COMING UP SHORT

The former labor secretary examines the failure of his generation to fulfill the promise of building a better world.

Reich, an economist and UC Berkeley professor—and anti-Trump commentator—jokes toward the end of his book that if it’s true that you lose half an inch of height every five years after 60, then, at his tallest not-quite-five-feet, “if I live as long as my father did, I may vanish.” His title refers instead to the fact that his peers did not respond adequately to what Reich considers the perennial human challenge: standing up to bullies. Remembering his boyhood, Reich links his bullied early years to the bullying that goes on all around us today, thanks in good part to a demagogue, himself a bully, “who’d exploit the powerlessness and rage of Americans who felt economically bullied.” It might have been any bully—Reich prophesied that long ago in the generic—but we all know who came along in the void left by a generation that, whether self-absorbed or because of some other fault, didn’t continue to work toward “the decent, sustainable, and just society that was within our grasp.” Indeed, he continues, many of his age-mates and younger contemporaries worked toward the opposite goal, evidenced by the Roberts Supreme Court’s apparent commitment to undoing voting rights laws and the marked rise in economic inequality since the 1960s, the last decade in which blue-collar workers could buy a home on one income. Other harms that Reich enumerates are Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to the peaceful transfer of presidential power, the mania on the part of corporate heads to maximize shareholder profit at any cost, the vast expansion of the national debt, “rendering it impossible for the government to invest in things average Americans desperately need,” and much more.

A sharply pointed chronicle of a society that, Reich laments, gladly tolerates the strong brutalizing the weak.