This article appears in the October 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

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.”

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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.

Bob doesn’t say much in his memoir about the considerable change in his politics since he burst into national prominence. A half dozen books of his, from The Next American Frontier in 1983 to The Work of Nations in 1991, created excitement among Democrats about new directions in economic policy and led to his role as an adviser to presidential hopefuls Gary Hart and Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988, and finally Clinton in 1992.

In those years, Bob’s main themes concerned industrial policy and the need for a more skilled workforce. He argued that a globalized, postindustrial economy demanded public policies supporting a shift in investment from “standardized, high-volume” production to “flexible, high-value” production. In the “era of human capital,” America needed to make major new public commitments to lifelong education and training for workers. He didn’t emphasize the value of unions, and no one would have described his proposals as populist. His new book doesn’t discuss why he may have later concluded that although industrial policy and human capital investments were sensible policy, they were unlikely on their own to stop rising inequality.

Moderates in both parties supported deregulatory policies that hurt unionized workers.

An incident in the Prospect’s early history illustrates how different Bob’s thinking was then. After the second issue came out in June 1990, he called me (the magazine came out of an office in Princeton at the time) because he felt an article by Bob Kuttner, “The Poverty of Neoliberalism,” was an implicit attack on him. “Neoliberalism” in 1990 referred to a chastened, moderate liberalism; the article criticized neoliberals for arguing that Democrats needed to distance themselves from the progressive liberalism of the New Deal and Great Society that called for economic regulation, support for unions, redistributive taxation, and expanded social insurance. I assured Bob Reich that the article was not aimed at him; it restated ideas all three of us signed on to in the Prospect’s prospectus. But since he was sometimes described as a neoliberal (as in Randall Rothenberg’s 1984 book The Neoliberals), it was understandable that he could think he was the target.

As secretary of labor, Bob was a public advocate for the North American Free Trade Agreement that Clinton supported. In his 1997 memoir, Locked in the Cabinet, Bob recalls making the case for NAFTA in February 1993 at his first meeting with AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland: “Look: Mexican tariffs on the stuff we sell them are four times higher than our tariffs on what they sell us. Cut both sets of tariffs and we’ll export like mad. That means more jobs here.”

“Bullshit,” the union chief responded, “Harvard economist bullshit.” Bob continues in his 1997 account: “I restrain myself from saying the next thing on my mind: The real problem is that the unskilled U.S. workers who once had good factory jobs are inevitably being replaced, either by lower-wage foreign workers or by computers and robots. They need newer and better skills. Stop trying to protect yesterday’s jobs. Join us in preparing people for tomorrow’s jobs … Trade isn’t the problem, and you know it.”

That internal soliloquy, which is consistent with Bob’s writings before becoming labor secretary, suggests that at least in his first weeks on the job, he didn’t object to NAFTA. In Coming Up Short, however, he remembers his view differently: “I wasn’t allowed to speak out publicly against NAFTA, of course, but I dreaded media interviews where I had to defend it.” Perhaps he is recalling what he thought of NAFTA after it became clear that Congress was not going to pass the Reemployment Act, the program he hoped would boost the skills and employability of workers and enable them to adjust to NAFTA. (A historian, Lee Vinsel, describes Bob’s thinking and the history of that bill in a forthcoming article.)

Bob now views both NAFTA and the later opening to China as having taken a terrible toll politically as well as economically: “You can trace a direct line from these trade deals and the subsequent job or wage losses to the rise of Donald Trump in 2016.”

Many other Democrats regret going along with free trade; even Clinton does. What they see now they didn’t anticipate then. The economy was strong during the 1990s; it enabled Clinton to become the first Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt to be re-elected. The damage from trade agreements was regionally concentrated. NAFTA primarily devastated working-class communities in the South and helped discredit Democrats in those areas; the China shock later did the same on a larger scale, with critical effects in the Midwest.

As I put it in my own book, moderates in both parties went “sleepwalking into revenge,” and not just on trade. They supported deregulatory policies that hurt unionized workers too. American society was changing radically because of new technologies, vanishing unions, and declining real incomes for people without a college education, especially men. Much of this would have happened in the long run regardless of the policy choices of the 1990s. Bringing back highly automated factories today won’t bring back that many jobs. But because Democrats have been seemingly indifferent to the felt interests of people whose livelihood and self-respect were being destroyed, they have taken the blame.

I DON’T CLAIM THAT DURING THE 1990S I had any greater foresight than Bob Reich. If either of us is entitled to use “failure” as a description for his time in the Clinton administration, that would be me. I had a hand in Clinton’s proposed Health Security Act and, not to brag, its failure was a bigger deal than the failure of Bob’s Reemployment Act. But my new book is a history, not a memoir, and I have a different view of liberal politics and Democratic presidencies over recent decades. “Failure” is not how I sum them up.

The great project of liberal and progressive politics in the 20th century’s second half became the achievement of equal rights and respect for people who had been left out of the New Deal and earlier Progressive Era reforms. The Black freedom struggle provided the spark and the model for the legal claims, economic goals, and cultural transformation sought not only by other racial minorities but by the women’s and LGBTQ+ movements. With critical support from liberals in the courts, the media, and the Democratic Party (and, at first, many Republicans), those movements brought about revolutionary changes in American life. Despite setbacks, these remain historic achievements, but they have come at a cost.

The pursuit of a broader vision of equality didn’t just predictably provoke opposition from the right. Beginning in the mid-1960s, it produced a breach in progressive politics between unions on the one hand, and the Black, feminist, gay and lesbian, anti-war, and environmental movements on the other. Those movements confronted labor leaders with demands for change in their racist and sexist practices and denounced their complicity in the Vietnam War. That attack later cost the labor movement moral legitimacy and progressive allies as the unions came under siege by employers and the Reagan administration. Lawsuits against unions for racial and gender discrimination also hit them hard financially.

Long before Clinton and Obama, the labor movement lost priority in Democratic administrations. In 1964, the Democratic platform called for repealing the provision of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that allowed states to pass anti-union, right-to-work laws, but Lyndon Johnson let that promise slide behind other priorities, and it met defeat in a Senate filibuster. Jimmy Carter also failed to champion labor law reform. To many of the post-Watergate generation of Democratic leaders, unions were “dinosaurs,” relics of another era. In all the years after World War II when Democrats held congressional majorities, they failed to pass a single bill that aided private-sector union organizing.

American politics since the 1990s has been a tie game in which Democrats have been losing.

Republicans were so hostile to unions that Democrats could take labor’s support for granted. But what for Bob Reich is Reagan’s “giant U-turn” is, in my account, only a “half-turn right.” While Reagan’s policies increased economic inequality, neither he nor his Supreme Court appointments brought about the full counterrevolution against modern liberalism and equal rights that Trump and the Roberts Court are now undertaking. In the decades after Reagan, the rights-oriented movements persisted and, in the case of LGBTQ+ people, gained ground. This continuing skew, the broadening of social equality together with the exacerbation of economic inequality, helped produce the crisis we now face.

The 1990s were a historical turning point, though they didn’t lead in a straight line to Trump. In national politics, the past 35 years have been a 50-50 era, with two sharply divided but closely matched parties. Democrats won the popular vote in seven out of eight presidential elections from 1992 to 2020. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point out in their book Tyranny of the Minority, Democrats also won a majority of the votes cast nationally in Senate elections over every six-year cycle from 1996 to 2020 (it takes six years for every seat to come up for election). But the structure of American institutions worked against them. In both 2000 and 2016, the Electoral College gave Republicans the presidency, and during 12 of the 24 years from 1996 to 2020, Republicans had Senate majorities because of their dominance of smaller states. Defeats that matched the actual voting patterns of the public might have led Republicans to move back toward the center; instead, Republicans learned they could move further right at no cost.

In short, American politics since the 1990s has been a tie game in which Democrats have been losing. When they’ve won the presidency, they haven’t won Congress by large enough margins, or for a long enough time, to sustain anything like a New Deal or Great Society agenda. But losing has posed more serious risks than in the past because Republicans are no longer the center-right party they used to be. As Trump gained control of two institutions—the Republican Party and the Supreme Court—the critical change has been Republican radicalization, not a symmetrical polarization or big Republican electoral gains.

America has become a 50-50 country in another sense. Until the late 20th century, the United States was a 90-10 society: Americans thought of the country’s racial makeup as 90 percent white, 10 percent Black. It is closer to a 50-50 society in the white-minority balance today, though not nearly at that point. In the 1990s, the media began proclaiming a majority-minority future based on census projections that, as the late Richard Alba explained in The Great Demographic Illusion, were fundamentally misleading.

Obama’s election in 2008 confirmed for many Democrats that demography was political destiny, and for many Republicans that America was near a dangerous tipping point that required drastic action. Contrary to the hopes that Obama would bring a “post-racial” future, his election increased anxieties among racial conservatives. That too was part of the sleepwalking pattern. Alarm bells were ringing on the right, and Democrats failed to understand that immigration and border security, like trade, could have explosive political repercussions.

The main difference between Reich’s account and mine is that I don’t reduce the story to economics. The concerns about race, gender, and sexuality—what some dismiss as “identity politics”—are not just distractions from the economic stakes. The American revolutions of the 20th century had a tragic historical timing. They developed in an era when, for independent reasons, working-class livelihoods were being undermined. The two developments became the basis on which a far-right movement could find new support, just enough to win the tie game.

The danger now is that Trump and the Roberts Court can entrench a right-wing regime for the long term. This was always a risk in a constitutional system that, as Trump has shown, is vulnerable to an executive coup. America was born in the contradiction between freedom and racial slavery, from which our later conflicts between freedom and social subordination have been descended. It was a lovely illusion that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. Freedom and equality were never truly guarantees. They have to be fought for over and over, and it will be a fight now even to preserve elementary fairness in elections and the law. That is all we can say with certainty about the American prospect.