Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: Robert Reich says the origin of our troubles with Trump and MAGA go back to the sixties
he says it was our mistake, starting with the sixties movements – that we created “a giant political void that would eventually be filled by Donald Trump’s angry, bigoted cultural populism.” His new memoir is “Coming Up Short” — we’ll talk about it, later in the hour. But first, how do we face how bad things are now, while also understanding the reasons for hope – and the opportunities for action? Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor and publiser of The Nation, will comment – in a minute.
[BREAK]
Katrina vanden Heuvel, longtime editorial director and publisher of The Nation, has returned to work this week as editor of the magazine. She’s also been a columnist for the Washington Post. She’s written for the New York Times, the LA Times, and The Guardian, where she’s now a regular contributor. Katrina, welcome back
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Thank you, Jon. You know, if I might preempt you, which I’ve done too often on talk TV — These are extreme times, and I felt that, while there will be a successor to me, someone younger, I felt at this moment a trust in The Nation, both as a trust of history, a trusted independent publication, at a time when independent media is under terrible stress. And I’m not fetishizing history, I’m not tethered to history, but I do draw from history to understand what is happening today. I believe that it is an unparalleled, dangerous, perilous time. At the same time, I feel a resilience, having studied and lived through terrible times, and I think that allows me to find the writers and thinkers.
And also my sister used to say her friends loved ‘Yes!’, exclamation point, and she said they love The Nation, but they thought of it as “No!” exclamation point, maybe. But I do think this is a time to lift up what’s happening around this country and the world that offer alternative affirmative projects, because we can’t all live on doom and gloom, and doom scrolling all day. We need, I hate to say, the vision, but to have an alternative sense of what is working and lessons to be drawn, but in ways that are alive and vibrant. And I really feel dedicated to that.
And the executive editor, who will become John Nichols, is also someone I’ve worked with. We’ve devised the honor roll over the years, people doing good things in bad times, good times, not so good times, and drawing that from the thirties, 1930s, from the magazine. There’s a new politics that The Nation in some ways has found a tie to, and we are going to really test that in these coming months and years.
JW: Of course, the publishing landscape, as you’ve suggested, is a lot darker now than when you left day-to-day editing in 2019. Just to remind everybody, the publisher of the Washington Post stood next to Trump at his inauguration. Another of his companies paid $40 million to license a Melania Trump documentary. That’s the Washington Post’s owner. Several of their most important writers left in protest.
More recently, CBS fired its top late night host, Stephen Colbert, whose nightly ridicule of Trump has been relentless and hilarious. And the parent company of CBS, Paramount, paid Trump $16 million for, in quotes, his ‘presidential library’ after he sued them for a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.
And before that, ABC news paid Trump 15 million, again for his presidential library, to settle a defamation lawsuit over a report by George Stephanopoulos. That’s the Washington Post, CBS and ABC.
And some ways much worse is the Republicans in Congress have defunded NPR and PBS. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is closing. And that means many dozens of public radio and TV stations, especially in the less populous red states, will go dark. That is a totalitarian move that’s a lot bigger than networks paying cash to Trump. And that makes independent media, including The Nation, more important than ever. It deepens our responsibilities.
And as you’ve said, the hardest part is facing how bad things are, while we are also seeing the reasons for hope and for action. Doing both of those things simultaneously is hard, but as you say, you’ve had some experience with this.
KVH: Our longtime contributor, you knew him well, Jon, Gore Vidal used to describe The Nation as ‘an early alert warning system’ to what’s coming over the transom, over the fortifications. I think of my colleague, Mark Hartsgaard, whose book ‘On Bended Knee’ was about the media during the Reagan era. This is worse, but I would suggest that we revisit the 1996 National Entertainment Series. The Nation did the first centerfold, which showed GE, ABC, News Corp — It showed that news was a cog in a corporate structure, which had regulatory business in Washington DC. We’re seeing that revealed painfully crystal clear in the Trump years.
The independence of a publication is marked not just by its financial state, but it is in these times largely defined by those who want to be close to a president who thrives on corruption and spectacle and input into his own piggybank. But I do think that the corporate media has shown how craven it is in these last months, and it’s up to The Nation and independent media, not to speak truth to power, Jon, because I believe those in power know the truth, but to expose the truth — so that ordinary people, good people, can seize that news and mobilize. Because if you don’t know, you don’t know what you’re mobilizing for. I do think The Nation does play a critical role in these times. Just briefly, we did a lot of reporting on how Rupert Murdoch bought his way to end the serious cross-ownership rules. Those are going to be obliterated in the next few weeks. And we have his move to LA: the LA Pest is going to open soon.
JW: You’re talking here about Rupert Murdoch’s announcement that he’s launching a California edition of the New York Post right wing tabloid, and this is supposed to happen in early 202,6 based in Los Angeles, called the California Post.
KVH: I think there is very high quality journalism being done at The Nation at other publications that are independent. I’m on the Hillman Media Judging Committee and we see that every year. It’s the business model, Jon, that is still very perilous and dangerous, as we see how the corporate media has capitulated, anticipatorily capitulated, and opened the sluice gates for more peril to the media remaining.
JW: We need to remember that what Trump is doing is not popular, even among his own supporters, right now. His tariffs are the main thing that’s been driving down his approval ratings and causing his 2024 coalition to unravel. Let me just summarize some of the recent data from the Economist-YouGov poll. His overall approval rating just in the six months since he took office: down 21 points. Down 44 points with 18 to 29 year olds. Approval down 30 points with Hispanics since he took office. 29 points down with Independents. Down 20 points with people making less than a hundred thousand dollars a year. And it’s not just the economy, inflation, the high prices for food and rent. He’s underwater on virtually all the issues. Many more people disapprove than approve of what he’s done on immigration, deportations, education, social programs. On healthcare, his approval rating is 35%. So we have big opportunities here — and also big responsibilities.
KVH: I agree. We have opportunity. We have responsibility. Those numbers are exhilarating. It doesn’t mean that those numbers move in a straight line direction. I think the town hall meetings, which we’re going to cover this August, will expose lawmakers to anger and despair, and may open things up. But it demands an opposition party which speaks directly to people’s lives and offers an alternative so that it’s not one and a half parties. I do think the media plays a role here. There are independent media showing the despair and the disillusion, but Trump dominates the news. He still dominates the arena and that needs to change. I think we’re seeing alternative leaders speak in ways that do touch people.
JW: I want to talk about that – because, while the news is terrible, it’s not all bad. Probably the brightest light in the current dark landscape is Mamdani, the Social Democrat who beat former governor Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City. What has The Nation had to say about his campaign?
KVH: Well, you’ll see more next week when the interview John Nichols and I did – the hour interview at the Little Flower Cafe in Astoria, ‘Little Flower’ being the nickname for Zorhan Mamdani’s favorite mayor, Fiorella LaGuardia. What Mamani has done, and I saw him on Sunday with Elizabeth Warren, who came to campaign for him, is make affordability a central premise of a progressive landscape. It’s not the banks, but affordability of groceries, of transportation, of housing. And he’s done it with a smile and an elegance and a use of social media that is truly unparalleled. It shows, it reminds us that The Nation needs, yes, sincerity, but also levity, I mean with a purpose. And I’m impressed.
He came back from Uganda where he went to see his parents and grandparents to introduce them to his new wife. But he came back and he met with a family of the private security cop who had been killed in the terrible shootings a few days before, when he’d been in Uganda. And he did it with a humanity that crossed the politicization and weaponization of such incidents.
I think he has a real chance and he’s brought together a great coalition. Your viewers may know of ranked choice voting. It didn’t work well in 2021 in New York City. We endorsed 1, 2, 3, but one was Zorhan and two was Brad Lander, who’s been a long time progressive advocate on the city council, now controller. The Working Families Party the next day did the same lineup of Zorhan and Brad Lander. What Brad Lander did though in coalition with Zorhan is very important to understanding the success of ranked choice voting.
JW: And it’s not just deep blue New York City where we’ve had some striking progressive victories, just in the last month. Let’s talk about Seattle. Seattle, the home of Microsoft and Amazon, where a woman named Katie Wilson is showing that Mamdani is not alone. I didn’t know about her until I read The Nation.
KVH: That’s part of the role of The Nation in a way. But Katie Wilson, that is a tough city, but she has taken it on through taxation issues, the referendum, the big tech, high tech corporations, and she is a transportation expert. The mayor of Boston who’s 36 is going to be reelected. So there are those around the country, and I do think with gridlock and worse in Washington DC it’s important to have champions at the city and state level.
JW: Much more amazing than Seattle or Boston: let’s talk about Omaha, a city in one of the reddest states that has had a Republican mayor who’s held office since 2013; won her last race by 30 points. Nevertheless, a Democrat, John Ewing Jr., beat her in May by nearly 13 points. If you do the arithmetic there, that’s a shift of 43 points. In Omaha, a red city. Again, I learned about this from The Nation. What can Democrats learn from John Ewing Jr’s victory in Omaha?
KVH: Well, first of all, Nebraska has a very good Democratic chair who’s written for us, Jane Kleb. You are a historian. I am not. But that region of the country had farmer-labor alliances. It was a populist part of the country, and he’s retrieving those traditions in a modern way. So I think he’s running a populist multiracial campaign in the big cities, in Omaha a populist campaign, which leads with the bread and butter issues. And I think that there’s an opening for that and he’s showing it.
So when people say it can’t be done — I think next is Idaho. I’m going to take back Frank Church’s seat. The famous story: Eric Foner emailed –great historian — emailed me one night and said,’ can someone get something to Bernie Sanders? Can he stop talking about Denmark?’ Eric Foner in the middle of the night wrote an open letter, which we published, it was to Bernie, about retrieving your own country’s radical traditions, which exist — and are not so odd and fringy. They’re part of the tradition, and I think that part of The Nation’s mission is to highlight what is new but has roots in a history.
JW: I think Trump knows he’s in deep trouble in the midterms next fall. He knows how unpopular he is. He knows how tiny his the Republican margin is in the House, and how likely that the Democrats can win the House. I think that explains this authoritarian scheme of his in Texas to eliminate five Democratic congressional seats through an unprecedented reapportionment move. John Nichols has a piece up at The Nation right now at the website that says,’Representative democracy will live or die in Texas.’
KVH: It’s a sign of how authoritarian, not only Trump is, but some of the governors, who were ramming through legislation to rig the system. That is not a democratic system that Abbott is trying to create, and it’s happened before. And you are looking at people who rigged the rules. And by the way, it’s also the anniversary, I think the 60th of the Voting Rights Act. Making that more difficult to do? That’s called democracy, and that’s how they run. That’s how they rule, and it’s something we have to expose and rally people to understand how dangerous it is because it’s a slippery slope. You begin in Texas, you’re going to see it around the country, and we’re asking one of the legislators, a good lawyer who fled, to write for The Nation about the experience.
JW: In conclusion here, you’ve just returned to the editor’s desk at The Nation this week. What do you see the schedule for the next weeks and months and year for what we used to call ‘America’s oldest weekly’?
KVH: Well, we’re doing events to mark the 160th anniversary – from an event at Ethical Culture honoring the intern program, which Victor Navasky started more than 40 years ago. Someone wrote to me today that they value The Nation, not just because of the words we publish, but because of the people we’ve kind of brought through the media and journalistic system. So that will be interesting.
And then we have Kaveh Akbar, our poetry editor, with Judy Collins.
And then we’re heading to San Francisco where I hope to be in conversation with Jerry Brown, and we’ll have Elie Mystal, our great justice correspondent, and Rebecca Solnit and others in conversation about this moment.
But I also turn back to my desk and I’m going to edit Jamie Galbraith on parallels between Reagan and Trump on the economy, which is something to think about. And a piece about the New York City political scene, which has changed really in interesting ways. The Working Families Party, which The Nation helped create in 1998, is now considered sort of the senior guy on the street. And DSA, which you’ve seen over time, Democratic Socialists for America has had a lot of energy and input.
I do think that I’m a deviation at The Nation because we do have a younger generation of democratic socialists. I remain a Rooseveltian 2.0. Lina Kahn, the great anti-monopolist professor, former head of the FTC, had an op-ed the other day, I wish we’d published it — about Zorhan and small business. We should not cede small business to the right. And his work on halal trucks and bodegas have redefined in some measure what small businesses do.
One of our contributors, I’ve said this before, Norman Thomas, a socialist we endorsed in 1932, said, ‘there are no lost causes. There are only causes waiting to be won.’ But I do think that realism is important, but also resilience. I think it’s a very tough time for a lot of people and we have to be understanding of that — so that we give people, not the week of Trump, we do that, but we also give them the week of Resistance 2.0.
JW: Katrina Vanden Heuvel, she’s Publisher of The Nation — And now, once again, editor of The Nation Magazine. Katrina, thanks for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.
KVH: Thank you.
[BREAK]
Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk with Robert Reich about how we got here and what we can do now. He’s done a lot in his life: He’s a legendary teacher at Berkeley. He was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. He’s written 18 books, which have been translated into 22 languages. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He’s a columnist now for The Guardian. And a lot of us read his daily newsletter at Substack or follow him on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, where he is a star. And he has a new book out: It’s called Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America. We reached him today in Berkeley. Robert Reich, welcome back.
Robert Reich: Well, good to talk to you, Jon.
JW: You call your memoir ‘a story of the failure of my generation.’ It’s mine too. You say it was our mistake, starting with the sixties’ movements. We had a civil rights movement and an anti-war movement, and then in the seventies, a women’s movement, then a gay rights movement, then an environmental movement. But you say one movement was missing — and that created what you call ‘a giant political void that would eventually be filled by Donald Trump’s angry, bigoted, cultural populism.’ What was missing?
RR: Well, in a word, it was the labor movement – actually, two words, Jon. The labor movement had been around obviously in fits and starts over a hundred years, but I didn’t really, and here’s my confessional, I didn’t really think about it in those days as a movement. Labor was there. It was big labor, there were big companies, big corporations, and there was big government, and it didn’t seem necessary in a way to consider or to talk about the labor movement or to talk even about the working class. And I think that that was my error. It was an error that a lot of people made because all of these other movements did take a life of their own, they accomplished a great deal, but by forgetting about workers and the labor movement, I think we laid the groundwork for something quite ugly.
JW: The Democrats’ great turn away from the working class and the labor movement of course came in the Bill Clinton years when you were Secretary of Labor. The whole thing was pretty clear from the start of the Clinton campaign in 1992, at least if you listened to third party candidate, Ross Perot. You quote him in your book on the subject of NAFTA, which George HW Bush had just negotiated with Mexico, also Canada, in one of the presidential debates in ‘92, watched by 60 million people. That’s about the same number that watched the debates this year. Perot explained why he was against NAFTA. “If you’re paying $13 or $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border and pay $1 an hour, have no healthcare, no environment or pollution controls, no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound coming from the south.” Today, that seems obvious. How did it seem to you in 1992?
RR: In 1992, Jon? I was worried about that. I thought that, and I put it in slightly in different terms. I worried that American workers would lose bargaining leverage. They were already losing bargaining power. I talked about it inside the, in coed incipient Clinton administration, but I lost those internal debates. It was very clear, Bill Clinton and other people around him wanted to embrace NAFTA, and I did what I was told to do, and I think in retrospect, I don’t know whether that was the right thing to do. I argued as much as I could, and I also argued against Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization. In fact, I was worried that that would have an even bigger, essentially a sucking sound. I lost a lot of the arguments internally, Jon, I’ve written about that. You and I have talked about that, and I guess from where we are right now, I see that all of this contributed to, it didn’t lead in inevitably to Donald Trump, but it contributed to the emergence of Donald Trump.
JW: The big debate in American politics really for the last 50 years has been framed by the Republicans. They say more government is bad. Freedom from big government is good, freedom for the market. You’ve been arguing with this position for a long time now. Remind us what your reply has been.
RR: I’ve said it so often. It just, it’s sort of automatic and I don’t think people even listen because I’m so predictable. The question is not more or less government. The question is, who is government for? Is it working for average working people and the poor, or is it working for the people who have a lot of money and a lot of resources and big corporations? And certainly, over the last decades, government has done more and more on behalf of the latter, that is big corporations and the wealthy because that’s where the money has come from for campaigns. That’s where the legalized bribery that I talk about in the book has really occurred. And if we want to, and we have to, and this is not if we want to, we have to disabuse ourselves from that kind of addiction. And the Democratic Party has got to give up the corporate and financial Democrats that have been so important to the party in terms of money but have eroded the party’s moral authority.
JW: When you were Secretary of Labor, you did get Congress to raise the minimum wage just before the ‘96 elections. What had it been and what did they do?
RR: Well, they raised the minimum wage to, I believe it was $5 and—
JW: 15.
RR: 15 cents, which I mean, it doesn’t, from today’s standpoint, it doesn’t look like anything, but it had been $4 and 25 cents. It was a Republican Senate and a Republican House. They didn’t want to raise the minimum wage. And basically, it wasn’t me, I mean, I did try to lead that charge on the hill, but what really did it was that most Americans and the Republicans saw the polls, the same polls that everybody else saw. And it was not just one poll. It was poll after poll after poll. Most Americans wanted the minimum wage raised, not because they would benefit. They knew that they were not on a minimum wage, but they felt that it was the fair thing to do. And that’s a very important part of the story because Americans have this very deep-seated sense of what’s fair and what’s not fair. I saw it firsthand when I was labor secretary and before and after and since. And we can’t simply assume that everybody is cynical like Donald Trump, or everybody is negative and mean spirited like Donald Trump. No, I think Americans really are fundamentally good and fair.
JW: It’s been 16 years since Congress raised the federal minimum wage. It’s been $7 and 25 cents. You said the Republicans supported it in 1996, and that was because so many Americans supported raising the minimum wage. Don’t so many Americans still support raising the minimum wage? 83% say the current $7 and 25 cents rate is not enough to live on. How much should it be in 2023? 65% of voters said $15 an hour. Younger people favor a lot more.
RR: Today, you’re absolutely right. I mean the same percentage, if not more, want the minimum wage raised. It hasn’t been raised since 2009. This is crazy. We can’t expect. Most people cannot possibly live on today’s minimum wage. It should be at least $15. And if you actually controlled for both inflation and productivity improvements, it would be closer to 20 or $25 an hour.
JW: So after Clinton, of course, then came Obama, there was that speech in 2004 that he gave at the Democratic National Convention that made him an instant hero. He said, “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America. There’s a United States of America.” Now today, that seems totally wrong, doesn’t it?
RR: It does. It seems quaint, if not wrong. I mean, how can there be not a liberal and not a conservative America? And I think what Obama was trying to do, and he did it with such grace, and he did, he continued to try to do it. And that is to tell us that we are part of one society, one experiment in democracy, and we shouldn’t allow people to try to divide us. I mean, look, let’s be clear here, the divide and conquer strategy has been very effective. And it’s been used by, I’m sure Vladimir Putin has been using it. And I’m sure also the oligarchy of America has used it because you see, if you can divide Americans and make them think that they’re real enemies are the people on the other side of the political divide, then they don’t look up and see where all the money and power really has gone in our society.
JW: Obama didn’t really help with this problem at all. Despite the economic crash of 2008. He stuck with Wall Street and the big banks and divide in America, deepened and after America, the 2016 elections. Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primaries even though he wasn’t a Democrat. And even though, as you say, he was a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont. You say, if the DNC had not tipped the scales against him by rigging campaign financing in favor of Hillary, Bernie would’ve been the party’s nominee in 2016. How do you feel about Bernie?
RR: I love Bernie. He’s one of my heroes. I don’t know where he gets his energy, his stamina, his tenacity. But he’s been there and he’s out there, even as we speak, he’s out there. He’s talking to people. He’s telling the truth, and God bless Bernie.
JW: I want to change the subject to your teaching. You taught at Harvard and then you taught at Berkeley. You’ve just retired. Harvard, of course, the elite private school, Berkeley, the flagship public university. What differences did you see, and which did you like better?
RR: Oh, Berkeley. I mean, Harvard is a wonderful institution, obviously, but I love University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, in fact, the entire University of California system is the largest and most powerful system of upward mobility in America. My students, most of them were first generation, first generation in terms of getting a college diploma. A third of them came directly. They transferred from community colleges. It’s an engine of upward mobility.
JW: One thing I want to ask you about that I’ve learned only recently, not everybody is interested in politics the way we are. In fact, most people aren’t very interested in politics. They don’t follow the news that much, especially working class and poor people. They’re preoccupied with their own lives, their own problems, their own pleasures, politics for them, is sort of like the Olympics. You watch it every four years for a couple of days, maybe you hope your team wins. And all the effort and all the money that our side puts into getting the right message out, a message that’s been tested, they don’t pay attention. They’re not very interested. They vote on vague feelings: ‘I like him,’ or ‘he seems like a good guy to me’ =- or they don’t vote at all. 89 million people did not vote in 2024. That’s a lot more than the number of people who voted for Trump, 77 million.
So better messaging, which so much of our work goes into figuring out, better messaging may not be the best way to reach all these people. We need to find other modes of communication, other ways to reach them than the kind of politics we’ve been doing all our lives. And now you are a star on TikTok and YouTube where you have 1.3 million subscribers. And on Instagram you have 2 million followers – and Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, these are the places where now where millions of people who don’t read the daily newspaper or watch TV news get their information. How did you become so good at this?
RR: I don’t know. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I have two sons, one of whom named Sam has been doing a lot of social media. Sam runs a company called Dropout Television. Have you seen any of that?
JW: Nope.
RR: Well, you’re not alone. I mean, nobody our age has seen it. But young people, my students, they all know Sam. In fact, somebody came up to me on the sidewalk just a couple of days ago and said, I mean, “Are you Sam Reich’s father?”
But a few years ago, it was about 10 years ago, Sam said to me, “Dad, I know you write books. You like to write books. And I know you get a lot of satisfaction out of it, but my generation is – they’re not big readers, particularly of your kind of book. And if you want to reach my generations generation, you’ve got to do social media.”
And at that point, I barely knew what social media was, but he tutored me, he helped me. And I have a little group of young people who are in their twenties and thirties who helped me do it. I couldn’t do it without them. They’re very talented and they keep me young to the extent that anybody can do that. So yes, I mean, I still write books, hence the book we are talking about, Coming Up Short, but I do a lot of social media because it is a way of teaching. It is a way of connecting.
JW: I want to talk about one other thing: tall people. Your memoir, you called Coming Up Short. It’s the thesis of your book that our generation failed to strengthen democracy. But that’s also a pun about your height. You are not a tall person. I am not a tall person. And you make the point that the taller candidate usually wins the election. Our tallest presidents, I look them up, there’s a Wikipedia page, ‘Presidents by height.’ Lincoln is our tallest president, six feet, four inches. LBJ number 2, 6’3” and a half, Clinton 6’3”, FDR 6’2”, Obama 6’2”, George HW Bush 6’2”, JFK 6’1”, Reagan 6’1”, Joe Biden, 6 feet even. What about Trump? Of course, Trump lies about his height. He claims to be 6’3”. There’s also a Wikipedia page about this, but photos show him standing right next to Obama, and they’re exactly the same height, more or less. Trump has more hair on top of his head, so maybe he’s, and Obama is 6’2”. I had a professor who blamed all the troubles of the world on what he called the six-footers. Why should the six-footers always win?
RR: Well, that’s a very good question. I think there’s a lot of prejudice in our society that we don’t talk about against short men or in favor of tall men, and women it’s slightly different. But I think that the studies that I’ve read, and I’ve been kind of interested in this subject, obviously I have a personal interest, but I’ve been interested sociologically. It turns out that, and there are many evolutionary biologists and others who think that we are kind of genetically wired to choose big people, tall men, to be our leaders because they are, again, in terms of kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest, they are the ones who can protect us. Even our language, when we talk about ‘looking up to somebody’ or ‘somebody has stature’ or I mean, there are all kinds of ways we unconsciously are prejudicial. And then in dating, I don’t know whether you had this experience, Jon. I’m very short and there were a number of girls who just didn’t want to look at me. They didn’t want to go out with a boy who is shorter than they were. And that was the cruelest, the cruelest of all prejudices.
JW: Last thing: the long game. Going back to Bernie just for a minute here. One of the things you say you love about Bernie is that he exemplifies the long game his whole life. He’s been saying the same thing. He doesn’t have a problem staying on message. We have midterms coming up in a year and a half. Then we have an election after that. What is the long game for us right now?
RR: I think the long game has got to protect our democracy, and to actually get it back, to revive and rebuild democratic institutions. In the book, I talk about Donald Trump as not being the cause of our present problems, but the consequence, the culmination of decades of neglect. We took many of these institutions for granted. We deregulated. I was part of an administration that deregulated Wall Street, that embraced free trade, that didn’t pay much attention as corporations got bigger and bigger and monopolized industries that didn’t really pay much attention to unions. And I think that all of this added up to a, I don’t want to be reductionist here and say it automatically led to Trump, but it led to a large and disaffected and angry working class that felt looked down upon, felt forgotten. And when somebody like Trump came along, and even though he lied through his teeth and even though he was a Trojan horse for the wealthy and the billionaires, he sounded like, he acted like he cared about, and he recognized working class people.
JW: Robert Reich – his new book is Coming Up Short, A Memoir of My America. Bob, thank you for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.
RR: Well, Jon, thank you.