan Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore, further eroded public trust. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out $16 trillion in homeowner wealth; 10 million families lost their homes while no top banker was indicted. Barack Obama appointed the same Clinton-era economists who had deregulated Wall Street, and the bailout deepened mistrust of a system widely viewed as rigged. The Tea Party emerged on the right and the Occupy movement on the left, but neither translated into lasting political change.

In fall 2015, Reich traveled through the heartland and found raw anger. People across party lines described the system as 'rigged' and expressed enthusiasm for both Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist senator from Vermont, and Trump. The American dream had faded: Americans born in the early 1940s had a 92 percent chance of earning more than their parents, while those born in the 1980s had only a fifty-fifty chance. Reich traces the death of the Republican Party as a governing institution, from his father's liberal Republicanism through Richard Nixon's corruption and Reagan's anti-government ideology to Trump's authoritarian turn. He identifies five elements of fascism, including rejection of democracy in favor of a strongman, nationalism based on racial superiority, and disdain for women and nontraditional gender identities, and argues that Trump exhibits all five. He details the 2024 billionaire effort to reinstall Trump, with Elon Musk alone donating more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

In the final section, Reich outlines 'the long game': sustained activism that may not achieve its goals in one's lifetime but makes life meaningful. He credits Joe Biden with nearly reviving 'democratic capitalism' through large-scale public investment, aggressive antitrust enforcement, and a pro-labor agenda. Reflecting on 20 years of teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Reich acknowledges that his boomer generation failed to build the decent society within its grasp. The responsibility now falls to the next generation, and he remains optimistic because of the young people he works with, whom he trusts to repair the damage.