Corey Robin's Blog, page 14

Tim Walz, Hannah Arendt, and the Occupation at Wounded Knee

Before Tim Walz became a politician, he was a high school teacher. One of his passions as a teacher was the subject of the Holocaust.

Walz wrote his masters’ thesis on “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom.” It argued that the way we teach the Holocaust and genocide in school was mistaken. Walz pushed for an approach that didn’t separate the Holocaust from other genocides and human rights abuses. He also insisted that it was a mistake to focus on the maniacal character of Hitler and the Nazis. Instead he argued for a more integrated, comparative, and historicist approach, incorporating factors such as colonialism, economics, and civil war, and connecting the Holocaust to the Cambodian and Armenian genocides.

This is standard stuff now, but this was back in the early 1990s, when, as Walz says, teachers were teaching the Holocaust by having students wear yellow stars and stand at the back of the lunch line. (In 2008, the great New York Times journalist, Samuel G. Freedman, wrote a great profile on Walz as a teacher of the Holocaust.)

In 2020, when Walz was already governor of Minnesota, he did an interview with a Jewish podcast. He spoke there about how he had his students read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, even though “it seemed a little deep for them.” (See episode 44.)

On that podcast, Walz connected his interest in the Holocaust to an experience he had as a fourth grader growing up in Nebraska. His father was the superintendent of schools, and it was 1973. That was the year that members of the Oglala Lakota tribe and the American Indian Movement took over the town of Wounded Knee, which had been the site of the 1890 massacre of native Americans.

The town Walz lived in was not far from Wounded Knee. Walz remembers organized militias of men standing guard on top of the building in his town. He also remembers—actually he only discovered this later—that there had been a movement in the town to prevent Native American students from going to school during the occupation at Wounded Knee. Things were that tense.

Walz’s father opposed that effort and made sure that all students were able to attend school.

On Jew lovers and Jew haters

I wrote a piece for The New Yorker on America’s latest passion project: the Jew.

My first and only experience of antisemitism in America came wrapped in a bow of care and concern. In 1993, I spent the summer in Tennessee with my girlfriend. At a barbecue, we were peppered with questions. What brought us south? How were we getting on? Where did we go to church? We explained that we didn’t go to church because we were Jewish. “That’s O.K.,” a woman reassured us. Having never thought that it wasn’t, I flashed a puzzled smile and recalled an observation of the German writer Ludwig Börne: “Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me for it. But all are thinking about it.”

Thirty-one years later, everyone’s thinking about the Jews. Poll after poll asks them if they feel safe. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris lob insults about who’s the greater antisemite. Congressional Republicans, who have all of two Jews in their caucus, deliver lectures on Jewish history to university leaders….

The G.O.P. is not the only party whose solicitude for the Jews betrays an underlying unease. President Biden has said repeatedly that without Israel no Jew in the world is safe. It sounds like a statement of solidarity, but it’s really a confession of bankruptcy, a disavowal of the democratic state’s obligation to protect its citizens equally. As Biden told a group of Jewish leaders in 2014, nine months before Trump announced his Presidential campaign, “You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States . . . there is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the State of Israel.” I’ve lived most of my life in the United States; three of my four grandparents were born here. If the President of my country—a liberal and a Democrat, no less—is saying that my government can’t protect me, where am I supposed to go? I’m Jewish, not Israeli.

Some Jews might feel cheered by Republican crusades against antisemitism or Democratic affirmations of Israel. But there is a long history to these special provisions and professions of concern. Repeating patterns from the ancient and medieval world—and abandoning the innovations pioneered by Jews in the United States—they are bad for democracy. And bad for the Jews.

You can keep reading here. I discuss how antisemitic Europe developed the model of the Court Jew, how democratic America broke with that model, how Ulysses S. Grant once tried to expel the Jews, and why we should be worried when leaders of the Jewish community seek to return to the model of the Court Jew, as they are now, and give up on the democratic model that so many American Jews fought for over the years.

They’re weird

I hadn’t heard of Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, before this past weekend. But like many people, I’ve been struck by the pivot he’s signaled in how the Democrats, and the left more generally, should talk about Trump. Asked by Jake Tapper why he insists on calling Trump “weird” rather than an “existential threat to democracy,” which is how most Democrats and progressives have been describing Trump since 2016, Walz said: It gives him [Trump] way too much power. Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks, whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought we just give him way too much credit. When you just ratchet down some of the scariness […]

They’re weird

I hadn’t heard of Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, before this past weekend. But like many people, I’ve been struck by the pivot he’s signaled in how the Democrats, and the left more generally, should talk about Trump.

Asked by Jake Tapper why he insists on calling Trump “weird” rather than an “existential threat to democracy,” which is how most Democrats and progressives have been describing Trump since 2016, Walz said:

It gives him [Trump] way too much power. Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks, whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought we just give him way too much credit. When you just ratchet down some of the scariness and just name it what it is…That is weird behavior. I don’t think you call it anything else.

At a rally in St. Paul, Walz was even more pointed:

“The fascists depend on fear…but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”

Damn right. I hope other Democrats—and with them, the army of commentators inside and outside of the media and academia—follow suit.

I’ve written quite a bit about why I think the model of fascism or authoritarianism is not the right way to think about the Republicans or the right more generally today. I won’t rehearse those arguments I’ve made again here.

But I’ve also made a different argument, since the rise of Trump, about why I think the left’s tone of moral and political alarm is so unhelpful to opposing Trump. Walz makes the case in 2024 pithily; I made it, back in December 2016, in Jacobin, at greater length.

Here’s what I said then.

In the last few days, I’ve gotten a lot of emails and comments asking me why I seem, in my Facebook posts and tweets, to downplay the threat of Trump. Why I resist the comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, why I emphasize the continuities between Trump and previous Republicans, why I insist on attending to the fractures and cleavages within his coalition.

Now, of course, nothing I say is meant to downplay the threat at all; it’s all designed to get us to see it more clearly (clearly, of course, by my lights), and while I don’t see my posts or tweets primarily or even secondarily as organizing tools, I’d like to think they give us some potential sense of leverage over the situation. But let me not get too fancy or fussy in my response; let me simply take this criticism head on.

There are a lot of academic, intellectual, and scholarly reasons I could cite for why I say what I say about Trump, and you probably know them all, and they’re all relevant and important. But there is, I recognize, something deeper going on for me. And that is that I am fundamentally allergic to the politics of fear. That term is complicated (I explore it a lot in my first book), so forgive the very truncated, simple version I’m about to give here.

The politics of fear doesn’t mean a politics that points to or invokes or even relies on threats, real or false. It doesn’t mean a politics that is emotive (what politics isn’t?) or paranoid. It means something quite different: a politics that is grounded on fear, that takes inspiration and meaning from fear, that sees in fear a wealth of experience and a layer of profundity that cannot be found in other experiences (experiences that are more humdrum, that are more indebted to Enlightenment principles of reason and progress, that put more emphasis on the amenability of politics and culture to intervention and change), a politics that sees in Trump the revelation of some deep truth about who we are, as political agents, as people, as a people.

I cannot tell you how much I loathe this kind of politics. At a very deep and personal level. I loathe its operatic-ness, the way it performs concern and care when all it really is about is narcissism and a desperate desire for a fix. I loathe its false sense of depth and profundity. I loathe its belligerent confidence that it, and only it, understands the true awfulness of the world. I loathe the sense of exhilaration and enthusiasm it derives from being in touch with this awfulness, the more onerous citizenship, to borrow a phrase from Susan Sontag, it constructs on the basis of this experience.

And so if I have a weakness or a blind spot — and I genuinely see how it can be a blind spot — it’s to political discussions and mobilizations that repeat this kind of politics, even when they come from the left. I say it’s a weakness or a blind spot because in the course of trying to avoid this kind of politics, I may wind up, inadvertently, giving the impression that something is not as dangerous as it is. I may wind up overstating its familiarity and intelligibility. While I still refuse to believe that pointing out the precedents for a current danger somehow diminishes that danger, I know my Burke well enough to know that when we pare back the exoticism, novelty, and strangeness of a thing, when we try to make it more proportionate to our understanding, it can have the accompanying effect (and affect) of making that thing seem less dangerous.

In any event, among the many reasons the election of Trump has so depressed me, and why I’ve not commented much since the election and have mostly stayed off social media, is that it has given license to the politics of fear on the left. Particularly on social media. Once again, we have that sense that we are face-to-face with some deep, dark truth of the republic. Once again, we have that sense that those of us who insist the horribles of the world should not and cannot have the last word, are somehow naifs, with our silly faith in the Enlightenment, in politics, in the possibility that we can change these things, that politics can be about something else, something better. I find that sensibility deeply conservative (not in my sense of the word but in the more conventional sense), and I resist it with every fiber of my being.

I still stand by this argument. And I’m happy to see smart pols, like Walz and others, seeing and saying the same thing now.

Like a diary, only far more masculine

When he was deployed in Iraq and a student at Yale Law School, J.D. Vance occasionally blogged. “It’s like a diary,” he wrote, “only far more masculine.”

Here’s what I learned about Vance from his blogs. (If you’re confused by the different names on the blogs, well, there’s a there.)

1. Getting emotional, he feels “more like a female than I think I ever have or will.

2. Except for Jesus Christ, Winston Churchill may have been the greatest man that ever lived, and his life was a lot like Vance’s.

3. He cries twice on one day. With one exception, this is the only time he’s cried since he was 13.

4. In the midst of having to write a long paper at Yale, he notes, “Apparently the Whiffenpoofs (or something like that), a Yale a cappella group, is having an open-bar event to celebrate their appearance on some reality show. Hopefully I can get done in time to go.”

James Scott, 1936-2024

James Scott, the Yale political scientist who specialized in so many things, has died.

Jim was a scholar of peasant politics and societies, Southeast Asia, state planning, ecology, forestry, Balzac, and much else. He meant a great deal to a great many people, intellectually and personally, but there’s a small cohort of us, who came to Yale in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for whom he holds a special place in our hearts.

We had come to the political science department intending to study political theory, only to discover, upon our arrival, that the official political theorists on the faculty were neither political nor theoretical.

Though we tried to make it work as theorists, many of us in this cohort wound our way to working with Americanists like Rogers Smith, who bridged the divide between theory and empirical work, and/or Jim. If we were lucky, we wound up working with both of them. I was lucky.

In 1991-92, I got involved in the graduate worker union. By the summer of 1992, I was helping to lead it, and though I vowed with every semester that I’d step back from my union work, my involvement only increased with the years. For reasons that I can’t now remember, and against the advice and better judgment of my friends, I kept the department political theorists, along with Rogers, on my dissertation committee. But then in 1995-96, after I led a grade strike, the theorists—Steven Smith and Ian Shapiro—struck back. They revised their letters of recommendation for me, effectively blacklisting me from any future job in academia.

It was at that point that I retooled my entire dissertation committee. I made Rogers my main adviser, and I asked Jim to join my committee. I had taken a course with him on anarchism and always found him curious about ideas and up for an intellectual adventure. Unlike many of the faculty—who thought a dissertation on fear was somehow not really a topic of politics or theory (these were political scientists, mind you, but this was the 1990s, so that’s the way things were)—Jim loved my dissertation topic. And my approach: a combination of intellectual history (Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville) and revisionist reading of McCarthyism as a case study in political fear. Somewhere in my basement are his detailed comments—sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed—on each of my chapters. He was a big fan of my two chapters on Montesquieu, which were my favorites, too. He had good taste.

There’s a lot I could say about Jim as a scholar, but there are people far more well versed in his work and impact than I am, so I’ll leave that to them. And I could say a lot more about Jim as an adviser, but there are students upon whom he had far greater an influence, so I’ll leave that to them. I don’t mean that Jim wasn’t substantive; far from it. He affected multiple disciplines and is read by virtually everyone in the humanities and social sciences. And probably the natural sciences as well, since he was extraordinarily sensitive to questions of nature and the environment and the interaction between peoples, politics, and natural processes.

But it’s a testament to Jim as a person that despite being such an interested and invested adviser, and despite being such an intellectual heavyweight, he didn’t change my intellectual course or scholarship. “He wears his learning lightly” is a cliche among academics and scholars, but Jim really did. And his authority, too. He just let me do my thing, commenting and correcting, but never steering or directing.

Jim was that rare thing in academia: a genuine egalitarian. He was one of the most illustrious scholars of the social sciences, translated into multiple languages, recipient of every award, extraordinarily well read, yet he always treated me as if I were a conversation partner, as if my dissertation were a book, and he were just an interested reader.

From the get go, Jim was a firm supporter of the grad union. It’s fashionable now for academics to support academic unions—thank God—but this, again, was the early 90s. Jim was one of the very few members of the Yale faculty—Michael Denning, Hazel Carby, and David Montgomery were some of the others—whom we could count on for consistent support. In political science, he might have been the only member of the faculty to always support us.

It was 1993 or 1994, I can’t remember when, and the union had done some sort of action, I can’t remember what. I came to Jim to get him to sign some petition or something, I can’t remember for what. He immediately signed it but then said, sort of sideways, “I’m very cross with GESO.” I have no memory of what he was upset about, but here’s where his egalitarianism really kicked in. Despite his irritation, he never allowed it to be anything more than it was. He never played the part of the disappointed authority, the professor betrayed. He was just annoyed about something, he expressed his annoyance to me, and that was that. He was on one side of the power divide, I was on another, but in that moment of disagreement, which both of us knew would go no further than that, I got a glimpse of equality and respect.

Spaces available in course this fall

This fall, I am teaching a course, “Politics Through Literature,” which still has spaces available for students to register.

You can register whether you are an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, another college in the CUNY system, or at any college in the New York area. Please reach out to me for information on how to register if you an undergraduate outside the CUNY system. There is no online component; all instruction is in-person.

The course is listed as POLS 3440 and meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:30-10:45.

Below is the course description from the syllabus.

This course takes up some of the most wrenching and destabilizing concerns of politics and art—money, sex, beauty, property, and the family—through great works of literature and political philosophy. Our canon ranges from the ancient Greeks to contemporary Black writers, from the gay graphic novelist Alison Bechdel to the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Along the way, we’ll ask ourselves the following questions:

1. Why and how is art a political concern? Why do members of a polity care so much about what their writers think and write? Does art do anything politically?

2. What is a proper political concern? Do questions of family life, or sexual intercourse and romantic love, belong in the political sphere?

3. How do our everyday experiences and fantasies of beauty and love, and of the body, reflect political categories like race or wealth? And how are race and wealth framed by our experiences and fantasies of beauty, love, and the body?

The goal of the course is threefold. First, that we come away with a greater attunement to, and a heightened awareness of, what we do with art and what art does with us. Second, that we acquire a greater understanding of why it is that the people of a polity, both citizens and politicians, get so rattled by art, by what is read in the classroom and seen on the screen or in a museum. Last, that we see politics itself as a form of art, a stylized performance that, like art, draws from and speaks to, and reconfigures, our most intimate and personal dreams and desires and longings.

Please share this announcement widely.

Marriage and Markets in Hayek and Freud

I’ve got a new piece up at The New Yorker on a new biography of Friedrich Hayek.

I got a chance to range widely. From Hayek’s dalliance with the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet—

In November, 1977, on a still-sticky evening along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek boarded a flight bound for Chile and settled into his seat in first class. He was headed to the Valparaíso Business School, where he was scheduled to receive an honorary degree. Upon arrival in Santiago, the Nobel laureate was greeted at the airport by the dean of the business school, Carlos Cáceres. They drove toward the Pacific Coast, stopping for a bite to eat in the city of Casablanca, which had a restaurant known for its chicken stew. After their meal, they steered north to Viña del Mar, a seaside resort city in Valparaíso, where Hayek would take long walks on the beach, pausing now and then to study the stones in the sand.

To the casual observer, it seemed like a typical autumnal recessional, the sort of trip that illustrious scholars enjoy at the end of their careers. This one had a wintrier purpose. 

To Hayek’s relationship to Freud—

Friedrich August Edler von Hayek was born on May 8, 1899, in his parents’ apartment in Vienna. Two miles away, Sigmund Freud was putting the finishing touches on “The Interpretation of Dreams.” “Fin-de-siècle Vienna” invokes a century-straddling city whose violent metamorphosis, from the crown jewel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the capital of the Austrian Republic, released into the world a distinctive swirl of psychoanalysis and logical positivism, fascism and atonal music. Though often omitted from the city’s syllabus, Hayek’s writings are among its lasting texts.

To what I think the smartest left readers of Hayek may have overlooked or under-emphasized—

Hayek’s is an economy in which a few can act, with all the power of nature, while the rest of us are acted upon. That domination is directly derived from his vision of the economy and his conception of freedom. It is a commitment obscured by Hayek’s readers, not only his right-wing defenders but also his left-wing critics. The latter tend to focus on other sources of domination or unfreedom: the cruel and carceral state that enforces Hayek’s neoliberal order; the remote global institutions that put that order beyond the reach of democratic citizens; the patriarchal family that offers tutorials in submission to the market; and the construction of the enterprising self that is so emblematic of contemporary capitalism.

Persuasive as these readings are, they don’t quite capture that moment of élite domination in the Hayekian market… 

To the relationship between Hayek’s theory of markets and the reality of his marriage—

The great trial of Hayek’s life was his twenty-four-year marriage to Helena (Hella) Fritsch, much of which he spent trying to get out of. Caldwell and Klausinger devote the last three chapters of their biography to the divorce—and for good reason, even if they can’t see it. In Hayek’s anguished bid to end his marriage, we find, just as Freud would have anticipated, the private pathology of the public philosophy, the knowledge problem in practice. That we should discover those pathologies in a marriage is less remarkable than it might seem. From the treatises of antiquity to the novels of Jane Austen to the economics of Thomas Piketty, writers of all sorts have understood the overlap between unions of soul and contracts of need.

You can read the whole article here.

From Marx’s Capital to Student Housing at Berkeley

The summer after I graduated college, a group of friends and I moved out west and lived together in Berkeley, California. There were about ten of us in Rochdale Village, a complex of student cooperative housing on Haste Street, just off Telegraph Avenue, not far from the Berkley campus.

I hadn’t thought about those apartments, or their name, till this afternoon, when I was reading Marx’s chapter on cooperation (chapter 11) in the first volume of Capital. I’m reading Capital in a new and amazing translation by Paul Reitter; it’s edited by Paul North. Wendy Brown has a foreword, and Will Roberts has an afterward. It’s due out this September. I’ll be reviewing it.

In the middle of chapter 11, Marx has a long footnote on workers’ cooperatives. He mentions one, in Manchester, that was so successful on so many terms, it provoked the Spectator to sniff that while it had “immensely improved the condition of the men” working there, it “did not leave a clear place for masters.” Leading Marx to comment, “Quelle horreur!“

This particular set of cooperatives was located in the borough of Rochdale within the wider metropolitan area of Manchester. Begun as a consumers’ cooperative, North explains in a useful editorial note, The Society of Equitable Pioneers eventually became a workers’ cooperative, “providing a model for the application of socialist ideas that workers emulated elsewhere in Great Britain.”

So potent was the example that it eventually made its way across the Atlantic, providing an inspiration for affordable housing in New York City, under the Mitchell-Lama program, for cooperating farming in Wisconsin, and student housing in Berkeley.

What I Saw—and Learned—at a New York City Student Walk-Out for Palestine

I was working at my desk this morning when I got a text from my daughter, who’s 16 years old, and a student at Brooklyn Tech. She wanted to know if I would go with her to a walkout for Palestine that had been organized by and for New York City high school students. Having dragged her to so many demonstrations when she was much younger, I was thrilled to be asked to join her on this one.

We met up, and at 3 pm, the students converged at 52 Chambers Street, where the Department of Education is located. I was impressed by a few of the increasingly familiar elements that distinguish this generation of protesters from previous ones—the extraordinary diversity of the students, the variety of boroughs they were coming from, the initiative of the students (from every corner of the protest, a different student would start a chant whenever the crowd fell silent), and the leadership role of female students.

But what most struck me about the protest was how frequently I heard the phrase “the truth.” In my more than thirty years on the left, I’ve never heard so much talk of “the truth.” The speakers and the chanters invoked the phrase repeatedly.

The media claims we live in a country whose citizens and residents believe in something called truthiness rather than the truth, that reality no longer matters to people, that the young are truth-addled and fact-adjacent. But judging by these students, that seems like the opposite of, well, the truth. They were absolutely passionate on the topic, seeming to me almost old-fashioned in their belief in the truth, in their conviction that the truth would set them free.

One of the other watchwords of the protest was “scholasticide“—the destruction of education and knowledge. This is obviously a huge problem right now in Gaza, where schools and universities are being obliterated by the Israeli state, and students and teachers are being killed day after day. Some of the most eloquent speakers at the protest connected, with minimal hyperbole or rhetoric, that destruction to what’s happening in New York City public schools and universities, where budget cuts, austerity, and the persecution of pro-Palestine teachers are degrading the state of education in this city. They invoked the words of Frederick Douglass, one of the most far-seeing American theorists on the relationship between the denial of knowledge and the subjugation of a people, to make sense of why they, these students, were protesting Israel’s destruction of Gaza in front of the New York City Department of Education.

We hear a lot of talk and speculation about why young people in America are so passionate on the topic of Palestine. From the students I was listening to today, the connection is clear. They see in Gaza the destruction of heritage, the obliteration of knowledge, the assault on institutions of learning. Far from seeming like a world away, it seems like the world in front of them. There’s been an assault upon the obligation of each generation to pass on to the next generation the intellectual legacy that was passed on to it, and whether the site of that assault is Gaza or the New York City school system, the problem is systemic. For people who are coming of age now, it’s also personal.

On the other hand…at one point in the rally, when I was taking a lengthy video shot, panning out across the crowd and the signs, a very sweet-looking student standing next to me—he couldn’t have been more than 15—said, “Your camera’s not on, sir.” He turned to his friend and said, “My dad does that all the time.”

Whatever we’re not teaching them, in other words, they’re still teaching us. In more ways than one.