When Bob Kuttner, Bob Reich, and I founded The American Prospect in 1990, we were aiming to promote ideas for America’s future, as the magazine’s name indicates. That future hasn’t worked out the way we wanted, to put it mildly. Thirty-five years later, two of us have written new books with different stories about the path the country has followed. Reich’s is an autobiography, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, while mine is a social and political history, American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge From the 1950s to Now.
In Coming Up Short, Bob uses his experience of being bullied because of his height (four feet eleven) to frame contemporary politics. He sees America as having devolved into a struggle between the bullies and the bullied, the rich and powerful vs. the working majority—and the bullies have been winning. As the book ends, he admits that, at least personally, he hasn’t succeeded at the “short game” (the puns never stop), but he is no less committed to a “long game” that he believes we can win.
Born in 1946—the same year, he points out, as Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—Bob grew up in a hardworking middle-class family amid the broadly shared prosperity of the post–World War II era. Then came the “giant U-turn” toward inequality in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, and the battle that Bob waged as secretary of labor in Bill Clinton’s first term, a section of the book that he calls “Failure.”
From that failure, Bob draws a straight line to Trump. He recalls a speech that he gave after Newt Gingrich and the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, when he said that “we are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and disillusionment are easily manipulated. Once unbottled, mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society.” To which he now adds: “I wish I had been less prescient.”
Why did things turn out so badly? While pointing primarily to the bullies, Bob also blames Clinton and Barack Obama and their dependence on “big money” and desire to please Wall Street. “Both Clinton and Obama,” he writes, “stood by as corporations busted trade unions, the backbone of the working class.” Since then, “anti-establishment fury at a ‘rigged system’” has become the driving force in politics. Bob’s hero now is Bernie Sanders. “Because Democrats have not embraced economic populism, the only populist version available to voters without college degrees has been the Republican cultural one.” And that cultural populism is “entirely bogus,” a ruse used by Trump and others to distract from the true, economic stakes.
