Fresh Air - Robert Reich: The Baby Boomers Fell Short

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich served under President Clinton from 1993 to 1997. He opens his new memoir, Coming Up Short, with an apology on behalf of the Baby Boom generation for failing to build a more just society. Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews the books Pariah and The Dancing Face.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich opens his new memoir with something unusual for a public figure. An apology. An apology on behalf of his generation, the baby boomer. for failing, as he puts it, to build a decent, sustainable, and just society. Reich was born in 1946 the same year as President's Trump, Bush, and Clinton,

sons of the greatest generation, who came of age in a time of post-war optimism, when prosperity and possibilities seemed endless. But as Reich tells it, those promises have morphed into widening inequality, bitter political division, and unchecked rise of corporate power. His new book, Coming Up Short, A Memoir of My America, argues that the choices his generation and others have made helped pave the way to today's fractured democracy and economic disparity. Depressing stuff, but Reich also points to the progress that was made and makes a case for reviving what he calls community and democratic capitalism

rooted in America's founding ideals. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy Emeritus at UC Berkeley. has served in three presidential administrations and has written 18 books, including the work of nations, saving capitalism, and the common good. He's also the subject of a new documentary called The Last Class. Robert Reich, welcome back to fresh air. Well, thank you, Tanya. Before we get to your book, I want to ask you about some news.

President Trump recently nominated E.J. Antony from the Heritage Foundation as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that was after firing the former head and claiming without evidence that the agency's numbers were rigged. How alarmed by this move should we be? Quite alarmed. Tanya, it's very difficult to talk about one particular Trump initiative that is alarming because so many of them are alarming.

He has flooded the zone. But this one really did strike home for me because when I became Secretary of Labor, I was very strongly urged by my predecessors, by Congress, by everybody who knew about the Bureau of Labor Statistics to make sure, above all, regardless of what else I did as Labor Secretary, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics would be guarded, its independence would be protected because it is the crown jewel. of all of the data we have in America about what is happening to the economy, what's happening to jobs and wages, where the economy is going. And so it's very important that it be protected from political influence. Donald Trump's response to the very disappointing jobs report. I mean, it was disappointing, is probably the worst thing he could have done in terms of the independence and credibility of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he basically shot the messenger. He fired the current Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner saying baselessly that she had cooked the books without any evidence and then has nominated as her successor somebody who is not respected as somebody who is non-partisan who's drawn fire even from right-wing economists as.

being partisan and very unreliable. Those disappointing jobs numbers that Trump is responding to, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there were job gains for May and June, but they were down by 258,000. And that seems to be the number that really set the president off. You're saying that this agency is nonpartisan. It's supposed to be the place where we're supposed to get accurate information. Is there any way? How likely is it that those numbers are wrong or that they've somehow been manipulated?

There's no likelihood that they've been manipulated. You have to understand these numbers come from a group of professionals, many of whom are working independently. They have a process that is the most accurate and careful process you can imagine for putting these numbers together. Many administrations have been disappointed from time to time with the numbers because sometimes we are heading into a recession. Presidents don't like that. They don't like to hear that job numbers are down. But that's too bad. I mean, they have to live with that reality. The recent job numbers are alarming. What Donald Trump should have done is be be alarmed, as we all must be, because it looks as if we are heading into a recession.

But instead of accepting that and changing what he is doing and altering his economic policies, he seems to be just becoming even more definitive. This is what he does. He digs in when he's attacked. Former head Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said that what Trump did, firing the head of BLS in particular, is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism? Is that how you would characterize it? Absolutely.

I might even use a stronger word, neo-fascism, because I think that authoritarianism implies a system in which a small group of people run government, but fascism or neo-fascism suggests a system in which basically one person, a dictator, a tyrant runs everything. And we are beginning to see evidence of that. That is an extraordinary term to apply to an American president, especially from someone like you who have served in many presidential administrations, Republican and Democrat. What's your process to feel comfortable with saying that with that description at this moment. I've done a lot of research on fascism, starting with an article in the New York Times

magazine, written by former Vice President Henry Wallace, it was called American Fascism. And Wallace, in 1944, when he wrote it, had no problem talking about fascism because, of course, America was at that time dealing with Nazism, fascism in Germany and spreading around the world, but nobody had talked as directly and distinctly about American fascism. I found that article extraordinarily prescient and important. Fascism is different from authoritarianism. authoritarianism has to do with centralized authority in just a small number of people. Fascism has to do with the worship and power of basically one individual who takes an entire economic and political system over.

In your book, you talk about President Trump and how he, in many ways, is just a symptom of something larger that we have been seeing over the course of a few decades now. This book title coming up short, it has a double meaning, your own height, 411, which we're going to talk about a little later. And also this argument that the baby boomer generation has fallen short of strengthening democracy. This is also the generation, Robert. It's your generation that marched against Vietnam, pushed for civil rights, expanded predictions, only to see that really many of its members in this moment later became elites who benefited from inequality.

When did you start to see the collective breakdown? I began to be aware of this, Tanya, in the late 1980s. When I was just simply looking at economic data, I was also traveling around the country, promoting my latest book, doing free-floating focus groups, if you will, and it became very apparent to me that wages for most people were flattening. If you adjusted for inflation, people were no longer getting ahead. I had seen this anger beginning earlier than that, but then when I became labor secretary and I was out in the states and talking to people in various cities and in rural areas, I became even more aware of the anger and the bitterness that people felt because they were doing what they thought they needed to do. They were fulfilling their side of the bargain, the social contract.

They were working hard and they were following the rules. And they had assumed that if they did that, they would be getting ahead. They would be moving up. They could buy a better house or at least get access to a home that they wouldn't have to have two wage earners necessarily. they could also look forward to their children doing better than they were doing. But it looked as if that contract had come apart. It was starting to come apart. And that angerness and bitterness only grew in subsequent years.

That process that you go through when you write a book where you go out not just to bookstores, but you go to communities to talk to people about the issues that are in the book and the larger issues that are impacting them, And we actually saw this in your 2017 Netflix documentary, Saving Capitalism. And I'm bringing that up because we got to watch you. This is in modern day, recent day, fast forward from the mid-80s, which we're going to get back to. But in that documentary, you talk to many Americans, the same types that you did back in the 80s who were working full-time but struggling to get by. But there's this moment that really stayed with me.

It is this meal that you were having with business leaders in Kansas City, I believe. And there was this woman, Annie Presley, who had built several successful small businesses. And she told you that she feels vilified by her success. She feels like she is being made to feel bad for what she's contributed to our country. So those business owners, of course, like Annie, didn't create the system, but they benefited from them. And then at the other side of it, you're talking with people who can barely get by. And so it really does bring up this issue of how to move toward understanding if everyone feels under attack. Well, exactly.

And that's what we've come to. Everybody feels under attack. The process of widening inequality happens not because anybody is particularly evil or villainous or that they're They are doing something wrong. It happens slowly. It happens in steps. It happens because inevitably as inequality widens those corporations and those individuals who benefit from the widening inequality who are taking more and more of the wealth and income of

the nation. They at least some of them have the power due to their wealth and income to begin. to begin to influence legislation, to begin to influence regulation, to influence what happens at the federal and state levels, to have and be able to afford armies of lobbyists and litigators. And it is through that process that the game, the rules of the game, the actual rules of capitalism get altered and changed to their benefit. and often to the non-benefit of average working people. Often average working people are actually hurt by these rule changes.

Donald Trump is, in many respects, the consequence, the combination of five decades of that system getting worse and worse and worse. You took us to this time period of the late 80s. kind of when we were nearing the end of Reaganism, of trickle-down economics. People were starting to feel things at that point. But then the Clinton administration of the 90s and that contingent of baby boomers, which included you, seemed like a great hope. But something broke down then as well. It's also when we started to see this growth in corporations. Take us back to that time period as well, when we started to see an even further fracturing. And and a disparity between the wealthy and the haves and the have-nots.

Well, the 1990s are a very important period in this story because even though I am very proud and continue to be proud of the accomplishments of the Clinton administration of which I was a part in terms of the family and medical leave and the widening of the earned income tax credit, making it more available to people, there were decisions made that actually did hasten the widening inequality that we suffered this century. Decisions about, for example, China's accession to the World Trade Organization, the NAFTA, North American Free Trade Act, the deregulation of Wall Street,

the decision essentially to allow big corporations to get much bigger, that is, to turn the administrations and the public's back on antitrust, to basically not allow labor unions to grow because you see corporations were firing people who were trying to organize unions. And you see, all of that together, all of that together and many other examples I provide in the book made it much more difficult for average working people to get ahead and loaded the dice in favor of big corporations and the very wealthy. I bet the process of writing this book illuminated a lot of what-ofs, could-ofs for you. Do you ever look back and feel regretful for what you didn't do or what you didn't say or doing more? All the time. When I look back at my role as Labor Secretary, I regret that I didn't fight harder. I mean, inside the meeting rooms in the old executive office building and the cabinet office and even when I was talking. in private to the president, President Clinton.

I did try to argue my case, but I feel, in retrospect, I should have argued even more passionately. Maybe I even should have threatened to resign. I don't know. You think that it would have had an effect. There were so many forces, but I just wonder, yeah. But you and former President Clinton talk about these things today. No. And I flatter myself thinking that if I had threatened to resign over some of these decisions that it would have made that much of a difference, no, probably not. But inevitably, in writing about the last, particularly the last 50 years, I asked myself over and over again, what could I have done? What should I have done?

could I have made a louder noise about much of this? Could I have been more influential and more convincing? How could I have done it? I mean, you can't rewrite your own personal history and you certainly can't rewrite the rest of history and you don't want to think of yourself in grandiose ways as if you could actually change any of this history. but I have to be completely candid with you in saying that it bothers me. It worries me. I'm haunted by some of this.

Is there a particular issue or decision that was made during that time period that still keeps you up at night? It's so big, so broad, so many things happened over the last 50 years. And you played small roles in all of those as we move through. But is there any one thing particular that you still think about? Very small roles. But, yes, I think about, for example, the Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization. At the time, people argued, and these were people inside the Clinton administration, many Democrats, many Republicans, argued that if you allowed China to trade and export more to the United States, that would hasten democratic reforms. small d in China. I was suspicious.

It didn't seem likely. I think that that Chinese system was so ingrained and so impervious to reform that I doubted that there would be any change. I also worried, frankly, about what would happen with this tsunami of imports from China to the United States. would happen to American jobs, particularly manufacturing jobs, particularly unionized manufacturing jobs. I made some objections, I made some arguments, but Tanya, I didn't make them as strongly as I should have and I didn't really understand or anticipate that something in the order of five million American jobs, mostly manufacturing jobs, would disappear.

half of them, according to many researchers, because of the Chinese imports, deluging America. Let's take a short break. Our guest today is Robert Reich. We're talking about his new book, Coming Up Short, A Memoir of My America. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. Support for NPR, and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. WJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right.

Learn more at RWJF.org. There's this one particular section of your book that you tell this story that for me it spoke to something greater about communication and maybe the ways that progressives actually communicate ideas and how they talk to people. So you write about your Senate confirmation during the Clinton administration in the 90s and how you were coached to handle the tough questions you'd face. And it's a funny story, but there also seems to be a lesson in how to communicate with the masses, of course, also how to communicate with our representatives. But can you briefly share it? I was coached as all candidates and nominees are coached, presidential nominees for the cabinet. I was coached by a group of people who kept on saying to me, you know, the goal here is not to tell the senators what they already know or to preach to them or to lecture them. What you have got to do is show them how much you respect them.

And instead of trying to convince them or show them or explain, what you must do is be modest and humble. What you must do over and over again is say, Senator, I look forward to working with you on that. Or, Senator, thank you for the work you've done on that issue. We may have small disagreements from time to time, but I really do look forward to our efforts together on this issue. Whatever you do, don't try to take them on in these confirmation hearings, because that's not what this is about. What did you learn from that experience? I feel like I see it when you're interacting with people who might be of different opinions, but have you taken that out into your life? Well, this goes back to the issue of bullying.

When I was very small, I've always been small, but I mean, when I was very young and small, I was bullied a great deal as many children are. But I felt humiliated and powerless and shamed. And I think that what I tried to do, one of my techniques, strategies for dealing with those feelings was to be a very good student, to learn a lot, to be able to reason and show analytically why somebody was wrong, why my positions were thoughtful. and correct. But you see, that was not really a winning strategy either because it's not a matter of telling people the right answer. As I became a teacher, I've been a teacher for 43 years. I love being a teacher.

I love the classroom. And once I was in the classroom, I realized the issue is helping other people use their own critical thinking. It's helping other people come to their conclusions. You might coax them. You might give them some help. You might use humor. You might play games with them.

You might do a lot of things. But it's always very important to remain humble. It's critically important not to feel that you are smarter than anybody else. I can imagine those are lessons that you just learn with that continual year after year you're in front of a new group of students, you're interacting in real time. This is not through the internet or social media or a high level. You're in an office, you know, in D.C. somewhere. You're like on the ground and you're interacting. So much of our world is not that anymore. I think it's part of what has been refreshing and seeing the way that you move through with people

over the last few years, especially. Do you see that as a challenge? I mean, there's It seems to be where everyone thinks that the other side is the boogeyman and that we're on polar opposites. But that ability to be able to do all of the things that you're talking about and to be humble in the face of other people, that actually requires you to be face to face. It does. And it's very difficult. I remember when I was Labor Secretary being at one of these big receptions. I hate receptions. I mean, receptions are the worst things ever invented because I would have to be standing.

And usually I was standing with people who were, you know, two feet or a foot and a half taller than I, and I couldn't hear them very well. And I'd, you know, occasionally, you know, I'd feel their breath or their spit or whatever it was fall on me. It was like, I can't describe to you how awful those receptions were. One particular reception, though, I was interested in hearing somebody who, a senator who was on the Judiciary Committee, but he was very tall, six foot seven, and the only way I could even get close to hearing him was, well, I finally decided to stand on a chair. And our faces were just about parallel. And I said, Senator, I'm very interested in what you just said, but I couldn't hear it from down there. And he laughed. His name was Alan Simpson, Senator Alan Simpson.

And we discovered that we had a great deal in common. Going back to your point about face-to-face, I mean, we literally were face-to-face as long as I was on a chair. And we became great friends. Even then in the 1990s, it was considered to be wrong. It was illicit for a Democratic member of the cabinet to be friendly, a good friend with a Republican senator. So we used to sneak out for lunch. My staff didn't like the idea and his staff didn't like the idea. and we thought it was great fun.

And we became very, very good friends. I considered him to be one of my best friends, even though we did not see eye to eye literally or figuratively on almost anything. But we shared a sense of humor and we shared a love of our families. I'm curious how long you work through this idea of tying your personal experiences with being short and the country and your generation falling short. short. I think it's been with me for, in one form or another, for about 50 years.

I've always been deeply in love with this country. Now, it sounds hokey. I've always loved the movies of Frank Capra, for example. People used to call it Capricorn, corny. It's a wonderful life. The movie affected me very deeply. And I think growing up, I felt that the country was essentially a good place. There was a moral horror to America.

There was a moral authority to America. Believe me, I understood the sins of slavery and the sins of what we did to the Native American population. I understood how badly we behaved in many respects around the country, around the world. But I believe that there was an essential goodness to America. And I think that in turn was related to how I was related to how I was. was brought up as a very, very young child because my parents smothered me with love. They made me believe that regardless of how powerless and ashamed I felt because of my height, But I was fine.

I was a good person. And I guess those two parallel feelings and the feelings of love for the country and the feelings that my parents had about me fused in some way. It's hard to explain it. But I think that the book represents that kind of fusion. Let's take a short break. Our guest today is Robert Reich. We're talking about his new book, Coming Up Short, A Memoir of My America.

We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is fresh air. You have encouraged progressives and the Democratic Party more generally to do this thing that you're saying, do to talk about power and how the economic system has been rigged against them. But there was that time period during 2019, 2020, and on where it felt like Democrats might have been talking extensively about power, especially when it comes to systemic racism and the legacies of enslavement. And there was huge backlash from that.

There was huge pushback from the right against cases like affirmative action and BLM, Black Lives Matter. Democrats have to understand, and this is true not just of Democrats, but everybody who wants to push and help the nation move forward, that the white working class has felt besieged for 50 years. The white working class has felt that nobody has paid attention. Nobody has helped. They haven't moved forward. They've been working hard. They've been moving and doing everything they are supposed to do, but they have not made it. In fact, they're falling further and further behind.

And their children are even further behind. They are. Their children are even further behind them. So certain issues like affirmative action strike the white working class as direct insults, as direct competitors. If black people or brown people are going to get help and going to be put in front of the line of the white working class and their children, that doesn't seem fair to a lot of the white working class. I think Democrats just have to be sensitive, have to talk about changing the structure of power in America so that white people who are working class people and black people who are working class and poor people. people who are white or black and lower middle class people who are afraid of becoming working class or becoming poor, all of us understand that we are being held back by a system increasingly dominated by big corporations and wealthy people who are abusing their wealth and power to rig the system against us. We have to talk differently about all of us being in the same big boat.

At this point, it feels so hard because it feels like talking about one makes the other feel, one feels slighted by the other, by just even broaching the subject. I think that's one of the problems of our current discourse. People are so defended against what they consider to be assaults on, their own position, their own identity. But look, Tanya, we've got to get over it. We have got to understand that the crucial political and economic challenge in front of us is coming together, coming together in a way that counterbalances the enormous

economic and political power of a small group of corporations and people at the top that are abusing their power. I don't want to be misunderstood here. I'm not saying that all extraordinarily wealthy individuals are bad. No, they're bad when they abuse their wealth by turning it into political power that rigs the system against everybody else and in their favor. That's the problem. That's the essence of the problem. The essence of the problem is when Elon Musk puts a quarter of a billion dollars into American politics to elect Donald Trump or to elect anybody for that matter. That's the essence of the problem.

We cannot have a democracy if that goes on. You know, when you were talking about your students that you have worked with over the years and over the decades, I mean, there's always this sentiment from older generations. that, well, the future is in the hands of you, the younger generation. But what gives you the confidence that we can succeed where your generation fell short? Because that is what you're saying in this book, is that there was so much idealism from the late 60s. There was so much progress that happened

that really laid the foundation for the society, all of the many of the great things. I'm sitting here as a black woman. woman, in part because of what happened during that time period. But what gives you the confidence that young people can succeed where your generation fell short? We fell short, but we didn't lack successes. We fell short, certainly. But when we joined together and the civil rights and voting rights movements are good examples, we made huge progress. And so when I say the younger generation will pick up where we failed, it's not

that we failed, it's they will pick up from where we fell short. They will pick up and they have to. It's not a matter of will they. They don't have any choice. We have to have them do so. Otherwise, we are going to be in the dustbin of history. Otherwise, we're going to find ourselves lacking all moral authority. It's not just that China will outcompete us. That's not the essence of it. It's not just the climate change we will not deal with. That's a huge problem. Or we won't deal with nuclear proliferation, or we won't deal with artificial intelligence, or we won't deal with a rising bigotry and prejudice around the world, or authoritarianism. No, the problem is we won't have the moral authority to do anything about any of this.

And I refuse to accept that. Robert Reich, thank you so much for this conversation. Well, Tanya, thank you for having me. Robert Reich served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. His new book is coming up short, a memoir of My America. After a break, our book critic Marine Corrigan reviews two new Rye novels. This is Fresh Air. As the August heat rises, the thirst for escape reading intensifies.

Our book critic Marine Corrigan says, The cool thing about her two latest picks, one a spy story, the other a crime caper, is that they make you think even as they entertain. Last month, in a now viral opinion piece called When Novels Mattered, New York Times columnist David Brooks bemoaned what he sees as the increasing irrelevance of literary fiction to American life. Gone are the days when Updike Mailer and Morrison dominated bestseller lists. Now, fantasy and genre fiction rule.

I'm not going to jump into the bear pit here, except to say that perhaps Brooks isn't reading the right stuff. Here's my recommendation for two genre novels that manage to be sly, rye, and smart works of social commentary, even as they entertain. Neither are in league with, say, port noise complaint or the color purple, but nor are they mental styrofoam. I've been following Dan Fesperman's espionage novels since his debut in 1999, with Lie in the Dark. That novel was set during the Siege of Sarajevo, which Fesperman, a former foreign correspondent, covered. Pariah, his latest spy story, also draws from recognizable real-life figures and situations. Hal Knight, the anti-hero of this tale. is a comedian and movie star who parlayed his brand of bro humor into a political career.

Knights served for two months as a Democratic congressman from California, but had to resign when a video went viral of him profanely bullying an actress on set. As we're told, on a spectrum of bad male behavior that ran from, say, Al Franken at its tamest to Harvey Weinstein at its vilest extreme, Hal's transgressions fell well toward the lower end, yet still within the vast middle ground where final judgment often depended on who was doing the judging. The opening of this tale finds Hal sulking in isolation on a Caribbean island, drinking dirty martinis and appropriately enough reading Philip Roth. What Hal doesn't know is that the CIA is watching. Soon, a trio of agents approach him.

They recruit Hal to accept an invitation to perform his comedy routine for the president of the Eastern European country of Bolrovia. It seems that something rotten is underway in Bolrovia. If Hal can keep his eyes and ears open while he's yucking it up with the despot, he may garner valuable intel. Pariah embraces a slew of spy novel tropes, the flawed hero who needs redemption, double agents, and the bewildering layout of the old capital city of Bolrovia,

where one wrong turn can lead Hal to the ultimate dead end. In a delicious climactic moment, set in an underground bar called the Green Devil, A group of former Fox News personalities even makes an entrance. As always with suspense, the greatest pleasure lies in the plot, which here has the quality of being labyrinthine but lucid. Mike Phillips, a British author born in Guyana, also has a long track record in crime writing,

along with a parallel career as an art curator. That expertise comes into play in the dancing face, a crime novel that originally came out in Britain in 1997 and is now available for the first time in the United States. Here's the premise. A black university professor named Augustus Gus Dixon attends a committee meeting to discuss holding protests against a touring African art exhibition whose objects were the spoils of claspers. colonialism. Impatient with the academic grandstanding of his colleagues, Gus snaps. Demonstrations and vigils were pointless, he told his colleagues. The only result would be a few

minutes on the air being patronized by a succession of young white women with microphones. Accordingly, Gus masterminds a scheme to steal the dancing face, a gold mask from Benin that's packed away in a London exhibition space. The plan naturally goes haywire, given that Gus's accomplices don't share his lofty motives for stealing the mask. Chief among them is the wealthy Nigerian businessman who's bankrolled the heist and who expects to add the mask to his personal art collection. The dancing face engages issues of reparations and identity,

while also holding its own with other classic crime novels about missing mcuffins. I'm thinking of novels like the Maltese Falcon and Cotton comes to Harlem. Like those novels, The Dancing Face offers an antic, absurdist take on the spectacle of flawed human beings attempting to set to rights a world gone wrong. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Pariah by Dan Fesperman and The Dancing Face by Mike Phillips. Freshier's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorock, Anne-Marie Baudenado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thaya Chalner, Anna Bauman, and John Sheehan. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Susan Nacundi directed today's show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. Support for NPR, and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org.