Author: Robert Reich

The real significance of Ron DeSantis’s presidential announcement on Twitter had little to do with DeSantis but everything to do with Elon Musk. It was that Twitter, under Musk, has fully embraced the political right. Why is Musk doing this? He acts as if he wants to be the darling of libertarian bros. But he is really aiming to lead democracy’s foes. Musk wants to crush unions and declare the United States a free-to-make-as-much-as-you-can-on-the-backs-of-working-stiffs zone. He calls himself a “free speech absolutist”, but that is utter nonsense. He wants to elevate the speech of people like DeSantis but suppress...

I hate to say this, but America no longer has two parties devoted to a democratic system of self-government. We have a Democratic Party, which is still largely committed to democracy. And we have a Republican Party, which is careening at high-velocity toward authoritarianism. Okay, fascism. What occurred in Nashville in April is a frightening reminder of the fragility of American democracy when Republicans obtain supermajorities and no longer need to work with Democratic lawmakers. The two Tennessee Democrats expelled from the Tennessee House were not accused of criminal wrongdoing or even immoral conduct. Their putative offense was to...

An artificial intelligence boom is taking over Silicon Valley, with high-tech firms racing to develop everything from self-driving cars to chatbots capable of writing poetry. Yet AI could also spread conspiracy theories and lies even more quickly than the internet already does – fueling political polarization, hate, violence and mental illness in young people. It could undermine national security with deepfakes. In recent weeks, members of Congress have sounded the alarm over the dangers of AI but no bill has been proposed to protect individuals or stop the development of AI’s most threatening aspects. Most lawmakers don’t even know...

If 2022 presented any single lesson, it was the social costs of greed. Capitalism is premised on greed but also on guardrails — laws and norms — that prevent greed from becoming so excessive that it threatens the system as a whole. Yet the guardrails cannot hold when avarice becomes the defining trait of an era, as it is now. Laws and norms are no match for the possibility of raking in billions if you’re sufficiently ruthless and unprincipled. Donald Trump’s tax returns, just made public, reveal that he took bogus deductions to reduce his tax liability all the...

Sometimes I feel like screaming at the mainstream media for failing to alert people to crucial, although complicated, issues affecting our democracy coming from different parts of government simultaneously. Case in point: Moore v. Harper, argued on December 7 before the Supreme Court, and the Electoral Reform Act, which must be enacted before the end of this Congress because Republicans won’t touch it once they control the House. The two are intimately connected but you wouldn’t know that from the mainstream media, which is treating them as two separate stories. Let me make the connection. In Moore, North Carolina...