Robert Reich on The Fight for a Fair America

W. Kamau Bell talks with economist, author, and former U.S.

Labor Secretary Robert Reich about his lifelong fight against inequality, his journey through four presidential administrations, the capture of American democracy by big money, and why he refuses to give up on social justice. Kamau opens the show by “giving Robert his flowers” for being one of the few public figures who have remained focused on social justice and inequality throughout their lives without wavering.

Reich reflects on how widening inequality, corporate money in politics, and a Democratic “Faustian bargain” with the wealthy long predated Donald Trump. Reich traces his politics back to being bullied as a very short child and protected by an older boy, Mickey Schwerner, who was later murdered by the Ku Klux Klan as a civil rights worker.

Reich recounts how this commitment led him into the anti-Vietnam War movement, organizing students for Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign, then into a Rhodes Scholarship, where he met Bill Clinton, and later to serving in the Carter-era Federal Trade Commission and eventually to becoming Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. Kamau and Reich also discuss Reich’s evolution into a pop culture figure, generational identity, and staying connected with younger people.

Turning to the present, Reich warns against despair in the face of authoritarianism, neo-fascism, and bigotry, arguing that hopelessness is exactly what those forces want so people will give up and cede everything. The conversation also turns to war and foreign policy: Reich strongly supports Ukraine’s defense, condemns the war in Iran as “really, really stupid,” and calls Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a dangerous war criminal whose actions have turned Israel into a pariah, while stressing that opposing Netanyahu is not antisemitic.

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Music by Chris Dowd. Part of the Pushkin Network.

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