Robert Reich Quotes

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not. President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

It turns out that what money buys has rapidly diminishing emotional returns ... As long as we're not destitute, happiness depends less on getting what we want than appreciating what we already have.

A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.

A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.

The idea of a “free market” separate and distinct from government has functioned as a useful cover for those who do not want the market mechanism fully exposed. They have had the most influence over it and would rather keep it that way. The mythology is useful precisely because it hides their power.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort.

Powerlessness can be a self-fulfilling prophesy. There is much that is wrong with America. But it will only be made right only if we force change to occur.

It’s no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners’ share of the nation’s total income peaked in 1928 and 2007—the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

It is no great feat for an economy to create a large number of very-low-wage jobs. Slavery, after all, was a full employment system.

Indentured servitude is banned, but what about students seeking to sell shares of their future earnings in exchange for money up front to pay for their college tuitions?

Anyone found not enjoying themselves will be shot.

Yet the notion that you’re paid what you’re “worth” is by now so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that many who earn very little assume it’s their own fault.

The problem was not that Americans spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able to provide them. the American economy had been growing briskly, and America's middle class naturally expected to share in that growth. But it didn't. A larger and larger portion of the economy's winnings had gone to people at the top.

The tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003—and extended for two years in 2010—in 2011 saved the richest 1.4 million taxpayers (the top 1 percent) more money than the rest of America’s 140.89 million taxpayers received in total income.

we still haven’t learned the essential lesson of the two big economic crashes of the last seventy-five years: when the economy becomes too lopsided—disproportionately benefiting corporate owners and top executives vis-à-vis average workers—it tips over.

It is still possible to find people who believe that government policy did not end the Great Depression and undergird the Great Prosperity, just as it is possible to uncover people who do not believe in evolution.

Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which government “intrudes.

Education is a public good that builds the capacity of a nation to wisely govern itself, and promotes equal opportunity.

The economy exists to serve us. We do not exist to serve it.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve. They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

Angry voters are more willing to support candidates who vilify their opponents and find easy scapegoats. Talking heads have become shouting heads. Many Americans have grown cynical about our collective ability to solve our problems. And that cynicism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as nothing gets solved.

Corporations don't create jobs. Customers do. So when all the economic gains go to the top, as they're doing now, the vast majority of Americans don't have enough purchasing power to buy the things corporations want to sell, which means businesses stop creating enough jobs.

Both Madison and Thomas Jefferson were influenced by the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, who defined a “republic” as a self-regulating political society whose mainspring was civic virtue.

At the same time, most of what government does that helps them is now so deeply woven into the thread of daily life that it’s no longer recognizable as government.

I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

Don’t assume that we’re locked in a battle between capitalism and socialism. We already have socialism—for the very rich. Most Americans are subject to harsh capitalism.

Americans who are angry and suspicious of one another will fight over the crumbs rather than join together against those who have run off with most of the pie.

Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made,” President Harry Truman observed. It was “what they called public power…

The invisible hand of the marketplace is connected to a wealthy and muscular arm.

What we have lost, I think, is a sense of our connectedness to each other and to our ideals—the America that John F. Kennedy asked that we contribute to.

no one should confuse income for virtue, net worth for worthiness. The underlying reality is that capitalism is not working as it should or as it can.

Keynes declared capitalism the best system ever devised to achieve a civilized economic society. But he recognized in it two major faults—“its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

A market—any market—requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market.

There can be no “free market” without government. The “free market” does not exist in the wilds beyond the reach of civilization. Competition in the wild is a contest for survival in which the largest and strongest typically win. Civilization, by contrast, is defined by rules; rules create markets, and governments generate the rules.

The concentration of wealth in America has created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency, a health-care system in which they can buy care that others can’t, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.

Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market. The rules are neither neutral nor universal, and they are not permanent. Different societies at different times have adopted different versions. The rules partly mirror a society’s evolving norms and values but also reflect who in society has the most power to make or influence them.

the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.

Fewer and fewer large and medium-sized companies offer their workers full health-care coverage—74 percent did in 1980, under 10 percent do today. As a result, health insurance premiums, co-payments, and deductibles are soaring.

So many Americans are angry and frustrated these days—vulnerable to loss of job and health care and home, without a shred of economic security—they’re easy prey for demagogues offering big lies. Yet the only antidote for big lies is big truth—told relentlessly and powerfully. You must be armed with it.

Don’t believe the system is a meritocracy in which ability and hard work are necessarily rewarded. Today the most important predictor of someone’s future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they’re born into.

For three decades almost all the gains from economic growth have gone to the top. In the 1960s and 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans got 9–10 percent of our total income. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, that share had more than doubled, to 23.5 percent. Over the same period the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent tripled its share. We haven’t experienced this degree of concentrated wealth since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. He might have added that everyone is entitled to their own interpretations but not their own logic. When we accept lies as facts, or illogic as logic, we lose the shared reality necessary to tackle our common problems. We become powerless.

The problem is that the choice we make in the market don't fully reflect our values as citizens. We might make different choices if we understood the social consequences of our purchases or investments and if we knew all other consumers and investors would join us in forbearing from certain great deals whose social consequence were abhorrent to us.

We can help restore the common good by striving for it and showing others it’s worth the effort.

Political victories that undermine trust in politics shouldn’t be considered victories; they’re net losses for society. Record corporate profits achieved by eroding the public’s trust in business aren’t successes; they’re derelictions of duty. Lobbying and campaign donations that result in laws and regulations favoring the lobbyists and donors aren’t triumphs if they weaken public confidence in our democracy; they, too, are abject failures of leadership.

Democracy depends on citizens who are able to recognize the truth, analyze and weigh alternatives, and civilly debate their future, just as it depends on citizens who have an equal voice and equal stake in it. Without an educated populace, a common good cannot even be discerned. This is fundamental.

But in modern America we often shame the wrong people. Instead of deterring behavior that undermines the common good, shame is too often deployed against people who don’t fit in—to ostracize them even further.

Patriotism based on the common good does not pander to divisiveness. True patriots don’t fuel racist or religious or ethnic divisions. They aren’t homophobic or sexist or racist. To the contrary, true patriots confirm the good that we have in common. They seek to strengthen and celebrate the “We” in “We the people.

We are born, we grow up, we live our lives as best we can. If we are thoughtful we are good parents and good partners. If we are wise we strive for integrity and intimacy. If we are fortunate we discover love and joy. If we are able, we make the world a little better than we found it. That is all there is for any of us.

Be patient. Changes that alter the structure of power and widen opportunity require years of hard work, as those who toiled for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, or have been working for the rights of the disabled and gays, would tell you. It took thirty years of continuous fulmination for women to get the right to vote; fifty years of agitation before employers were required to bargain with unionized workers. Those who benefit from the prevailing allocation of power and wealth don’t give up their privileged positions without a fight, and they usually have more resources at their disposal than the insurgents. Take satisfaction from small victories, but don’t be discouraged or fall into cynicism. And don’t allow yourself to burn out. I

Our core identity—the most precious legacy we have been given by the generations who came before us—is the ideals we share, the good we hold in common. If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing our sense of the common good.

It seems entirely possible to me that by the 2016 election, the public will be ready to entertain a much bolder set of ideas about creating a more shared prosperity,” said Robert Reich, who was labor secretary under Clinton.

Edward G. Ryan, the chief justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, warned the graduating class of the state university in 1873. “The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, ‘Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?’ 

It is a central obligation of politicians as well as journalists, researchers, scientists, and academicians to inform the public of the truth, and to identify lies without fear of retribution. It is the civic responsibility of all of us to check the facts we read or hear, to find and depend upon reliable sources, to share the truth with others, and hold accountable those who lie to us or suppress the truth.

Trump is the best thing ever to have happened to the new American oligarchy. In addition to his tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, he stokes divisiveness in ways that keeps the bottom 90 percent from seeing how the oligarchy has taken over the reins of government, twisted government to its benefit, and siphoned off the economy’s benefits. His deal with the oligarchy has been simple: He’ll stoke division and tribalism so most Americans won’t see CEOs getting exorbitant pay while they’re slicing the pay of average workers, won’t pay attention to the giant tax cut that went to big corporations and the wealthy, and won’t notice a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign donations.

Lehman Brothers’ Repo 105 program—which temporarily moved billions of dollars of liability off the bank’s books at the end of each quarter and replaced them a few days later at the start of the next quarter—was intentionally designed to hide the firm’s financial weaknesses. This was a carefully crafted fraud, detailed by a court-appointed Lehman examiner. But no former Lehman executive ever faced criminal prosecution for it. Contrast this with the fact that a teenager who sells an ounce of marijuana can be put away for years.

An Apple executive told The New York Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.

Along with individual responsibility goes some societal responsibility to enable young people and their parents to do what they need to do. Otherwise, what is a society?

There’s no problem with borrowing from the future in order to finance investments in the future.

Do you recall a time when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?

people with the most to lose from genuine social change have put themselves in charge of social change.

As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized, those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for a different government—often one that favors them or their patrons.1

Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you'll never really satisfy yourself that you've made it, and accept that that's okay

people who believe the game is rigged are easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas.

The problem is not the size of government but whom the government is for.

A concern for the common good—keeping the common good in mind—is a moral attitude. It recognizes that we’re all in it together. If there is no common good, there is no society.

In 1934, when the economy began emerging from the bottom of the Great Depression, it grew 7.7 percent. The next year it grew more than 8 percent. In 1936 it grew a whopping 14.1 percent.

With declining state and local spending, total public spending on education, infrastructure, and basic research has dropped from 12 percent of GDP in the 1970s to less than 3 percent in 2011.

The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and win America back. This will require a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor, and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy and against concentrated power and privilege, determined to rid politics of big money, end corporate welfare and crony capitalism, bust up monopolies, stop voter suppression, and strengthen the countervailing power of labor unions, employee-owned corporations, worker cooperatives, state and local banks, and grassroots politics. This agenda is neither right nor left. It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.

The biggest political divide in America today is not between Republicans and Democrats. It’s between democracy and oligarchy. Hearing and using the same old labels prevents most people from noticing they’re being shafted.

The rich don’t create jobs. Jobs are created when the vast majority of Americans buy enough to make companies add capacity and hire more workers. But that won’t happen unless the vast majority has enough money to do the buying.

By 2016, the typical American household had a net worth 14 percent lower than the typical household in 1984, while the richest one-tenth of 1 percent owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. Income has become almost as unequal as wealth: Between 1972 and 2016 the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent, adjusted for inflation, although the American economy nearly doubled in size. Most of the income gains went to the top.

Forget what you may have learned about the choice between the “free market” and government. A market cannot exist without a government to organize and enforce it. The important question is whom the market has been organized to serve.

Corporations do not automatically obey laws. They weigh the size of the penalty relative to the gain from law breaking. In the age of oligarchy, laws are window dressing when penalties aren’t high enough and the people responsible for the lawbreaking are not held accountable. Unless the government prosecutes individuals or at least claws back their pay, the law is not of particular concern to the inhabitants of C-suites. Eleven years after Wall Street’s near meltdown, not a single major financial executive had been convicted or even indicted for crimes that wiped out the savings of countless Americans. Contrast this with a teenager who is imprisoned for years for selling an ounce of marijuana.

In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts would come from low-income programs. Yet at the same time, the Republican budget would provide a substantial tax cut to the rich—who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation’s total income.

In the 1970s only about 3 percent of retiring members of Congress went on to become Washington lobbyists. By 2016, fully half of all retiring senators and 42 percent of retiring representatives had turned to lobbying, regardless of party affiliation. This wasn’t because more recent retirees have had fewer qualms than their predecessors about making money off their contacts in government. It was because the financial rewards from corporate lobbying had ballooned. The revolving door rotates the other way, too: If a lobbyist can land a plum job in an administration, he or she becomes even more valuable on leaving. In his first six months as president, Trump handed control of every major regulatory agency to lobbyists from the industries they would oversee.

The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, ‘Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?’ 

On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, only 18 percent of Americans said they trusted national news media, according to the Pew Research Center. In a Gallup poll at about the same time, nearly two-thirds of Americans believed the mainstream press was filled with “fake news.” Contrast this with American opinion almost five decades before. In 1972, in the wake of investigative reporting that revealed truths about Vietnam and Nixon’s Watergate scandal, 72 percent of Americans expressed trust and confidence in the press.

Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of others. On a large scale, power is the capacity to set the public agenda—to frame big choices, to influence legislators, and to get laws enacted or prevent them from being enacted, to assert one’s will on the world.

Their aim is to divide and conquer: pit unionized workers against nonunionized, public sector workers against nonpublic, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the middle class against the poor.

Look back over the last hundred years and you’ll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income—as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977—the nation as a whole grew faster, and median wages surged. The basic bargain ensured that the pay of American workers coincided with their output. In effect, the vast middle class received an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth. We created that virtuous cycle in which an ever-growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats. On the other hand, during periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion—as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day—growth slowed, median wages stagnated, and we suffered giant downturns.

Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn’t even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.

Some argue shareholder capitalism has proven to be more “efficient” than stakeholder capitalism. It has moved economic resources to where they’re most productive, and thereby enabled the economy to grow faster. By this view, stakeholder capitalism locked up resources in unproductive ways, CEOs were too complacent, corporations were too fat—employing workers they didn’t need, and paying them too much—and they were too tied to their communities. It is a tempting argument, but in hindsight a fallacious one. Any change that allows some people to become better off without causing others to be worse off is technically a more “efficient” use of resources. But when all or most of these efficiency gains go to a few people at the top—as has been the case since the 1980s—the common good is not necessarily improved. Just look at the flat or declining wages of most Americans, their growing economic insecurity, and the abandoned communities now littering the nation. Then look at the record corporate profits, soaring CEO pay, and jaw-dropping compensation on Wall Street. All Americans are stakeholders in the American economy, and most stakeholders have not done well.

An economy should exist for the people who inhabit it, not the other way around. The purpose of an economy is to provide everyone with opportunities to live full, happy, and productive lives. Yet when most people come to view the economic game as rigged, this most basic purpose cannot be achieved. It is impossible to live happily in a society that seems fundamentally unfair or to live well in a nation rife with anger and cynicism.

Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made,” President Harry Truman observed. It was “what they called public power…bank deposit insurance…free and independent labor organizations…anything that helps all the people.” Every time over the last century Americans have sought to pool their resources for the common good, the wealthy and powerful have used the bogeyman of “socialism” to try to stop them.

Get out of your ideological bubble. If most of the people you talk with agree with you, you’re wasting your time. You need to engage with people who may disagree or who haven’t thought hard about the issues. Reach across to independents, even to Republicans and self-styled Tea Partiers. Find people who are willing to listen to the facts and are open to arguments and ideas, regardless of the label they apply to themselves. We need them.

Americans have clung to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re worth in the market, without examining changes in the legal and political institutions that define the market. This tautology is easily confused with a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid. Yet this claim is meaningful only if the system’s legal and political institutions are morally just. It has lured us into thinking nothing can or should be done to alter what people are paid because the market has decreed it. By this logic, the oligarchy is natural and inevitable.

The last time the "best and brightest" got control of the country, they dragged it into a protracted, demoralizing war in Southeast Asia, from which the country has still not fully recovered. Yet Reich seems to believe that a new generation of Whiz Kids can do for the faltering American economy what Robert McNamara's generation failed to do for American diplomacy: to restore, through sheer brainpower, the world leadership briefly enjoyed by the United States after World War II and subsequently lost not, of course, through stupidity so much as through the very arrogance the "arrogance of power," as Senator William Fulbright used to call it to which the "best and brightest" are congenitally addicted. This arrogance should not be confused with the pride characteristic of aristocratic classes, which rests on the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor. Neither valor and chivalry nor the code of courtly, romantic love, with which these values are closely associated, has any place in the world view of the best and brightest. A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains. Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts. Even the concept of a republic of letters, which might be expected to appeal to elites with such a large stake in higher education, is almost entirely absent from their frame of reference.

Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon lent their support to such interventionist measures as Medicare and the Environmental Protection Agency. Eisenhower pushed for the greatest public works project in the history of the United States—the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which linked the nation together with four-lane (and occasionally six-lane) interstate highways covering forty thousand miles. The GOP also backed large expansion of federally supported higher education. And to many Republicans at the time, a marginal income tax rate of more than 70 percent on top incomes was not repugnant.

Il Dr. Paul Arnheim non era soltanto un uomo ricco, era anche uno spirito superiore. La sua fama trascendeva il puro fatto che egli era l’erede di un giro d’affari di portata mondiale; nelle ore d’ozio aveva scritto libri che, nei circoli più avanzati, venivano giudicati straordinari. Le persone che fanno parte di tali circoli puramente culturali sono superiori al denaro e ai privilegi della borghesia; ma non si deve dimenticare che, proprio per questo, sono colte da un particolare entusiasmo quando un uomo ricco diventa uno dei loro; e, oltre tutto, nei suoi programmi e nei suoi libri Arnheim annunciava niente meno che la fusione di anima ed economia, vale a dire di idea e potere. Gli spiriti sensibili, dotati di un sottilissimo fiuto per il futuro, proclamarono che egli univa in sé quei due poli, nel mondo solitamente separati, e alimentarono la voce secondo cui stava nascendo una nuova forza, chiamata a dirigere ancora una volta verso il meglio i destini del Reich e, chissà, forse anche del mondo. Infatti, che i principi e i sistemi della vecchia politica e diplomazia stessero scarrozzando l’Europa verso la tomba era da tempo una sensazione universalmente diffusa, e s’era già iniziato in tutti i campi l’allontanamento degli esperti.

In September 2019, actress Felicity Huffman was sentenced to fourteen days in jail for shelling out $15,000 to rig her daughter’s SAT scores so she could get into a top university. In 2011, Kelley Williams-Bolar, a single black mother living in public housing in Akron, Ohio, was charged with multiple felonies and sentenced to two five-year sentences for using her father’s address to enroll her daughters in a better public school. That same year, Tanya McDowell, a homeless black mother living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was sentenced to five years in prison for enrolling her five-year-old son in a neighboring public school.

From World War II until 1981 the top marginal income tax rate never fell below 70 percent. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican whom no one ever accused of being a socialist, the top rate was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, Americans with incomes of over $1 million (in today’s dollars) paid a top marginal rate, on average, of 52 percent. As recently as the late 1980s, the top tax rate on capital gains was 35 percent. But as income and wealth have accumulated at the top, so has the political power to reduce taxes. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which were extended for two years in December 2010, capped top rates at 35 percent, their lowest level in more than half a century, and reduced capital gains taxes to 15 percent.

As income and wealth have concentrated at the top, political power has moved there as well. Money and power are inextricably linked. And with power has come influence over the market mechanism. The invisible hand of the marketplace is connected to a wealthy and muscular arm. It is perhaps no accident that those who argue most vehemently on behalf of an immutable and rational “free market” and against government “intrusion” are often the same people who exert disproportionate influence over the market mechanism. They champion “free enterprise” and equate the “free market” with liberty while quietly altering the rules of the game to their own advantage. They extol freedom without acknowledging the growing imbalance of power in our society that’s eroding the freedoms of most people.

The idea of “the common good” was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare”—not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.” During the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, Americans faced common perils that required us to work together for the common good, and that good was echoed in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear. The common good animated many of us—both white and black Americans—to fight for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. It inspired America to create the largest and most comprehensive system of public education the world had ever seen. And it moved many of us to act against the injustice of the Vietnam War, and others of us to serve bravely in that besotted conflict.

I’m not suggesting anyone has acted illegally. To the contrary: CEOs believe they are supposed to maximize shareholder returns, and one means of accomplishing that goal is to play the political game as well as it possibly can be played and field the largest and best legal and lobbying teams available. Trade associations see their role as representing the best interests of their corporate members, which requires lobbying ferociously, raising as much money as possible for political campaigns of pliant lawmakers, and even offering jobs to former government officials. Public officials, for their part, perceive their responsibility as acting in the public interest. But the public interest is often understood as emerging from a consensus of the organized interests appearing before them. The larger and wealthier the organization, the better equipped its lawyers and its experts are to assert what’s good for the public. Any official who once worked for such an organization, or who suspects he may work for one in the future, is prone to find such arguments especially persuasive. Inside the mechanism of the “free market,” the economic and political power of the new monopolies feed off and enlarge each other.

If Marx had no time for the state, it was partly because he viewed it as a kind of alienated power. It was as though this august entity had confiscated the abilities of men and women to determine their own existence, and was now doing so on their behalf. It also had the impudence to call this process ‘‘democracy.’’ Marx himself began his career as a radical democrat and ended up as a revolutionary one, as he came to realize just how much transformation genuine democracy would entail; and it is as a democrat that he challenges the state’s sublime authority. He is too wholehearted a believer in popular sovereignty to rest content with the pale shadow of it known as parliamentary democracy. He is not in principle opposed to parliaments, any more than was Lenin. But he saw democracy as too precious to be entrusted to parliaments alone. It had to be local, popular and spread across all the institutions of civil society. It had to extend to economic as well as political life. It had to mean actual self-government, not government entrusted to a political elite. The state Marx approved of was the rule of citizens over themselves, not of a minority over a majority. The state, Marx considered, had come adrift from civil society. There was a blatant contradiction between the two. We were, for example, abstractly equal as citizens within the state, but dramatically unequal in everyday social existence. That social existence was riven with conflicts, but the state projected an image of it as seamlessly whole. The state saw itself as shaping society from above, but was in fact a product of it. Society did not stem from the state; instead, the state was a parasite on society. The whole setup was topsy-turvy. As one commentator puts it, ‘‘Democracy and capitalism have been turned upside down’’—meaning that instead of political institutions regulating capitalism, capitalism regulated them. The speaker is Robert Reich, a former U.S. labour secretary, who is not generally suspected of being a Marxist. Marx’s aim was to close this gap between state and society, politics and everyday life, by dissolving the former into the latter. And this is what he called democracy. Men and women had to reclaim in their daily lives the powers that the state had appropriated from them. Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it. It is hard to see why so many defenders of democracy should find this vision objectionable.

In the last years of the Republic there were films such as Robert Siodmark's Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930)) and Gerhard Lamprecht's Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives, 1931), which embraced the airy streets, light-dappled forests, and lakes surrounding Berlin. Billie Wilder, a brash young journalist and dance-hall enthusiast, worked on the scripts for both these films. While Kracauer and Eisner saw malevolence in the frequent trope of doubling (one being possessed by another and thus becoming two conflicting psychological presences), Wilder witnessed another form of doubling during the Weimer era: transvestitism, a staple of cabaret. Men dressing as women (as do Reinhold Schünzel in der Himmel auf Erden [Heaven on earth]) and Curti Bois in Der Fürst von Pappenheim [The Masked Mannequin][both 1927]) or women as men (as does Dolly Haas in Liebeskommando [Love's Command, 1931]), in order to either escape detection or get closer to the object of their affection, is an inherently comic situation, especially when much to his or her surprise the cross-dresser begins to enjoy the disguise. Billie left Germany before he directed a film of his own; as Billy he brought to Hollywood a vigorous appreciation of such absurdities of human behavior, along with the dry cynicism that distinguished Berlin humor and an enthusiasm for the syncopations of American jazz, a musical phenomenon welcomed in the German capital. Wilder, informed by his years in Berlin (to which he returned to make A Foreign Affair in 1948 and One, Two, Three in 1961), wrote and directed many dark and sophisticated American films, including The Apartment (1969) and Some Like it Hot (1959), a comedy, set during Prohibition, about the gender confusion on a tonal par with Schünzel's Viktor und Viktoria, released in December 1933, eleven months into the Third Reich and the last musical to reflect the insouciance of the late Republic.

The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization. Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone. Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions. Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor. Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. These various techniques of social control were successful.