Robert Reich's good fight

[Celerity]

For decades, the former US labour secretary has waged a lonely struggle against corporate greed. Has he failed?

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/views/people/73702/robert-reichs-good-fight

https://archive.ph/WhHfL



Robert Reich is short: 4ft 11in, to be exact. He has multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, also known as Fairbank’s disease, a rare genetic disorder affecting bone growth. Throughout his career in government and academia, including stints as the United States’s secretary of labour under Bill Clinton and an economic adviser to Barack Obama, Reich has often made jokes about his height. In the late 1990s, he hosted a PBS talk show with the late Republican senator Alan Simpson called The Long and the Short of It (Simpson is 6ft 7in). And when Reich ran unsuccessfully in the 2002 Democratic primaries for governor of Massachusetts, he titled his concurrent book I’ll Be Short. The Boston Herald even ran the front-page headline “Short People are Furious with Reich” for joking about his height on the campaign trail.

From the title Coming Up Short, you might expect Reich’s new book to follow a similar pattern. But this, unlike his more straightforwardly polemical books, is a memoir—and in it, he reveals that his height has not always been a laughing matter. In particular, he details his experiences of severe, traumatic bullying as a child, with his size marking him out to nastier students as an easy target. Reich recounts the survival tactics he would employ, including finding benevolent older students who could act as his protectors. One such student was Michael Schwerner, whose kindly presence made him feel safer at school. Recruited by civil rights leader John Lewis to volunteer in Mississippi, Schwerner later joined the civil rights movement, and he and his wife helped to register African-American voters during the state’s “Freedom Summer” in 1964.

Months later, aged 24, Schwerner was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. His body remained undiscovered for 44 days. After hearing of Schwerner’s murder as he started university, something changed in Reich. He saw that there were much more powerful and dangerous bullies in the world than the ones he confronted in the playground. He began to see bullying not just as an interpersonal challenge he had faced, but as a structural condition of society. From politics and economics to gender relations and the law, bullies were everywhere. And, quite often, they won. “By the time I was a young man,” Reich tells me from his study in Berkeley, California, “I understood that bullying really is a metaphor for all sorts of abuses of power. Men bullying women, or white supremacists bullying black people and brown people, or employers bullying employees.”

His own experiences, he says, solidified his “lifelong conviction that our moral responsibility is to protect the weak from the strong”. He remembers his father, a progressive Jewish Republican, yelling “son of a bitch” at political figures he saw as bullies—such as Senator Joseph McCarthy—when they appeared on his television set. Meanwhile, Reich became inspired by the legacies of populist Democrats such as Franklin D Roosevelt, whom he saw as the antidote to the bullies of the world. This would set him on a mission into the reformist circles of law and government. But first, he needed training. The young Reich travelled to New Hampshire to study at the Ivy League Dartmouth College, where he would go on a date with Hillary Rodham from the all-female Wellesley College.

snip

[Auggie]

1. The new book sounds great

Thanks for sharing

[Passages]

2. He would have made an exceptional president.

K&R

[calimary]

3. As long as we have people like him fighting the good fight for us,

we are winners!

[oasis]

4. I've always liked Reich. Great speaker, a ton of wisdom.

[Seeking Serenity]

5. Dang, reading the thread header, I thought we'd lost him.

Don't do me like that.