Corey Robin's Blog, page 14

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, […]

Harvard, or A Study in Total Depravity

Harvard has hired Ballard Partners, one of the top lobbying firms in DC, to defend its interests against Trump. Ballard former lobbyists include Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief-of-staff, and Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General. When the great American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen was casting about for a subtitle for his study of the American academy, one of the ones he came up with was: “A Study in Total Depravity.”

In Santa Barbara this week

I’m going to be speaking in Santa Barbara on Thursday and Friday of this week (January 24 and 25). On Thursday, at 12:30, on the UC Santa Barbara campus, I’ll be delivering the Phi Beta Kappa Public Lecture, on “Why do—or did—economists read the ancient Greeks?” On Friday, at 10 am, I’ll be doing a workshop on my book-in-progress “King Capital.” You can get all the details for either of these events here. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello. An excerpt from the talk: Through a close reading of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, I’ll show how two economists used the ancient Greeks to identify a different turn and possibility in the modern world. Not a […]

Why have we stopped comparing Trump to Andrew Jackson and started comparing him to William McKinley?

Democracy in America is not well, but what ails it? According to one diagnosis, the country is suffering from multiple strains of one-man rule—tyranny, fascism, authoritarianism. Variants of the virus originate in the people and their passions. Citizens vote the tyrant into power. Racism, misogyny, or some other affliction of cruelty and fear, fuels their votes. Democracy is not just threatened by disease. It is the disease. This idea, of despotism from the demos, has a distinguished pedigree. Plato and Aristotle thought that all, or nearly all, forms of tyranny arise from the people. The vulgar many oppose the virtuous few, whose ethos of remove is an irritant to the many. Stirred by a demagogue, the people and their leader […]

Finding my mother in me—and in my classroom

The older I get, the more I love teaching. When I was starting out as a professor, teaching wasn’t my main concern. I was a good teacher, I’d like to think. I always put a lot of time into it. I spent hours prepping for lecture. I spent even more hours reading rough drafts of student papers and then grading them. I supervised dissertations. I was dedicated to the job and wanted to do it well. But these were secondary to my main ambition, which was to make my mark as a scholar and a writer. When I turned 50—that was seven years ago—things began to change. I became more careful about my time and relationship to academia as a […]

Israel came late to American Jews

My mom died last month. Going through some of the personal items she left for me, I found this book. The Jews of America was the textbook that virtually all of my sisters and I used in religious school, or Sunday School as it was called in Reform synagogues of the time, as we made our way toward our bar and bat mitzvahs. It’s how we learned about Jewish history and heritage, not just in America, despite the title, but across time and space. Ours was a typical Reform temple in the suburbs, so I assume this was a pretty standard text. The book came out in 1969, with a new edition in 1973. My sisters and I would have […]