Robert Reich and the Liturgical Emotions of the Woke Priesthood
How moral binarism, affective trauma, and symbolic resistance define the last liberal clerics
Dispatches of the Postliberal Cyborg
Robert Reich: “Some of you are concerned about my safety…”
“…my health, because I’m nearly 80…”. He quotes a follower warning him “they’ll try to get rid of you,”... In: “Please don't worry about me”.
Robert Reich —former Labor Secretary under Clinton, Berkeley professor, and a prominent voice in America’s institutional left— has become one of the most consistent spokespersons for the emotionalized liberal clergy. His recent public message, where he reassures his followers about his safety and health while urging them to “resist the Trump regime,” crystallizes several key patterns of late liberal moral performance.
Editorial Note
This is not a personal attack. It’s not partisan either. It’s a structural diagnosis — not a critique, but a tectonic mapping of the scaffold of a discourse. Robert Reich is not just a former public servant or left-wing intellectual — he is a paradigmatic figure of the emotionalized technocratic progressivism that dominates late liberal culture. This short mapping dissects the tectonic grammar of his discourse.
How moral binarism, affective trauma, and symbolic resistance define the last liberal clerics
1. Messianic Self-Perception (with Emotional-Moral Tones)
Reich doesn’t just offer political analysis — he offers comfort, strength, and hope. He speaks as a moral guide:
“We’re in a national emergency.”
“I need to give you the facts, arguments, and analyses.”
“I want to give you the strength to get through this nightmare.”
This is not the voice of a technocrat. It is the voice of a secular preacher. The stakes are not political, but spiritual.
2. Moral Binarism: The Just vs. the Evil
Reich doesn't argue —he condemns. Trump is a tyrant, DEI critics are white supremacists, and anyone not sharing the liturgy is a threat:
“Trump’s rejection of diversity, equity, and inclusion is nothing more than white rights and white supremacy.”
This is not political language. It’s theology.
3. Collective Trauma as Framework
Reich presents the Trump era as a psychological catastrophe:
“I want to help you not drown in denial or despair.”
“We are living through a nightmare.”
This language doesn’t foster debate — it closes it. Opposition becomes trauma, and resistance becomes healing.
4. Personal Victimhood as Moral Currency
He paints himself as both strong and fragile, heroic yet vulnerable:
“Some of you are concerned about my safety…”
“…my health, because I’m nearly 80…”
The tone of his message reaches dramatic intensity when he quotes a follower warning him — in his words — “they’ll try to get rid of you,”...
This elevates him morally: he is the old prophet suffering for the people, unyielding in the face of fascism. His July 2025 Substack post, titled “Please don’t worry about me”, is a textbook example of affective self-framing: a mix of personal frailty, heroic resolve, and emotional bonding with his audience — not through argument, but through shared vulnerability.
This mode of self-victimization is not unique to Reich. It is a common affective posture within progressive moral discourse: emotional vulnerability becomes a source of legitimacy, turning weakness into virtue and pain into epistemic authority.
The political becomes therapeutic — and those who suffer most, speak loudest.
5. Ritualized Resistance
Sharing posts or buying a book is now moral action:
“Your active role can be no more than sharing my posts…”
Resistance is reduced to symbolic gestures — a liturgy of belonging rather than a program of transformation.
6. The Narrative of Permanent Exception
Trump is not just a political opponent; he is the embodiment of evil. This justifies:
The end of deliberation.
The glorification of censorship.
The moral de-legitimization of dissent.
The “emergency” never ends — because that’s what sustains the performative regime.
Structural Conclusion
Robert Reich represents a new class of emotionalized technocratic preachers. These are not policymakers. They are clerics of the collapsing faith — combining Enlightenment jargon with postmodern affect. They no longer analyze: they exhort, they console, they warn, and they sanctify.
The political has been moralized, and the moral has been liturgized. What remains is a theatre of righteous despair — where every post, every film, every book becomes a sacred rite against the growing darkness.
We are not witnessing a battle of policies.
We are witnessing the last sermon of liberalism.
Coming soon:
Three Ways to Misread the Collapse — a comparative tectonic reading of Reich, Fukuyama, and Heidegger at the End of the Liberal Age.
The Postliberal Cyborg is the Path.