LAURA FLANDERS & FRIENDS

ROBERT REICH FIGHTS DEMOCRACY’S BULLIES

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LAURA FLANDERS: If today’s guest wasn’t so generous, kind, and funny, he could really get under one’s skin. For one thing, he is utterly clear-eyed about all the chances that he and his generation had to make the US better, healthier, and more fair, and how they blew all those chances one by one. He’s also under no illusion about how those very failures led to the deadly regime of cruelty, chaos, and corruption that we are living through now. He’s starring in a film about the importance of public education, and how he’s leaving that field just as it’s fighting for its life. And he has just published a very poignant book on all this, which came out in August, making for a miserable vacation reading. As if all of that wasn’t exasperating enough, he also has the gall to publish a cheery, resistance-focused Substack that assured readers recently that presidential war mongering and a looming recession aside, rebellion is rising and the overthrow of despotism is close. He also makes endless bad puns about his diminutive height. I’m referring, of course, to the towering social critic and economic powerhouse, former Labor secretary and longtime professor, Robert Reich, who knows I’m kidding, I hope. Robert Reich’s latest book, just out, is titled, “Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America.” The documentary about his teaching career called “The Last Class” is playing in cinemas across the US. He’s the co-founder of Inequality Media and hosts the weekly “Coffee Klatch” podcast, as well as writes a newsletter on Substack. He’s a social media star with his sketches and explainers. It is my very great pleasure to welcome back to the program Robert Reich, welcome.

ROBERT REICH: Well, thank you. Laura, it’s nice to see you again.

LAURA FLANDERS: You too. So let’s get the cheery stuff out of the way to begin, shall we?

ROBERT REICH: Oh, no, no. We need more cheeriness stuff. Let’s make this entire discussion cheerful. It wouldn’t bother me.

LAURA FLANDERS: Well, we’ll get back to here, but let’s start there. You know, I believe in focusing on the positive, and that’s what you did in your most recent Substack newsletter. Right as I was descending into the pits of despair, here you are saying that as you travel around the country with your book and the film, you are finding the spirit of rebellion rising. Really? What are you seeing? What can you tell us to cheer us up?

ROBERT REICH: Well, I’m seeing a lot of Americans, even in so-called red states, people who tell me that they voted for Donald Trump, saying that they regret their votes. They think he’s the worst president in American history. And many people are just are at wits’ end. And I’ve been across the country, you know, hawking, peddling my book. And the irony, of course, is that the book, “Coming Up Short,” is about America coming up short, not only because I’m very short, but America coming up short in terms of not dealing with the underlying problems that culminated with Donald Trump.

LAURA FLANDERS: Well, that’s where I want to go next, because you are saying in this recent Substack that Trump might be losing. But your book, as you just pointed out, documents, describes these long-term trends that go way beyond fixing through a change in the occupant of the White House or a majority in Congress. So how do you square those two things? You call it ironic, but it’s more than that.

ROBERT REICH: Well, actually, Laura, you and I over the years have talked about some of these underlying trends, and particularly, the twin trends of widening inequality of income and wealth, and political power, but also, with that widening inequality, comes more and more corruption. We saw, even before Donald Trump, a society and an economy and a politics that was getting out of control. We could not have stayed on the road we were on. Sadly, it has ended, at least this part of the road, with Donald Trump. I hope we are going to be learning something from this horrible experience.

LAURA FLANDERS: Well, what do you learn from the failures that you document in the book? Or maybe I should say, because there’s a lot of them in there, which ones haunt you most? Which do you think were the most decisive, welfare reform, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement? You were in the Clinton administration in those early years.

ROBERT REICH: Well, I tried to fight, Laura, very hard, and I am proud of some things that were done. The Family and Medical Leave Act, I think, was a major milestone. I think that, I was an advisor to Obama. I think the Affordable Care Act was very, very important. I mean, Democrats and Democratic presidents have achieved some important milestones over the past several decades. But I was also around when Bill Clinton deregulated Wall Street, which, I think, was the beginning of what we ultimately saw in 2008, a financial crisis in which the banks were bailed out, but nobody else was. A lot of, you know, millions of homeowners lost their homes, and millions of people lost their savings and jobs. I also was there at the beginning when NAFTA and Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization were also being pushed by the Clinton administration. You know, Laura, we used to have an unwritten contract in this country, kind of a social contract, that if you did work hard, if you played by the rules, if you were good parents, if you tried very hard, you would not only do better during the course of your working life, but your children would do better than you. And that is what has come apart, particularly for people without college degrees, particularly for families without college degrees, particularly in particular areas of the country that have been overlooked in terms of the new economy. And so many people have become so disaffected and angry, and felt looked down upon by these winds of change. And the United States didn’t do anything. We didn’t really help the people who were being left behind become part of the future. That’s the error, that’s the fundamental error. That’s, I think, the kind of problem that invited a Donald Trump, invited a demagogue, because when you have that many people who are disaffected and feel oppressed by a system, then when somebody comes along who is saying, “Well, I’m not part of that system, I’m gonna be your voice, I’m gonna be your”- “Representative. I’m going to Be there for you,” that’s called a strongman. That’s not part of democracy, that’s part of autocracy, that’s part of neo-fascism.

LAURA FLANDERS: So you have this shaving off, especially of the white parts of the working class, into this kind of zone of being easily manipulated, with a deflector in chief as our president. Of all the crises and concerning developments on the horizon right now, where are you most focused, Robert? Which development frightens you most? Is it the jobs crash, as you’ve called it? Is it the environment? Is it the ICE abductions, cops and troops on the streets, the courts, which?

ROBERT REICH: I think worrisome things are, number one, the loss of democracy, the loss of our rule of law. And with that, everything from due process to the safety that we should feel as individuals in what had been the world’s leading democracy. That there is not going to be recrimination against us if we criticize the president, that we can not worry that there is going to be maybe police who will be grabbing us off the street and disappearing us because we have brown skin or speak with an accent. I mean, these are fundamentals. And as a Jewish child, I grew up in a house in the shadow of Hitler and Nazi Germany. I remember my parents in the ’50s just overwhelmed in terms of their feelings of fear and disgust that this went on.

LAURA FLANDERS: You tell a great story, a powerfully memorable story, in the book about moving house, and what you thought was a welcoming committee coming to your door.

ROBERT REICH: I was only, you know, three or four years old. So this is recounted to me by my parents. But when we moved into this community in Northern New York State, we were met by a group of older men who came to our door. My mother thought they were a welcoming committee, but they were not a welcoming committee. She invited them in. They did not wanna sit down. She asked, you know, she said, “Please, sit down.” No, they wouldn’t. My father said, “What is this about?” And they said, “Mr. and Mrs. Reich, we want you to know that this is a Christian community, and we don’t feel that you will be happy here. You will not be comfortable here.” Now, you know, that was all my father needed to hear. I mean, he basically threw them out of the house, and then decided, in his very determined way, we would never, ever move from there. But that kind of discrimination, that kind of anger and belligerence, that small-mindedness, well, Laura, in many ways, we’re still living with it.

LAURA FLANDERS: And that kind of courage, I guess what I took from that story was your family’s courage, standing their ground. And I think it’s that that I, for one, I’m looking for, and seeing to some extent out there. One place that some are looking for courage today is the courts. Now, you had an opportunity to consider the chief justiceship of John Roberts, and actually testified about his fitness, or lack thereof, for that position.

ROBERT REICH: But I testified against his becoming chief justice because I looked at his record as a lawyer, as somebody who had been in government. And he seemed to me to be not respectful of the fundamental rights and also the needs of most people. I mean, look, basically, we’re talking about power. I mean, this entire discussion we’ve had so far is about power. One of the themes in my book is bullying, that if you let the people with power just do whatever they want to do, if there are no constraints on them, they will brutalize people who have less power. And whether we’re talking about men versus women, or employers versus employees, or white people versus Black people, or whatever dimension of society we’re talking about, that potential for bullying and brutalization is almost always there. The Supreme Court that I argued before in the 1970s was a court that respected that notion. It understood that one of its fundamental responsibilities was to interpret the Constitution in ways that would protect the vulnerable. This new court, current court, the John Roberts court, does just the opposite.

LAURA FLANDERS: All right, so the court won’t save us, and we can talk in a minute about whether Democrats will save us. Where are the third rails in this moment that we’re in? It seems like we have blown through many of them, landed on many of them, whether it’s raiding Medicaid or talking in concerning ways about Social Security. The Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said recently that these vouchers, these kid coupons, are perhaps a backdoor way to privatize Social Security. Is Social Security, in your view, safe at this moment?

ROBERT REICH: No. Social Security, I used to be a trustee of the Social Security Trust Fund. Social Security is not going to run out of money, I mean, that’s just a myth, but it is going to be under some stress. And the problem with Social Security is that the cap on the proportion of your income, subject to Social Security taxes, has not risen in accordance with how much of the total income of America has gone to the top. In other words, if you’ve simply understood how unequal our income has become, you would raise the cap on income subject to Social Security quite considerably, and maybe, you know, starting at $250,000 a year income all the way up to Elon Musk.

LAURA FLANDERS: Why not?

ROBERT REICH: Well, exactly, why not? That’s what a system should be if we’re equitable. So the problem with Social Security is not that the Social Security Trust Fund is going to run out of money per se. The problem is that it’s not now based on a realistic assessment of the inequality that is now built into our labor market. That needs to be fixed. But I do worry that this administration is going to attack Social Security. Elon Musk, now that we’re talking about Elon Musk, or I was, he and his DOGE did begin to attack the Social Security Administration. And that was sort of, in many ways, a test run, because Social Security had been the third rail of American politics. It has a huge, huge following. People love Social Security. It is one of the most important and favorable programs that the federal government has ever come up with, but that’s why Republicans would like to attack it. And believe me, they will try.

LAURA FLANDERS: What do you think is stopping all of this being felt more keenly among the people that you are seeing, among the people that voted for Donald Trump, and the country at large? I mean, a recession was predicted if the Trump tariffs went through and the attacks on immigrants went through, it hasn’t happened yet. What’s holding it at bay? And if we’re just sort of resting on a little bubble of AI technology, how dangerous is that?

ROBERT REICH: We are resting on very thin ice, whether it’s a bubble, or whatever metaphor you want to use. Laura, I think that the data are, to the extent that we can trust it, and I think we can trust it so far, are showing not only that job growth has stalled, for all intents and purposes, there is no job growth. The reason I believe there’s no job growth is that no sane employer is going to invest in additional capacity at a point in time when you can’t predict anything. You don’t know what Donald Trump is going to do tomorrow with tariffs or with taxes, or with anything else. And he has centralized so much authority, so much power in the Oval Office that his wins, his capricious and arbitrary decisions, are totally unpredictable. So you’re not going to see investment. At the same time, we are seeing inflation, because those tariffs are essentially import taxes, and those import taxes are being paid right now by companies, American companies, they’re importing goods from around the world, and they are beginning to set prices for customers. We are already seeing, in food, in agriculture, in commodities, a huge increase in food prices. People know this, but in narrow political news or political views, it is good news, because it puts the administration into a bind, and it makes it more likely that in the midterm elections of 2026, the Democrats will take back one or both chambers of Congress.

LAURA FLANDERS: That won’t stop it, will it?

ROBERT REICH: Is that going to stop the direction of authoritarianism? Is that going to save us from this neo-fascism? Maybe not. It could slow it down. But ultimately, we have, as American citizens, many more responsibilities than just voting in the midterm elections. We, as individuals and as citizens, can and should do much, much more. More than a century ago, we had the first Gilded Age in the United States that bears remarkable similarity to what we’re going through now. In that first Gilded Age, we had the equivalent of billionaires, the equivalent of Elon Musk. They were called, at that time, robber barons. They ruled American industry. They were monopolists. They made sure that workers were paid very, very little. They corrupted politics. Some of them sent their lackeys to put sacks of money on the desks of client legislators. But the good news is that the public would not stand it. The public rose up. There was a huge outcry, a huge response, negative response, to the first Gilded Age. We had what historians call the Progressive Era, following upon that Gilded Age. And the Progressive Era was an era of great reform, starting with antitrust, anti-monopoly law, laws that restricted what corporations could do. We also instituted an income tax and several wealth taxes. This was a remarkable era, Laura. Now, if you get that kind of response to the first Gilded Age, a Progressive Era, why would we not have another Progressive Era as a response to the Gilded Age we are now in, the second Gilded Age?

LAURA FLANDERS: Do you see Democrats out there who are accepting, who are advancing that agenda? And if so, who? And what do you think of their chances?

ROBERT REICH: Some of them are. I mean, they are the legacies of Bernie Sanders. AOC would be one good example. Mamdani in New York might be another one. There are progressives, good progressives around the country. But rather than tar them with one particular name or one particular brand, I would say that the essential reality here is that we are now in a brutal, bullying, authoritarian regime. And it is absolutely essential that we move from this to a progressive regime, which would be one in which not only are we, once again, a democracy, but we are an economic democracy, that more and more of our institutions respond to the needs of average working people. And we’re now the opposite of that. And everything that’s coming out of Washington is the opposite of that right now.

LAURA FLANDERS: The US government, as we are speaking, has about three weeks left in the last congressional budget appropriation before money runs out. What’s your advice to the Democrats today? Do they try to cut a deal with this administration, or stand firm against it, and shut this government down?

ROBERT REICH: If the Republicans, who now control Congress, say, “We’re not going to give you any role at all, and we are not even going to reassume our constitutional role as Congress,” then I think Democrats have no choice but to say, “Forget it, that’s it. The only way we bring attention to this crisis is we stop and shut the whole place down.”

LAURA FLANDERS: I ask all of our guests on this program the following question, and so I am going to ask you too, Robert Reich, what do you think is the story that the future will tell of this moment? You’ve looked back in your memoir, what about looking forward, I don’t know, 25, 50, 100 years? What do you think the story will be that the future tells about us?

ROBERT REICH: There is, in this history game that we’re now playing, always a dark undercurrent. And I don’t wanna be a Pollyanna. There is the possibility that we give up our democracy and give up on equality, and give up on social justice, and become really a more and more of an oligarchy, a white male oligarchy, in which white male Christian nationalism comes to dominate America. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but certainly, if you just took a picture of what Washington is right now and what Donald Trump has done, and who he is put into positions of leadership, you might come to that conclusion. I refuse.

LAURA FLANDERS: And I refuse with you. Robert Reich, thank you so much for all of your work, past, present, and future. Clearly, you are not giving up or retiring anytime soon. It’s been great having you with us.

ROBERT REICH: Well, thank you, Laura.

LAURA FLANDERS: We’ve always had inequality, going back to feudal times. But there’s a difference. Back then, the feudal lord and the peasants he exploited lived on the same land. Even absentee landlords and monarchs knew those peasants had pitchforks, and they felt the sting of them from time to time. With early factories came the factory floor, but both bosses and workers walked upon it. Globalization and monopoly capital added distance. But it wasn’t until the financial markets took over as a source of wealth that that relationship between power and money, and control became almost invisible to the human eye. It wasn’t the market that was invisible under neo-liberalism, it was that relationship, a relationship that Donald Trump, in his Trumpian way, is making visible once again. When he sends troops and guards, and ICE agents into the streets, they may be masked, but their cruelty is up close and personal, and visible. And there’s almost nowhere that the president can go himself today without getting booed by the peasants of this time. Do they have pitchforks? Well, he may be wondering that. And so are we. We’ll be watching. You can find my full uncut conversation with Robert Reich and hear his thoughts on crypto, among other things, through subscribing to our free podcast. All the information’s at our website. Till the next time, stay kind, stay curious. For “Laura Flanders and Friends,” I’m Laura. For more on this episode and other forward-thinking content, subscribe to our free newsletter for updates, my commentaries, and our full uncut conversations. We also have a podcast. It’s all at lauraflanders.org.