Corey Robin's Blog, page 16

Breaking up is hard to do. Unless you’re Karl Marx.

It’s probably been done before, though I don’t know of the book if it has, but one could write a terrific book on Marx and his breakups.

The model here would be Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives. Instead of a book about five Victorian marriages, however, and the mix of intellectual, personal, and political sparks they emitted, this would be a book about Marx’s intellectual and political divorces. And how each was a critical turning point in his thought and life.

The criterion for inclusion would be that Marx had a personal relationship with these individuals. No chapters on Hegel or Smith or Aristotle. Otherwise it would be too sprawling and insufficiently personal, more of a standard intellectual history rather than the biography of mutual minds that I have in mind.

There would be chapters on Marx and Bauer, Marx and Ruge, Marx and Hess, Marx and Grün, Marx and Feuerbach, Marx and Proudhon, Marx and Bakunin, Marx and Lasalle, and so on. There’d also be a final chapter on Marx’s one enduring love: with Engels.

Where Rose’s book is interested in what marriage brings to and does for a mind, this book would focus on what divorce brings to a mind. Some of the questions it might ask: Why was it so necessary for Marx not only to break with other minds but also to project onto those minds positions that he once held, using those minds as a way of working himself to another position? Why did so many of Marx’s breakups occur in such a concentrated period of time (1843 to 1848), when Marx was in his twenties. Relatedly, why are one’s twenties such a critical moment in intellectual and political formation more generally? And what was so different about Marx’s relationship with Engels that allowed both for the relationship to endure and for Marx to grow inside of it?

Such a book also would allow readers to see that some of the ideas people associate with Marx are in fact the ideas of the partners he ultimately rejected.

Pat Carta, 1945-2024

Pat Carta, an extraordinary organizer with Local 34 and one of the great leaders of the unions at Yale, has died.

I worked closely with Pat between 1993 and 1996. She trained me as an organizer, and though I don’t think she ever realized this, she felt like family to me. In fact, she reminded me a great deal of my family, particularly my mom. She was tough, warm, smart, loving, difficult, charismatic, powerful, relentless, demanding, honest, fearless. I always wished I could tell her what she meant to me, but she wasn’t someone who invited that kind of disclosure. Unless you said it from afar. As I’m doing now.

Though it’s been nearly 30 years now, two things about Pat stand out across the decades.

First, she understood fear like no one I’ve ever met. Every organizer knows about fear—the fear of the boss, the fear of retaliation, the fear of vulnerability. Pat understood something else, something deeper, about fear: the fear we have of our own power, particularly when we’re using it against people who have authority over us or people we respect.

Underneath every one of our fears of someone with power, Pat thought, is our fear of defeating or overcoming that power. Pat understood that because all of us grow up with fear, we learn to live with our fear. We adapt to it, our limbs and organs grow around it, we internalize it, it becomes a part of us. When it comes time to letting go of it, we can be suddenly and surprisingly reluctant to do so. We’ve gotten too attached.

Psychoanalysts and political theorists—Plato and Rousseau come to mind—know all about this kind of thing. Pat did, too. And gave me a classroom experience in overcoming it, the likes of which I never learned from anyone else.

Second, I’ve never met anyone with a stronger sense of working-class consciousness.

A lot of people, particularly in academia and journalism, have a lot of opinions and ideas about working-class people in America. And, of course, like any group of people, there’s a dizzying amount of diversity in the working class. I know it’s hard to believe this, and it’s certainly hard to say it, but Pat seemed to transcend all that. I’ve never seen anyone reach across the differences between people—people sitting right next to her at a table—by a combination of love and confrontation. From that combination, she created class consciousness.

Pat was a white, Italian, Catholic woman, a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a daughter. Above all, she was a member of the working class. She understood and felt its grievances, she hated the humiliation and indignity workers suffered, she knew how smart workers could be, she knew the difference between resentment, on the one hand, and rights and respect, on the other. She felt those things keenly, whether up close or on far. She knew how to talk about them. She knew how to fight for them.

Pat is part of a generation of workers and organizers whose knowledge you’ll never find in a book. In fact, she always used to laugh, in a fun way, at graduate students taking notes in organizing meetings. Everything important, she said, was up here, pointing to her head, and in here, pointing to her heart. You can’t write it down.

Well, Pat, here I am, writing it down.

Our Democracy versus The Democracy

I’ve noticed an interesting if subtle choice of words in Walz’s commentary. He frequently invokes the phrase “the democracy.” This is noticeable for two reasons. First, since the rise of Trump, liberals and progressives of all stripes have resorted to the phrase “our democracy.” I’ve never liked it. It’s cringey and sanctimonious. It has the air of a fetish, as if democracy were a possession, like a precious ring or family heirloom. Democracy is not a possession; it’s a prospect and a process, a condition to be fought for, perpetually. Second, during the early half of the nineteenth century, democracy was frequently called “the democracy.” As if it were a threatening animal, which it was. It was initially the term […]

Our Democracy versus The Democracy

I’ve noticed an interesting if subtle choice of words in Walz’s commentary. He frequently invokes the phrase “the democracy.”

This is noticeable for two reasons.

First, since the rise of Trump, liberals and progressives of all stripes have resorted to the phrase “our democracy.” I’ve never liked it. It’s cringey and sanctimonious. It has the air of a fetish, as if democracy were a possession, like a precious ring or family heirloom. Democracy is not a possession; it’s a prospect and a process, a condition to be fought for, perpetually.

Second, during the early half of the nineteenth century, democracy was frequently called “the democracy.” As if it were a threatening animal, which it was. It was initially the term of choice among the Federalists, who were democracy’s great critics. But then it got taken up by democracy’s advocates, with pride, much as “queer” was a century and a half later.

I have no idea if Tim Walz knows this history or not, though he was a history teacher in high school, so he might. Whether he does or doesn’t, it’s a welcome shift in the discourse. One that I hope others embrace.

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 […]

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.”