Corey Robin's Blog, page 17

Covid Reading

I’m in the midst of recovering from covid—my family and I were hit with it two weeks ago—and doing a fair amount of reading.

Just prior to getting sick, I had completed a long piece on oligarchy and the Constitution, which is actually the fourth in a series of pieces I’ve completed over the last few months that I expect to appear in print this summer. (The other three are on Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and the idea of late capitalism.)

The combination of being sick, and finishing those pieces, left me with time and energy for little more than resting in bed and reading. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Here is what I’ve been reading or re-reading:

Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to KeynesQuinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of NeoliberalismWendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth RevolutionJanek Wasserman, The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of IdeasAngus Bergin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the DepressionWendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the WestMichel Foucault, The Birth of BiopoliticsDaniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal PoliticsMelinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social ConservatismBruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger, Hayek: A Life 1899-1950

I’m reviewing the last book, the Hayek biography, which is not out yet, and thought I’d use the occasion to catch up on some books I’d never really read (the Wasserman duo, for example, and the Burgin and Stedman Jones) and to re-read some books I have read but haven’t written about or worked through to the degree that I would like.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything on Hayek so I’m looking forward to writing about the biography, which, 100 pages in, is extremely informative and judicious though not the most arresting literary experience I’ve had. Caldwell and Klausinger admit that the biography is meant to be a kind of response to the recent neoliberalism literature, so I’m hoping to get a dialogue going between these various authors.

I’ve also been reading a fair amount of literature. I loved this new translation of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, though it’s translated here as Fathers and Children. The generational conflict and unease spoke to me a lot more than it did the first time around (or at least spoke to me from the perspective of the elders, who seemed alternatively hilarious and sad.)

I got about 2/3 the way through Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. The opening chapter blew me away: That description of mother and maid, Mrs. Flanders and Rebecca, tending to a baby in a little cottage by the sea, “conspirators plotting the eternal conspiracy of hush and clean bottles,” brought me back to those first months of being a parent (my child is now 14). But nothing in the chapters afterward (except for Woolf’s account of the Reading Room in the British Museum in chapter nine) came close to recreating that thrill of the first chapter. I’m going to try and keep reading, since I’m not so far from the end, but there are a lot of oil slicks and briar patches where I just have no idea where I am and no idea where I’m going.

I also re-read The Great Gatsby, which I haven’t read since, maybe, high school? In the very first days of being sick, when I couldn’t even read, I listened to a lot of Melvyn Bragg’s radio show on BBC 4 In Our Time. There was an episode on The Great Gatsby, which piqued my interest. So I took the novel off the shelf. I tried to like it, and take it on its own terms (and the commentators on Bragg’s show make a good case for it), but the whole thing felt as slight as I had remembered it, very American. Try as I might, I couldn’t take it seriously. Gatsby’s dream still seems as silly and small as it did to me when I was younger and more embarrassed by these vision quests than I am now. The only character who seems real, and not simply the object of social observation, is, oddly enough, Tom Buchanan. Even though he is an object of social observation, there’s an equilibrium between his inner and outer life that works, at the level of character. The rest of them don’t really hold up.

That said, I did start reading Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, which Edmund Wilson thought had the potential of being Fitzgerald’s most perfectly realized novel (he died before he could finish it). You can see why Wilson thought this. With his settlement upon the dream factory as an industry and the setting of his story, Fitzgerald achieves the social vantage that he sought in Gatsby but with the eye and ear for its inner consequence that someone like Wharton or Stendhal manages consistently to produce on the page. Very un-American.

Talking Heads

On Sunday, I was interviewed by Kai Wright on his excellent NPR show “The United States of Anxiety.” The other guest who came on after me was some musician named David Byrne.

Wright and I talked about Biden, his State of the Union Address, and why his presidency hasn’t turned out to be an FDR-style transformational presidency.

You can catch the show here.

In other news, I’ve got some pieces in the hopper. Look for some mammoth essays on Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, both of which I’ve been working on for about two years, and a shorter take on the idea of late capitalism. Will share them when they’re out.

On the anniversary of January 6 and other matters

I had two pieces and an interview come out today.

In Politico, I address the anniversary of January 6, arguing that the events of that day have misled us about the real challenges we face. A quick taste:

While scholars warn of fascism on the one side and pundits bicker over wokeness on the other, the larger and longer view reveals how blinkered both of these assessments are. The right’s road to power does not run through street violence, mass rallies, fake news or lawless coups. The left’s weakness has nothing to do with critical race theory and cancel culture. Both claims suffer from the same shortcoming: They focus on the margins rather than the matrix.

Driving the initiatives of the Republicans and the inertia of the Democrats are two forces. The first is the right’s project, decades in the making, to legally limit the scope and reach of democracy. The second is the Constitution, which makes it difficult for the national majority to act and easy for local minorities to rule. What happened on Jan. 6 is far less significant than what happened before Jan. 6 — and what has and has not happened since then.

I also spoke with Masha Gessen on Jane Coaston’s New York Times podcast The Argument. We talked about January 6, what we’ve learned since then, and the future of democracy in America. Masha is one of the most eloquent and intelligent defenders of the thesis about Trump and authoritarianism that I have been arguing against, so it was a great opportunity to engage with their claims.

Last, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked me and a bunch of other scholars what we thought was the best scholarly book of 2021. The choice was easy:

The lifeless biography is a genre with many devoted practitioners. Frances Wilson is not one of them. Dedicated to Keats’s proposition that a “life of any worth is a continual allegory,” Wilson has found, in the owner of the Titanic, moral and psychological mysteries worthy of Joseph Conrad, and, in Dorothy Wordsworth, both the albatross and mariner of Samuel T. Coleridge’s poem.

In Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Wilson turns to D.H. Lawrence and discovers an unexpected vein of autofiction, almost religious in its intensity.

I highly recommend Wilson’s book. There is no other biographer like her out there. You can read more of what I said about the book here.

Happy New Year, all.

An Assessment of the Biden Presidency

During the Trump days, I argued that the Trump presidency signified the waning power, if not end, of the Reagan regime. To that extent, Trump bore comparison to Jimmy Carter, whose presidency also signaled the end of another political order (the New Deal).

I was wrong about that, and I explained how and why in a lengthy piece in 2019.

My argument about Trump was based on two theories: one, my own, about conservatism and the right; the other, Steve Skowronek’s theory of the presidency.

In the New York Times this weekend, I take stock of the Biden presidency, asking, essentially, this: if Trump turned out not to be Carter, how does that help us understand Biden? The Skowronek theory still applies and yields some interesting insights.

As the year ends, I should note that I haven’t written as much this year as I have in the past. Family turned out to take up a lot more of my time this year than in years past. But I did manage to write a few pieces that I am proud of.

The first was my lengthy consideration of the Trump legacy, after 1/6, and what it might mean for American politics in the coming years. You’ll see it’s in keeping with much of what I say about Biden in the Times piece.

The second was an analysis of the surprising convergence between Philip Roth and Hannah Arendt.

The last was an appreciation of the work of Janet Malcolm.

I do have a number of pieces in the hopper, however, which should be coming out early next year. One is on late capitalism. Another is on Adam Smith. And a third is on John Maynard Keynes.

Be well, everyone.

Janet Malcolm on the moral evasion of psychological language

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer:

“The book’s [Harry Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity] thesis…is that there is a kind of evildoer called a psychopath, who does not seem in any way abnormal or different from other people but in fact suffers from ‘a grave psychiatric disorder,’ whose chief symptom is the very appearance of normality by which the horror of his condition is obscured. For behind ‘the mask of sanity’ there is not a real human being but a mere simulacrum of one….

“Cleckley’s ‘grave psychiatric disorder’ is, of course, the same disorder that afflicted Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and a host of other wonderful literary creations. The attempt to solve the problem of evil and perpetuate the Romantic myth of the innate goodness of man through the fanciful notion that the people who commit evil acts are lacking in the usual human equipment—are not ‘real’ human beings at all but soulless monsters—is a familiar topos of Victorian Romantic literature….To McGinniss, the concept of the psychopath did not so much offer a solution to his literary problem of making MacDonald a believable murderer as give him permission to evade the problem—just as the concept itself evades the problem it purports to solve. To say that people who do bad things don’t seem bad is to say something we already know: no one flaunts bad behavior everyone tries to hide it, every villain wears a mask of goodness. The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police offers, who daily encounter its force.”

Janet Malcolm and Joshua Cohen

Janet Malcolm has died. I, along with three other writers, wrote something about her for The New Republic.

Like Orwell, who thought Homage to Catalonia would have been a good book had he not turned it into journalism, Malcolm described her writing as a failure of art. Only writers who invent, she said, can write autobiographies. Journalists like her could not. They lacked the ability to make themselves interesting. The light of their work was powered, almost entirely, by the self-invention of their subjects.

You can read the rest of it here.

On Tuesday, at 7:30 pm (EST), I’ll be interviewing Joshua Cohen about his amazing new novel, The Netanyahus. You can sign up for the online event here. I can’t say enough good things about the novel—it’s about Jews, Israel, the Diaspora, identity politics, campus politics, declining empires, tribalism, nose jobs, and more. And Cohen is just an extraordinarily fertile mind, a genuine novelist of ideas, who’s also very funny. Should be a fun event. I hope you’ll join us. Again, sign up here.

(It just occurred to me that my previous blog post was about Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth. There’s an interesting parallel between these two sets of writers—in terms of gender, Judaism, sensibility, and more.)

Double Trouble: The Identity Politics of Philip Roth and Hannah Arendt

Philip Roth has been in the news, as has Palestine. By sheerest coincidence, a piece I’ve been mulling over for some time—on the uncanny convergence between the lives and concerns of Roth and Hannah Arendt, particularly when it came to Jewish questions such as Zionism—came out in The New York Review of Books last week. The piece starts with the Blake Bailey controversy, but goes on to explore what the surprising parallels between Roth and Arendt, who knew and respected each other, has to say about the left, Jewish identity politics, and American political culture today.

In 2014, the mystery writer Lisa Scottoline wrote an instructive essay for The New York Times about two undergraduate seminars she took with Philip Roth at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s. One of the courses was the literature of the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt was on the syllabus.

In his five-page discussion of those years at Penn, Roth biographer Blake Bailey makes no mention of this course or Arendt. Instead, he focuses on the other course, “The Literature of Desire,” and Roth’s erotic presence inside and outside the classroom. In the wake of the allegations of sexual assault and inappropriate behavior that have been made against Bailey, the omission may seem small or slight. Yet it is telling. As Judith Shulevitz argues in a searching analysis of the allegations and the biography, Bailey is as incurious about Jewishness as he is about the reality of women. When the two come together in the form of Arendt, his interest seems, well, nonexistent.

The result is a life stripped of one of its vital currents. Arendt was a real presence for Roth, and the unexpected convergence between their biographies and concerns, particularly regarding Jewish questions, is as uncanny as the doubles that populate Roth’s novels.

The difference between the two writers is obvious. She was born in Germany in 1906; he was born in Newark in 1933. She fled Hitler and never looked back; he fled his parents and kept going home. She wrote The Human Condition; he wrote Portnoy’s Complaint.

Yet, throughout the postwar Jewish ascendancy in America, as other writers and scholars eased their way into the conversation, Arendt and Roth distinguished themselves—not by stirring up the little magazines but by contending with the Jews. Summoning the anxious wrath of a still vulnerable community, Roth and Arendt occupied a singular position: defending the margin against the marginalized, refusing the political pull and moral exaction of an embattled minority. Today, at a moment of rising anti-Semitism and increasing polarization, when the tendency, even among writers and intellectuals, is to circle the wagons in defense of team and tribe, their shared archive of heresy among the heretics pays revisiting.

You can read the rest here.

What was the “Is Trump a Fascist?” Debate Really All About?

I have a new piece up at The New Yorker. I take stock of the debate over whether Trumpism is an authoritarian/fascist/tyrannical formation.

Throughout the Trump years, I consistently argued that that what I call the strongman thesis (just as a catch-all way of describing the various terms that were used for Trumpism) was not the most helpful way of thinking about what was going on with Trump or on the right. In this piece, I try to step back from that debate and examine what was really driving it.

Long story short: where liberals and leftists saw power on the right, I saw, and continue to see, paralysis. Not just on the right, in fact, but across the political spectrum.

And in an odd way, it was the centuries-long dream of democratic power that helped frame liberals’ and the left’s misunderstanding and misrecognition of our ongoing political paralysis.

As I argue in the piece’s conclusion:

This is the situation we now find ourselves in. One party, representing the popular majority, remains on the outskirts of power, thanks to the Constitution. The other party, representing the minority, cannot wield power when it has it but finds its position protected nonetheless by the very same Constitution.

We are not witnesses to Prometheus unbound. We are seeing the sufferings of Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock—immigration reform, new infrastructure, green jobs—up a hill. It’s no wonder everyone saw an authoritarian at the top of that hill. When no one can act, any performance of power, no matter how empty, can seem real.

Anyway, have a read of the piece at The New Yorker, and after you’re finished, feel free to weigh in here with your criticisms, complaints, compliments, and queries.

Keynes thought he was ugly. What does that mean for political theory?

Throughout his life, John Maynard Keynes was plagued by the conviction that he was ugly. In his diary, Keynes’s father notes that his six-year-old son “thinks no one ever was quite so ugly.” When he was 23, Keynes complained to Lytton Strachey that “I have always suffered and I suppose always will from a most unalterable obsession that I am so physically repulsive….The idea is so fixed and constant that I don’t think anything—certainly no argument—could ever shake it.”

Keynes didn’t lack for sexual partners. He kept a detailed list of his sexual experiences, and it’s long. Nor was he an unhappy person, prone to self-doubt. He was just convinced that he was ugly.

Interestingly, his lack of confidence in his physical attractiveness made no dent in his confidence more generally. In virtually every sphere of his life—academic, social, financial, political—Keynes had a sense of command.

It makes me wonder more the relationship between physical attractiveness and political authority. According to Annelien de Dijn’s new book Freedom: An Unruly History, the Greeks made a muchness out of the fact that the aristocratic ruling class was “kaloi” or beautiful and the people who were ruled were “kakoi” or ugly (kakoi also means bad). The aristocracy were the beautiful people. (There’s a connection between the fact that Socrates was low-born, the son of a mason, and constantly referred to as an appallingly ugly man.)

That idea survives today mostly in celebrity culture, less so in political culture. I mean, physical attractiveness can be a source of political charisma (see JFK or Obama; also see David Bell’s excellent book Men on Horseback), but it can also be a political liability. There’s a sense that someone who’s attractive may be a lightweight, and if the politician in question is a woman, the question of physical attractiveness gets caught up with all kinds of sexism and misogyny (see AOC).

It’s interesting to me that, outside of feminist political thought and maybe Nietzsche, modern political theory has so little to say on this question. It can’t be that that is due to any bias toward systemic or structural approaches to politics in modern thought. Aristotle, after all, was very much interested in the systems and structures of politics but was also interested in the relationship between a man’s physical bearing and his moral and political authority.

Actually, now that I think about it, the main place in modern political thought where you see issues of physical attractiveness come up is in racist thought, from the Enlightenment through fascism. These aren’t exactly structural theories in the way we ordinarily think of structural theory, but they do posit an underlying structure to physical beauty, and ascribe a political import to that structure.

Not sure what to make of it all.

The End of the Academic Washingtonian Complex?

I have some doubts about what a Biden administration will or can do, but I’d be grateful if Biden delivers on this:

He relishes freewheeling discussion, interrupting aides and chiding them for what he deems overly academic or elitist language. “Pick up your phone, call your mother, read her what you just told me,” he likes to say, according to aides. “If she understands, we can keep talking.” Aides made a point of editing out all abbreviations other than U.N. and NATO.

Politicians have their own jargon, but one of the irritating features of the Obama administration (Professor in Chief?) was the proliferation of academic tropes in everyday political conversation, among leaders, their staffers, organizers, and journalists.

Go to the Twitter profile of some mid-level official from the Obama administration or of a staffer with a Democratic-related nonprofit, and you’ll see in their bio some cloying reference to “Obama alum” or “MMFA alum.” It’s as if, rather than wielding the power of the American state or serving as its propagandist, they spent a year on a college campus, shooting the shit and playing beer bong pong.

That’s why the most common cultural reference among the Obamanauts, after The West Wing, is Harry Potter (set in a school that looks like a college) or St. Elmo’s Fire, where several of the characters are caught up in the college to Capitol pipeline that is life in DC.

If Biden can discourage that self-styled culture of DC, that’d be something.