Robert Reich does not posture. He does not pander. He does not preen for book deals or MSNBC hits or whatever soulless fluff passes for relevance in a country unraveling at the seams. He speaks. And when Robert speaks, the air shifts. Because somewhere deep in his chest—not under a flag pin, not hidden behind a podium—is a furnace built from every lesson this country has learned the hard way and keeps trying to forget.
While Trump tantrums through 2025 like a bankrupt Caesar screaming into a golden toilet bowl, Robert Reich reminds us—without raising his voice—that authoritarianism doesn’t arrive on horseback. It shows up in a golf cart with a grudge and a fragile ego, dressed in executive orders and a borrowed uniform. And if we don’t call it what it is, it stays. It festers. It grows.
But Robert does call it. He’s been calling it for years. And he does it with the kind of clarity that slices through the fog like a lighthouse in a category five shitstorm. He doesn’t need to outshout the chaos. He just lays out the map, points to where we’re headed, and says, “You don’t have to go down with this ship. You can fight. Peacefully. Powerfully. Precisely.”
He doesn’t preach hope like it’s a bedtime story. He offers it like it’s a tool. A responsibility. A thing you hold with both hands while the ground shakes and the walls crack and the powerful demand your silence. He tells us to hold the line. To stay calm. To disobey like citizens, not sheep. And somehow, even in the thick of all this madness, he still believes we can win.
Robert Reich is not trying to be the voice of the resistance. He’s trying to make sure we remember we are the resistance. That democracy isn’t defended by hashtags and nostalgia—it’s defended by people who refuse to bow, refuse to break, and refuse to shut up.
So no, he doesn’t scream. He doesn’t march around in tactical cosplay or wave flags until they become meaningless. He just walks into the storm with a spine like rebar and says, “I’ve seen this play before. Let’s not let it end the same way.”
And if we have any sense left in us at all, we follow that man.
https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich
This post has been syndicated from Closer to the Edge, where it was published under this address.