Coming Up Short by Robert B. Reich A Memoir of My America
What's it about?
Coming Up Short (2025) shares politician and academic Robert Reich’s insider perspective on working in the Carter and Clinton administrations, and examines whether his generation of politicians and activists succeeded in making America more inclusive and democratic or fell short of those ideals.
In 1946, within just two months, four babies were born who would all shape American politics: Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Robert Reich. Reich's grandmother told him he'd be President someday. Perhaps she was trying to reassure her grandson that despite his small stature – Reich only ever grew to be 4 foot 11 – he'd accomplish great things.
Reich never became President like those born around him, but he did get a close-up view of all their presidencies. He started his career in the Ford and Carter administrations and served as Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton.
The story of Reich’s career is intertwined with another, bleaker story: the story of how America has failed to live up to its potential. As Reich sees it, the country has slowly but inexorably abandoned its working class. Now, it’s dealing with the fallout of that abandonment: a nation disenfranchised and divided like never before.
In this summary of Reich's memoirs, you'll get his inside view of how America reached its current crisis point and what can be done to fix it.
Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" was released in 1946. It tells the story of George Bailey, an everyman banker who helps ordinary folks buy homes. His antagonist is the mercenary industrialist Mr Potter who squeezes every last drop of capital from those unfortunate enough to rent his properties. Today it's a Christmas classic, but back then the FBI actually considered it communist propaganda – apparently the idea that people might come before profit was dangerously radical.
Robert Reich was born the same year “It’s a Wonderful Life” was released, to Ed and Mildred, owners of a women’s clothing store. 1946 was the peak of the Baby Boom – 3.4 million babies were born, the most in US history. For many of these babies, the American Dream was more like a guarantee. This generation would inherit extraordinary economic benefits: the GI Bill which ensured free college education for veterans, strong unions, and an economy where the Great Depression had actually leveled the playing field by wiping out Gilded Age monopolists.
Of course, even then, the American dream had boundaries. Black Americans still faced segregation and structural racism. So did Jews, like the Reichs. When the family moved to South Salem a group of men Mildred thought was a welcoming committee instead bluntly informed her this was a "Christian community" – Jews weren't wanted. The family dug in their heels and stayed.
Robert's formative years unfolded during the McCarthy trials – Senator Joseph McCarthy's paranoid crusade to root out supposed communist infiltrators from American institutions. Anyone who supported workers' rights or economic equality became suspect. The Reichs faced their own economic pressures. Their clothing store, Beverly's, initially served working-class women but struggled financially. To survive, they pivoted to selling "country club casuals" to wealthier suburbanites – abandoning their original customers to ensure their own economic survival.
These experiences crystallized the themes that would define Reich's career. His father's business transformation mirrored America's broader abandonment of working people. He saw echoes of the bullying he endured from schoolmates in the campaign of public persecution McCarthy led against anyone who stood up for the working classes. When Reich went on to enter politics for himself, he saw the Republican policy consistently choosing the interests of America’s Mr Potters over its George Baileys; but Reich’s own upbringing had already resolved him to stand on the side of the everyman.
Robert Reich grew up in a left-wing family. But the “Old Left” politics of his parents and grandparents – fighting for jobs, pensions, and workplace security through powerful labor unions – were out of favour with the younger activists he fell in with in high school and college,
The "New Left" student radicals took a completely different approach. These college-educated activists assumed economic prosperity was a given – why fight for material comfort when you already had it? Instead, they focused on civil rights and "participatory democracy." Their defining cause became opposing the Vietnam War, where America was fighting to prevent communist North Vietnam from taking over the South in a conflict that would ultimately claim 58,000 American lives. Reich himself dodged the draft thanks to his height – at 4'11", he was an inch short of the 5-foot minimum, though the disappointed recruiting officer quipped he'd have made an excellent "tunnel rat", fighting in the narrow Viet Cong underground networks.
Working as an intern for Bobby Kennedy taught Reich, then an idealistic activist, hard lessons about political reality. Kennedy was JFK's younger brother, a former attorney general who'd become a passionate civil rights advocate and was eyeing a presidential run. When Reich organized an antiwar petition on his own time, he assumed his boss would approve. Kennedy was privately against the war but furiously ordered Reich to remove his name – political relationships with President Lyndon Johnson trumped personal convictions. Reich has no hard feelings towards his former boss. And, in fact, Kennedy's June 1968 assassination remains Reich's biggest historical "what if" – he's convinced Kennedy would have beaten Nixon and steered America toward greater equality.
Reich saw new-left idealism and political reality come into conflict once again in 1970, during New York's "Hard Hat Riot." Reich was protesting the Kent State shootings – where National Guard troops killed four student demonstrators – when construction workers violently attacked the protesters. These workers, many Vietnam veterans themselves, felt completely abandoned. The GI Bill had expired in 1956; middle-class prosperity wasn't theirs. The Old Left had championed their interests, but the New Left ignored them entirely.
During the hard hat riots, Reich first grew aware of the schism between working-class Americans and the movement claiming to represent them. It was only a matter of time, Reich felt, before this schism grew into a gaping divide.
In 1971, the US Chamber of Commerce asked corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to write a report on the American Left's activities. Powell’s memo concluded that business was ‘under siege’ from labor unions, environmental groups, and consumer advocates: strong words for groups simply trying to ensure corporations served all stakeholders, not just profits. But Powell’s solution was just as forceful. Business needed to fight back by cultivating serious political power.
The memo galvanized corporate America like nothing before. A wave of corporate money poured into politics, creating the now-familiar corporate-political complex – armies of lobbyists and Political Action Committees, or PACs. There were fewer than 300 PACs in 1970; by 1980, over 1,200 existed.
This big money systematically corrupted lawmaking. Bankruptcy laws that once helped ordinary people reorganize debts were gutted, pushing more families into financial ruin. Corporate intellectual property protections like patents were extended, creating monopolies, while worker protections like pensions were stripped away. Laws preventing Wall Street banks from gambling with people's money? Repealed.
Robert Reich witnessed this transformation firsthand working for Jimmy Carter. Carter is often dismissed as a failed one-term president. Reich sees it differently – Carter's administration was caught in the middle of America's biggest political U-turn. Carter lost reelection partly because the Federal Reserve, mandated by Congress to control inflation, raised interest rates and triggered a recession. Carter’s initiatives to protect workers and consumers met fierce Congressional resistance, up to the point of Republican-led government shutdowns. In short, Powell's memo had worked. Corporate influence was protecting business interests, and business saw Carter as the enemy.
Reagan's victory cemented this shift. The 1980s brought "Reaganomics" and an era of hostile takeovers – corporate raiders buying companies, then slashing costs to boost stock prices, including massive payroll cuts. Workers lost good union jobs, and entire communities built around corporations were abandoned. Most significantly, the role of corporate CEOs fundamentally changed. Instead of serving all stakeholders – workers, consumers, communities – they now served shareholder value at all costs. This "shareholder capitalism" infected sectors like healthcare and education, creating phenomena like medical debt that bankrupts families.
Reich watched this U-turn with dismay. Could it be reversed through laws preserving social balance and worker protections? He'd soon get his chance to find out…
In 1992, Robert Reich was teaching economics at Harvard when a staff member interrupted his class – President-elect Bill Clinton was on the phone. Reich had attended Yale Law School with a young Bill Clinton and a young Hillary Rodham. In fact, Reich maintains that he introduced the pair. But since their Yale Law School days, Clinton had carved out a political career as Arkansas governor while Reich had moved out of politics and into academia, publishing influential books on economic theory. That call changed everything: Clinton asked Reich to head up his economic transition team.
Reich's excitement quickly turned to dismay when Clinton’s team discovered the federal budget deficit was far worse than anticipated. Reagan had inherited a modest deficit in 1981 but implemented massive tax cuts for the wealthy, causing it to balloon. Clinton's election platform promised to "put people first," but now deficit reduction would have to come before that – meaning deeper cuts to education, job training, and healthcare, where robust investment had been promised.
At least one core promise seemed achievable: stop corporations from deducting CEO pay exceeding a million dollars as a business expense. When Reagan was elected in 1980, CEOs earned 35 times the average worker's salary. Reich wanted to protect taxpayers from subsidizing these inflated salaries. By the time Clinton left office in 2000, CEOs earned over 300 times the average worker’s salary. What happened?
Well, Clinton had another economic advisor: Bob Rubin, former Goldman Sachs executive. Rubin wanted to slash the deficit to calm bond markets – when government borrowing decreases, interest rates fall and the economy grows – giving Clinton credibility on Wall Street. Reich represented the left and government intervention; Rubin represented the center and corporate interests. Pundits called the push-pull between these opposing economic counsel “The Battle of the Bobs”. But in Reich’s opinion it wasn’t much of a battle: Clinton consistently chose Rubin.
Rubin championed free trade, dismantling regulations, and embracing globalization. Reich acknowledges US workers have benefited as consumers from the cheaper goods that are a byproduct of these policies. Overall, though, Rubin’s approach has benefitted white-collar workers and what Reich calls ‘the pinstripe economy’ as opposed to ‘the paycheck economy’.
As a direct result of Rubin’s policies, workers have seen their wages stagnate and protections dissolve. Between 2000 and 2017, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs vanished. Meanwhile, the finance sector ballooned from 10 percent of corporate profits in 1950 to 40 percent by Clinton's end. When that finance bubble burst, causing global recession, who felt the pain? Workers, not Wall Street.
In 1994, Labor Secretary Robert Reich sent Clinton a prescient memo warning he was in danger of losing Congress. The economic plan was working on paper, but ordinary Americans weren't feeling it. The middle class was becoming what Reich called "the anxious class" – caught between stagnant wages and rising costs while watching the gap between top earners and everyone else widen dramatically.
Reich's solutions were straightforward: require companies to share profits with employees, strengthen unions, push the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, and raise the minimum wage. Clinton ignored the memo. That November, Democrats lost control of Congress for the first time in decades.
Enter Newt Gingrich, the combative Georgia congressman who masterfully channeled American rage toward the right. Gingrich and his fellow Republicans painted Democrats as elitist and out of touch – and perhaps there was some truth in that, given that Clinton's deficit-focused policies had actually hurt working families while helping Wall Street.
Clinton didn't always listen to Reich, but Reich managed some victories. Working with Senator Ted Kennedy, he successfully pushed through a minimum wage increase, giving millions of workers their first raise in years. He also implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act, allowing workers to take unpaid time off for family emergencies without losing their jobs – a basic protection most other developed countries had long provided.
By 1997, though, Reich had had enough. Tired of constantly battling deficit hawks like Bob Rubin and Al Gore, who prioritized Wall Street confidence over worker welfare, he left the administration.
Reich remained politically engaged, watching in horror as the 2000 election became a travesty decided by cable news and the Supreme Court. The Court's decision to stop Florida's recount was, in his view, fundamentally immoral – they handed the presidency to George W. Bush despite Al Gore winning the popular vote and likely winning Florida if all votes had been counted.
Reich assumed Republicans and the Supreme Court would never recover from this ethical nadir. He was catastrophically wrong. Republicans continued to be buoyed by angry, disenfranchised working classes that Democrats, under Clinton's corporate-friendly policies, had helped create. This swell of resentment grew under Bush, exploded in the Tea Party movement during Obama's presidency, and culminated in the election – and then reelection – of Donald J. Trump. The very workers Democrats once championed had become their fiercest opponents, and Reich had watched it happen from the inside.
When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, few took him seriously. A reality TV star and businessman with dubious credentials, a compulsive liar running when the economy seemed to be doing well – why elect this disruptor? Because broad economic indicators don't tell individual stories of struggle. The truth was, anti-establishment rage had been building for years among people who'd lost jobs, savings, and homes in the 2007 recession while seeing their wages stagnate and costs rise. Wall Street got bailed out – they didn't. Their cities and communities were hollowed out, while healthcare and education became luxury items.
Much of the Democratic establishment still refuses to reckon with Trump's rise, instead ascribing his victory in 2016 purely to racism. And to be clear, Trump certainly has exploited America's racial divisions to redirect righteous economic anger toward false scapegoats like immigrants.
But those blindsided Democrats should have looked at the other candidate who performed surprisingly well in 2016: Bernie Sanders. His economic progressivism – attacking Wall Street, championing Medicare for All, promising free college tuition – appealed broadly because it addressed the material concerns Trump voters actually had. Sanders showed there was hunger for an economics-first message that put working families before corporate profits. Democrats failed to learn this lesson then, and it was repeated in 2024.
So is the American dream dead? Reich doesn't think so. In fact, he considers himself an American patriot. Not the insidious form of white male Christian nationalism that Trump calls patriotism. But true patriotism. One that means inclusion for all and a dedication to the nation's ideals: rule of law, equal justice, civil rights, freedom of speech. One that isn't expressed through symbolic displays but through sacrificing for the common good. One that works to strengthen democracy and public trust in institutions.
The American Dream is on shakier ground than ever before. But true patriots, patriots like Robert Reich, believe it is still worth fighting for.
In this lesson to Coming Up Short by Robert Reich, you’ve learned that Robert Reich believes America has abandoned its working class in favor of corporate interests. Despite serving as Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, Reich watched Democrats embrace Wall Street-friendly policies that alienated their traditional base, contributing to the rise of anti-establishment anger that fueled the rise of Donald Trump. Though the American Dream may be in crisis, Reich maintains that true patriotism requires fighting for economic equality and democratic institutions that serve all Americans, not just corporate profits.
Coming Up Short (2025) shares politician and academic Robert Reich’s insider perspective on working in the Carter and Clinton administrations, and examines whether his generation of politicians and activists succeeded in making America more inclusive and democratic or fell short of those ideals.
In 1946, within just two months, four babies were born who would all shape American politics: Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Robert Reich. Reich's grandmother told him he'd be President someday. Perhaps she was trying to reassure her grandson that despite his small stature – Reich only ever grew to be 4 foot 11 – he'd accomplish great things.
Reich never became President like those born around him, but he did get a close-up view of all their presidencies. He started his career in the Ford and Carter administrations and served as Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton.
The story of Reich’s career is intertwined with another, bleaker story: the story of how America has failed to live up to its potential. As Reich sees it, the country has slowly but inexorably abandoned its working class. Now, it’s dealing with the fallout of that abandonment: a nation disenfranchised and divided like never before.
In this summary of Reich's memoirs, you'll get his inside view of how America reached its current crisis point and what can be done to fix it.
Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" was released in 1946. It tells the story of George Bailey, an everyman banker who helps ordinary folks buy homes. His antagonist is the mercenary industrialist Mr Potter who squeezes every last drop of capital from those unfortunate enough to rent his properties. Today it's a Christmas classic, but back then the FBI actually considered it communist propaganda – apparently the idea that people might come before profit was dangerously radical.
Robert Reich was born the same year “It’s a Wonderful Life” was released, to Ed and Mildred, owners of a women’s clothing store. 1946 was the peak of the Baby Boom – 3.4 million babies were born, the most in US history. For many of these babies, the American Dream was more like a guarantee. This generation would inherit extraordinary economic benefits: the GI Bill which ensured free college education for veterans, strong unions, and an economy where the Great Depression had actually leveled the playing field by wiping out Gilded Age monopolists.
Of course, even then, the American dream had boundaries. Black Americans still faced segregation and structural racism. So did Jews, like the Reichs. When the family moved to South Salem a group of men Mildred thought was a welcoming committee instead bluntly informed her this was a "Christian community" – Jews weren't wanted. The family dug in their heels and stayed.
Robert's formative years unfolded during the McCarthy trials – Senator Joseph McCarthy's paranoid crusade to root out supposed communist infiltrators from American institutions. Anyone who supported workers' rights or economic equality became suspect. The Reichs faced their own economic pressures. Their clothing store, Beverly's, initially served working-class women but struggled financially. To survive, they pivoted to selling "country club casuals" to wealthier suburbanites – abandoning their original customers to ensure their own economic survival.
These experiences crystallized the themes that would define Reich's career. His father's business transformation mirrored America's broader abandonment of working people. He saw echoes of the bullying he endured from schoolmates in the campaign of public persecution McCarthy led against anyone who stood up for the working classes. When Reich went on to enter politics for himself, he saw the Republican policy consistently choosing the interests of America’s Mr Potters over its George Baileys; but Reich’s own upbringing had already resolved him to stand on the side of the everyman.
Robert Reich grew up in a left-wing family. But the “Old Left” politics of his parents and grandparents – fighting for jobs, pensions, and workplace security through powerful labor unions – were out of favour with the younger activists he fell in with in high school and college,
The "New Left" student radicals took a completely different approach. These college-educated activists assumed economic prosperity was a given – why fight for material comfort when you already had it? Instead, they focused on civil rights and "participatory democracy." Their defining cause became opposing the Vietnam War, where America was fighting to prevent communist North Vietnam from taking over the South in a conflict that would ultimately claim 58,000 American lives. Reich himself dodged the draft thanks to his height – at 4'11", he was an inch short of the 5-foot minimum, though the disappointed recruiting officer quipped he'd have made an excellent "tunnel rat", fighting in the narrow Viet Cong underground networks.
Working as an intern for Bobby Kennedy taught Reich, then an idealistic activist, hard lessons about political reality. Kennedy was JFK's younger brother, a former attorney general who'd become a passionate civil rights advocate and was eyeing a presidential run. When Reich organized an antiwar petition on his own time, he assumed his boss would approve. Kennedy was privately against the war but furiously ordered Reich to remove his name – political relationships with President Lyndon Johnson trumped personal convictions. Reich has no hard feelings towards his former boss. And, in fact, Kennedy's June 1968 assassination remains Reich's biggest historical "what if" – he's convinced Kennedy would have beaten Nixon and steered America toward greater equality.
Reich saw new-left idealism and political reality come into conflict once again in 1970, during New York's "Hard Hat Riot." Reich was protesting the Kent State shootings – where National Guard troops killed four student demonstrators – when construction workers violently attacked the protesters. These workers, many Vietnam veterans themselves, felt completely abandoned. The GI Bill had expired in 1956; middle-class prosperity wasn't theirs. The Old Left had championed their interests, but the New Left ignored them entirely.
During the hard hat riots, Reich first grew aware of the schism between working-class Americans and the movement claiming to represent them. It was only a matter of time, Reich felt, before this schism grew into a gaping divide.
In 1971, the US Chamber of Commerce asked corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to write a report on the American Left's activities. Powell’s memo concluded that business was ‘under siege’ from labor unions, environmental groups, and consumer advocates: strong words for groups simply trying to ensure corporations served all stakeholders, not just profits. But Powell’s solution was just as forceful. Business needed to fight back by cultivating serious political power.
The memo galvanized corporate America like nothing before. A wave of corporate money poured into politics, creating the now-familiar corporate-political complex – armies of lobbyists and Political Action Committees, or PACs. There were fewer than 300 PACs in 1970; by 1980, over 1,200 existed.
This big money systematically corrupted lawmaking. Bankruptcy laws that once helped ordinary people reorganize debts were gutted, pushing more families into financial ruin. Corporate intellectual property protections like patents were extended, creating monopolies, while worker protections like pensions were stripped away. Laws preventing Wall Street banks from gambling with people's money? Repealed.
Robert Reich witnessed this transformation firsthand working for Jimmy Carter. Carter is often dismissed as a failed one-term president. Reich sees it differently – Carter's administration was caught in the middle of America's biggest political U-turn. Carter lost reelection partly because the Federal Reserve, mandated by Congress to control inflation, raised interest rates and triggered a recession. Carter’s initiatives to protect workers and consumers met fierce Congressional resistance, up to the point of Republican-led government shutdowns. In short, Powell's memo had worked. Corporate influence was protecting business interests, and business saw Carter as the enemy.
Reagan's victory cemented this shift. The 1980s brought "Reaganomics" and an era of hostile takeovers – corporate raiders buying companies, then slashing costs to boost stock prices, including massive payroll cuts. Workers lost good union jobs, and entire communities built around corporations were abandoned. Most significantly, the role of corporate CEOs fundamentally changed. Instead of serving all stakeholders – workers, consumers, communities – they now served shareholder value at all costs. This "shareholder capitalism" infected sectors like healthcare and education, creating phenomena like medical debt that bankrupts families.
Reich watched this U-turn with dismay. Could it be reversed through laws preserving social balance and worker protections? He'd soon get his chance to find out…
In 1992, Robert Reich was teaching economics at Harvard when a staff member interrupted his class – President-elect Bill Clinton was on the phone. Reich had attended Yale Law School with a young Bill Clinton and a young Hillary Rodham. In fact, Reich maintains that he introduced the pair. But since their Yale Law School days, Clinton had carved out a political career as Arkansas governor while Reich had moved out of politics and into academia, publishing influential books on economic theory. That call changed everything: Clinton asked Reich to head up his economic transition team.
Reich's excitement quickly turned to dismay when Clinton’s team discovered the federal budget deficit was far worse than anticipated. Reagan had inherited a modest deficit in 1981 but implemented massive tax cuts for the wealthy, causing it to balloon. Clinton's election platform promised to "put people first," but now deficit reduction would have to come before that – meaning deeper cuts to education, job training, and healthcare, where robust investment had been promised.
At least one core promise seemed achievable: stop corporations from deducting CEO pay exceeding a million dollars as a business expense. When Reagan was elected in 1980, CEOs earned 35 times the average worker's salary. Reich wanted to protect taxpayers from subsidizing these inflated salaries. By the time Clinton left office in 2000, CEOs earned over 300 times the average worker’s salary. What happened?
Well, Clinton had another economic advisor: Bob Rubin, former Goldman Sachs executive. Rubin wanted to slash the deficit to calm bond markets – when government borrowing decreases, interest rates fall and the economy grows – giving Clinton credibility on Wall Street. Reich represented the left and government intervention; Rubin represented the center and corporate interests. Pundits called the push-pull between these opposing economic counsel “The Battle of the Bobs”. But in Reich’s opinion it wasn’t much of a battle: Clinton consistently chose Rubin.
Rubin championed free trade, dismantling regulations, and embracing globalization. Reich acknowledges US workers have benefited as consumers from the cheaper goods that are a byproduct of these policies. Overall, though, Rubin’s approach has benefitted white-collar workers and what Reich calls ‘the pinstripe economy’ as opposed to ‘the paycheck economy’.
As a direct result of Rubin’s policies, workers have seen their wages stagnate and protections dissolve. Between 2000 and 2017, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs vanished. Meanwhile, the finance sector ballooned from 10 percent of corporate profits in 1950 to 40 percent by Clinton's end. When that finance bubble burst, causing global recession, who felt the pain? Workers, not Wall Street.
In 1994, Labor Secretary Robert Reich sent Clinton a prescient memo warning he was in danger of losing Congress. The economic plan was working on paper, but ordinary Americans weren't feeling it. The middle class was becoming what Reich called "the anxious class" – caught between stagnant wages and rising costs while watching the gap between top earners and everyone else widen dramatically.
Reich's solutions were straightforward: require companies to share profits with employees, strengthen unions, push the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, and raise the minimum wage. Clinton ignored the memo. That November, Democrats lost control of Congress for the first time in decades.
Enter Newt Gingrich, the combative Georgia congressman who masterfully channeled American rage toward the right. Gingrich and his fellow Republicans painted Democrats as elitist and out of touch – and perhaps there was some truth in that, given that Clinton's deficit-focused policies had actually hurt working families while helping Wall Street.
Clinton didn't always listen to Reich, but Reich managed some victories. Working with Senator Ted Kennedy, he successfully pushed through a minimum wage increase, giving millions of workers their first raise in years. He also implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act, allowing workers to take unpaid time off for family emergencies without losing their jobs – a basic protection most other developed countries had long provided.
By 1997, though, Reich had had enough. Tired of constantly battling deficit hawks like Bob Rubin and Al Gore, who prioritized Wall Street confidence over worker welfare, he left the administration.
Reich remained politically engaged, watching in horror as the 2000 election became a travesty decided by cable news and the Supreme Court. The Court's decision to stop Florida's recount was, in his view, fundamentally immoral – they handed the presidency to George W. Bush despite Al Gore winning the popular vote and likely winning Florida if all votes had been counted.
Reich assumed Republicans and the Supreme Court would never recover from this ethical nadir. He was catastrophically wrong. Republicans continued to be buoyed by angry, disenfranchised working classes that Democrats, under Clinton's corporate-friendly policies, had helped create. This swell of resentment grew under Bush, exploded in the Tea Party movement during Obama's presidency, and culminated in the election – and then reelection – of Donald J. Trump. The very workers Democrats once championed had become their fiercest opponents, and Reich had watched it happen from the inside.
When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, few took him seriously. A reality TV star and businessman with dubious credentials, a compulsive liar running when the economy seemed to be doing well – why elect this disruptor? Because broad economic indicators don't tell individual stories of struggle. The truth was, anti-establishment rage had been building for years among people who'd lost jobs, savings, and homes in the 2007 recession while seeing their wages stagnate and costs rise. Wall Street got bailed out – they didn't. Their cities and communities were hollowed out, while healthcare and education became luxury items.
Much of the Democratic establishment still refuses to reckon with Trump's rise, instead ascribing his victory in 2016 purely to racism. And to be clear, Trump certainly has exploited America's racial divisions to redirect righteous economic anger toward false scapegoats like immigrants.
But those blindsided Democrats should have looked at the other candidate who performed surprisingly well in 2016: Bernie Sanders. His economic progressivism – attacking Wall Street, championing Medicare for All, promising free college tuition – appealed broadly because it addressed the material concerns Trump voters actually had. Sanders showed there was hunger for an economics-first message that put working families before corporate profits. Democrats failed to learn this lesson then, and it was repeated in 2024.
So is the American dream dead? Reich doesn't think so. In fact, he considers himself an American patriot. Not the insidious form of white male Christian nationalism that Trump calls patriotism. But true patriotism. One that means inclusion for all and a dedication to the nation's ideals: rule of law, equal justice, civil rights, freedom of speech. One that isn't expressed through symbolic displays but through sacrificing for the common good. One that works to strengthen democracy and public trust in institutions.
The American Dream is on shakier ground than ever before. But true patriots, patriots like Robert Reich, believe it is still worth fighting for.
In this lesson to Coming Up Short by Robert Reich, you’ve learned that Robert Reich believes America has abandoned its working class in favor of corporate interests. Despite serving as Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, Reich watched Democrats embrace Wall Street-friendly policies that alienated their traditional base, contributing to the rise of anti-establishment anger that fueled the rise of Donald Trump. Though the American Dream may be in crisis, Reich maintains that true patriotism requires fighting for economic equality and democratic institutions that serve all Americans, not just corporate profits.
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