Corey Robin's Blog, page 10

Nick Xenos, 1948-2025

It says something that I learned of the death of Nick Xenos, a recently retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, not from an official announcement or an article in the newspaper but from the dozens of phone calls and texts I received, within just a few hours of his death, from his former students and current colleagues. Nick died, in other words, the way he lived, amid a beloved community of the most steadfast friends. That’s rarer in academia than we might think. I can’t exactly remember when I first met Nick or came into contact with him, though it was more than 20 years ago. I had known his name forever, and always associated it […]

What Arendt Can Mean for Today

The New York Times reports tonight that the federal government has arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University who has been active in pro-Palestine protests on campus and who is a permanent legal resident of the United states. Given that neither Khalil’s lawyer nor his eight-months-pregnant wife knows where in the United States he is currently being held, “detained” seems like a euphemism. Kidnapped seems more appropriate. Secretary of State Marc Rubio said today, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” Khalil has a green card, which means, I repeat, that he has the legal right to live and work in the United States. […]

The cruelty is not the point: On Muskism and McCarthyism

The magazine n+1 did a long interview with me about Muskism and McCarthyism, where, among other things, I said: One of the claims you often heard during Trump 1.0, which I always thought was misleading, was that “the cruelty is the point.” If you know anything about the history of political intimidation and politically repressive fear, you know that the cruelty is not the point. Silence, obedience, and submission—subjugation for political ends—that’s the point. The goal of McCarthyism was to crush what was left of the New Deal left-liberal alliance, primarily in the labor movement, and it succeeded. The point wasn’t to be cruel. Trump and some of his allies really are just sadists, psychopaths, and sociopaths. There is no […]

Letting Go

My mom has been gone now for more than three months, and her death has loomed over much that I read and write and think. It has certainly shaped one part of my reading of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. There are two nearly perfect moments in the novel, a novel that I think is mostly imperfect and flawed. They both involve the young Philip Roth’s relationship to his mother. Sons and mothers, or mothers and sons, is not usually Roth’s strength as a novelist; it mostly serves as comic relief, usually at the expense of the mother. Roth is more interested in fathers and sons, and sons and fathers. Though, interestingly, I’d say his truest, most tender, portrayal […]

The culture war doesn’t distract us from the class war; it directs us to it.

Many people of my generation have heard of Bill Safire, who worked as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew. When I was growing up, Safire had long departed the Nixon White House. He was now a columnist for the New York Times—perhaps the first in what is a by-now familiar sequence of the Times’ hiring voices who could speak for the “reasonable right” on its oped page. Like William F. Buckley, Safire liked to style himself a man of words, and his columns were often peppered with painful pedantry and middlebrow mewling (I can do alliteration, too!) over the rules of proper usage, the etymology of words, and such. So let’s do some here. Despite […]

Kafka Comes to CUNY

Three days ago, the New York Post reported that Hunter College was looking to hire a scholar in Palestinian Studies. The job ad read: We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality. It took less than a New York minute for Governor Hochul to order the job listing taken down and for CUNY leaders to comply. According to Hochul’s office, “Hateful rhetoric of any kind has no place at CUNY or anywhere in New York State.” The hateful rhetoric in question? These words and phrases: “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” and “apartheid.” If […]

Not your grandparents’ Marxist theory of the state

Most readers and followers of Marx are familiar with two fairly simple and stereotypical versions of his theory of the capitalist state. The first, which can be gleaned from On the Jewish Question and other writings, essentially sees the liberal constitutional state, with a rule of law and various civil liberties, as the perfected form of the capitalist state. The second, which can be gleaned from the Eighteenth Brumaire, sees a populist dictator, like Louis Bonaparte, as a different, more authoritarian version of the capitalist state. But in reading and re-reading Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx, I think we can find, in Marx’s other writings, particularly his articles on 1848, some of which were later collected in The Class Struggles in […]

Marx on Trump’s Abuses of Power

One of the more surprising elements in Bruno Leipold’s book Citizen Marx is just how fierce a critic Marx was of what political scientists call presidential systems. In presidential systems, the executive is invested with power that does not derive from the legislature, as in a parliamentary system. Instead, the executive is invested with power derived from elsewhere, most commonly election by the people themselves. Such systems tend to lionize the executive as a creature above and beyond the normal shabbiness of politics. That kind of elevation of the executive in a presidential system is something that Alexander Hamilton, that old fox, was wise to, and why he advocated so forcefully for it. Marx saw immediately how such a system, […]

Joan Robinson predicted our future

Joan Robinson, one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century, never won a Nobel Prize. Here she is, in 1962, writing to Robert Solow, a very good economist in the 20th century, who did win the Nobel Prize: Dear Bob, To me you are a fascinating study—A clever man who cannot see a simple point. Here is Robinson, also writing in 1962, in a prescient piece for the New Left Review on what we now call the care economy and Baumol’s cost disease: The services to meet basic human needs (particularly healthcare and education) do not lend themselves to mass production: they are not an easy field for making profits, especially, as with our egalitarian democratic notions, they have […]

The Real Plot Against America

There’s a moment in the middle of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America where the family has just learned that the father, Herman, is going to be transferred by his long-time employer, an insurance company, from Newark to somewhere in Kentucky. It’s very clear that the transfer is punitive, punishment for the father having crossed his sister-in-law, who is very connected with the fascist Lindbergh administration. The transfer order also looks a lot like simple ethnic cleansing, except that it’s framed as an “opportunity” that has been opened up by the Department of Interior, along the lines of the Homestead Act, where you get to be a pioneer in empty territory. But it’s all Jews who are being transferred. Though […]