Corey Robin's Blog, page 12

Salvador and Social Death

New York Times: Shortly after the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador this weekend, the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, posted a three-minute video on social media. It featured shackled men being marched off a plane over a dramatic electronic soundtrack and into prison, where they were shaved bald….Many of the 85,000 Salvadorans apprehended have disappeared into the prison system, held for years without trial and without their families knowing if they are alive….Mr. Bukele said the deportees would be held for at least a year and made to perform labor and attend workshops under a program called “Zero Idleness.” Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: There is one form of identification that deserves special attention, since it […]

Hard Choices in the NYC Mayoral Race

Politics, they say, is about making hard choices. And none seems harder right now than whom to vote for in the New York City mayoral race. According to the New York Times, the top two fundraisers in the race are Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo. It’s true that Mamdani is overwhelmingly getting his money from small donors, which is good, while Cuomo is getting his money from the big wigs. Including Jessica Seinfeld, who, last I heard, was giving thousands of dollars to a pro-Israel group that beat the crap out of pro-Palestine protesters at UCLA. But, as the Times notes, there are other issues of concern about both candidates. On the one hand, there’s this: Andrew Cuomo, who resigned […]

McCarthyism at Yale, Then and Now

At the height of the Second Red Scare, Yale University covered itself in glory when Yale president Charles Seymour declared, “There will be no witch-hunts at Yale because there will be no witches.” In other words, no McCarthyite congressional committee is going to investigate our professors because…we’ll make sure not to hire any professors who’d be investigation-worthy. That’s what they called protecting academic freedom—I kid you not—during the 1950s.* I was reminded of old Charles Seymour when I read in the New York Times that Yale Law School has suspended Helyeh Doutaghi, deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project, whose work and affiliated faculty and staff I’ve long admired and spoken with. Why was Doutaghi suspended, which, the […]

When Bogie Betrayed Himself

After reading my interview in n+1 on “Muskism and McCarthyism,” the producers at On the Media, the weekend show on NPR hosted by Brooke Gladstone, contacted me for a follow-up conversation. It’s airing this weekend. We ranged widely, from the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil to how Humphrey Bogart betrayed himself to HUAC, from why the term McCarthyism is so misleading to what kind of people and institutions a regime of fear can create. At the end of the interview, Brooke reminded me of a conversation we had had, on her show, during Trump 1.0 on the question of fascism and authoritarianism. She asked me where I stood on that question today. You should have a listen. Speaking of having a […]

Full Speed Ahead

Last summer, long before the election and inauguration of Trump 2.0, I wrote a piece in The New Yorker, arguing that American Jews were returning to a form of politics they had perfected in Europe but abandoned in the United States. Surveying what happened on college campuses during the last year of Biden’s presidency, I warned that we were reverting to a kind of politics from the Middle Ages and early modern era that betrayed the democratic traditions of Jewish politics in the United States: Instead of organizing or joining democratic movements to fight racism, defend immigration, and build social democracy, Jewish leaders and donors supplicate sovereigns or would-be sovereigns who are antisemitic, or aligned with antisemitism, yet promise special protection for the Jews at home or in Israel. The […]

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 […]