AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And I’m Nermeen Shaikh. Welcome to our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

In a stunning victory this week, 33-year-old Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in the race to be mayor of New York City, sending shockwaves through the Democratic Party across the country. Mamdani was the top choice of 43.5% of Democratic primary voters in New York’s ranked-choice system. He defeated former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who conceded the race Tuesday night. If Zohran Mamdani wins in the general election in November, he will be the city’s youngest mayor in over a century as well as the first Muslim mayor of New York. He won with an energetic campaign that brought in tens of thousands of volunteers and a laser focus on the issue of affordability.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford. A city where they can do more than just struggle. One where those who toil in the night can enjoy the fruits of their labor in the day. Where hard work is repaid with a stable life. Where eight hours on the factory floor or behind the wheel of a cab is enough to pay the mortgage. It is enough to keep the lights on. It is enough to send your kid to school. Where rent-stabilized apartments are actually stabilized. Where buses are fast and free. Where childcare doesn’t cost more than CUNY. And where public safety keeps us truly safe.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Just as stunning as Zohran Mamdani’s victory is the defeat of the former governor. Andrew Cuomo entered the primary as the easy frontrunner with broad name recognition and the support from the largest super PAC ever in New York City mayoral primary history. The PAC, called Fix The City, shattered all previous records, raising more than $25 million to back Cuomo’s attempt at a political comeback four years after he resigned over sexual misconduct allegations by at least 11 women who were former staffers.

AMY GOODMAN: How did this earthquake, this massive upset, happen? And what does this say about the Democratic Party and Democratic voters in this moment that the campaign of a Democratic Socialist focused on affordability beat out such formidable establishment opponent? We’re joined now by someone who’s made teaching about rising inequality and its impacts on society his life work.

Robert Reich has held many positions over his career, secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, best-selling author, prolific creator of viral videos online, and cofounder of Inequality Media. But above all, he considers himself a teacher. He’s been a professor for over 40 years. In fact, he just taught his last class, at least for now. Yes, there’s a new film out about Robert Reich, which is called just that, The Last Class. And it looks at this last semester teaching at UC Berkeley. The course, Wealth and Poverty, Wealth and Inequality. Here’s a clip from the film.

ROBERT REICH: I try to be mindful of the world these students are entering. I was talking with some of them recently, and I asked, “You’re no longer Generation Z. What do you call yourself? What’s the generation after Generation Z? What are you?” And they, several of them, said, “We’re the last generation.”

AMY GOODMAN: The last generation. Robert Reich joins us in our studio here in New York because the film, The Last Class, is premiering this weekend at the IFC. But you are coming at, to say the least, an extremely significant moment in New York’s history, in the country’s history. You endorsed Mamdani. You endorsed Zohran Mamdani early on. That is certainly more than the Democratic leaders of this city have done. Even after this victory, technically, it’s in a week because it’s ranked-choice voting, and the results will come out next week, but he got 43% of the vote at a time when, at some point, Andrew Cuomo was something like 40 points ahead. And I think what Mamdani said is, his own name recognition was at 1%, and maybe that was an exaggeration, he said.

But the name of your class, Wealth and Poverty, very much signifies the significance of this campaign, the very issues he addressed, where right now, Senator Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, leader of the Democrats in the House, they kind of congratulated him, but they didn’t even endorse him at this point. Talk about the shockwaves and what you think this suggests for the future.

ROBERT REICH: Well, shockwaves is a good way of putting it, Amy. The Democratic Party really needs to learn this lesson. It’s a lesson that, over the last 40 years, it could’ve learned over and over again. But the lesson is very simple. There is a huge anti-establishment wave in America, that’s the strongest wave in American politics. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the bottom 60 to 80% of Americans have not seen a real wage increase in 45 years.

People are doing a little bit better than they did 45 years ago, but the people at the top are doing wonderfully well. They’re having weddings in Venice. There’s so much conspicuous consumption at the top. Wealth has moved, has been siphoned off. And it’s because the economy is rigged. I hate to say it. This is the one thing that I agree with Donald Trump about. The economy is rigged, but it’s rigged against working-class people. And I think Mamdani understood that. He understood that people have got to want a change, but also they want affordability, they want an economy that is working for them, and they want new faces. They want younger people. They want a new generation of Democratic leaders.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: One of the winning features of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was a series of interviews that he conducted in parts of New York City that had previously voted Democrat, but in this election, went Trump. And I think what you’re saying, that this is where you agree with Trump, that the economy is rigged, that in part explains why people shifted from the Democratic Party to Trump, the people that Mamdani spoke to. And he came to see, in fact, that the problem was affordability. So, if you could elaborate a little bit more on how you think this was the perhaps determining issue in this kind of surge towards Trump and the Republican Party in the last election.

ROBERT REICH: Well, it’s clear that Trump fooled the majority of Americans, or at least a plurality, into thinking that he would be their savior, he would be doing something about prices, he would actually be responding to the needs of average working people. Now, he hasn’t, obviously. He didn’t in his first term. Remember, the major thing he did in his first term was a big tax cut, mostly for the rich. That’s what he’s doing now, again, another big tax cut, mostly for the rich. But he uses the symbols of cultural populism, like immigration, to persuade a lot of people that he’s on their side.

Now, I’m not suggesting Democrats go in that direction. Quite the contrary, I think Democrats need to go in the direction of economic populism. They need to talk about the reality, and that is that wealth and income are really almost at a record level, moving to the top. And it is no accident. This is because of huge amounts of money spent in politics by big corporations and the wealthy. But what’s wonderful, and I think Democrats really should take some solace from this, about Mamdani’s campaign is that you had the biggest war chest in modern American politics against him. You had Bill Clinton endorsing him.

AMY GOODMAN: Your boss.

ROBERT REICH: My former boss. [Laugh] Not my boss anymore. And you have the Democratic establishment really making a kind of last-ditch effort to do everything they possibly could for him. And they failed miserably. If there’s not a lesson here about people rising up, demanding what they want and what they need, and a new generation of Democrats rising, talking to people authentically about what they need, I don’t know what the lesson is.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, we want to talk about the fact that you were also – you’re saying all of this not as someone who’s an outsider but someone who’s served in successive Democratic administrations. So, we’d like to go back over 30 years and turn to a speech you gave in 1994 at the Democratic Leadership Council when you were still the Secretary of Labor for Bill Clinton.

ROBERT REICH: My friends, we are on our way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated. Once unbottled, mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of a society, replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today, the targets of that rage – and we see it around us, you can only read the daily paper, you don’t have far to look. Today, the targets of that rage are immigrants, and welfare mothers, and government officials, and gays, and an ill-defined counter-culture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that’s you, Robert Reich, speaking in 1994 when you were still labor secretary for Bill Clinton. You’ve described this moment as your 1994 warning about Trump-ism, so if you could elaborate on that and also when you came to be totally disillusioned with the Democratic Party.

ROBERT REICH: I came to be disillusioned with the Democratic Party [Laugh] years ago, before I was secretary of labor. But the Democratic Party – these parties, these things called political parties, are no longer what they used to be. They are basically fundraising machines. Donald Trump has made the Republican Party into not just a cult, but a very dangerous dictatorial, kind of systemic structure. But let me just say that when I said in 1994 that if inequality continued to widen and the middle class continued to shrink, that we would see a demagogue coming along, what I meant was that we would create the conditions in which a lot of Americans were desperate enough that they would vote for a demagogue.

And obviously, Donald Trump did come along. He has fooled a lot of people. He continues to fool a lot of people. He’s a con man. We all know he’s a con man. But unless the Democrats come up with somebody who’s truthful, who has as much or if not more charisma, but is telling people what is actually happening and talking in realistic terms about the economy and power. The word power is a very important word here, and it’s not used nearly enough. But the fact of the matter is that most Americans feel powerless. Most Americans feel that they have lost whatever power they had. And that’s why, I think, they were looking for a strongman. This is a crisis right now. I don’t have to tell you, you guys are doing a fabulous job. Thank you for what you’re doing.

But unless the Democratic Party – and we don’t have a third party. We’re not going to have a third party very easily. Unless the Democratic Party really does respond to the moment – and why can’t it? You have Donald Trump there surrounded by billionaires, supported by billionaires, creating a government by, for, and of billionaires. Why is this not the perfect time for the Democrats to emerge as the party of average working Americans once again?

AMY GOODMAN: When you were labor secretary, you opposed your own president’s welfare reform, what many called welfare deform. Now, you have the House Speaker Johnson saying perhaps on Tuesday, they’re going to vote on the budget bill, what President Trump calls, of course, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, others call the One Deadly Bill Act. You have hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts in Medicaid. You have Democrats tinkering around the edges. But what do you think needs to happen at this point? Zohran Mamdani has said the only answer to organized money is organized people. This is a message you’ve had for decades.

ROBERT REICH: He’s exactly right. And this is a time for people to say, “No,” in a very mass way. We see mass demonstrations. That demonstration we had recently was the biggest demonstration we’ve had in recent American history.

AMY GOODMAN: No Kings, five million at least marching in the streets.

ROBERT REICH: The No Kings, that’s right. But we’re not going to tolerate taking money from Medicaid, and food stamps, and nutrition, and possibly from Medicare as well, to give a big tax cut to the richest people in America when they’ve never been as rich. This is not something that any political person, any political advisor should find terribly complicated. It’s not something that any Democrat should find complicated. This is giving the Democratic Party a platter on which to develop a platform. And you see what Mamdani did. This is an era not unlike the 1930s in terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the need…

AMY GOODMAN: He says free buses, he says freeze the rent, he says that kids have to have free childcare. What’s interesting is, de Blasio, the most popular program he ever did, when people were saying, “No, you can’t possibly afford this,” was this pre-K school for kids all over the city, absolutely free. One of the most popular programs in New York City.

ROBERT REICH: [Laugh] Again, this is not complicated stuff. People do need help with childcare. People are working. Women and men are working harder than ever. People…

AMY GOODMAN: How do you pay for it?

ROBERT REICH: Well, we’re the richest country in the world. We’ve never been richer. Amy, this is what Democrats have got to say. We pay for it by raising taxes on the wealthy. We pay for it with a wealth tax. We pay for it the ways in which Teddy Roosevelt – you don’t even have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. His fifth cousin, Teddy Roosevelt, in 1901 was contemplating and developed sort of a wealth tax in terms of an estate tax. There are things that can be done and should be done, and Democrats cannot be afraid of sounding, what, socialist, radical? This is the time for sounding a little bit strong.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re here in New York City for your film, The Last Class, which is premiering at the Quad in New York City. You are what – President Trump turned 79 on June 19, No Kings Day protests. Against his big birthday military parade, five million people marched. You just turned 79 as well. You’re, like, five, six days apart. Your final message on what needs to happen.

ROBERT REICH: Well, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, and I also were born within a month and a half of each other under slightly different signs. Maybe that’s the difference. [Laugh] But what has to happen is, we’ve got to have a Democratic Party that is not afraid, that doesn’t take big money, that says to big corporations and Wall Street, “Too bad. We are going to represent the people. That’s the direction we’re going in, and we’re not going to hear anything different.” And the corporate Democrats, goodbye.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you so much for being with us. It’s great to have you in studio. Robert Reich, former labor secretary, best-selling author. Subject of the new film, The Last Class, about his last class that he taught last year at UC Berkeley, Wealth and Poverty. Was it over a thousand students attended that class?

ROBERT REICH: Yep.

AMY GOODMAN: Up next, the Trump administration’s attack on vaccines. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Llama,” by MAKU Soundsystem, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.