For more than four decades, Robert Reich has been ringing the alarm bell about rising inequality in America. He did it as a member of three presidential administrations, including a stint as labor secretary under President Clinton. He did it as a revered professor at U.C. Berkeley, Brandeis and Harvard. He’s currently doing it online, where, somewhat improbably, the 79-year-old has become a new-media star, having built a devoted audience of millions across Substack, TikTok and Instagram. Through it all, his message has remained consistent: Inequality — be it economic, racial or political — erodes social trust, diminishes belief in democracy and can create openings for demagogues…He recently retired from teaching after more than 40 years. Indeed, the run-up to his final lecture is the subject of a documentary, “The Last Class,” which is currently in theaters. Reich also has a memoir on the way, “Coming Up Short,” which will be published on Aug. 5. In the book, and in our conversation, he reckons with the political failures of his fellow baby boomers, the rise of what he sees as a culture of brutality and bullying and why Democrats have failed to connect with struggling Americans.

…The title of your memoir is a pun on the fact that you’re short, but it also refers to your argument that your generation failed to strengthen democracy, failed to reduce economic inequality and, generally, failed to contain “the bullies.” What went wrong? We took for granted what our parents and their parents bequeathed to us. I was born in 1946, as were George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. The so-called greatest generation gave us not only peace and prosperity but the largest middle class the world had ever seen. What I try to understand is how we ended up with Donald Trump. Trump is the consequence, not the cause, of what we are now experiencing. He is the culmination of at least 50 years of a certain kind of neglect. And I say this very personally, because I was part of this failure. It is a reckoning that is deeply personal.

But how useful is the generational frame? Because alongside the shortcomings, baby boomers helped reduce racial discrimination, grew the environmental movement, bolstered feminism and gay rights and helped to shepherd along giant technological advances. So is it really accurate to describe the problem as a “generational” failure? Or is the issue more that conservative politics, which plenty of baby boomers have always held, have won some significant victories over the last 50 years? It’s not fair to blame a generation, but I think it is fair to say there has been, in America, a failure to appreciate the importance of democracy, the importance of holding back big money. Because as inequality has gotten worse and worse, the middle class has by many measures shrunk. That is an open invitation for corruption. We see more and more big money undermining our democratic institutions. We could not have stayed on the path we were on even if Trump hadn’t come along. We were opening ourselves to, if not a demagogue, then something like a demagogue, because so many people became so angry and were convinced even before Trump that the system was rigged against them. I don’t want to minimize the good things that have happened over the past 70 years, but the fact of the matter is we ended up with a very large number of Americans who feel that the American system and the promise of America was a sham.

…In a bigger-picture sense, are there reliable strategies for dealing with economic bullies? If you’re an average working person today, you are extraordinarily vulnerable. Nobody is protecting you. This is one of the attractions that Donald Trump wittingly or unwittingly presented in 2016 and continues to present. He has provided an explanation for people who have been economically and socially brutalized and bullied. An explanation that is, by the way, completely wrong and that has to do with immigrants and the deep state and transgender people. Part of the book is my attempt to help the Democrats, or at least the progressives, see that the way forward is to talk truthfully about why it is that so many people are powerless and bullied and feel so vulnerable and so angry.

What’s your diagnosis for why Democrats have struggled to do that? Some Democrats don’t want to tell the true story of concentrated wealth and power because they are drinking at the same trough as Republicans. This quandary has been growing since I was in my 20s, beginning to watch money and politics and the Faustian bargain that the Democrats were making. The Democrats want to be on the side of social justice and fairness and equal opportunity and political equality, and yet some Democrats — I don’t want to tar with too broad a brush here — are taking money and don’t want to bite the hands that feed them. I’ve seen it personally. I saw it when I was at the Federal Trade Commission; I saw it when I was at the Justice Department working in the Ford administration; I saw it very close up when I was in the Clinton administration and then at a distance when I was providing some advice to Barack Obama. One of the frustrating things about writing this book and reliving these years is that I came across memos and letters and videos of me at that time saying over and over again, like a broken record, “If we stay on this path, we are going to find ourselves in the not-too-distant future with a demagogue, and our democracy is going to be threatened.”

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