'It is a reckoning': DC insider blasts Baby Boomers — and blames them for Trump

26 July

Former labor secretary Robert Reich admits the Boomer generation ushered in a lot of good things. But what it also gave us was the overarching mentality that gave us President Donald Trump.

“What I try to understand is how we ended up with Donald Trump,” Reich tells the New York Times. “Trump is the consequence, not the cause, of what we are now experiencing. He is the culmination of at least 50 years of a certain kind of neglect. And I say this very personally, because I was part of this failure. It is a reckoning that is deeply personal.”

Reich argues that the same generation that gave us the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act also voted in tax cut after tax cut for itself while its children’s world burned. It also held the reins for whole decades while a yawning inequality gap swallowed a significant portion of the U.S. population.

“I think it is fair to say there has been, in America, a failure to appreciate the importance of democracy, the importance of holding back big money. Because as inequality has gotten worse and worse, the middle class has by many measures shrunk,” Reich said. “That is an open invitation for corruption. We see more and more big money undermining our democratic institutions.”

“We ended up with a very large number of Americans who feel that the American system and the promise of America was a sham,” said Reich, and the neglect made the generation susceptible to a demagogue like Trump.

Pro-business Democrats only aggravated the inequality by embracing many of the same policies that caused it.

“Democrats — I don’t want to tar with too broad a brush here — are taking money and don’t want to bite the hands that feed them,” Reich said. “I’ve seen it personally. I saw it when I was at the Federal Trade Commission; I saw it when I was at the Justice Department working in the Ford administration; I saw it very close up when I was in the Clinton administration and then at a distance when I was providing some advice to Barack Obama.”

“Who in the world needs corporate Democrats when you have a Republican Party that is pretty good at representing big corporations, even though it now has a facade of populism?” he added.

Reich reserves much of his blame also for the politicians who exploited the public’s anger, however.

“I would guess that most Trump supporters are good people and nice people, and they probably love their families and are patriotic. They have been sold a bill of goods by a con man, by a malignant narcissist who has come along at a very dangerous point in this country’s history,” Reich said. “I’m not blaming them. I blame Trump and his lackeys and the people around him, and Republicans in the House and the Senate. I can’t imagine what they tell each other or even tell themselves in the morning when they’re putting their lapel pins on, looking in the mirror.”

Read the full New York Times report at this link.

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