Corey Robin's Blog, page 18

On the question of impeachment and what it could mean

Over the last four years, I’ve argued that this is a potential moment of realignment, where the Reagan regime we’ve been living under could be shattered and repudiated, and replaced by a new political regime. One of the reasons I’ve pressed so hard on the Trump/Carter comparison is to point out that the Reagan regime, like the New Deal regime in the 1970s, is more vulnerable than we realize. I continue to maintain that Trump’s inability to rule—most spectacularly put on display this past week—reflects the crumbling power of that regime. That doesn’t mean the regime can’t do damage on its way out—the last sentence of The Reactionary Mind makes a point of saying “how much it [the Reagan regime] will take with it on its way out, remains to be seen”—but that regime is far weaker than at any point since its inception.

Now we come to the
question of impeachment.

The last impeachment of
Trump focused on an issue that did not go to the heart of the Reagan regime but
was much more about the perfidy of Trump himself. In this respect, it was not
unlike the impeachment of Clinton, which was also about the man (and perhaps
more loosely about the cultural changes in the country), and quite different
from the impeachment of Andrew Johnson and almost-impeachment of Richard Nixon,
which were focused on those men as symbols of a larger regime-type problem.

The possible promise of
the impeachment of Trump now (I say possible promise deliberately, so please
keep reading) is that it could, in theory, turn Trump into a much larger symbol
of something more rotten. Wednesday’s mob was attacking the legislature and the
results of a democratic election, in which the forces of a reactionary party
suffered a blow. Not a lethal blow, but a blow. The mob’s attack was a white
supremacist spasm against not a multiracial democracy but the possibility of a
multiracial democracy.

And here we come to the issue of a realignment and the real stumbling block to a realignment and an impeachment that could be about something much more. If the Democrats were a party genuinely interested in realignment, they would be doing a few things. Not only would they want to win elections, but they’d want to shatter the Republican Party. More than that, they’d want to take over the state apparatus and turn it to far different ends: to genuinely empower black people (not just in terms of symbolic representation but in terms of housing, education, jobs, and criminal justice); to genuinely empower a broader working class, which includes high percentages of African Americans and people of color; and to transform all the anti-democratic vestiges of our sclerotic, ancient constitutional order (the role of the filibuster in the Senate, the non-representation of Puerto Rico, DC, and other colonies/territories, the role of the Supreme Court, and more).

If the Democrats were to
pursue that political, social, economic, and cultural agenda, it would be
fulfilling the promise of the Nevada primaries, where we saw a genuinely
multiracial coalition striving toward a more perfect social democracy.

The impeachment and conviction of Trump by that Democratic Party could be a genuine moment of beginning. It wouldn’t shatter the Republican regime, but it would be the opening shot. It would put the GOP on notice, and it would put more hidebound forces in the Democratic Party on notice.

I have no idea whether the existing Democratic Party will in fact impeach Trump. (For the record, I think it has to; I don’t see how Wednesday’s violent storming of Congress can go unpunished, and if the impeachment should reach the Senate, the conviction has to include, as a punishment, the permanent barring of Trump from future office and, if possible, the declaration of his inability to pardon himself and his cronies. But I doubt the impeachment will get that far.)

But what I do know is that the Democratic Party as it is currently constituted is not prepared to use an impeachment to launch the kind of realignment I’m talking about. There are a lot of references today to Reconstruction, the Lost Cause, and all that, but whether or not today’s Republican Party is like the white supremacist cadre of former slaveholders and their allies, it’s very clear that today’s Democratic Party is nothing like the Republican Party that smashed the slaveocracy and then sought, through a multiracial coalition of Jacobins and proto-comrades, to reconstruct the South, to completely transform the society in which formerly enslaved and newly subjugated peoples could sit as equals in the temple of democracy.

Where does that leave us? Where we were before: in a moment of extended suspension, an interregnum between an old world and a new. I see real possibilities, in theory, for the kind of confrontation with the Reagan order, and could imagine an impeachment battle leading to the kind of confrontation within the Democratic Party that we need for a realignment. Whether it will come, I don’t know.

I don’t quite see the political forces necessary to turn these political battles of impeachment into a larger question of the social standing of citizens. But sometimes those necessary forces are summoned, to our surprise, through the very fact of struggle or limited political battle.

If it comes to impeachment, that would be my hope.

Max Weber: Worst Colleague Ever

In my New Yorker piece on Max Weber, which came out yesterday, I alluded to Weber’s many, often failed, forays into political life. Several folks on social media have expressed surprised about these expeditions. The facts of Weber’s political involvement don’t seem to fit with the aura of political detachment that surrounds his writing. Indeed, some of Weber’s writing can make him seem almost hermetically sealed off from the barest of political obligations, which is to communicate clearly.

But Weber was intensely involved in the political life of his day. In fact, I had an entire section of my piece devoted to these involvements, and was originally going to open the essay with that as a kind of set piece. For a variety of reasons, my editor and I decided to kill it.

But I thought I’d share it here.

Max Weber, a scholar of hot temper and volcanic energy, longed to be a politician of cold focus and hard reason. Between the 1890s, when he launched his academic career, and his death from pneumonia in 1920, Weber made repeated incursions into the public sphere of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany—to give advice, stand for office, form a party, negotiate a treaty, and write a constitution.

Most of these forays were failures. Officials didn’t listen; opportunities disappeared; proposals were rejected; amendments were ignored. Time and again, particularly after defeat, Weber would disavow any political ambition. But in the end, he couldn’t deny, as he confessed to a friend, that his “secret love” was for “the political.”

Why did Weber never manage the transition from pen to power? He was a riveting speaker, attracting legions of listeners from inside and outside the academy. He had good instincts and enviable judgment. His political antenna was so finely tuned, his map of the terrain so expertly drawn, he seemed to know, at every corner, which way to turn.

Despite a nervous breakdown in 1898, which drove him from the classroom for twenty years, and crippling bouts of depression that sent him to spas and sleeping pills, he rarely suffered from the thought that others might know better than he. “If one is lucky” in politics, he observed toward the end of his life, a “genius appears just once every few hundred years.” That left the door wide open for him.

Even in the delirium of his final days, Weber could be heard declaiming on behalf of the German people, jousting with their enemies in several of the many languages he knew. So appointed for politics did he seem that the philosopher Karl Jaspers, his close friend and most ardent fan, wondered whether Weber hadn’t “unconsciously” arranged his own derailment of destiny.

The truth is less exotic. Simply put, Weber was impossible to work with. His “intellectual superiority was a burden,” sighed his wife Marianne. His “ethical standards were inordinate.” Though offered as exoneration, as if Weber were too good for this world, the comment suggests how exasperating he could be. “The Germans,” Goethe said, “make everything difficult, both for themselves and for everyone else.” Weber made things very, very difficult.

Every move, every maneuver, had to be just so. After agreeing, during World War I, to speak publicly on behalf of a propaganda outfit for the war, Weber complained that he had been instructed not “to be too precise” in his formulations. “That is not my way.” What was his way? “Taking things to an extreme; I cannot do otherwise.”

For a man so clear-eyed about the larger questions of power, both its shifting balances and long-term tendencies, Weber could be myopically exacting about the minutia of a moment. “A politician must make compromises,” he announced after withdrawing from yet another party to which he had been briefly attached; “a scholar cannot justify this.” But that was just a fancy way of saying nobody did anything right—which in politics, as in families, may be the wrongest position of all.

Weber’s refusal of compromise put him into frequent, often needless, conflict with comrades and colleagues. “He bubbles over,” one scholar remarked, “but he bubbles over for too long; first he should bubble, then he should flow.” Weber never flowed. Even Marianne acknowledged that his “constant criticism of the political conduct of his own group was disquieting.”

Far from making him look principled, his intransigence made him seem unsteady, even explosive. Weber could blow up anything. Anticipating his arrival at what was slated to be a tense meeting of the faculty, a historian commented to the art historian sitting next to him, “The most excitable man in the world is about to storm in.” As it happens, Weber was the picture of calm at that meeting, delivering what the art historian would call a “Hellenic” performance.

But there’s a reason, beyond mental illness, that he was thought of as unstable and inconstant. A supernova of energy, Weber lacked the critical element that distinguishes the dilettante from the professional: staying power. Every burst of light left behind a black hole.

If you missed the New Yorker piece, you can check it out here.

Max Weber: Man of Our Time?

Max Weber died at the tail end of a pandemic, amid a growing street battle between the right and the left. What could he possibly have to say to us today?

I try to answer this, and some other questions, in my review this morning, in The New Yorker, of an excellent new translation, by Damion Searls, of Weber’s Vocation Lectures.

I have to confess, a little guiltily, that I get in a few shots against older leftists, of the ex-SDS type, who like to use (or misuse) Weber’s “ethics of responsibility” against the putative transgressions of younger leftists who are allegedly in thrall to an “ethics of conviction.” It’s one of those tropes in contemporary argument that I really don’t like.

Anyway, this piece took me a year and a half to write, and went through eleven drafts. I’ve never worked so much on a shorter piece of prose, I don’t think.

A taste:

Weber delivered the first of the two lectures, on the scholar’s work, on November 7, 1917, the day of the Bolshevik Revolution. One year later, a wave of revolution and counter-revolution swept across Germany. It didn’t break until after Weber delivered his second lecture, on the politician’s work, on January 28, 1919. Weber makes occasional, if oblique, reference to the swirl of events around him, but the dominant motif of both lectures is neither turbulence nor movement. It is stuckness. The particles of academic and political life have slowed to a halt; all that was air has become solid.

Weber’s complaints will sound familiar to contemporary readers. Budget-strapped universities pack as many students as possible into classes. Numbers are a “measure of success,” while quality, because it is “unquantifiable,” is ignored. Young scholars lead a “precarious quasi-proletarian existence,” with little prospect of a long-term career, and the rule of promotion is that “there are a lot of mediocrities in leading university positions.” Every aspiring academic must ask himself whether “he can bear to see mediocrity after mediocrity promoted ahead of him, year after year, without becoming embittered and broken inside.” The “animating principle” of the university is an “empty fiction.”

The state is equally ossified. 

…

When Weber constructed his theory, it was less a description than a prayer, a desperate bid to find friction in a world supposedly smoothed by structure. He was hardly the only social theorist to over-structure reality, to mistake the suspended animation of a moment for the immobilisme of an epoch. Tocqueville suffered from the same malady; Marcuse, Arendt, and Foucault shared some of its symptoms as well. But Weber needed the malady. The question is: Do we?

You can read the rest here.

Gonzo constitutionalism on the right, norm erosion on the left

I’m in the New York Review of Books this morning, offering my thoughts on the election as part of the magazine’s series on November 2020. I make three points:

The right used to be thought of as a “three-legged stool” made up of economic libertarians, statist Cold Warriors, and cultural traditionalists. Whether that characterization was true, it expressed an understanding of the right as a political entity capable of creating hegemony throughout society. That is no longer the case. Today, the right’s three-legged stool is an artifact, a relic, of counter-majoritarian state institutions: the Electoral College, the Senate, and the courts.However undemocratic these three institutions may be, they are are eminently constitutional. The most potent source of the right’s power is neither fascism nor authoritarianism; it is gonzo constitutionalism.Should the Democrats win the White House and the Senate come November, they will have to engage in a major project of norm erosion just to enact the most basic parts of their platform. Should they do so—eliminating the filibuster, say, for the sake of achieving voting rights for all citizens—we will see that norm erosion is not how democracies die but how they are born.

Check the rest of it out here. And if all goes well, my piece on Max Weber should be out soon.

CUNY, Corona, and Communism

The coronavirus has hit CUNY, where I teach, hard: more than 20 deaths of students, faculty, and staff, and counting. Yet the impact of the virus on CUNY has received almost no press coverage at all.

At the same time, the media continues to focus its higher education coverage, during the coronavirus, where it always has: on elite schools.

The combination of these elements—the unremarked devastation at CUNY, the outsized attention to wealthy colleges and universities—led me to write this piece for The New Yorker online:

It seems likely that no other college or university in the United States has suffered as many deaths as CUNY. Yet, aside from an op-ed by Yarbrough in the Daily News, there has been little coverage of this story. Once known proudly as “the poor man’s Harvard,” CUNY has become a cemetery of uncertain dimensions, its deaths as unremarked as the graves in a potter’s field.

The coronavirus has revealed to many the geography of class in America, showing that where we live and work shapes whether we live or die. Might it offer a similar lesson about where we learn?…

During the Depression, the New York municipal-college system opened two flagship campuses: Brooklyn College and Queens College. These schools built the middle class, took in refugees from Nazi Germany, remade higher education, and transformed American arts and letters. In 1942, Brooklyn College gave Hannah Arendt her first teaching job in the United States; an adjunct, she lectured on the Dreyfus affair, which would figure prominently in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In the decades that followed, CUNY built more campuses. Until 1976, it was free to all students; the government footed the bill.

What prompted this public investment in higher education was neither sentimentality about the poor nor a noblesse oblige of good works. It was a vision of culture and social wealth, derived from the activism of the working classes and defended by a member of Britain’s House of Lords. “Why should we not set aside,” John Maynard Keynes wondered in 1942, “fifty million pounds a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university.” Against those who disavowed such ambitions on the grounds of expense, Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” And “once done, it is there.”

Public spending, for public universities, is a bequest of permanence from one generation to the next. It is a promise to the future that it will enjoy the learning of the present and the literature of the past. It is what we need, more than ever, today. Sending students, professors, and workers back to campus, amid a pandemic, simply because colleges and universities need the cash, is a statement of bankruptcy more profound than any balance sheet could ever tally.

You can read the whole piece here.

Since it came out on Thursday, I’ve learned of three additional deaths at CUNY, all students in their last year at Lehman College: Daniel DeHoyos, Zavier Richburg, and Lenin Portillo. The Lehman College Senate has voted that they all be awarded posthumous degrees. That brings the total number of deaths at CUNY that I know of to 26.

Speaking of the activism of the working classes, I also wrote for The Nation an essay on the communist, which doubles as a review of Vivian Gornick’s classic The Romance of American Communism, which has recently been reissued, and Jodi Dean’s excellent work of political theory, Comrade.

The communist stands at the crossroads of two ideas: one ancient, one modern. The ancient idea is that human beings are political animals. Our disposition is so public, our orientation so outward, we cannot be thought of apart from the polity. Even when we try to hide our vices, as a character in Plato’s Republic notes, we still require the assistance of “secret societies and political clubs.” That’s how present we are to other people and they to us.

The modern idea—that of work—posits a different value. Here Weber may be a better guide than Marx. For the communist, work means fidelity to a task, a stick-to-itiveness that requires clarity of purpose, persistence in the face of opposition or challenge, and a refusal of all distraction. It is more than an instrumental application of bodily power upon the material world or the rational alignment of means and ends (activities so ignoble, Aristotle thought, as to nearly disqualify the laborer from politics). It is a vocation, a revelation of self.

The communist brings to the public life of the ancients the methodism of modern work. In all things be political, says the communist, and in all political things be productive. Anything less is vanity. Like the ancients, the communist looks outward, but her insistence on doing only those actions that yield results is an emanation from within. Effectiveness is a statement of her integrity. The great sin of intellectuals, Lenin observed, is that they “undertake everything under the sun without finishing anything.” That failing is symptomatic of their character—their “slovenliness” and “carelessness,” their inability to remain true to whatever cause or concern they have professed. The communist does better. She gets the job done.

You can read the rest here.

Okay, back to reading Smith and Keynes, and on Smith and Keynes, for an essay I’m working on now. (And still waiting for another essay I’ve done on Weber to come out.) And reading and preparing for my last class (on Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf) this coming week.

Hope everyone is healthy and safe.

Politics in a Time of Plague

I hope this post finds all of you healthy and safe. It’s been a terrible month, more than a month, for so many people.

The New York Review of Books asked me to write something about pandemics and politics. How, they asked me to consider, is it possible to do democracy under quarantine?

I decided to flip the question. Much of what is called democracy, after all, presumes the quarantine of vast parts of the citizenry, that they be kept isolated, politically if not physically.

So the real question, it seems to me, is how have isolated and separated men and women, often under great duress, nevertheless managed to create democracy over the ages?

That’s what I wrote about here, with a little help from Frederick Douglass, Betty Friedan, Primo Levi, and the best of the best: Frances Fox Piven. Here’s a small excerpt:

When people express concern about the consequences of pandemic politics for democracy, they are thinking of a fairly familiar, and limited, repertoire of activities—voting, primaries, conventions, marching in the streets. But the counter-tradition of inauspicious democracy teaches us that the world of established institutions and familiar tactics, even if those tactics once belonged to protest movements past, is not the only place to look for democracy. It presses us instead to look at those networks of interdependency that Piven spoke of, to see how subordinate classes might use as leverage the dependence of their superiors (and society) upon these subordinates, to bring about a greater democratization of the whole.

Isolation, it has been pointed out, is a luxury many men and women in the United States cannot now afford and will probably never enjoy. For many in the working class, and some in the professional classes, there is no withdrawal from public spaces to a place of greater safety at home. These men and women are picking lettuce, boxing groceries, delivering packages, driving buses and trains, riding buses and trains, filling prescriptions, operating registers, caring for the elderly, taking care of the sick, burying the dead. Though these disparities understandably arouse a sense of deep unease, and guilt among those who are their beneficiary, there is a dimension to this inequity that has gone overlooked. The state designates these men and women to be “essential workers,” and while that designation has earned those workers little more than a patronizing thanks for their “selflessness” from President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, and other worthies, the designation is nonetheless a recognition of their potential power right now. Power that some have begun to wield.

You can read the rest here.

A couple of months ago, I wrote another piece for the New York Review of Books website. It seems like from another world. But it was about the Iowa Caucuses and what they mean for democracy. I don’t think I ever posted about that piece here, so I am now.

I’ve got two more pieces coming out in the coming weeks/months: a long essay on American communism, which doubles as a review of Vivian Gornick’s Romance of American Communism and Jodi Dean’s Comrade; and another long essay on Max Weber. I’ll post them here when they do.

To everyone who’s reading: I hope that if you are healthy, you are healthy, and that if you’re sick, you get better.

2019 In Writing

I did a lot of writing this year. This is a brief list of some of my favorites.

My book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, came out. It got some pretty great reviews. You should buy it.

I began writing for The New Yorker Online, which has been a joy.

My first piece was on political converts, men and women who make the journey from one ideology to another, and why the move from left to right has mattered more, over the course of the last century, than the move from right to left.

My second piece was on Eric Hobsbawm, a Communist and a historian, and how his failure at the first made possible his success at the second.

My last piece was an excerpt from my book on Clarence Thomas. It was selected by The New Yorker as “one of our biggest stories of 2019.”

I wrote three other pieces for other venues.

The first was a lengthy essay in Dissent on a bunch of memoirs from the Obama administration. It was at the top of the list of the magazine’s “most read pieces” of 2019.

The second was a much shorter piece I did for Boston Review on what Hayek has to teach the left about politics, morals, and economics.

The last was a very short piece for New York Magazine on what happens when journalists get too close to academics, and vice versa. This, as it turns out, was one of the more controversial pieces I’ve written over the years. A lot of people didn’t like it; there was a lot of argument about it on social media. It also was the occasion for an interesting discussion on On the Media.

Speaking of journalism and academia, I’m working on a long piece on Max Weber, a scholar who did journalism (and tried to do politics). Stay tuned for that some time in the new year.

I’m also working on a combined review of Jodi Dean’s Comrade, which I’m loving, and Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, which I’ve long been a fan of and which is being reissued this coming year.

And once I’m done with that, I’ve got a piece to do on Adam Smith, empathy, and markets.

Oh, and Alex Gourevitch and I have written an academic article on freedom and the left. It should be out sometime in the coming year (though academic publishing schedules are wonky).

On a completely unrelated note, I taught, among other things, a new intro course in political theory this past fall. We read Plato’s Republic, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. That was it. I’ve never taught a course with so few texts, but it was a great experience. The students, almost all of them first-years, were amazing, finding connections between these three very different texts that I hadn’t seen or considered. We did a lot of very careful and close reading. I hope it was as much fun for them as it was for me.

Happy Hanukkah and Happy New Year.

P.S. You’ll notice that the blog has a slightly new look. Thanks to designer Remeike Forbes for all the work on it these past few months and over the years.

On C-SPAN tomorrow, a conversation between me and Jamelle Bouie on Clarence Thomas

If you missed my conversation with Jamelle Bouie at the New York Public Library about The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, not to worry: it will be aired tomorrow night, Saturday, October 12, at 9 pm (East Coast time) on C-SPAN.

Also, if you want to see a conversation in person, I’ll be talking with Rebecca Traister about the book at the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, on Thursday, October 24, at 7 pm. Really looking forward to that event.

Doug Henwood interviewed me about the book on his show Behind the News. We talked about how Thomas’s views echo some of the arguments set out by Max Horkheimer in his famous 1936 essay “Authority and the Family,” and why it’s the wrong question to ask for evidence of where Thomas breaks with the right.

In case you missed it, there was a fantastic review of the book by Orlando Patterson (I still can’t get over this) in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. It’s already online and should be appearing in print in the coming weeks. There was also Jennifer Szalai’s rave review in the daily New York Times.

The Harvard legal scholar Kenneth Mack had an excellent review of the book in the Washington Post.

And there will be more reviews and interviews coming up; stay tuned.

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas on sale today!

 

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas goes on sale today, with the help of a rave review in this morning’s New York Times. In the Times, Jennifer Szalai writes:

It’s a provocative thesis, but one of the marvels of Robin’s razor-sharp book is how carefully he marshals his evidence. He doesn’t have to resort to elaborate speculation or armchair psychologizing, relying instead on Thomas’s speeches, interviews and Supreme Court opinions. Just as jurists make ample use of the written record, Robin does the same.

…

The result is rigorous yet readable, frequently startling yet eminently persuasive.

…

It isn’t every day that reading about ideas can be both so gratifying and unsettling, and Robin’s incisive and superbly argued book has made me think again.

The book was excerpted two weeks ago in The New Yorker. It also has been widely reviewed—in Bookforum, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and National Review, which, despite the criticisms, called the book “thoroughly researched and engagingly written…a valuable and overdue engagement,” and elsewhere.

You can buy the book at Amazon, or if you prefer other vendors, there’s a list here.

Enjoy—and look forward to hearing your thoughts!

They Came From Everywhere

Last night, my wife Laura organized a terrific debate watch party for Bernie Sanders supporters at a local bar. About 40 to 50 people showed up.

The best part of it was that while most people were firm Bernie supporters, a fair number were not. They were Bernie-curious, but undecided. They came because of friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, and so on, who brought them there. So it felt like a base-expanding moment.

Even better, I had an interesting conversation with one woman, who is a definite Bernie supporter, and her boyfriend, who is less certain about Bernie. They’re both nurses. Her parents immigrated from China about 30 years ago. She lives in Sheepshead Bay. So she told me she identifies with Bernie at that level: Bernie and she are both children of immigrants who grew up in Brooklyn. Her boyfriend likes Bernie because he, the boyfriend, has a ton of student debt. She likes Bernie because he’s got new ideas, she said.

It all made me think of that opening line in Vivian Gornick’s Romance of American Communism: They came from everywhere.