The Revenge of the Radcons; Wealth and Power

Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America
by Robert B. Reich, Ph.D.

For anyone who believes that liberal isn't a dirty word but a term of honor, this book will be as revitalizing as oxygen. For in the pages of Reason, one of our most incisive public thinkers, and a former secretary of labor mounts a defense of classical liberalism that's also a guide for rolling back twenty years of radical conservative domination of our politics and political culture.

Chapter 1

It might help you to know a few things about me so that you understand where I'm coming from. I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a rural part of New York State, near the Connecticut border. My father worked six days a week and my mother five days a week at their two clothing stores. We weren't poor, but I remember my father worrying a lot about paying the bills. Another thing you should know is I was very short for my age. I still am. Both my parents were normal size, so my short height was something of a puzzle. But being a very short boy, it was natural I got picked on at school.

There's no way of proving these things, but I suppose my early worries about paying the bills and being bullied had a few long-term effects. As an adult, I've been teaching and writing about the economy and government - that is, about wealth and power. I've also had the honor of serving under three presidents, most recently in Bill Clinton's cabinet. In these roles I've tried to help people without much money get better jobs, and also tried to stop some corporations from abusing their power.

The market is where wealth is accumulated; politics is where public power is exercised. In a democracy, they are supposed to be kept separate. But in fact, people with a lot of wealth exert significant political power, and people with a lot of power can arrange things so that they end up with a lot of wealth. When wealth and power are concentrated in a relatively few hands, democracy can become a sham and a lot of bullying can occur. The great liberal Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis put it best more than sixty years ago: "We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." We are now losing our democracy, and we have to get it back.

I never used to think of myself as being a liberal. Compared to most students in the sixties, I was considered pretty conservative. I went to Dartmouth College, whose political epicenter in those days was about 25,000 miles to the right of Berkeley.

I rejected a lot of the values and politics of the student New Left of the sixties. Taking over college buildings and burning American flags seemed dumb to me. I viewed the Vietnam War as morally wrong but never drifted into the cynicism or anti-Americanism of some of my leftist friends, who started spelling America with a "k." I always believed it possible to reform the nation by working within the political system - and still do. I spent much of my senior year campaigning for Eugene McCarthy, by then the only presidential candidate who vowed to end the war. And I've spent a big portion of my life since then in public service. While I've never refrained from criticizing our political leaders when I thought they were wrong, I've always had a deep love for this country. To me, America is a great, noble, continuing experiment. We haven't achieved our ideals by a long shot. But the ideals are still worth working for: protecting the weak from the strong, overcoming prejudice, providing broad opportunity to everyone, creating a vibrant democracy.

My first full-time job after law school was working for Robert Bork at the Justice Department, in Gerald Ford's administration. Bork, you may remember, was the person who fired the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, during the Watergate investigation. Cox had been trying to get the White House to hand over tape recordings of conversations that would show if Richard Nixon was involved in the Watergate break-ins. Nixon finally handed over the tapes anyway, on August 5, 1974. He knew their contents would condemn him. Four days later, Nixon resigned. A few weeks after that, I arrived in Washington and reported to Bork.

Bork had been one of my professors at law school. I didn't share his political views but I respected him. So when he asked me to come to Washington, I accepted. My job was to write briefs on behalf of the United States in cases that were to come before the Supreme Court. I stayed two years before moving to the Federal Trade Commission, after Jimmy Carter was elected president. Bork went on to become one of the most thoughtful radical conservatives in America. You may recall that in 1987 Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court, setting off an intense battle over his confirmation. I quote Bork at some length in this book because his writing has been so influential among radical conservatives. I still disagree with him, but I still respect him.

It's possible to disagree and yet still be respectful. I strongly disagree with, but know and respect, several of the radical conservatives I quote in this book - not only Bork but also Bill Bennett, a former Reagan administration official who has become the Radcon voice of public morality; Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, who has articulated much of Radcon foreign policy; and Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. Their ideas deserve a fair hearing, and a clear case should be made for why they are dangerously wrong.

Copyright © 2004 by Robert B. Reich

About the Author

Robert B. Reich is University Professor at Brandeis University and Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis's Heller Graduate School. He is also a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He served as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. This is his tenth book. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.