Corey Robin's Blog, page 19

When Politics Becomes Professional: From the Obamanauts to the New Deal

The historian Josh Freeman has an excellent review of Michael Walzer’s Political Action, which came out in 1971 but has been reissued by NYRB Books. Freeman compares Walzer’s short pamphlet to the Manual of Practical Political Action, another how-to political guide, prepared in 1946 by the labor movement’s National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC), one of the first modern PACs. Both texts were written at moments of political deceleration, when the velocities of change were about to alter dramatically or already had.

But here’s what Josh says about that earlier moment that’s relevant for today:

For NCPAC…organizing requires strategies that are not inherently progressive. Somewhat apologetically, the Manual suggests borrowing techniques from commercial advertising, presenting detailed guidance, much of it derived from standard business practices, about newspaper advertising, radio spots, and direct mail. The Popular Front from which it had emerged well understood the mechanics of persuasion, with one foot in working-class movements and another in the creative professions, from theater to cinema to advertising and the graphic arts. The idea of organizing as a politically neutral enterprise requiring specialized knowledge has had a long afterlife. Perhaps its most influential reincarnation was through Saul Alinsky and his many followers. Glimpses of it can be seen in Barack Obama’s account of his community organizing days in Dreams from My Father.

But, of course, technique goes only so far. For all its meticulous cataloging of knowledge needed for effective organizing, from billboard advertising rates in thirty different cities to how to use skits to enliven meetings (include ones written by Arthur Miller about inflation and civil rights), NCPAC got creamed in the 1946 congressional elections. The Republicans, campaigning against the New Deal, organized labor, prices increases, and the ineptitude of the Truman administration, won control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1930. Among other things, the Democratic defeat opened the door to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, the beginning of a rollback of labor power that has continued ever since.

How quickly and easily a Popular Front-inspired left-wing cultural politics got turned into, and ultimately reduced to, a Madison Avenue-style campaign of political advertising!

Radical organizers always know that the work they’re doing is not simply political; it’s also ideological and ultimately cultural. They really are transforming people in fundamental ways. (This fall, I’m teaching Plato’s Republic for the first time in many years, and it’s hard to think of a more concrete instance of the kind of soulcraft that Plato describes there than the labor movement in its heyday.) In the case of the left wing of the New Deal, that cultural politics had an additional side to it: left-wing cultural producers in Hollywood, on the radio and TV, and on Madison Avenue (of which there were more than a few) saw themselves engaged in a task of radical transformation, changing souls through the popular arts.

(For a wonderful look back on this moment from a different vantage, read this interview Josh Cohen just did with the economist Samuel Bowles, whose father, Chester Bowles, was in the Roosevelt Administration. After the war, Bowles wrote an economic pamphlet that sought to popularize and explain Keynesianism to a mass audience. Bowles, too, had his origins in Madison Avenue, and he sought to use all the skills of persuasion he learned there on behalf of a consumer’s republic.)

But like all politics, cultural politics has its ebbs and flows. The entire left got creamed in and after 1946—not just the Democrats in Congress but also the hundreds of thousands of strikers who launched one of the most massive strike waves in American history that year, only to see their efforts ultimately met by Taft-Hartley and the general repression of the McCarthy era. But in the case of cultural politics, we see demolition and winnowing, an efflorescence turned inward, the sprawling movements that connected labor to Hollywood to Madison Avenue reduced to professionalized advertising.

I’ve just finished a lengthy piece on the memoirs of the Obama administration, and one of the most striking elements of those reminiscences is how fluidly and fluently the Obamanauts channel the activist traditions of the 1960s into the professional (neo)liberal politics of the Democratic Party since the 1980s. That translation had already begun in the 1970s, with the election of black mayors and other black officials. Back then, however, there was more awareness that the electoral turn was a diminution (perhaps necessary but nonetheless a diminution) of the mass movement in the streets. As one representative publication of black activists put it: “The marching has stopped.” Professional politics was what replaced it. By the time of Obama’s election, that awareness of diminution had been completely lost. His election was viewed as simply another step forward.

If you read the Obamanauts too quickly, theirs can seem to be a story exclusively about race and the civil rights movement and politics since the 1960s: how the motifs of the black freedom struggle are translated into the election of the first black president. But read against the arc of the New Deal, the Obama neoliberal story comes to seem part of something larger and longer. The labor movement, the Popular Front, the left—they all had a similar moment of professionalization.

To be clear: all movements need leaders, elected officials, bureaucrats, and, yes, professionals. While bureaucracies and leadership get a lot of shit from the left for shutting down radicalism, there’s a strong argument to be made (and that I largely agree with) that bureaucracies and leadership help sustain radical activism at its most powerful moments and that they help preserve the fruits of that activism long after it has died down.

The tragedy of the stories Freeman tells and I’ve read in the Obamanaut memoirs is how easy it is to forget the radical origins and roots of those bureaucracies and leaderships, how once the work of repression (and other political factors) is done (often with the help of those leaders and bureaucracies, as we saw during the McCarthy era), all we’re left with is a professionalized political class, who can’t even mix memory and desire, who have not even the wish, much less capacity, to stir dull roots with spring rain.

Book Launch with Jamelle Bouie at the New York Public Library

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of my book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, at the New York Public Library. I’ll be in conversation with New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. The launch will be on Monday, September 23, at 7 pm. It’ll be in the Berger Forum, on the second floor of the main branch of the library, at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. Tickets are free, but they’re on a first come, first serve basis, so reserve them now. You can do so here. Hope to see all of you who can make it!

When you hear a familiar voice at the other end of the line…

About six weeks ago I got a call from a number in DC I didn’t recognize. I answered the phone warily, saying hello more as a question than a greeting. At the other end, I heard, “Professor Robin?” “Who’s this?” I asked. “It’s Nina Totenberg from NPR.” I started cracking up, almost uncontrollably, and finally said, hi, hi, of course, Nina Totenberg. She noted that I sounded “furtive.” I noted that I didn’t recognize the number.

Anyway, we wound up having a lovely chat about Clarence Thomas. Totenberg is as warm and friendly and personable on the phone as she is on air.

On Friday, a small bit of our conversation made it into the segment she did on Thomas in Morning Edition.

Here’s some other book-related news.

The first advance review of the Thomas book is in. It’s at Kirkus. They call it “a penetrating profile of the Supreme Court’s longest-serving justice.”

Here’s the full review:

Analyzing speeches, court opinions, and Thomas’ writings, Robin (Political Science/Brooklyn Coll. and CUNY Graduate Center; The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, 2017, etc.) argues persuasively that Thomas’ right-wing conservatism and black nationalism make him “the most extreme justice on the Supreme Court.” Thomas, writes the author, believes “that racism is permanent, the state is ineffective, and politics is feeble.” Noting that he rejects “virtually all of Thomas’s views,” Robin warns against dismissing them, and he presents them in detail along with critiques from other justices and analysts. Central to Thomas’ beliefs is the valorization of the black male provider and protector, “a figure of authority whose word is law for the women and children under his care.” Black men, “stolid, moral, responsible, authoritative, upstanding,” are essential to the black community. For Thomas, white racism and liberal politics combine to undermine black interests. Blacks, therefore, “should cease to look to electoral politics as a means of bettering their situation; any involvement in electoral politics will only confirm white power and reinforce black powerlessness.” Efforts such as affirmative action, for example, reinforce black powerlessness by failing to treat blacks and whites as equals, defining blacks as “inferior and deficient.” When Thomas considers the incarceration rate for blacks and liberals’ cry for judicial and prison reform, he counters that “the racist dimensions of the carceral state” actually benefit African Americans: Harsh policing protects black neighborhoods from crime, and stringent punishment fosters law-abiding behavior. Adversity—even slavery and society under Jim Crow—“helps the black community develop its inner virtue and resolve.” Acknowledging that we are all trapped “in the same historical moment” as Thomas, Robin asks readers to examine the premises underlying their own social and political views. Thomas’ “beliefs are disturbing, even ugly,” Robin acknowledges; “his style is brutal. I want to make us sit with that discomfort rather than swat it away.”

A penetrating profile of the Supreme Court’s longest-serving justice.

We’re lining up events in New York, DC, and elsewhere; I’m going to be in conversation with Jamelle Bouie, Rebecca Traister, and others.

For the political scientists among you, there’s going to be an author meets critics panel at APSA, with a great lineup of commentators that includes Dahlia Lithwick, Lawrie Balfour, Brandon Terry, Mark Tushnet, and Adrienne Davis, and is chaired by Jodi Dean.

I’ll have a fuller schedule of events, with dates and times and places, as the summer unfolds.

But for now, you can, um, pre-order the book!

For academics in search of a public audience

I often get requests for advice from academics who are writing a book for a university press but who want the book to reach a broader non-academic audience. Despite getting useful scholarly critiques from anonymous reader reports, these academics want someone to help them with the style and structure of the book. They want to write a book that will crossover, that will speak not only to their peers in the field but also to readers outside their field, ideally outside the academy. They just don’t know how to do it; they need help figuring out how.

While most academic presses don’t have such editors, there is something called a development editor who can do exactly that kind of work for you. The legal scholar Sam Erman recently wrote about working with a development editor on his latest book, and it sounds as if the process was extremely productive, utterly transforming the book.

I know such an editor who I highly recommend to all of you. His name is John Pallattella. John was for many years the literary editor of The Nation, where I worked with him on multiple essays—on everything from Hannah Arendt to conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s to the politics of freedom in the United States (some of these essays eventually became chapters in The Reactionary Mind; John also worked closely with me on revising that book for its second edition). I wrote about the experience of working with John as an editor here.

John is now working as a development editor, and whether your concerns are how to translate the abstruse findings of your discipline to the common reader or how to craft a strong opening chapter that will grab the reader’s attention or structuring the book into different chapters and pieces, John has the kind of eye—and equally important, ear (John is also a poet who who’s attuned to the music of a sentence)—you’re looking for.

If you’re interested in talking to John about this kind of work, he can be reached at jpala14@gmail.com.

How on God’s green earth did Clarence Thomas just write an opinion on race and jury trials that was well to the right (or was it?) of Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and even Neil Gorsuch?

In a 7-2 vote, the Supreme Court today overturned the conviction of Curtis Flowers for murder; he had been on death row in Mississippi for 22 years. The Court held, in Flowers v. Mississippi, that the trial court had wrongly concluded that the prosecution’s decision to strike a potential juror, who is black, was not motivated by racial discrimination. Flowers, who is also black, has been tried six times for the same murder by the same prosecutor. There is a long record of the prosecutor striking potential jurors who are black.

What’s interesting about the Court’s opinion is the line-up. Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority decision; he was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both conservatives, as well as the Court’s four liberal justices. The only two dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

A lot of the social media commentary I’ve seen has focused on Thomas’s dissent. How is it possible for Thomas to deny a claim of racial discrimination so overt and patent and persistent that even Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Alito were forced to acknowledge it? “The numbers speak loudly,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Over the course of the first four trials, there were 36 black prospective jurors against whom the State could have exercised a peremptory strike. The State tried to strike all 36.” That stark background reality clearly influenced the majority opinion, as Alito took pains to emphasize in his concurrence. How could Thomas pretend otherwise?

As always, it pays to read the whole of Thomas’s opinion. As is often true of a Thomas opinion, this one is long. Forty-two pages long—far longer than Kavanaugh’s majority opinion. The first 32 pages of Thomas’s opinion focus on the facts of the case and the various rules for determining whether discrimination is present, whether peremptory strikes are invalid, and so on. There Thomas gives the specific reasons why he thinks the majority is wrong in its conclusions about this particular case.

But, honestly, that’s not where the real action of Thomas’s opinion lies. It’s in the last 10 pages—the part where Gorsuch is so freaked out by Thomas’s reasoning that even he takes flight from the opinion (this often happens in a Thomas opinion; the Court’s conservatives join him in a few parts but get the hell out of there when he starts showing his hand)—that Thomas unveils his real argument, what the whole case is really about for him. As is often true of Thomas revelations, it’s of a secret that’s been hiding in plain sight for decades.

Simply put, Thomas does not believe that the Constitution should prohibit the state or the defense from striking down potential jurors on the basis of race. What’s even wilder is his reasoning for that claim. Thomas believes that the role of racism in jury trials (as well as society as a whole) is so intense—”racial prejudice exists,” Thomas writes in his dissent, “and can affect the fairness of trials”—that the only protection, or at least the main protection, a black person will have against that racism is his or her ability to strike down potential jurors who are white. Because “race matters in the courtroom,” he concludes, Thomas would “return to litigants one of the most important tools to combat prejudice in their cases.”

That “return to litigants one of the most important tools” is a reference to racially based peremptory strikes, which were declared unconstitutional by the Court in the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky. Peremptory strikes are decisions by the defense or the prosecution to strike a potential juror without having to give a reason. In Batson, the Court held that the prosecution could not use such strikes to strike jurors on the basis of race. Later, it extended that rule to the defense. Neither side can strike potential jurors on the basis of race.

From the moment he joined the Court, Thomas has taken issue with Batson. In one of his very first cases, Georgia v. McCollum (1992), Thomas challenged the Court’s ruling that a white defendant should not be allowed to strike down potential jurors who were black. While the Court’s other conservatives focused their ire on the Court’s ruling that a defendant was a state actor and thus constrained by the Batson rule—Scalia called that claim “sheer inanity”—Thomas took the utterly novel approach of swapping out the actual white defendant in the case for a hypothetical black defendant. Suppose, he said, a black defendant was facing the prospect of a majority-white or all-white jury. Would we not want that defendant to have the power to strike down potential jurors who were white?

Even more explosively, Thomas reached back to a post-Reconstruction-era case, Strauder v. West Virginia, which struck down the state’s blanket prohibition on blacks serving on juries, to argue that the Court had once claimed, and “reasonably” so, that “all white juries might judge black defendants unfairly.” Thomas made the added critical point that such claims about all-white juries being prone to racism can be sustained, under Strauder‘s reasoning, even “without direct evidence in any particular case.” In other words, even when there is no evidence of racial bias, a court can assume that jurors or juries will be biased for reasons of race. In 1992, Thomas insisted, as did the Court in 1880, that “the racial composition of a jury may affect the outcome of a criminal case”—whether or not there was any evidence of that racial composition affecting the outcome in the particular case. “I do not think that the premise of Strauder has become obsolete,” he concluded. So patent and persistent was the significance of race.

Fast forward to 2019. In Flowers, Thomas again invokes Strauder, claiming again (he almost uses the same phrasing from Georgia v. McCollum) that “the racial composition of a jury could affect the outcome of a criminal case.” He adds: “The racial composition of a jury matters because racial biases, sympathies, and prejudices still exist. This is not a matter of ‘assumptions,’ as Batson said. It is a matter of reality.” He even cites several academic studies, in journals like Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and the Journal of Ethnicity and Criminal Justice, that he claims confirm the role of racial bias in jury trials. “Academic studies appear to support this commonsense proposition.”

What’s more, he says, the Court knows that “race…matters.” Yet it “continues to apply a line of cases that prevents, among other things, black defendants from striking potentially hostile white jurors.” Citing his own earlier opinion, he concludes, “I remain ‘certain that black criminal defendants will rue the day that this Court ventured down this road that inexorably will lead to the elimination of peremptory strikes.'”

His big take-home point?

The more fundamental problem is Batson itself….I would return to our pre-Batson understanding—that race matters in the courtroom—and thereby return to litigants one of the most important tools to combat prejudice in their cases.

This is the heart of the opinion, as I say. And again, it’s telling that this is exactly the part of the opinion that Gorsuch refuses to join. Precisely because it’s where Thomas most distinguishes himself from other conservatives on the Court: by insisting that racism is such a pernicious and pervasive force in the courtroom that the best weapon against it is to empower black defendants to use their peremptory strikes in order to create juries that look more like them.

How this conclusion can be squared with the first 33 pages of the opinion—where Thomas repeatedly denies that racism played a role in the prosecutor’s decision to strike various jurors—or in his many other opinions where he seems not to be particularly bothered by the role of race in policing and prisons, is a complicated issue. But luckily, I’ve got a book coming out in September, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, that seeks to make sense of these and similar puzzles. You can buy it here.

The book has gotten some great blurbs.

“Only a political diagnostician as keenly incisive as Corey Robin could render such a complex and fascinating portrait of Clarence Thomas. This meticulous analysis of the touchstones and turning points in Thomas’s life finds ideological consistency in the seemingly quirky patchwork of his thought: an odd amalgam of ultra-libertarian revanchism, patriarchal fundamentalism, black nationalism, and state-backed authoritarianism. Robin delivers a riveting guide to the multiple paradoxes that underlie Thomas’s unusually self-protective persona, and masterfully shows their resonance in the juridical rulings that govern us all.”

—Patricia Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights

“It requires the ferocious curiosity and intellectual courage of a Corey Robin to rush into the heart of one of the most vexing mysteries faced by modern Supreme Court watchers: How to reconcile Justice Clarence Thomas’ radical conservatism with his unforgiving use of race as jurisprudential lodestar? For political conservatives who have been blinkered to Thomas’ essentialism on race, and liberals who have refused to reckon with his lived experience with black marginalization and stigma, this book will be equally discomfiting. Robin steps into the grey space we have all largely ignored in assessing Justice Thomas, in order to marry the constitution of a black nationalist to the capitalism, sexism, and integration-skepticism of an ascendant movement conservative. Robin’s Clarence Thomas is less an enigma than an Invisible Man; a living jurisprudential testament to the doctrine and dogma of a jurist who utterly rejects liberal claims to a monopoly on legal racial equality, even while insisting that Trump-era political conservatism is the best engine for promoting the same. Robin’s Clarence Thomas is neither silent nor marginal. Our failure to understand why that is, how it occurred, and what it implies, comes at the peril of both conservatives and liberals alike.”

—Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Editor, Slate

“Clarence Thomas is by far the Supreme Court’s most interesting and perplexing Justice, criticized by many and understood by few. Patiently working through all of Thomas’ writings, Corey Robin tells a remarkable story about a remarkable figure—a man of complex views whose austere philosophy has been hiding in plain sight. Robin shows us Thomas’s black nationalism, his deep pessimism about race relations, his fervent embrace of capitalism, and his stern demand for a severe and uncompromising system of criminal justice. What emerges is a portrait that is as fascinating as it is disturbing. You may think you know who Clarence Thomas is. But you don’t know the half. This book is a revelation.

—Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School

“When Clarence Thomas took his seat on the Supreme Court, no one could have predicted that he would have become the silent justice and the most influential justice. Corey Robin’s elegant and insightful analysis shows how Thomas’s blend of black nationalism and conservatism helped him fashion a jurisprudence that will shape American life for years to come. This is the book Court watchers—which we all should be—have waited for.”

—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello

 

What Thomas’s opinion about abortion today tells us about his jurisprudence as a whole

I’ve been getting a lot of queries about Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky. Briefly, Thomas spends all but a few paragraphs of his twenty-page opinion outlining what he sees as the eugenicist dimensions of abortion and birth control. This, as many have noted, is a new turn in Thomas’s abortion jurisprudence. Thomas essentially argues here that abortion is the way that women select and de-select the kinds of children they’re going to have.

What’s more, while much of the discussion on the right in this regard focuses on how considerations of the sex of the fetus or the presence of Down syndrome may influence the decision to have an abortion, Thomas focuses overwhelmingly on questions of race. Indeed, he spends an inordinate amount of time in his opinion rehearsing the role of racism in Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement. He discusses her work in Harlem and among African Americans in the South, as well as the connections between Nazism and eugenics. From there he goes to abortion. Reading Thomas, one comes away with the sense that abortion has nothing to do with the autonomy or equality of women but is instead a racist practice to control the size of the black population. The same goes for birth control.

At one point in the opinion, Thomas makes a point of noting the NAACP’s concerns during the 1960s about the racist dimensions of the birth control movement:

Some black groups saw “‘family planning’ as a euphemism for race genocide” and believed that “black people [were] taking the brunt of the ‘planning’” under Planned Parenthood’s “ghetto approach” to distributing its services. Dempsey, Dr. Guttmacher Is the Evangelist of Birth Control, N. Y. Times Magazine, Feb. 9, 1969, p. 82. “The Pittsburgh branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” for example, “criticized family planners as bent on trying to keep the Negro birth rate as low as possible.” Kaplan, Abortion and Sterilization Win Support of Planned Parenthood, N. Y. Times, Nov. 14, 1968, p. L50, col. 1.

At another point in his opinion, Thomas slyly mentions that the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade cites the work of an extraordinarily influential and renowned British legal scholar who, according to Thomas, flirted with eugenics:

Similarly, legal scholar Glanville Williams wrote that he was open to the possibility of eugenic infanticide, at least in some situations, explaining that “an eugenic killing by a mother, exactly paralleled by the bitch that kills her misshapen puppies, cannot confidently be pronounced immoral.” G. Williams, Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law 20 (1957). The Court cited Williams’ book for a different proposition in Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113, 130, n. 9 (1973).

By the time the opinion is over, it seems like abortion and birth control are simply a Nazi-style mode of racial management of the demographics of a population.

However extreme this opinion may be, it is very much in keeping with Thomas’s overall approach to constitutional questions. I have a book about Clarence Thomas, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, coming out on September 24, and I don’t want to give too much of it away, so let me just say this: One of Thomas’s most consistent moves in his jurisprudence is to take constitutional matters that left and right disagree about but nevertheless argue about on similar terms—Thomas consistently takes these matters and transforms them into questions of race. He does this with the Establishment Clause: where both sides are debating questions of religion, he makes it all about race. He does the same with the Takings Clause: where both sides are debating questions of eminent domain, he makes it about race. He does this with campaign finance: where both sides are debating speech and the First Amendment, he makes it about race. In each instance, he takes the topic at hand and says, nope, this is really about race. And goes from there.

What’s more, as I show in the book, this isn’t just a ruse or a way of trolling the left. It’s not just a simple playing of the race card. It’s, well, you’ll have to read the book. Which, as I said, is out on September 24 and which you can pre-order now.

There’s also a lengthy footnote in Thomas’s opinion in Box, where he compares the thinking underlying eugenics to that which underlies disparate impact, a doctrine that falls under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He cites the work of the conservative black economist Thomas Sowell. I think Thomas’s jurisprudence on disparate impact, as well as the impact and influence of Sowell upon Thomas, has been radically misunderstood. But again, I don’t want to give away too much of the book here. So…

Update (2 pm)

My wife Laura, who works in the reproductive rights movement, just made an excellent point about the parallel between Thomas’s opinion and the Anita Hill controversy. During the Senate confirmation hearings, when Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment, there was a struggle in the commentary that boiled down to this question: Who gets to be black? Thomas and his supporters presented him as the embattled voice of the black community; Hill was depicted as a treacherous woman in alliance with liberal groups, trying to bring the black man—and with him, the black community—down. Thomas was black; Hill was a woman: that was the way the controversy played out, at least on one side. This was one of the many explosive insights at the heart of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s pioneering article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.”

Fast-forward to Thomas’s opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood. Studies show that black women are far more likely to get an abortion than other women. Support for abortion among black women is among the highest of any demographic group. And as Jamila Taylor argued, because black women are more likely to live in states with restrictive abortion laws, they have a lot more to lose from Thomas-inspired or Thomas-inflected opinions. So who gets to be black here? Once again, in Thomas’s world, it’s not black women; this time, it’s the fetus.

 

On Eric Hobsbawm and other matters

I’m in The New Yorker this morning, writing about Richard Evans’s new biography of the historian Eric Hobsbawm, explaining how the failures of Evans the biographer reveal the greatness of Hobsbawm the historian:

Hobsbawm’s biographer, Richard Evans, is one of Britain’s foremost historians and the author of a commanding trilogy on Nazi Germany. He knew Hobsbawm for many years, though “not intimately,” and was given unparalleled access to his public and private papers. It has not served either man well. More data dump than biography, “Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History” is overwhelmed by trivia, such as the itineraries of Hobsbawm’s travels, extending back to his teen-age years, narrated to every last detail. The book is also undermined by errors: Barbara Ehrenreich is not a biographer of Rosa Luxemburg; Salvador Allende was not a Communist; one does not drive “up” from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles.* The biography is eight hundred pages because Hobsbawm “lived for a very long time,” Evans tells us, and he wanted “to let Eric tell his story as far as possible in his own words.” But, as we near the two hundredth page and Hobsbawm is barely out of university, it becomes clear that the problem is not Hobsbawm’s longevity or loquacity but the absence of discrimination on the part of his biographer.

Instead of incisive analyses of Hobsbawm’s books, read against the transformations of postwar politics and culture, Evans devotes pages to the haggling over contracts, royalties, translations, and sales. These choices are justified, in one instance, by a relevant nugget—after the Cold War, anti-Communist winds blowing out of Paris prevented Hobsbawm’s best-selling “The Age of Extremes” from entering the French market in translation—and rewarded, in another, by a gem: Hobsbawm wondering to his agent whether it’s “possible to publicize” “Age of Extremes,” which came out in 1994, “& publish extracts on INTERNET (international computer network).” Apart from these, Evans’s attentions to the publishing industry work mostly as homage to the Trollope adage “Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon also take away from England her authors.”

…

Hobsbawm was obsessed with boredom; his experience of it appears at least twenty-seven times in Evans’s biography. Were it not for Marx, Hobsbawm tells us, in a book of essays, he never would “have developed any special interest in history.” The subject was too dull. The British writer Adam Phillips describes boredom as “that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins.” More than a wish for excitement, boredom contains a longing for narrative, for engagement that warrants attention to the world.

A different biographer might have found in Hobsbawm’s boredom an opening onto an entire plane of the Communist experience. Marxism sought to render political desire as objective form, to make human intention a causal force in the world. Not since Machiavelli had political people thought so hard about the alignment of action and opportunity, about the disjuncture between public performance and private wish. Hobsbawm’s life and work are a case study in such questions. What we get from Evans, however, is boredom itself: a shapeless résumé of things starting and nothing beginning, the opposite of the storied life—in which “public events are part of the texture of our lives,” as Hobsbawm wrote, and “not merely markers”—that Hobsbawm sought to tell and wished to lead.

***

Down the corridor of every Marxist imagination lies a fear: that capitalism has conjured forces of such seeming sufficiency as to eclipse the need for capitalists to superintend it and the ability of revolutionaries to supersede it. “In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality,” “The Communist Manifesto” claims, “while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.” Throughout his life, Marx struggled mightily to ward off that vision. Hobsbawm did, too.

…

But what the Communist could not do in life the historian can do on the page. Across two centuries of the modern world, Hobsbawm projected a dramatic span that no historian has since managed to achieve. “We do need history,” Nietzsche wrote, “but quite differently from the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge.” Hobsbawm gave us that history. Nietzsche hoped it might serve the cause of “life and action,” but for Hobsbawm it was the opposite: a sublimation of the political impulses that had been thwarted in life and remained unfulfilled by action. His defeats allowed him to see how men and women had struggled to make a purposive life in—and from—history.

The triumph was not Hobsbawm’s alone. Moving from politics to paper, he was aided by the medium of Marxism itself, to whose foundational texts we owe some of the most extraordinary characters of modern literature, from the “specter haunting Europe” to the resurrected Romans of the “Eighteenth Brumaire” and “our friend, Moneybags” of “Capital.” That Marx could find human drama in the impersonal—that “the concept of capital,” as he wrote in the “Grundrisse,” always “contains the capitalist”—reminds us what Hobsbawm, in his despair, forgot. Even when structures seem to have eclipsed all, silhouettes of human shape can be seen, working their way across the stage, making and unmaking their fate.

You can read it all here.

Also, as many of you know, for the last two years, I’ve been making the case that Donald Trump’s presidency is what the political scientist Steve Skowronek calls a “disjunctive” presidency. Over at Balkinization, I use the opportunity of my deep, deep agreement with the great Jack Balkin—whose views on so many things I share, and who also has argued for Trump as a disjunctive presidency—to raise some questions about our shared position, and where our analysis may go awry. You can read that here.

 

* Several astute readers pointed out to me that this locution of traveling “up” somewhere is often used in Britain to signify going from a smaller to a larger place rather than traveling from south to north. I passed the information on to my editor at The New Yorker, and they’ve now cut the phrase from the text. I’m leaving it here because, well, the error was mine, and in a passage where I’m pointing out Evans’s errors, I should acknowledge my own.

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is coming to a theater near you!

I’ve finished my book on Clarence Thomas. The galleys are here; I love love love the cover! The pub date is September 24. You can pre-order now!

 

David Brion Davis, 1927-2019: Countersubversive at Yale

David Brion Davis, the pathbreaking Yale historian of slavery and emancipation, whose books revolutionized how we approach the American experience, has died. The obituaries have rightly discussed his many and manifold contributions, a legacy we will be parsing in the days and months ahead. Yet for those of us who were graduate students at Yale during the 1990s and who participated in the union drive there, the story of David Brion Davis is more complicated. Davis helped break the grade strike of 1995, in a manner so personal and peculiar, yet simultaneously emblematic, as not to be forgotten. Not long after the strike, I wrote at length about Davis’s actions in an essay called “Blacklisted and Blue: On Theory and Practice at Yale,” which later appeared in an anthology that was published in 2003. I’m excerpting the relevant part the essay below, but you can read it all of it here [pdf].

* * *

As soon as the graduate students voted to strike, the administration leaped to action, threatening students with blacklisting, loss of employment, and worse. Almost as quickly, the national academic community rallied to the union’s cause. A group of influential law professors at Harvard and elsewhere issued a statement condemning the “Administration’s invitation to individual professors to terrorize their advisees.” They warned the faculty that their actions would “teach a lesson of subservience to illegitimate authority that is the antithesis of what institutions like Yale purport to stand for.”

Eric Foner, a leading American historian at Columbia, spoke out against the administration’s measures in a personal letter to President Levin. “As a longtime friend of Yale,” Foner began, “I am extremely distressed by the impasse that seems to have developed between the administration and the graduate teaching assistants.” Of particular concern, he noted, was the “developing atmosphere of anger and fear” at Yale, “sparked by threats of reprisal directed against teaching assistants.” He then concluded:

I wonder if you are fully aware of the damage this dispute is doing to Yale’s reputation as a citadel of academic freedom and educational leadership. Surely, a university is more than a business corporation and ought to adopt a more enlightened approach to dealing with its employees than is currently the norm in the business world. And in an era when Israelis and Palestinians, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs, the British government and the IRA, have found it possible to engage in fruitful discussions after years of intransigent refusal to negotiate, it is difficult to understand why Yale’s administration cannot meet with representatives of the teaching assistants.

Foner’s letter played a critical role during the grad strike. The faculty took him seriously; his books on the Civil War and Reconstruction are required reading at Yale. But more important, Foner is a historian, and at the time, a particularly tense confrontation in the Yale history department was spinning out of control.

The incident involved teaching assistant Diana Paton, a British graduate student who was poised to write a dissertation on the transition in Jamaica from slavery to free labor, and historian David Brion Davis. A renowned scholar of slavery, Davis has written pathbreaking studies, earning him the Pulitzer Prize and a much-coveted slot as a frequent writer at the New York Review of Books. He represents the best traditions of humanistic learning, bringing to his work a moral sensitivity that few academics possess. Paton was his student and, that fall, his TA.

When Paton informed Davis that she intended to strike, he accused her of betraying him. Convinced that Davis would not support her academic career in the future—he had told her in an unrelated discussion a few weeks prior that he would never give his professional backing to any student who he believed had betrayed him—Paton nevertheless stood her ground. Davis reported her to the graduate school dean for disciplinary action and had his secretary instruct Paton not to appear at the final exam. In his letter to the dean, Davis wrote that Paton’s actions were “outrageous, irresponsible to the students…and totally disloyal.”

The day of the final, Paton showed up at the exam room. As she explains it, she wanted to demonstrate to Davis that she would not be intimidated by him, that she would not obey his orders. Davis, meanwhile, had learned of Paton’s plan to attend the exam and somehow concluded that she intended to steal the exams. So he had the door locked and two security guards stand beside it.

Though assertive, Paton is soft-spoken and reserved. She is also small. The thought of her rushing into the exam room, scooping up her students’ papers, engaging perhaps in a physical tussle with the delicate Davis, and then racing out the door—the whole idea is absurd. Yet Davis clearly believed it wasn’t absurd. What’s more, he convinced the administration that it wasn’t absurd, for it was the administration that had dispatched the security detail.

How this scenario could have been dreamed up by a historian with the nation’s most prestigious literary prizes under his belt—and with the full backing of one of the most renowned universities in the world—requires some explanation. Oddly enough, it is Davis himself who provides it.

Like something out of Hansel and Gretel, Davis left a set of clues, going back some forty years, to his paranoid behavior during the grade strike. In a pioneering 1960 article in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Davis set out to understand how dominant groups in nineteenth-century America were gripped by fears of disloyalty, treachery, subversion, and betrayal. Many Americans feared Catholics, Freemasons, and Mormons because, it was believed, they belonged to “a machine-like organization” that sought “to abolish free society” and “to overthrow divine principles of law and justice.” Members of these groups were dangerous because they professed an “unconditional loyalty to an autonomous body” like the pope. They took their marching orders from afar, and so were untrustworthy, duplicitous, and dangerous.

Davis was clearly disturbed by the authoritarian logic of the countersubversive, but that was in 1960 and he was writing about the nineteenth century. In 1995, confronting the rebellion of his own student, the logic made all the sense in the world. It didn’t matter that Paton was a longtime student of his, that she had many discussions with Davis about her academic work, and that he knew her well. As soon as she announced her commitment to the union’s course of action, she became a stranger, an alien marching on behalf of a foreign power.

Davis was hardly alone in voicing these concerns. Other respected members of the Yale faculty dipped into the same well of historical imagery. In January 1996, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, several historians presented a motion to censure Yale for its retaliation against the striking TAs. During the debate on the motion, Nancy Cott—one of the foremost scholars of women’s history in the country who was on the Yale faculty at the time but has since gone on to Harvard—defended the administration, pointing out that the TA union was affiliated with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. Historians at the meeting say that Cott placed a special emphasis on the word “international.” The TAs, in other words, were carrying out the orders of union bosses in Washington. The graduate students did not care about their own colleagues, they were not loyal to their own. Not unlike the Masons and Catholics of old. It did not seem to faze Cott that she was speaking to an audience filled with labor historians, all of whom would have recognized these charges as classic antiunion rhetoric.

One of the reasons Cott embraced this vocabulary so unselfconsicously was that it was a virtual commonplace among the Yale faculty at the time. At a mid-December faculty meeting, which one professor compared to a Nuremberg rally, President Levin warned the faculty of the ties between the TAs and outside unions. The meeting was rife with lurid images of union heavies dictating how the faculty should run their classrooms. It never seemed to occur to these professors, who pride themselves on their independent judgment and intellectual perspicacity, that they were uncritically accepting some of the ugliest and most unfounded prejudices about unions, that they sounded more like the Jay Goulds and Andrew Carnegies of the late nineteenth century than the careful scholars and skeptical minds of the late twentieth. All they knew was their fear—that a conspiracy was afoot, that they were being forced to cede their authority to disagreeable powers outside of Yale.

Cott, Levin, and the rest of the faculty were also in the grip of a raging class anxiety, which English professor Annabel Patterson spelled out in a letter to the Modern Language Association. The TA union, Patterson wrote, “has always been a wing of Locals 34 and 35 [two other campus unions]…who draw their membership from the dining workers in colleges and other support staff.”

Why did Patterson single out cafeteria employees in her description of Locals 34 and 35? After all, these unions represent thousands of white- and blue-collar workers, everyone from skilled electricians and carpenters to research laboratory technicians, copy editors, and graphic designers. Perhaps it was that Patterson viewed dishwashers and plastic-gloved servers of institutional food as the most distasteful sector of the Yale workforce. Perhaps she thought that her audience would agree with her, and that a subtle appeal to their delicate, presumably shared, sensibilities would be enough to convince other professors that the TA union ought to be denied a role in the university.

The professor-student relationship was the critical link in a chain designed to keep dirty people out. What if the TAs and their friends in the dining halls decided that professors should wash the dishes and plumbers should teach the classes? Hadn’t that happened during the Cultural Revolution? Hadn’t the faculty themselves imagined such delightful utopias as young student radicals during the 1960s? Recognizing the TA union would only open Yale to a rougher, less refined element, and every professor, even the most liberal, had something at stake in keeping that element out.

In his article, Davis concluded with these sentences about the nineteenth-century countersubversive:

By focusing his attention on the imaginary threat of a secret conspiracy, he found an outlet for many irrational impulses, yet professed his loyalty to the ideals of equal rights and government by law. He paid lip service to the doctrine of laissez-faire individualism, but preached selfless dedication to a transcendent cause. The imposing threat of subversion justified a group loyalty and subordination of the individual that would otherwise have been unacceptable. In a rootless environment shaken by bewildering social change the nativist found unity and meaning by conspiring against imaginary conspiracies.

Though I don’t think Davis’s psychologizing holds much promise for understanding the Yale faculty’s response to the grade strike—the strike, after all, did pose a real threat to the faculty’s intuitions about both the place of graduate students in the university and the obligation of teachers; nor did the faculty seem, at least to me, to be on a desperate quest for meaning—he did manage to capture, long before the fact, the faculty’s fear that their tiered world of privileges and orders, so critical to the enterprise of civilization, was under assault. So did Davis envision the grotesque sense of fellowship that the faculty would derive from attacking their own students.

The faculty’s outsized rhetoric of loyalty and disloyalty, of intimacy (Dean [Richard] Brodhead called the parties to the conflict a “dysfunctional family”) betrayed, may have fit uneasily with their avowed professions of individualism and intellectual independence. But it did give them the opportunity to enjoy, at least for a moment, that strange euphoria—the thrilling release from dull routine, the delightful, newfound solidarity with fellow elites—that every reactionary from Edmund Burke to Augusto Pinochet has experienced upon confronting an organized challenge from below.

Paton’s relationship with Davis was ended. Luckily, she was able to find another advisor at Yale, Emilia Viotti da Costa, a Latin American historian who was also an expert on slavery. Da Costa, it turns out, had been a supporter of the student movement in Brazil some thirty years before and was persecuted by the military there. Forced to flee the country, she found in Yale a welcome refuge from repression.

Neoliberal Catastrophism

According to The Washington Post:

Former president Barack Obama gently warned a group of freshman House Democrats Monday evening about the costs associated with some liberal ideas popular in their ranks, encouraging members to look at price tags, according to people in the room.

Obama didn’t name specific policies. And to be sure, he encouraged the lawmakers — about half-dozen of whom worked in his own administration — to continue to pursue “bold” ideas as they shaped legislation during their first year in the House.

But some people in the room took his words as a cautionary note about Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal, two liberal ideas popularized by a few of the more famous House freshmen, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

…

“He said we [as Democrats] shouldn’t be afraid of big, bold ideas — but also need to think in the nitty-gritty about how those big, bold ideas will work and how you pay for them,” said one person summarizing the former president’s remarks.

Obama’s words — rare advice from a leader who has shunned the spotlight since leaving office — come as the Democratic Party grapples with questions of how far left to lean in the run-up to 2020. Most Democratic candidates seeking the presidential nomination have embraced a single-payer health-care system and the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to make the U.S. economy energy efficient in a decade.

It seems like there are an increasing number of areas where the discourse among centrists and liberals follows a fairly similar script. The opening statement is one of unbridled catastrophe: Trump is fascism on the ascendant march! Global warming will destroy us in the next x years! (I’m not making any judgments here about the truth of these claims, though for the record, I believe the second but not the first). The comes the followup statement, always curiously anodyne and small: Let’s nominate Klobuchar. How are you going to pay for a Green New Deal? Don’t alienate the moderates.

All of these specific moves can be rationalized or explained by reference to local factors and considerations, but they seem like part of a pattern, representing something bigger. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Eric Hobsbawm for a piece I’m working on, but the pattern seems to reflect the reality of life after the Cold War, the end of any viable socialist alternative. For the last quarter-century, we’ve lived in a world, on the left, where the vision of catastrophe is strong, while the answering vision remains inevitably small: baby steps, cap and trade, pay as you go, and so on. Each of these moves might have its own practical justifications, but it’s hard to see how anyone could credibly conjure from those minuscule proposals a blueprint that could in any way be commensurate with the scale of the problem that’s just been mooted, whether it be Trump or climate change.

I wonder if there is any precedent for this in history. You’ve had ages of catastrophe before, where politicians and intellectuals imagined the deluge and either felt helpless before it or responded with the most cataclysmic and outlandish utopias or dystopias of their own. What seems different today is how the imagination of catastrophe is coupled with this bizarre confidence in moderation and perverse belief in the margin.

Neoliberal catastrophism?