Working Class Advocate Robert Reich Has A New Book Coming Out In August, Coming Up Short

Bill Clinton began his political career as a leftist. He headed McGovern’s efforts in Texas and served a term as a progressive Attorney General in Arkansas and then as a progressive governor from 1979 to 1981. His defeat after one term had a profound effect on him and her covered drastically right when he ran and won again in 1982. He became a leading figure among the New Dems and the right-of-center DLC which advocated GOP-lite welfare reform, smaller government, and other anti-New Deal policies. He ran for president as a corporate Dem and governed that way as well (NAFTA, welfare reform, fiscal conservatism… all mainstream Republican policies).

Robert Reich was a classmate of Clinton’s at Yale. They became friends but later, as Clinton was moving right, Reich was moving left. Clinton appointed him Secretary of Labor but many of his efforts were stymied by right-wing Clinton appointees like budget director Leon Panetta, Fed chair Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, as well as by MAGA-in-the-making Clinton advisor Dick Morris.

He’s about to release his 20th book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, and on Thursday, he alerted his supporters, online and by e-mail that it would be published August 19. He described it as “part autobiography, part history focused on why America elected Trump in 2016 and then again in 2024, and part a story of the failure of my generation.”

I’ve seen the harm bullies like Trump cause, and I have spent much of my life trying to stop them.

I fought schoolyard toughs who teased and harassed me for being short. I was protected by a teenager who subsequently was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan for trying to register Black voters in Mississippi.

Like some of you, I marched for civil rights, protested the Vietnam War, and worked to elect Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar candidate for president in 1968.

As labor secretary to Bill Clinton, I tried to protect workers who were bullied by employers.

I always believed America was not a nation of bullies. We protected the vulnerable, comforted the afflicted, gave refuge to those fleeing violence and persecution, and gave voice to those who otherwise would not be heard.

Yet Trump was elected president in 2016 and then— after losing reelection in 2020 and instigating a coup and an attack on the U.S. Capitol, on American democracy itself— he was reelected in 2024. And on January 20, 2025, he took the oath of office for a second time.

I asked myself how a majority of American voters— albeit a razor-thin majority— could possibly choose to put him into the Oval Office again, trusting that he would abide by his oath when he betrayed it the first time.

There are many explanations, but for me the most convincing began to unfold more than four decades ago when I noticed that most Americans’ incomes were flattening even though the economy continued to grow.

Since then, the lion’s share of economic gains has gone to the top. Many Americans, especially those without college degrees, have felt little improvement in their lives, and their jobs have grown less secure. Vast swaths of the country have been abandoned by industry.

The basic bargain used to be that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you’d do better than your parents, and your children would do even better than you. But since the late 1970s, that bargain has become a cruel hoax. The middle class has shrunk. Some $50 trillion has been siphoned from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the richest 1 percent.

Understandably, many Americans feel frustrated and angry. Trump has given voice to that anger, although he directs it at scapegoats who have done nothing to cause it— undocumented workers, the “deep state,” transgender people, “communists,” and Democrats.

And he has done nothing whatsoever to address the underlying cause. In fact, he gave a big tax cut to the wealthy in his first term and is now preparing a second.

Through these years, I watched as other Republican presidents also cut taxes on the wealthy, arguing that the government should allow the so-called “free market” to operate without constraint— perpetuating the trickle-down myth that great wealth in the hands of a few will benefit the many as the rich make the nation more productive.

But as I came to understand, the “free market” is a misnomer, and little or nothing has trickled down.

Meanwhile, I watched Democrats abandon the working class.

John F. Kennedy was the last Democratic president to depend on the votes of working-class Americans while losing the votes of white, college-educated Americans by 2 to 1. Sixty years later, Joe Biden depended on the votes of college-educated Americans while losing the votes of the white working class by 2 to 1. Kamala Harris lost the working class by an even larger margin.

I saw Democratic leaders embrace free trade. I witnessed them deregulate finance and allow Wall Street to become a high-stakes gambling casino. I was there when they let big corporations gain enough market power to keep prices and profit margins high.

I saw them look away when corporations busted unions and slashed payrolls. I had a front-row seat when they bailed out Wall Street because its gambling addiction threatened to blow up the entire economy, but never bailed out homeowners who lost everything.

Over the decades, I have urged lawmakers to tell Americans why their pay continued to be lousy and their jobs less secure: certainly not because of immigrants, the “deep state,” transgender people, or any other Trump bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of its gains.

I warned that widening inequality and the corruption that accompanied it would eventually invite a demagogue who’d exploit the powerlessness and rage of Americans who felt economically bullied.

It’s possible that the arguments I’ve made over the decades have been wrong and my warnings alarmist. But they have been based on what I have seen and experienced.

And now that the nation has reelected exactly the kind of demagogue I portended, I feel added urgency in explaining why it is so important to reverse the staggering inequalities and legalized bribery that have characterized America even before Trump.

I love America and am proud of much that this nation has accomplished over my lifetime. I remain doggedly hopeful about the long-term future. But, undeniably, we and much of the world now face a brutal set of crises, headed by the decline of democracy and deterioration of the rule of law.

My father and others in the Greatest Generation won the Second World War and created the most powerful economy and strongest democracy the world had ever seen, populated by the largest and most prosperous middle class in history. My Boomer Generation and I then failed to create the decent, sustainable, and just society that was within our grasp.

But this doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Every single day, I meet and am inspired by younger generations of students and activists determined to keep up the fight against inequality and demagoguery. My hope is that they (and future generations) will be able to learn from the lessons I’ve witnessed firsthand— and correct the many ways my generation came up short. Hence, this book.