Robert Reich has become the poster child for everything that makes the modern Democratic Party unbearable — moral panic dressed as principle, weakness masquerading as wisdom. He speaks like a man convinced that cowering is a form of courage. Every post, every column, every clipped video carries the same tone: a sermon of despair delivered from behind a screen.

His recent newsletter, America’s Trauma, reads like the diary of a nervous breakdown with a Wi-Fi connection. Reich likens Trump’s presidency to collective abuse, calls his followers “lapdogs,” and paints the entire country as a therapy session gone wrong. To read him is to feel smothered — not by Trump, but by Reich’s own hand-wringing. There is no conviction, only complaint. No leadership, only lament. He mistakes emotional exhaustion for moral depth, as if sighing loudly enough might change the course of the country.

Some dismiss him as just a writer, a retired bureaucrat playing pundit. But that’s precisely the problem — he’s not. Reich’s voice carries weight. He has 1.4 million followers hanging on his every anxious word. He’s taught generations of students at Berkeley, he’s a regular on MSNBC, a contributor to The Guardian, and he shapes the moral tone of the Democratic Party’s intellectual class. He’s not fringe but part of the furniture. When Reich speaks, others echo. His words filter through podcasts, think tanks, and campaign talking points. He embodies the mood music of a movement that confuses vulnerability with virtue, self-pity with substance. His handwringing is contagious.

And the contagion has spread. This is the problem with so many men in the modern Democratic Party: they sound like patients, not patriots. They apologize before they speak. They talk endlessly about trauma, anxiety, and “healing the nation,” yet never once speak of duty, courage, or sacrifice. The party of Roosevelt and Kennedy has become a chorus of counselors. (RELATED: The Rise of the Male Bimbo)

There’s a kind of narcissism in it — a belief that to feel deeply is the same as to act bravely.

Reich, once Labor secretary under Bill Clinton, was supposed to be a man of ideas — a policy mind with genuine backbone. But over the years, the spine snapped. Now, instead of offering solutions, he offers symptoms. Every crisis is cast as emotional injury; every disagreement, a wound. He doesn’t teach resilience but instead normalizes fragility. There’s a kind of narcissism in it — a belief that to feel deeply is the same as to act bravely. (RELATED: This Man Is Not the Answer to the Masculinity Crisis)

And he’s not alone. Look at the Democrats’ supposed “model men.” Pete Buttigieg talks like a management seminar, smooth but soulless. Tim Walz had — and still has — the air of a defeated school principal pleading for silence in a rowdy classroom. Even Van Jones, one of the steadier voices on the left, slips into therapy talk when the moment calls for strength. These are not leaders built for the ugliness of politics. They are mediators in a world that demands fighters. They are spokesmen for a party that brings hand sanitizer to a knife fight and then wonders why it keeps bleeding. (RELATED: Real Leadership in the Unsung Men of the Armed Forces)

Reich’s essays feed that very softness. He tells his followers that feeling helpless is rational, that despair is a form of awareness. He gives permission to wallow, not to withstand. That’s the quiet poison of his politics — it keeps Democrats in a permanent state of psychological submission. While the right rallies with defiance, the left retreats into safe spaces. Reich chooses medication over mobilization.

His worldview is one where America is forever on the couch, never on its feet. And that is why men — real men — tune out. Not because they lack compassion, but because they crave conviction. They want to see strength that doesn’t submit, soften, or self-flagellate, leadership that stands firm. Reich embodies the opposite: the domesticated man, afraid of offense, fluent in outrage but uneducated in resolve.

If the Democrats want to win back men, they’ll have to shed the Reich mentality. They’ll have to rediscover the language of clarity and conviction. They’ll have to learn how to speak not like shrinks, but like statesmen, because men do not rally around worry. They rally around will. (RELATED: Travis Kelce Is the Blueprint Democrats Have Been Missing)

The politics of perpetual comfort, where emotion replaces action and empathy excuses inaction, is poison. That’s because empathy without energy becomes sentimentality, and sentimentality, once turned into politics, leads only to paralysis.

Reich’s words might soothe the faithful, but they repel the restless — the builders, the doers, the men who still believe guts, not grief, is what holds a country together. In the end, Robert Reich is not dangerous. He’s worse — dull, predictable, and terminally timid. And that is why the Democrats, unless they find the courage to change, will keep shrinking into irrelevance — a party of worriers in a world that demands warriors.

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