# Robert Reich — "a two-tiered society composed of a few winners" > [!quote] "My friends, we are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and disillusionment are easily manipulated. Once unbottled, mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of society, replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays, and an ill-defined counterculture." > — Robert Reich, U.S. Secretary of Labor, speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, November 1994 ## Context Reich delivered this weeks after the November 1994 midterms, in which Democrats lost both chambers of Congress. He was sitting Secretary of Labor in an administration that had just passed [[NAFTA]] and was moving toward welfare reform, and the speech was a warning aimed at his own party's coalition strategy rather than at Republicans. By his own later account he was reprimanded by the Clinton White House for giving it. The argument has two moving parts, and only the first is the familiar one. The familiar part is the diagnosis: a labor market splitting into a small set of winners and a much larger group whose mobility has stalled. The less-quoted part is the mechanism — that the resulting resentment has **no fixed target**. Reich lists the 1994 targets and then treats the list as contingent, something assigned by whoever is organizing the anger. That is what makes the passage durable: it describes a supply of political fuel and leaves the question of who lights it open. ## Why this matters This is the clearest pre-2015 articulation, by a sitting U.S. cabinet official, of the political economy that the [[Trump Escalator Announcement]] converted into a winning coalition twenty-one years later. Trump's 2015 launch speech ran the mechanism Reich described almost to specification: an economically dispossessed audience, an assigned set of targets (Mexican immigrants, China, "stupid" politicians), and a promise of restored significance. The value to the KB is that it dates the diagnosis to 1994 and locates it inside the Democratic Party — which means the 2016 realignment cannot be read as an unforeseen shock. ## Sourcing notes > [!warning] Two source caveats > **Exact date.** The precise date of **November 22, 1994** appears in Heather Cox Richardson's letter of October 2, 2026 and has not been confirmed by a second source. The month and the Democratic Leadership Council venue are confirmed independently. The frontmatter therefore records `1994-11`. > > **A closing sentence is single-source.** Richardson's letter continues the passage with: "But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?" That sentence does not appear in Reich's own republications of the speech or in the Baptist News Global account, and is deliberately excluded from the verbatim block above. Attribute it to HCR's rendering if used. > > **Wording.** The block above follows Reich's own reproduction. Richardson's version reads "whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated," "mass resentments," and "counter-culture"; the differences are grammatical, not substantive. ## See also - [[Robert Reich]] — the speaker - [[Trump Escalator Announcement]] — the 2015 speech this is read against - [[Plutocracy]] — the structural condition - [[NAFTA]] — the Clinton-era trade policy Reich was serving under while warning about its constituency