Corey Robin's Blog, page 11

Trump, the ideal delinquent

New York Times: President Trump, furious about delays in delivering two new Air Force One jets, has empowered Elon Musk to explore drastic options to prod Boeing to move faster, including relaxing security clearance standards for some who work on the presidential planes…He is infuriated that he begins his second term flying around in the same aging planes that once transported President George H.W. Bush. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899: The ideal pecuniary man is the ideal delinquent.

The opposition party is neither in opposition nor a party

Forty Twenty [aach, basic error] percent of Americans now say that they think flying is very or somewhat unsafe, up from 12% last year. Google searches for “is it safe to fly” are way up from the norm. And Trump just fired 400 workers at the FAA. If an opposition party can’t put these simple stats together to make a political argument about society, government, and our interdependence, it’s neither in opposition nor a party. Update, 3:30 pm On a related note, The Washington Post just reported this: The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that it is moving to correct the accidental firing of several people working onthe federal government’s response to an outbreak of avian influenza, commonly known […]

The world’s oldest democracy, backstopped by the financial markets

Two legal scholars whose work I admire have a useful analysis in the Times of all the steps courts can take during an escalating constitutional crisis. But the last part of their analysis really shocked me, insofar as it really, truly expresses the bankruptcy of the democratic imagination in this country, even by, maybe particularly by, the leading lights of the most liberal parts of the legal professoriate. Say, the authors ask, the courts have run out of all other options, and the administration is still defiant. What then? Their answer: Here, the resolution of an ultimate confrontation between the branches, which would dominate the news, would also depend on the response of a range of actors in the public […]

Elon Musk, Adam Smith, and the East India Company

Far from being something entirely new or novel, Elon Musk embodies something Adam Smith identified in The Wealth of Nations as one of the most pernicious political forms of the modern age: the East India Company. Most people don’t realize this, but Smith’s text, particularly the fourth book, is a sustained critique of the East India Company, which he identified as a monstrous hybrid of merchant and sovereign, “the worst of all governments for any country whatever.” Smith was most concerned about the role of the East India Company in India, but its reach was global and the repercussions revolutionary. The irony here is considerable. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, the same year as the American Revolution. […]

Trump is your worst HR Officer

This afternoon, a federal judge in DC issued a temporary restraining order to stop Trump’s firing thousands of employees at USAID. The judge was appointed by…Trump. I’ve already written about the very real possibility that Trump’s judges may rule against Trump; they did this, after all, repeatedly during his first term. And they’re doing it again, in his second term. But I want to address here a different, more troubling, issue. In their lawsuit against Trump’s gutting of USAID, the unions that brought suit claimed that Trump had exceeded his legal and constitutional authority by firing thousands of employees. “Not a single one of defendants’ actions to dismantle U.S.A.I.D. were taken pursuant to congressional authorization,” the unions claimed. “And pursuant […]

It was never going to be the Proud Boys

A thousand years ago, I wrote a book called Fear: The History of a Political Idea. A big part of that book was struggling to figure out how political intimidation and fear work in America. At the time (this was the 1990s), it seemed to many like a somewhat exotic, if not quixotic, project. “No one cares about fear,” a political scientist told me. Well, time passes, as Virginia Woolf wrote in To the Lighthouse. The United States styles itself the land of the free, home of the brave. Yet, as every observer from Tocqueville to W.E.B. Du Bois has remarked, this country has often been a society of intense fear. And what has been the most persistent, common source […]

Trump’s tariffs? We’ll see.

Most people on social media (and the left) are not too interested in what Trump does on tariffs. It doesn’t seem to raise the same questions and concerns about human rights that policies on immigration or DEI do. But as a sign of the limits of and constraints on Trump’s power, as well as of conflicts within his coalition, Trump’s moves on tariffs are really important. And I know the left does care about that (the extent of Trump’s power.) Also, don’t forget: outside of (yet related to) slavery, the fight over tariffs was probably the most significant conflict in American politics in the nineteenth century. In any event, Trump has repeatedly promised to impose across-the-board 25% tariffs tomorrow (February […]

Will the courts check Trump?

I’m not a big believer in courts and think the left has relied upon them for far too long. But there is an argument afoot on the left that irks me because it’s both factually wrong and, as is so often the case with the left, politically disempowering. The argument is that the courts will pose no check on Trump because Trump stacked them with loyalists during his first term. In today’s Times, legal scholar Deborah Pearlstein effectively dismantles that view. As Pearlstein shows, in 2023, two political scientists analyzed the “win rate” at the Supreme Court of every president since 1937. Despite the fact that Trump had a majority of Supreme Court justices who were either his appointees or […]

Tuskegee, tip of the iceberg

This past weekend, after Trump issued his executive order to get rid of DEI in all federal agencies, a massive air force training base in Texas eliminated any and all courses making any mention of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black pilots in the US military. There was a massive outcry against this decision, even among Republican senators. Even though the Pentagon initially defended the decision, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was eventually forced to publicly decry it. Not long after, the decision was reversed by the head of Air Education and Training Command. Like many people, I’ve long had a sense that Trump and his right-wing cultural warriors were poking at a hornets’ nest when it comes to institutional […]

What we do when we talk about teaching

In the face of a spate of executive orders about education and what we can and cannot teach about the United States, particularly with regard to race, I’m posting here the course description for my American Political Theory class that I’m teaching this term. It’s high time that those of us, particularly with tenure, who teach American history or American politics or American political thought or anything in that realm, stand up and speak out on behalf of what we teach. Not in a defensive or apologetic crouch, but proudly and loudly, affirming that we offer students an in-depth approach to central problems of the American experience. My course opens with readings from Aristotle and the Hebrew Bible on slavery, […]