Coming Up Short summary

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.