Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Katrina vanden Heuvel on Where We’re Going, and Robert Reich on How We Got Here | Start Making Sense

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Katrina vanden Heuvel on Where We’re Going, and Robert Reich on How We Got Here | Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: On John Weiner, later in the show, Robert Reich says the origins of our troubles with Trump and Maga go back to the sixties.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He says it was our mistake.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Starting with the sixties movements, he says, we created a giant political void that would eventually be filled by Donald Trump's angry, bigoted cultural populism.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: His new memoir is coming up short,
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll talk with him later in the hour.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But first, how do we face how bad things are now while also understanding the reasons for hope and the opportunities for action to train a van den Houvelle editor and publisher of the nation will comment in a minute.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Katrina Vandenhuvel, longtime editorial director and publisher of the nation, has returned to work this week as editor of the magazine.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's also been a columnist for the Washington Post.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's written for the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Guardian, where she's now a regular contributor.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Katrina, welcome back.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: You John, you don't have to come back if I might preempt you, which I've done too often on top TV making money.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: These are extreme times.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I felt that, well, there will be a cessor to me, someone younger, someone, but I felt at this moment that I felt a trust in the nation.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Both as a trust of history, a trusted independent publication at a time when independent media is under terrible stress.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm not fetishizing history.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not tethered to history, but I do draw from history to understand what is happening today.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I believe that it is unparalleled, dangerous perilous time.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: At the same time, I feel a resilience having studied and lived through terrible times.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that allows me to find the writers and thinkers and also
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: My sister used to say her friends loved yes exclamation point.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And she said they loved the nation, but they thought it was no patient point.
• 2:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe is maybe, but I do think this is a time to lift up what's happening around this country in the world that offer alternative affirmative projects, because we can't all live on doom and gloom and doom scrolling all day.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: We need, I hate to say the vision, but to have an alternative sense of what is working and lessons to be drawn, but in ways that are alive and vibrant, and I really feel dedicated to that.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the executive editor will become dramaticals.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: is also someone I've worked with, we've devised the honor roll over the years, people doing good things in bad times, good times, not so good times, and drawing that from the thirties, the ancient thirties from the magazine.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a new politics that the nation in some ways has found a tie to, and we're going to really test that in these coming months and years.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, the publishing landscape, as you've suggested, is a lot darker now than when you left day to day editing in twenty nineteen.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just remind everybody, the publisher, the Washington Post, did next to Trump at his inauguration.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another of his companies paid forty million dollars to license and Melania Trump documentary.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the Washington Post's owner.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Several of their most important writers left in protest.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: More recently, CBS fired its top late night host, Stephen Colbert, who's nightly ridicule of Trump has been relentless in hilarious and the parent company of CBS, Paramount paid Trump, sixteen million dollars
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: in quotes for his presidential library after he sued them for a sixty minutes interview with Kamala Harris and before that ABC news paid from fifteen million again for his presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over a report of George Stephanopoulos
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's, you know, that's the Washington Post CBS and ABC, and some ways much worse is the Republicans in Congress have defunded NPR and PBS, the corporation for public broadcasting in closing is closing, and that means many dozens of public radio and TV stations, especially in the less populous red states, will go dark.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is a totalitarian move that's a lot bigger than networks paying cash to Trump.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that makes independent media, including the nation more important than ever.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It deepens our responsibilities.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as you've said, the hardest part is facing how bad things are while we are also
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: seeing the reasons for hope and for action, and doing both of those things simultaneously is hard, but as you say, you've had some experience with this.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, our long-time contributor, you knew him well, John.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Goorvidal used to describe the nation as an early alert warning system to what's coming over the trance, you know, the trance and over the fortifications.
• 5:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think of my colleague, Mark Hertzberg, who's book on Bended Nee,
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: was about the media during the Reagan era.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is worse, but I would suggest that we revisit the nineteen ninety six national entertainment series.
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: The nation did the first center full, which showed G.E.
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: ABC News Corps.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: It showed that news was a cog in a corporate structure, which had regulatory business in Washington, DC.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're seeing that revealed painfully crystal clear like in the Trump years.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: The independence of a publication is marked not just by its financial state, but it is in these times largely defined by those who want to be close to a president who thrives on corruption and spectacle and input into his old piggy bank.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I do think that the corporate media
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: has shown how craving it is in these last these last months and it's up to the nation and independent media not to speak truth to power John because I believe those in power know the truth but to expose the truth so that ordinary people good people can seize that news and mobilize because what if you don't know
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: You don't know what you're mobilizing for, and maybe that's too martial or word, but I do think the nation does play a critical role in these times.
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's just briefly, we did a lot of reporting on how Rupert Murdoch bought his way to end the serious cross ownership rules.
• 6:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Those are going to be obliterated in the next few weeks, and we have him moving LA.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: The LA pass is going to open soon.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're talking here about Rupert Murdoch's announcement that he's launching a California edition of the New York Post-right wing tabloid.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is supposed to happen in early, twenty twenty-six-based in Los Angeles called the California Post.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think there's very high quality journals and being done at the nation at other publications independent.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm on the Hillman media.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Judging Committee, and we see that every year, it's the business model, John, that is still very perilous and dangerous, as we see how the corporate media has hitch-lended and, just to petorally, capitulated and open the sleuths gates for more peril to the media remaining.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: We need to remember that what Trump is doing is not popular, even among his own supporters.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right now, his tariffs are the main thing that's been driving down his approval ratings and causing his twenty twenty four coalition to unravel.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me just summarize some of the recent data from the economists, you go of Paul.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: his overall approval rating.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just in the six months since he took office down twenty one points down forty four points with eighteen to twenty nine year olds approval down thirty points with hispanics since he took office twenty nine points down within the pendants down twenty points with people making less than a hundred thousand dollars a year
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's not just the economy, inflation, the high prices for food and rent.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's underwater on virtually all the issues.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many more people disapprove than approve of what he's done on immigration deportations.
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: education, social programs.
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the health care, his approval rating is thirty-five percent.
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we have big opportunities here and also big responsibilities.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I agree.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have opportunity.
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have responsibility.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Those numbers are exhilarating.
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Doesn't mean that those numbers move straight line direction.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the town hall meetings, which we're going to cover this August, will expose lawmakers to anger and despair and make open things up.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it demands an opposition party, which speaks directly to people's lives and offers an alternative
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that it's not one-and-a-half parties.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I do think the media plays a role here.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are independent media showing the despair and the disillusion.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: But Trump dominates the news.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: He still dominates the arena.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that needs to change.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think we're seeing alternative leaders speaking ways that do touch people.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk about that because, well, the news is terrible.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not all bad.
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Probably the brightest light in the current Dark Landscape is Mondami, the social Democrat who beat former governor Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York City.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: What does the nation have to say about his campaign?
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, you'll see more next week when the interview, John Nichols, and I did the hour interview at the Little Flower Cafe in a story of a little flower being the nickname for Zormom Donnie's favorite mayor, Fierrella LaGuardia.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: What Mom Donnie has done, and I saw him on Sunday with Elizabeth Warren, who came to campaign for him, is make affordability a central premise of a progressive landscape.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not the banks.
• 10:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: But affordability of groceries and transportation of housing, and he's done it with a smile and an elegance and abusive social media that is truly unparalleled.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: It shows it reminds us that the nation
• 11:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, sincerity, but also levity, I mean, with a purpose.
• 11:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm impressed, I think he came back from Uganda where he went to see his parents and grandparents to introduce them to his new wife.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: But he came back and he met with the family of the private security.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: cop who had been killed in the terrible shootings a few days before when he'd been in Uganda and he did it with a humanity that crossed kind of politicization and weaponization of such incidents.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think he's has a real chance and he's brought together a great coalition.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Your viewers may know of rank choice voting.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It didn't work well in twenty twenty one in New York City, but we endorsed one two three, but one was all on.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And two was Brad Lander, who's been a long time progressive advocate city council now control the working fellas party the next day did the same line up of Zorpan and Brad Lander.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: What Brad Lander did though in a line in coalition with Zoran is very important to understanding the success of rendering.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not just deep blue New York City.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: where we've had some striking progressive victories just in the last month.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about Seattle.
• 12:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Seattle, the home of Microsoft and Amazon, where a woman named Katie Wilson is showing that Mom Dami is not alone.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know about her until I read the nation.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's part of the role of the nation in a way.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: But Katie Wilson, that is a tough city.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: But she is taking all through taxation issues, the referendum, the big tech high tech corporations, and she is transportation expert.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Mayor Boston was six, thirty six, it's going to be re-elected.
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there are those around the country, and I do think with Ridlock and worse in Washington, D.C.
• 12:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's important to have champions at the city and state level.
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Much more amazing than Seattle or Boston.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about Omaha, you know, the city in one of the reddest states that had a Republican mayor who's held office since twenty thirteen won her last race by thirty points.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nevertheless, a Democrat John Ewing Jr.
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beater in May by nearly thirteen points, if you'd be the arithmetic there, that's a shift of forty three points in Omaha, a red city.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, I learned about this from the nation.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: What can Democrats learn from this John Ewing Jr's victory in Omaha?
• 13:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: The first of all, Nebraska has a very good democratic chair who's written for us, Jane Kleb.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you're a historian, I am not.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that region of the country had former labor alliances.
• 13:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was a populist part of the country.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he's retrieving those traditions in a modern way.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think he's running a populist, multiracial in the big cities, but in Omaha, populist campaign, which leads with the bread and butter issues.
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I think that there's an opening for that.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he's showing it.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So when people say, can't be done, I think next, Idaho, I'm going to take back Frank Church to see that.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was John Culver.
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: We, you know, the famous story, Arab, phone, or email, greatest story, and emailed me one night and said, can someone get something to Bernie Sanders?
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Can he stop talking about Denmark?
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Eric Foner in the middle of the night wrote an open letter, which we published, but it was to Bernie about receiving your own country's radical traditions, which exist, and are not so odd in French.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're part of the tradition, and I think that's part of the nation's mission.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's to highlight what is new, but has roots in a history.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think Trump knows he's in deep trouble in the midterms next fall.
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He knows how unpopular.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He knows how tiny his mark the Republican margin is in the house and how likely the Democrats can win the house.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that explains this authoritarian scheme of his in Texas to eliminate five Democratic congressional seats through an unprecedented reapportionment move.
• 15:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Nichols has a piece up at the nation right now at the website that says representative democracy will live or die in Texas.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because sign of how authoritarian not only Trump is, but some of the governors for ramming through legislation to rig the system.
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is not a democratic system that Abbott is trying to create.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's happened before.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you're looking at people who rigged the rules.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, it's also the anniversary, I think, the sixteenth of the voting rights act.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: making voting difficult to do.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's called democracies.
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's how they run.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's how they rule.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's something we have to expose and rally people to understand how dangerous it is because it's a slippery slope.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: You begin in Texas.
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're going to see it around the country.
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're asking one of the legislators who good lawyer who fled to write for the nation about the experience.
• 16:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: In conclusion here,
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: you've just returned to the editor's desk at the nation this week.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you see the schedule for the next weeks and months and year for what we used to call America's oldest weekly?
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, we're doing events to mark the hundred and sixty years from a of event ethical culture honoring the intern program, which Victor Novasky started more than forty years ago.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Someone wrote to me today that they valued the nation.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Not just because of the words we published, but because of the people we've kind of
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: for all through the media and journalistic system.
• 16:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that will be interesting.
• 16:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we have Kave Akbar, our poetry editor with Judy Collins, and then we're heading to San Francisco, where I hope to be in conversation with Jerry Brown and we'll have Ali Mastal, our great justice correspondent.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: and Rebecca Solnit and others in conversation about this moment.
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I also turn back to my desk and I'm going to edit Jamie Galbraiths on parallels between Reagan and Trump on the economy, which is something to think about.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And a piece about New York City political scene, which has changed really in interesting ways, the working family's party, which the nation helped create in nineteen ninety eight is now considered sort of the senior guy on the street.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And DSA, which you've seen over time, Democratic Socialist for America, has had a lot of energy and input.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I do think that I'm a deviate deviationist at the nation because we do have a younger generation of democratic socialist.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I remain a Rooseveltian two-point-o and have to say Lena Khan the great anti-monopolis professor of government head of the FTC had an op-ed the other day I wish we'd published it about Zoran and small business.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: We should not see small business to the right and his work on how law trucks
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: and their dates have redefined in some measure what small businesses.
• 18:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, one of our contributors, I've said this before Norman Thomas, a socialist, we endorsed in thirties two, nineteen thirties, said they're no less causes, they're only causes waiting to be won.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I do think that realism is important, but also resilience.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's a very tough time for a lot of people, and we have to be understanding of that.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that we give people not the weak of Trump.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: We do that, but we also give the weak of resistance to point out.
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Katrina Vanden Hovel, she's publisher of the nation, and now, once again, editor of the nation magazine, Katrina, thanks for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now it's time to talk with Robert Reich about how we got here and what we can do now.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's done a lot in his life.
• 19:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's a legendary teacher at Berkeley.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was written eighteen books which had been translated into twenty two languages.
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's a columnist now for the Guardian, and a lot of us read his daily newsletter at Substack or follow him on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube where he is a star.
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he has a new book out.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's called Coming Up Short, a memoir of my America.
• 19:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: We reached him today in Berkeley, Robert Reich.
• 19:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back.
• 20:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, good to talk to you, John.
• 20:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: You call your memoir a story of the failure of my generation.
• 20:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's it's mine, too.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: You say it was our mistake starting with the sixties movements.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: We had a civil rights movement in an anti-war movement, and then in the seventies, a women's movement, then a gay rights movement, then an environmental movement, but you say one movement was missing.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that created what you call, quote, a giant political void that would eventually be filled by Donald Trump's angry, bigoted cultural populism.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: What was missing?
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, in a word, it was the labor movement, actually two words, John.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And your labor movement had been around, obviously, for in fits and starts over a hundred years.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I didn't really, and here's my confessional.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't really think about it in those days as a movement.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: The labor was there.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was just a big labor.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was big companies, big corporations, and there was big government.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it didn't seem necessary in a way to consider or to talk about the labor movement or to talk even about the working class.
• 21:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that that was my error.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was an error that a lot of people made because all of these other movements did take a life of their own.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: They accomplished a great deal.
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: But by forgetting about workers and labor and movement, I think we laid the groundwork for something quite ugly.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Democrats great turn away from the working class and the labor movement.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, came in the bill Clinton years when you were Secretary of Labor
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The whole thing was pretty clear from the start of the Clinton campaign in nineteen ninety two, at least if you listen to third party candidate Ross Perro, you quote him in your book on the subject of NAFTA, which George H. W. Bush had just negotiated with Mexico, also Canada, and one of the presidential debates in ninety two watched by sixty million people.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's about the same number that watched the debates this year.
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perro explained why he was against NAFTA.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're paying thirteen or fourteen dollars an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border and pay one dollar an hour have no health care no environment or pollution controls no retirement and you don't care about anything but making money there will be a giant sucking sound coming from the south closed quote today that seems obvious how did it seem to you in nineteen ninety two
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: In nineteen ninety two, John, I was worried about that.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I thought that, and I put it in a slightly different terms, I worried that American workers would lose bargaining leverage.
• 23:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were already losing bargaining power.
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I talked about it inside the incoate, incipient Clinton administration.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I lost those internal debates.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was very clear Bill Clinton and other people around him wanted to embrace NAFTA.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I did what I was told to do, and I think in retrospect, I don't know whether that was the right thing to do.
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I argued as much as I could, and I also argued against Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, I was worried that that would have an even bigger, essentially a sucking sound.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I lost a lot of the arguments internally, John.
• 23:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've written about that, but you and I've talked about that.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I guess from where we are right now, I see that all of this contributed to it didn't lead in electively, inevitably, to Donald Trump, but it contributed to the emergence of Donald Trump.
• 24:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, the big debate in American politics really for the last fifty years has been framed by the Republicans.
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: They say more government is bad.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freedom from big government is good.
• 24:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freedom for the market.
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've been arguing with this position for a long time now.
• 24:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remind us what your reply has been.
• 24:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've said it so often, it's sort of automatic and I don't think people even listen because I'm so predictable.
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: The question is not more or less government.
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: The question is who is government for?
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it working for average working people in the poor?
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or is it working for the people of a lot of money and a lot of resources and big corporations?
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And certainly over the last decades, government has done more and more on behalf of the latter, that is big corporations and the wealthy, because that's where the money has come from for campaigns.
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's where the legalized bribery that I talk about in the book has really occurred.
• 25:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if we want to, and we have to, this is not if we want to.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have to disabuse ourselves from that kind of addiction.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Democratic Party has got to give up the corporate and financial Democrats that have been so important to the party in terms of money, but have eroded the party's moral authority.
• 25:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you were a secretary of labor, you did get Congress to raise the minimum wage just before the ninety six elections.
• 25:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: What had it been and what did they do?
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, they raised the minimum wage to, I believe it was
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've dollars and fifteen, fifteen cents, which I mean, it doesn't from today's standpoint, it doesn't look like anything.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it had been four dollars and twenty five cents.
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was a Republican Senate and a Republican House.
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: They didn't want to raise the minimum wage.
• 26:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And basically, it wasn't me.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I did try to lead that charge on the Hill.
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what really did it was that most Americans and the Republican saw
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: The polls, the same polls that everybody also saw, and it was not just one poll.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's poll after poll after poll.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Most Americans wanted the minimum wage raised, not because they would benefit.
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: They knew that they were not on a minimum wage, but they felt that it was the fair thing to do.
• 26:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's a very important part of the story, because Americans have this very deep-seated sense of what's fair and what's not fair.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: I saw it firsthand when I was a labor secretary and before and after and since and we can't simply assume that everybody is cynical like Donald Trump or everybody is is negative and mean spirited like Donald Trump.
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, I think Americans really are fundamentally good and fair.
• 27:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's been sixteen years since Congress raised the federal minimum wage.
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's been seven dollars and twenty five cents.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: You said the Republican supported it in nineteen ninety six and that was because so many Americans supported raising the minimum wage don't so many Americans still report a still support raising the minimum wage eighty three percent say the current seven dollar and twenty five cent rate is not enough to live on.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: how much should it be in twenty twenty three sixty five percent of voters at fifteen dollars an hour younger people favor a lot more today uh... your absolutely right i mean the same percentage if not more want the minimum wage raise that has been raised uh... since two thousand nine this is crazy we can't expect most people cannot possibly live on today's minimum wage it should be at least fifteen dollars and if you actually controlled for both
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: inflation and productivity improvements.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: It would be closer to twenty or twenty five dollars an hour.
• 28:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So after Clinton of course then came Obama there was that speech in two thousand four that he gave at the Democratic National Convention that made him an instant hero.
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said, quote, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America.
• 28:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a United States of America, close quote.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now today, that seems totally wrong, doesn't it?
• 28:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: It does seem, it seems quaint, if not wrong.
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, how can there be not a liberal and not a conservative America?
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think what Obama was trying to do, and he did it with such
• 29:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: grace, and he continued to try to do it.
• 29:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is to tell us that we are part of one society, one experiment in democracy, and we shouldn't allow people to try to divide us.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, look, let's be clear here.
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: They divide in conquer strategy has been very effective.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: and it's been used by I'm sure Vladimir Putin has been using it and I'm sure also the oligarchy of America as used it because you see if you can divide Americans and make them think that their real enemies are the people on the other side of the political divide then they don't look up and see where all the money and power really has gone in our society
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Obama didn't really help with this problem at all despite the economic crash of two thousand eight piece stuck with Wall Street in the big banks and divide in America deepened and after America to twenty sixteen elections Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primaries even though he wasn't a Democrat and even though as you say he was a seventy four-year-old Jew from Vermont
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You say, if the DNC had not tipped the scales against him by rigging campaign financing in favor of Hillary, Bernie would have been the party's nominee in twenty sixteen.
• 30:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: How do you feel about Bernie?
• 30:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love Bernie.
• 30:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's one of my heroes.
• 30:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know where he gets his energy, his stamina, his tenacity, but he's been there and he's out there.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even as we speak, he's out there.
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's talking to people.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's telling the truth and God bless Bernie.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to change the subject to your teaching.
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: You taught at Harvard, and then you taught at Berkeley.
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've just retired Harvard, of course.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: When they lead private school, Berkeley, the flagship, public university, what differences did you see, and which did you like better?
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, Berkeley.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, Harvard is a wonderful institution, obviously.
• 31:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I love.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: University of California Berkeley Berkeley and in fact the entire University of California system is the largest and most powerful system of upward mobility in America.
• 31:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: My students most of them were first generation, first generation in terms of seeing getting a college diploma.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: The third of them came directly.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: They transferred from the community colleges.
• 31:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's an engine of upward mobility.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: One thing I want to ask you about that I've learned only recently
• 31:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not everybody is interested in politics the way we are.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, most people aren't very interested in politics.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: They don't follow the news that much, especially working class and poor people that preoccupied with their own lives, their own problems, their own pleasures, politics for them.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's sort of like the Olympics.
• 32:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: You watch it every four years for a couple of days.
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you hope your team wins and all the effort and all the money that our side puts into getting the right message out, a message that's been tested.
• 32:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: They don't pay attention.
• 32:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're not very interested.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: They vote on vague feelings I like him or he seems like a good guy to me or or they don't vote at all.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Adeline, million people did not vote in twenty twenty four.
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a lot more than the number of people who voted for Trump, seventy seven million.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So better messaging.
• 32:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: which so much of our work goes into figuring out better messaging may not be the best way to reach all these people.
• 32:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: We need to find other modes of communication other ways to reach them than the kind of politics we've been doing all our lives.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now you, you are a star on TikTok.
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And YouTube where you have one point three million subscribers in an Instagram, you have two million followers.
• 33:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, these are the places where now, where millions of people who don't read the daily newspaper or watch TV news get their information.
• 33:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: How did you become so good at this?
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
• 33:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really don't know.
• 33:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have two sons, one of them named Sam, has been doing a lot of social media.
• 33:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sam runs a company called Dropout Television.
• 33:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Have you seen any of that?
• 33:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nope.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you're not alone.
• 33:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, nobody, our age has seen it, but young people, my students, they all know Sam.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they, in fact, somebody came up to me on the sidewalk just a couple of days ago and said, I mean, are you Sam Rice's father?
• 34:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: But a few years ago, I was about ten years ago.
• 34:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sam said to me, Dad, I know you write books, you'd like to write books, and I know you get a lot of satisfaction out of it.
• 34:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: But my generation is there are not big readers, particularly of your kind of book.
• 34:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you want to reach my generations, you've got a generation, you've got a social media.
• 34:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And at that point, I barely knew what social media was.
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he tutored me.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: He helped me.
• 34:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I have a little group of young people who are in their twenties and thirties who helped me do it.
• 34:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't do it without them.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're very talented.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they keep me young to the extent that anybody can do that.
• 34:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yes, I mean, I still write books, hence,
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: The book we are talking about coming up short, but I do a lot of social media because it is a way of teaching.
• 34:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is a way of connecting.
• 35:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wanna talk about one other thing, tall people.
• 35:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your memoir, you called, coming up short.
• 35:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's the thesis of your book that our generation failed to strengthen democracy.
• 35:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that's also a pun about your height.
• 35:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You are not a tall person.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am not a tall person.
• 35:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you make the point that the taller candidate usually wins the election.
• 35:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our tallest presidents, I look them up.
• 35:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a Wikipedia page, presidents by height.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln is our tallest president's six feet four inches.
• 35:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: LBJ number two, six three and a half.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Clinton's six three, FDR six two, Obama six two, George H. W. Bush six two, JFK six one, Reagan six one, Joe Biden six feet even.
• 35:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: What about Trump?
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, Trump lies about his height.
• 35:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He claims to be six three.
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's also a Wikipedia page about this, but photos show him standing right next to Obama, and they're exactly the same height, more or less.
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trump has more hair on top of his head.
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: So maybe he's, and Obama is six, two.
• 36:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I had a professor who blamed all the troubles of the world on what he called the six footers.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why should the six footers always win?
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's a very good question.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a lot of prejudice in our society that we don't talk about against shortmen or in favor of a tall man.
• 36:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Women is slightly different, but I think that the studies that I've read and
• 36:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been kind of interested in this subject, obviously, I have a personal interest, but I've been interested in sociologically.
• 36:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: It turns out that there are many evolutionary biologists and others who think that we are kind of genetically wired to choose
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: big people, tall men, to be our leaders, because they are, again, in terms of kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest, they are the ones who can protect us.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even our language, we talk about looking up to somebody.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: or somebody has stature.
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or I mean, there are all kinds of ways.
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: We unconsciously are prejudicial.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then in dating, I don't know how you, whether you have this experience, John, I'm very short.
• 37:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there were a number of girls who just didn't want to look at me.
• 37:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: They didn't want to go out with a boy who is shorter than they were.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that was the coolest, the coolest of all prejudices.
• 37:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Last thing,
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: the long game.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Going back to Bernie, just for a minute here, one of the things you say you love about Bernie is that he exemplifies the long game.
• 37:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: His whole life, he's been saying the same thing.
• 37:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't have a problem staying on message.
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have midterms coming up in a year and a half, then we have an election and I have to do that.
• 38:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is the long game for us right now?
• 38:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think for long game has got to be to protect our democracy and to get actually get it back.
• 38:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: to revive and rebuild democratic institutions.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the book I talk about Donald Trump is not being the cause of our present problems, but the consequence, the culmination of decades of neglect.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we took many of these institutions for granted.
• 38:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: We deregulated, I was part of an administration, the deregulated Wall Street that embraced free trade.
• 38:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: that didn't pay much attention as corporations got bigger and bigger and monopolized industries, that didn't really pay much attention to unions.
• 38:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that all of this added up to a, I don't want to be reductionist here and say it automatically led to Trump, but it led to a large and disaffected and angry working class.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: that felt looked down upon, felt forgotten.
• 39:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when somebody like Trump came along and even though he lied through his teeth and even though he was a Trojan horse for the wealthy and the billionaires, he sounded like he acted like he cared about and he recognized working class people.
• 39:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Robert Reich, his new book is coming up short a memoir of my America.
• 39:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bob, thank you for all your work and thanks for talking with us today.
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, John, thank you.
• 39:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've been listening to start making sense of podcasts from the nation magazine, recorded in Los Angeles at our Blithe Avenue Studios.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minski is our producer.
• 39:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ludwig Hurtado is executive producer.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: D.D.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: gutton plan is editor of the nation, Boskarsun Kara is president of the nation, and Ketrina Vandenhuvul is publisher and editorial director of the nation.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our theme music is from Barcelona, Afrobeat, licensed by Creative Commons.
• 40:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can find out more about start making sense at TheNation.com.
• 40:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can subscribe to start making sense on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
• 40:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm John Weener.
• 40:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.