It’s a violation of the Constitution. There was no consultation with Congress, no consultation — as far as I can tell — with anybody. Trump is isolated. It’s a dangerous move. There’s no indication he has explored all of the potential negative consequences or any ways out. It was clear from the start it was not going to be a complete success. He claims it’s a complete success, but he claims everything. I mean, you can’t trust a word he says. And you can’t trust a word he gets from anybody, because he’s surrounded himself with sycophants who won’t give him the truth.

Of course, the retaliation has already begun. What does all this mean? It means that he gains even more power for his dictatorship, because there’s nothing like a war to give a head of state more concentrated power and to make it more difficult for everybody else, including the courts, to constrain him.

If I can speak presumptively for other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet, we all put loyalty to the United States higher than loyalty to Bill Clinton. Not that there’s necessarily a trade off with every president. But you’ve got to understand that if you are in a cabinet position, your job is to do the public’s work. You take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. The public is counting on you. By sharp contrast, Donald Trump doesn’t understand that, and none of the people around him seem to understand that.

Let’s put it this way: not every aspect of the Nordic economic model is appropriate or relevant to the United States. It would be very hard to institute it here if what you’re talking about is a democratic socialism and very substantial social safety nets and substantial public investments. But having said that, there’s no reason we have to be the outlier among all capitalist nations and have the cruelest form of capitalism on the planet among all advanced nations.

American capitalism is so cruel to workers that it, in some sense, gave us Donald Trump. Donald Trump is almost a direct consequence of — and I lived these years — of fifty years of neglect of the working class in the United States, of fifty years of allowing more and more monopolization of big corporations, of fifty years of adopting neoliberalist responses and solutions to American problems. Fifty years of allowing American finance to run the economy. At some point, you’re going to fall off the cliff.

At some point, inequality is going to get so wide and so much big money is going to be infecting our politics that the public is going to say, “We want a strong man. We want a demagogue over all of this.” So, I could not have predicted Donald Trump himself, but I saw the road we were on.

Officially, and according to the data we have, we’re getting very close. Whether we’ve surpassed it or not is a difficult question to answer because some of the ways of measuring inequality, from the 1880s, 1890s, 1900, were different and a lot of assumptions have to be built into any one of these models. But let me just say that we are surpassing Gilded Age levels of inequality in the sense that the top one-tenth of 1 percent is running off with a huge amount of our wealth while the bottom 20 percent of Americans are in deeper and deeper debt. And the gap is huge and is growing.

CEO pay is out of control. It’s now 350 times the pay of the typical worker. It is — in my lifetime — it’s never been close to that. Taxes on the wealthy have continued to be cut to the point where, when I was becoming politically conscious in the 1950s, the top tax bracket was 92 percent under Dwight Eisenhower. It’s now under 40 percent, but after tax credits and deductions, it’s way below that for the people at the very, very top. And what the remnants we have of a wealth tax, from the Teddy Roosevelt administration — I’m talking about corporate taxes and inheritance taxes and other forms of wealth tax — are basically gone.

So are we more unequal or less unequal than we were [during the Gilded Age]? I think a good case could be made that we’re more unequal than we were in the first Gilded Age — and we are in a second Gilded Age.

Yes. Absolutely.

[Roosevelt] comes probably as close as any. I’m talking about 1935, ’36, and maybe ’37. Because Roosevelt wasn’t afraid to experiment and he didn’t put labels on things. He wanted to really rescue the country from the ravages of the extreme capitalism that caused the Great Depression. He wasn’t afraid of regulation, of strong social safety nets. His labor secretary, Frances Perkins, my predecessor, was responsible for some of the most important social innovations in American history: Social Security, unemployment insurance, a forty-hour workweek, time and a half for overtime. Everything we take for granted really emanates from Frances Perkins.

It’s an important victory, showing Democrats how to win over young people and at the same time respond to the economic concerns of working-class voters.

Not very much, to tell you the truth. This administration — honestly, I don’t even call it an “administration,” I call it a “regime” — because it’s not as if they’re administering for the public. It’s just a group of people who are doing what Donald Trump wants them to do and who really are all about money and power. Gathering more and more money for themselves and gathering more and more power for themselves. And for Trump; especially for Trump.

I don’t know what the fuck the Democrats are doing, quite frankly. Some of them are taking James Carville’s advice and rolling over and playing dead, expecting that Trump is going to automatically overreach. I think that’s just wrongheaded. I think Democrats have got to wake up. They’ve got to be a true resistance party.

They have a platform handed to them, because you’ve got Donald Trump surrounded by billionaires, cutting taxes for billionaires, and at the same time cutting Medicaid and food stamps and lots of things average working people depend on. Could you imagine a better and easier scenario to attract working-class voters back to the Democratic Party, if you really were interested in doing that?

First of all, it’s very difficult, as you know, to start a third party in America. Because you are inevitably drawing votes away from one of the two major parties that is closer to you ideologically. And every time a third party has been tried, going all the way back to Eugene Debs, you end up strengthening the party that is furthest away from you. So, I’m skeptical.

I think that inside the Democratic Party there can be, and has been, a larger and larger progressive caucus. But the second part of your question is, “What do we mean by ‘progressivism’?”

Almost, that’s true, Ed. I think progressives have to stand for a society in which democracy is much stronger, in which we get big money out of politics, where social safety nets really do make the life of average working people easier and more secure substantially. And we bring democracy to the economy in terms of the workplace. You’re right, there is confusion about “liberalism” and “progressivism.” But there’s also confusion about liberalism. I mean, what is liberalism today? I don’t know.

Right now, the fight is between democracy and fascism. There is no center point between those two. People who say they’re “moderates” — I don’t even know what they’re talking about in terms of moderates. Either we’re in favor of a system that is a true democratic system or we succumb to more and more centralization of authority in one person, a dictator like Donald Trump.

Well, it’s possible. I’ve had arguments for years with people like Ralph Nader, who did mount a third-party challenge and contends to this day that he pulled people into the electorate. But the party of nonvoters has been bigger than either the Democratic or Republican Parties for most of the postwar era. This is not a new phenomenon. We don’t have people that are terribly excited about politics.

Is it possible if we had a third party that was really a working people’s party, that we could create the excitement and galvanize people who are now nonvoters to vote? Of course, anything’s possible. But I’m just saying that historically, it’s extraordinarily difficult to do that.

In terms of Harvard, Brandeis, and Berkeley combined, it’s about forty-two years.

Those attacks are shooting us, as a society, in the foot. I say this not as an academic. Our research universities are the most precious things we have in terms of global competitiveness and innovation. To take money away from our research universities and to tell them they can no longer have international students or international professors is nuts. It is committing suicide in terms of our future economy.

The Last Class really is a love letter to my students and an attempt to show the close connection between education and democracy. Democracy requires an educated public. It’s no secret that authoritarians, tyrants, dictators always seek to burn books and close schools and attack education, because they don’t want an informed public. We should be honoring our teachers, investing more in education, and making it easier for every American, regardless of income, to get the education they need to do well. But also to be fully functioning members of our democracy.