Coming Up Short

 Robert B. Reich, “Coming Up Short”, Alfred A. Knopf, 2025, 350  pp. 

This book is well-worth reading, I highly recommend it.

My Notes:

Pg. 6:  Over the past decades, Reich has consistently spoken up about policies he feared would widen income inequality even further.  He urged Democratic candidates and 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, ‘communists,’ or any other bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of the economy’s gains.

He asked Democrats to champion the working class: demand paid family leave, Medicare for all, free public higher education, stronger unions, and higher taxes on great wealth, and create the biggest boom in residential home construction since WWII.  He warned that widening inequality and the corruption that accompanied it would eventually invite a demagogue who would exploit the powerlessness and rage of Americans who felt economically bullied.

Pg. 63:  The followers of Ayn Rand who glorified the ‘free market’ and denigrated ‘government’ fooled themselves if they thought the ‘free market’ got them off this Trumpian hook.  As Reich came to understand, the market is itself a human creation—a set of laws and rules that define what can be owned and traded and how.  The government does not ‘intrude’ on the free market; it creates the market.  Government officials—legislators, administrators, regulators, judges, and heads of state—must decide on and enforce such laws and rules for a market to exist.  Without norms for the common good, officials have no way to make these decisions other than in their own interests.

Pg. 108:  The extremism of today’s six Republican appointees to the Supreme Court was on full display in their 2022 opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overruling Roe v. Wade.  Roe had been the law of the land for almost fifty years.  Even more ominous was Thomas’s concurring opinion, which pointed the way for the radicals on the Court.  If the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t protect abortion, said Thomas, the court ‘should consider’ other cases that rely on the same clause: Griswold v. Connecticut; Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case invalidating sodomy laws and making same sex sexual activity legal across the country and Obergefell v. Hodgesthe 2015 case establishing the right of gay couples to marry.  Thomas said the court had a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents. 

Pg. 128:  Economist Galbraith agreed with Reich that Reagan’s so-called supply-side tax cut was wrongheaded.  The highest marginal income tax rate had been 70 percent when Reagan took office.  He dropped it to 50 percent in 1982 and then to 28 percent in 1989.  Since then, it has never risen above 39.6 percent.  Reagan also cut taxes on inheritances, corporate profits, and capital gains.  The net result was a dramatic decline in total tax payments by the wealthy and the start of an explosion in the federal deficit and debt.  In effect, America’s wealthy went from supporting the government through their tax payments to supporting it by lending money at interest.

Pg. 137:  During the 1970s there were only thirteen hostile takeovers of big companies valued at $1 billion or more.  During the 1980s, there were one hundred fifty.  Between 1979 and 1989, financial entrepreneurs mounted more than two thousand leveraged buyouts, in which they bought out shareholders with borrowed money, each transaction exceeding $250 million.  The shareholders who sold out did well; the raiders did even better.  The losers were workers who lost their jobs, communities that lost their core businesses, and a nation that had to cope with ever angrier politics.

Pg. 184: Milwaukee had been known as the machine shop of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, when most of its adult population had well-paying union jobs in manufacturing.  As late as 1969, Milwaukee’s residents enjoyed the second-highest median income of any large American city.  But many of those jobs went abroad; others were replaced by automated equipment and software.  Since then, Milwaukee lost more than 80 percent of its manufacturing jobs and now has the second-highest poverty rate of any large American city.

Pg. 186:  As finance came to dominate the US economy in the 1980s and 1990s, capital was diverted from long-term investment to stock buybacks.  Financiers made complicated side bets on whether cash-strapped subprime borrowers would lose their homes.  Wall Street traders invested in ways to get a few milliseconds of advantage over other traders, so they could win speculative bets.  None of this added value to the economy.

Pg. 231:  From a speech Reich gave in 1995:  We are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger grkoup nof Americans left behind, whose anger and disillusionment are easily manipulated.  Mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of society, replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate.  Today the targets of that rage are immigrants, welfare mothers, government officials, gays, and an ill-defined counterculture.  But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?

Pg. 232:  Reich goes on to say he wished he had been less prescient.  The tinder was there.  Global trade, the deregulation of Wall Street, the raiders and the corporate obsession with share values, the corporate assault on unions, the Powell 1970s memo encouraging Corporations to give great bundles of money to affect the election system, the Supreme Court’s opening of big money into politics, the lack of help for people stranded in the old economy to adapt to the new.  It was a combustible mixture.  All it took was a match.  The match was Fox News.

Pg. 256:  In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt warned that a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power could destroy American democracy.  Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth.  The estate tax was enacted in 1916, and the capital gains tax in 1922.

Pg. 271:  By 2024, the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans brought home more than 40 percent of the country’s total income, up from 10 percent in the 1950s and 1960s, and they had over 30 percent of the nation’s wealth.  Families in the bottom half of the distribution had only 2 percent of total wealth.  Families in the bottom quarter were in debt.

Pg. 272:  On June 26^th 2024, the Court dealt its latest blow to federal anti-corruption law in Snyder v. United States, which held that ‘gratuities”—gifts and payments provided after a public official does what the briber wants—are not technically ‘bribes’ and therefore are not illegal.  Bribes, said the Court in this bizarre 6-3 decision, are only issued before the desired official act.

Pg. 285: The five elements of fascism reinforce each other. Rejection of democracy in favor of a strongman depends on galvanizing popular rage.  Popular rage draws on a nationalism based on a supposed superior race or ethnicity.  That superior race or ethnicity is justified by a social Darwinist idea of strength and violence, as exemplified by heroic warriors.  Strength, violence, and the heroic warrior are centered o male power.  These five elements also find expression in the white Christian nationalist movement that Trump is encouraging.  It is also the direction most of the Republican Party is now heading in.  These are not simply elements of authoritarianism but the essential elements of fascism.

Pg. 314:  After Reagan’s presidency, democratic capitalism, organized to serve public purposes, all but disappeared, replaced by corporate capitalism organized to serve the moneyed interests.  Joe Biden almost revived democratic capitalism.  The year 2022 saw the biggest investment in clean energy sources in American history—expanding wind and solar power, electric vehicles, carbon capture and sequestration, and hydrogen and small nuclear reactors.  Then came the largest public investment ever made in semiconductors, the building blocks of the next economy.

Pg. 338:  Today in 2026, to be a Progressive is no longer to be on the political left as the left used to be defined—seeking a larger government—but to be on the side of the Constitution, the rule of law, and a modicum of decency. 

NYT Book Review:

Frank Capra’s  “It’s a Wonderful Life” isn’t exactly transgressive cinema. It famously tells the story of George Bailey, the noble head of his family’s building-and-loan, contemplating suicide because his greedy competitor, Mr. Potter, who has secretly pocketed money that belonged to the building-and-loan. Bailey prevails when a grateful town pitches in to help him. The movie is sweetly sentimental and decidedly apolitical. What saves Bailey is not government intervention but small-town reciprocity and simple decency.

So it’s somewhat surprising to learn that “It’s a Wonderful Life” struck at least some people as radically un-American when it was released in 1946. The F.B.I. treated the movie as “evidence of Communist Party infiltration” in Hollywood, referring to a report whose authors (including the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand) claimed the film “deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.” Then, as now, it apparently wasn’t enough for some rich people to be rich; they demanded to be admired, too.

Robert B. Reich includes this episode in his new book, “Coming Up Short.” Like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Reich also entered the world in 1946, along with his fellow boomers Bill Clinton and Donald J. Trump. Mr. Potter’s avarice, he says, “was a prelude to modern Republican ideology. Since the political rise of Ronald Reagan, his party and the moneyed interests have used Potter-like social Darwinism to justify tax cuts for the wealthy, union-busting, and cutbacks in social safety nets.” Reich recounts how his generation grew up at a time of postwar abundance and youthful idealism. His book is offered as a memoir and a mea culpa.

Not that Reich has anything to apologize for. Unlike some of his fellow boomers, he didn’t become selfishly venal or brutally authoritarian. After serving as Clinton’s labor secretary, Reich returned to teaching and writing books. Two years ago, he taught his last class at Berkeley. He liked the fact that it was a public university, with a responsibility to the public good.

Reich’s political consciousness was formed early, as a child who was relentlessly picked on as a “mouse” and a “runt” because of his small size (hence the dad joke in the title). Despite being one of the few Jews in his school, he was forced to play Baby Jesus in the Christmas pageant. When he was 5, a series of older students had to escort him to the bathroom to protect him from his tormentors. Reich remembers feeling powerless and scared. He credits the kindness and encouragement of his third-grade teacher, Mrs. Camp, with changing his life. She helped him go from a “shy, insecure 8-year-old” to someone buoyed by a budding confidence and big ambitions.

He went on to excel in the postwar meritocracy: class president at Dartmouth, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (where he met Bill Clinton), graduate of Yale Law School (where he introduced Bill to Hillary Rodham). One of his law professors, the conservative Robert Bork, hired Reich as an assistant in the Gerald Ford administration.

Even though he and Bork had their political disagreements, Reich maintains that Bork was unfairly attacked by Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, who doomed the nomination of Bork to the Supreme Court. Reich suggests that getting grilled by those Democrats turned Bork into a reactionary. “Bork was treated horribly,” he writes, “and subsequently became one of the nation’s most inveterate cultural warriors.”

Bork’s trajectory is supposed to illustrate one of the main themes of the book: that the bullied often turn into bullies, and that the experience of vulnerability can mutate into fantasies of domination. But the Borking of Bork doesn’t seem to me the best example of actual bullying — after all, Bork didn’t necessarily inspire confidence when he carried out Richard Nixon’s order to fire the special prosecutor who was investigating Watergate, capping off the “Saturday Night Massacre.” The Democrats who didn’t believe that Bork deserved a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court weren’t simply being mean.

But Reich is unfailingly generous, to a touching (and occasionally maddening) degree; he likes almost everyone “personally,” even those he believes have damaged the country because their “judgment was terrible.” He is the exception to his own rule: As bullied as he was, he never became a bully. He has dedicated his life to promoting fairness, not revenge.

What saved Reich were patient teachers and compassionate kids like Mickey, a boy he met on an Adirondack vacation, whose full name was Michael Schwerner. Years later, in 1964, Schwerner was one of the young civil rights volunteers who was murdered in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan. Reich says that when he heard the news, “something snapped inside me.” He realized bullying was something that extended beyond his own personal experience. “I began to view the central struggle of civilization as fighting bullies — standing up against brutality.”

Reich comes across as thoughtful, genial and principled; he notes on the copyright page that portions of “Coming Up Short” appeared in a couple of earlier books, but the bit of recycling arguably reflects how steadfastly he has held onto his values. Unlike the economists Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, who also served in the Clinton administration, Reich has been remarkably prescient, regularly warning about the dangers of inequality and the perils posed by a financial industry run amok. His numerous books have a moral center because he has a moral center. Reich, who is 4-foot-11 (and prone to puns, as evinced by previous books like “Locked in the Cabinet” and “I’ll Be Short”), has long promoted civil society and government institutions as essential antidotes to a Hobbesian war of all-against-all: “I would not survive a minute in a society based on brute force.”

He remains hopeful. “I’m confident our sense of fairness will re-emerge,” he writes at one point in the book, yet he later worries that optimism can slip too easily into passivity. He criticizes mainstream Democrats for abandoning economic populism, leaving a vacuum for Republicans to fill with cultural populism, whose more virulent forms he calls “Trumpian neofascism.”

Even though this book is billed as a memoir, it’s ultimately a call to action. Over the last four decades, Reich has seen what happens when his colleagues succumb to complacency, presuming that everything will be just fine in the long run: “Nothing important works out in the end unless we work hard for it now.”