Reich - Coming Up Short

Robert Reich's Coming Up Short (2025) includes reflections on his life experiences coupled with the political evolution of the U.S., which in his estimation is "coming up short" for so many of its citizens. Reich owns his politics through the book which will not be a surprise to anyone who knows his career. While the assessment of where we are coming up short politically is dark, he does offer hope in describing students he has taught over the last years of his working life.

Reich's family benefitted from coming of age after the collapse of Gilded Age fortunes in the Great Depression, the result of which was wealth flowing to a new middle class, providing unbridled opportunity for many. The conservative perception (espoused by Ayn Rand, a prominent political commentator) of the popular Christmas story of this era, It's a Wonderful Life, was that it was evidence of Communist infiltration. The age of a rising middle class was built at a time of growing industry, population, and people of all sorts together in new and vibrant communities.

The upheaval of the Gilded Age and birth of a middle class was ripe for McCarthyism, which was a post WWII view striving to undermine the gains of FDR's New Deal. And who was ready to aid McCarthy's project - Roy Cohn. Cohn later became useful to the emerging NYC real estate mogul Donald Trump. As a fixer and mentor to Trump, one of Cohn's most significant introductions was to Rupert Murdoch. The significance of these three men's life-long working relationship cannot be overstated.

Reich recounted many of his childhood experiences, which are entertaining while revealing his character. Because of his small stature, Reich was often the object of bullies. During the summer of his 3rd grade year, he met Mickey, a teenager vacationing in an Adirondack cabin near where Reich's family was staying. During that summer, Mickey became Reich's supporter by just being a handsome big kid to hang with. Having lost track of Mickey, the stunning revelation that Mickey Schwerner was one of three murdered "Freedom Riders" in the summer of 1964 cemented Reich's commitment to be part of the generation of Americans "called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders" (p. 58). The Summer of 1964 and Reich's free speech and civil rights activism brought him to see "the central struggle of civilization as fighting bullies - standing up against brutality" (p. 66).

Reich dated Hillary Clinton, got chewed out by Bobby Kennedy as a campaign volunteer, and studied with Bill Clinton as a Rhodes Scholar. Exposure to these key figures was formative but experience in a T-Group in big Sur (similar to one I experienced in Cedar City, Utah, in 1971) caused him to see his youthful experiences of being bullied as related to the violence and upheaval that was gripping America. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., leaders who appealed to the idealism of young people and progressives, drove Americans from hope to despair.

About half-way through the book, Reich sharpened his critique that the U.S. government has shifted its focus. He said, "The real choice is who benefits by the decisions government makes about the rules of the game - people who are wealthy and privileged or those who are not, and who pays for it" (p. 258). Relaxed policies about campaign and candidate financial support have resulted in buying influence in the houses of congress and the White House. What is particularly problematic about this is that moneyed interests have shifted to maximizing their wealth rather than investing in innovation, services, improving productivity, and citizens' welfare.

Cruelty is found in individual actions as well as communities and governments. The prevailing form of cruelty in conservative politics is often based on a philosophy "that the only moral purpose of life is the pursuit of one's own happiness" (p. 81) which was foundational to the conservativism emerging in the 1970s, influenced by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Reich retorted, "If we are losing our national identify, it is not because we are becoming blacker or browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing our sense of common good" (p. 87).

The battle between conservative and liberal ideas has now become a battle for big money that corrupts lawmakers as they change rules to make the rich even richer. Assuming that capitalism is the only way to prosperity and that economic benefit will eventually trickle down to others, lawmakers and moneyed interests trample over any commitment to the public good. This perspective eclipsed the idea that businesses are stewards of public trust to benefit employees and consumers and that sharing wealth through good wages for employees and reasonable prices for goods and services was an ideal to which America ascribed.

Reich peppered quotable gems throughout the book as he reflected on his personal life experience and involvement in politics. Some of my favorites include:

On parenting - Teenage boys can't be scheduled. They're like clamshells. They open just for a moment, to take in a little nourishment or expel some dirt... If you're around when they open, you have a chance to see something truly beautiful inside (p. 301).

On partisanship - Once unbottled, mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of society, replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate (p. 305).

On journalism - If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, "I have a solution to the Middle East problem" and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news? (p. 308)

On privilege - My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks (p. 328)

On change - Being an activist for social justice means working hard but not expecting the goals to be achieved anytime soon (p. 379). 

On leadership - The long game requires a new and different conception of leadership, one in which leaders see part of their responsibility as building public trust (p. 431).

On American capitalism - The harshest form of capitalism in all the world's advanced economies. It takes almost no account for social costs and benefits (p. 426).

On youth - Instead of being bitter or angry, they have all sorts of ideas for how to clean it up, fix it, make the world better (p. 405).

On aging - ...there are four ages to life: youth, middle age, old age, and YOU LOOK GREAT (p. 458).

In the closing pages of the book Reich reflects:

Most people who "retire" stop what they call "working" and begin what they call "playing." But what if your work is also your play? What if it's your calling? What if its' deeply meaningful to you? (p. 456)

and continues...

Meaningful work - work that's more play than work - can lead to a longer life (p. 457).

Reich's reflection is in many ways a luxury that most people do not have the opportunity to obtain. There's a lot of privilege in teaching and writing but for those who are so lucky, comes the heavier responsibility of cultivating a legacy - something that shows you gave your best effort in your life's work.

Berry - World-Ending Fire

I was introduced to Wendell Berry over coffee by a candidate positioning himself to run for Illinois state representative in my district. I was immediately struck by Patrick Hanley's thoughtfulness and apparent intelligence, so I decided to pick something up and I chose The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (2017). I chose this book because it was a sequential collection of Berry's writing from 1968 to 2011. I found the entire book interesting but, because it was a collection over time, there are certain themes that are repeated through different stories and revelations. I found that the first several chapters and a couple of concluding chapters captured the "essentials" and I therefore focus on them in this review.

Hanley and Berry are both excellent examples of grounded leadership that is focused on improving communities and the general welfare of those who inhabit them. As studies of character, their conviction in leadership is exemplary.

Berry was a university professor with somewhat eccentric views of the environment and community resulting from his experience in restoring and expanding his family farm throughout his life. The introduction says, "Over the last century, by some estimates, over half the world's topsoil has been washed away by the war on nature that we call industrial farming" (page viii) and that is the central warning that frames the rest of the book. He attributes the fall of small family farms to urbanization that drew young people away from their own origins, origins that previously had connected them to other animals, plants, and the communities that nurtured them. Abundance seemed to prevail in the impersonal, disconnected spaces of cities and thus living abundantly (excessively) became the perceived mark of progress. All the while, the lands and animals that inhabited them were exploited and began a slide to unproductivity.

Berry offers an ominous prediction:

There appears to be a law that when creatures have reached the level of consciousness, as men have, they must become conscious of the creation; they must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of them, or else pay a terrible penalty; the spirit of the creation will go out of them, and they will become destructive; the very earth will depart from them and go where they cannot follow (p. 21).

The antidote is that we must embrace the universal reality that what is good for the world is good for us, which happens only when we try to know the world and our roles in it rather than exploiting and benefitting from it. Filling oneself with knowledge of the earth then brings the realization that the world is inexhaustible and will outlast any humans today or in the future. The question is an earth in what form and condition? A world that is dominated by consumerism and competition "destroys the natural environment" and it "abuses racial and economic minorities" in the same way (p. 49). To correct the abuse of the earth and other humans, "we are going to have to go far beyond public protest and political action. We are going to have to rebuild the substance and the integrity of private life in this country" (p. 53). In sum, "we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as 'environmental' problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them" (p. 66).

A theological perspective (not labeled as such) of creating and sustaining a beloved community is Berry's way forward - creating "common experience and common effort on a common ground to which one willingly belongs" (p. 94). The point of this strategy is that only by restoring local soil with joint effort can community cultures be restored - connected, appreciative, moderate, and abundant. A philosophical assumption of this kind of community is that the "standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goals are money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health - his land's health" (p. 122).

Berry's chapter on "Two Minds" describes the "Rational Mind - motivated by the fear of being misled, of being wrong," and the "Sympathetic Mind - motivated by the fear of error of carelessness, of being unloving" (p. 180). The 'Sympathetic Mind' is "informed by experience, by traditionborne stories of the experiences of others, by familiarity, by compassion, by commitment, by faith" (p. 184). In Berry's view, conservation is not enough and must stretch to "conserve the possibilities of peace and good work" (p. 199).

"Compromise Hell" asserts that "The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve" (p. 313). The sustainable alternative economy advocates:

1. Humans don't have to live by destroying the sources of their life.
2. Respect ourselves and our dwelling places and quit thinking of rural America as a colony.
3. Reaffirm the economic value of good stewardship and good work.
4. Reconsider solving economic problems by 'bringing in industry'.
5. Confront honestly the issue of scale - bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage.
6. Prioritize caring for our land.