Corey Robin's Blog, page 28

Reader’s Report

“i sent a piece about hitler to Reader’s Digest (sales 3.5 million) for their series ‘my most unforgettable character’. it came back very promptly. feuchtwanger tells me thomas mann and werfel, who has been very successful here, had their contributions sent back too. the magazine submits readers’ contributions to half a dozen experts. one checks whether the thing is brown, a second whether it stinks, a third that there are no solid lumps in it etc. that is how strictly it is checked to see that it is real shit before they accept it.”

—Brecht, Journals, 04/21/42

When Kant Was Late

The day he learned of the fall of Bastille, the ever-punctual Kant was late for his morning walk. That’s what the frenzied pace of the French Revolution did to people’s experience of time. It’s now been almost a week since we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation with North Korea. I wonder how cultural historians of the future will record or register the changed sense of felt time in this era.

What’s the connection between Lytton Strachey and Monica Lewinsky?

Here’s a pop quiz for you: What’s the connection between Lytton Strachey and Monica Lewinsky? No googling!

Answer: There’s a Bloomsbury tale, immortalized by Virginia Woolf in her essay “Old Bloomsbury,” about how she, her sister Vanessa, and her brother-in-law Clive were sitting in the drawing room at 46 Gordon Square one evening in spring, when “suddenly,” as Woolf tells it, “the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s dress. ‘Semen?’ he said.”

For Woolf, this incident seemed to inaugurate or announce a new era in human affairs, a revolution in manners and mores, the kind of sexual candor and frankness she may have had in mind when she wrote, elsewhere, “On or about December 1910, human character changed.”

Looking back on the Lewinsky affair, and the semen-stained blue dress in particular, one wonders if Woolf was right.

Anyway, there’s an essay to be written on “Lytton and Lewinsky: Two Stains That Changed the World. Or Not.”

On Marcel Ophuls’ The Memory of Justice

I’m about 2/3 of the way through Marcel Ophuls’s long-lost documentary The Memory of Justice, which is now playing on HBO. I had been alerted to it by this mostly appreciative review from Ian Buruma.

If I can be permitted an opinion without having quite finished the film (that comes tonight), part of me is disappointed with what I’ve seen.

The first half covers fairly well trodden ground, without unearthing much that’s new. Much of it feels like a director being put through his paces, or a director putting his subjects through their paces.

Despite his reputation as an interviewer, Ophuls doesn’t extricate a lot from Telford Taylor that you wouldn’t know from reading Taylor’s articles and books. Or from Albert Speer, for that matter, that you didn’t know from the hundreds of interviews Speer gave or the many biographies and meditations on him. If anything, Ophuls allows Speer an even greater dignity than Speer managed to conjure for himself through all his savvy manipulation from Nuremberg to the years of his comfortable retirement upon his release from Spandau.

Which is why Buruma’s specific appreciation of that particular treatment in the film (of Speer) seems odd.

Where Dönitz is shrill and defensive, Speer is smooth, even charming. This almost certainly saved his life. Telford Taylor believed that Speer should have been hanged, according to the evidence and criteria of Nuremberg. Julius Streicher was executed for being a vile anti-Semitic propagandist, even though he never had anything like the power of Speer. But he was an uncouth, bullet-headed ruffian, described by Rebecca West as “a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks,” a man one could easily regard as a monster. The judges warmed to Speer as a kind of relief. Compared to Streicher, the vulgar, strutting Göring, the pompous martinet General Alfred Jodl, or the hulking SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Speer was a gentleman. What saved him, Taylor recalls in the film, was his superior class. When Ophuls puts this to him, a ghostly smile flits across Speer’s face: “If that’s the explanation…, then I am only too pleased I made such a good impression.” In the event, Speer got twenty years; Dönitz only got ten.

Ophuls said in an interview that it was easy to like Speer. But there is no suggestion that this mitigated his guilt. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also interviewed Speer at length, called him “the true criminal of Nazi Germany,” precisely because he was clearly not a sadistic brute but a highly educated, well-mannered, “normal” human being who should have known better than to be part of a murderous regime. This is perhaps the main point of Ophuls’s film as well: there was nothing special about the Germans that predisposed them to become killers or, more often, to look away when the killings were done. There is no such thing as a criminal people. A quiet-spoken young architect can end up with more blood on his hands than a Jew-baiting thug. This, I think, is what Yehudi Menuhin meant by his warning that it could happen anywhere.

As a warning and reminder in the Age of Trump, when right-minded people seem more alarmed by the president’s vulgarity than they were by Cheney’s ruthlessness, this is an important point. But as a treatment of Speer, it’s familiar territory, an easy massage hitting all the right pressure points. H.L.A. Hart wondered what was the point of writing something everyone already knew. I guess it’s because there’s always a market for it. (There’s a scene in a postwar sauna, where naked men and women are interviewed about the gas chambers, and it, too, feels a little familiar and on the nose.) Conversely, because there are many ways to state a falsehood but only one way to state a truth, Kierkergaard (at least according to Robert Paul Wolff; I’ve yet to find the original), said the truth will always be boring. So perhaps repetition is the price we pay.

That said, there are four things about the film that make it worth watching.

First, there’s documentary footage there I’ve never seen, and it can be revelatory. I’ve read many times, for example, about how Göring dominated Nuremberg. But I never really had a sense of it, till now. I’ve read many times about how Robert Jackson, despite his (justifiably) luminous reputation as a rhetorician here at home, was tongue-tied by Göring’s rhetorical mastery during the cross-examination. It’s something else to see it on screen.

Second, and relatedly, in some of his interviews, Ophuls does capture something you simply couldn’t have known merely by reading. For example, Dönitz, in his interviews on camera, exhibits not only the prickliness and the defensiveness you might expect, but also the haplessness. He defeats himself on screen—similar to what Arendt describes Eichmann doing at his trial—but which it’s hard to get a sense of, merely on the page.

Third, once you get to part 2 of the film, which deals more aggressively with how the postwar generation grappled with Nazism—there’s an extended focus on actors in Germany, both during and after the Nazi era, that’s just chilling; likewise, Ophuls’s interviews of wife, who was the daughter of a Wehrmacht officer, are almost cruel in their demand for and receipt of clarity—the documentary comes into its own. This to me is the heart of the film: the presence of the past (no surprise, given The Sorrow and the Pity.)

Last, and this is a small moment in the film, but telling. Ophuls interviews a woman in Berlin who’s quite jolly. In an unsettling way: she laughs when she shouldn’t, she seems inappropriately hail fellow well met. But at one point in the interview Ophuls asks her what it was like when the Russians came into Berlin. She says, in that jolly fashion, that she was raped. Every woman was raped, she adds. He asks her how that was or something like that (the question itself is unnerving). She says, oh, it wasn’t too terrible. But her face says otherwise: the jolliness drains out with the blood. And Ophuls, trying I think to mirror what she’s saying, says something like, well, things happen in war. As if he’s describing a summer storm. She agrees.

The reason it’s such a powerful moment is that this is the early 1970s, long before there was such an extensive literature and discourse about the Russians’ raping of women in postwar Berlin. It gives a concrete sense of how important it is to have that literature, that discourse, on a buried topic, to name things, to give them a political shape—and thereby elevate them, bring them to consciousness, as personal experience.

If I have any other thoughts on the last 1/3 of the film, I’ll let you know.

How to win literary prizes

In 1941, Hella Wuolijoki, an Estonian-born Finnish writer and friend of Brecht’s, submitted a play to a literary competition in Finland. She didn’t win the prize. Brecht’s explanation? “she didn’t lobby. as if it weren’t the best things that most need publicity, intrigue and manipulation…”

Update (7:30 pm)

As someone pointed out in the comments thread, the play Wuloijoki submitted may actually have been a play Brecht wrote or wrote in collaboration with her. A little confusing from the journal entry itself.

The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects

John Harwood has a good piece about Trump’s downward spiral of weakness:

Increasingly, federal officials are deciding to simply ignore President Donald Trump. As stunning as that sounds, fresh evidence arrives every day of the government treating the man elected to lead it as someone talking mostly to himself.

…

“What is most remarkable is the extent to which his senior officials act as if Trump were not the chief executive,” Jack Goldsmith, a top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, wrote last weekend on lawfareblog.com.

“Never has a president been so regularly ignored or contradicted by his own officials,” Goldsmith added. “The president is a figurehead who barks out positions and desires, but his senior subordinates carry on with different commitments.”

…

The disconnect between Trump’s words and the government’s actions has been apparent for months.

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s Quinnipiac poll—showing Trump’s approval ratings at an all-time low (33%), with drops in support among Trump’s triad of support: men (40%), whites without college degrees (43%), and Republicans (75%)—and two week’s worth of articles demonstrating an increasingly restive Republican Party in Congress bucking Trump’s will (on Russia, war powers, health care, Jeff Sessions, and more), Harwood adds one more tile to the developing mosaic of Trump’s epic fail of a presidency.

It seems like we’ve gone, in a mere six months, from to this meme/scene from April 1945—

 

—without any of the promised the features in between: no Reichstag Fire, no Enabling Act, no Night of the Long Knives, and so forth.

Meanwhile, as I’ve argued before, where Trump is actually having a lot of policy and personnel success—long-term success, of the sort that will be impossible to reverse by his successors—is in appointing judges. While Trump has managed to reverse a lot of Obama’s regulatory regime, we should remember that that is the sort of thing presidents can do independently. And as Obama has now discovered, what one president can do, his successor can undo. And vice versa.

Judges are different. As Ronald Klain argued last month:

He [Trump] not only put Neil M. Gorsuch in the Supreme Court vacancy created by Merrick Garland’s blocked confirmation, but he also selected 27 lower-court judges as of mid-July. Twenty-seven! That’s three times Obama’s total and more than double the totals of Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton — combined. For the Courts of Appeals — the final authority for 95 percent of federal cases — no president before Trump named more than three judges whose nominations were processed in his first six months; Trump has named nine. Trump is on pace to more than double the number of federal judges nominated by any president in his first year.

Moreover, Trump’s picks are astoundingly young. Obama’s early Court of Appeals nominees averaged age 55; Trump’s nine picks average 48. That means, on average, Trump’s appellate court nominees will sit through nearly two more presidential terms than Obama’s. Many of Trump’s judicial nominees will be deciding the scope of our civil liberties and the shape of civil rights laws in the year 2050 — and beyond.

Which makes for an interesting irony.

Since Trump’s election, we’ve heard a lot of concern from intellectual and journalistic worthies about the dangers of populism. What might a strongman armed with the instruments of the people and propaganda—legislatures, rallies, speeches, and tweets—do? Specifically, what might he and his populist crowds do to the courts, ever upheld as the bastions of liberty against a rampaging, marauding people?

As it turns out, that question gets it exactly backward. It’s not what Trump will “do” (in the sense of illicit browbeating or intimidation) to the courts that matters; it’s what the courts will do for him and his legacy that matters. Far from strongarming an independent judiciary into submission, Trump will secure his legacy simply by nominating judges and having them approved by the Senate, exactly as the Constitution prescribes.

It will be the independent judiciary, the Constitution, the counter-majoritarian Senate, the rule of law—all those instruments and institutions, in other words, that the Trump-as-fascist crowd loves to uphold as the safeguards of freedom or as imperiled flowers of the moment—that will be the most critical sources of Trumpism’s long-term power and effects.

 

In America, who’s more likely to win an election: a scam artist or a war hero?

This campaign commercial for Amy McGrath, who is running for Congress in Kentucky, has got the Twitterati excited.

 

The campaign of McGrath seems in line with a decision, leaked last June, by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to field candidates who had seen combat, along with “job creators” and “business owners.”

The question is: does it work?

In the last ten presidential elections, only one candidate who actually fought in a war has won: George HW Bush.

All the rest either served their country by shooting flicks (Reagan) or manipulating family connections or deferments to avoid combat (Clinton, George W. Bush, Trump) or simply weren’t eligible for a draft (Obama).

Meanwhile, enlistees, soldiers, and war heroes, Republican and Democrat alike, have repeatedly lost: Mondale, Dukakis, Dole, Gore, Kerry, and McCain.

In the most spectacular face-off’s between a genuine war hero and a draft-dodger-ish type—Clinton v. George H.W. Bush in 1992, George W. Bush v. John Kerry in 2004—it was the draft-dodger-ish type that won. (And if you think the same rules don’t apply at the congressional level, just google the names Max Cleland and Saxby Chambliss. Though as Matt Countryman pointed out, Tammy Duckworth is an excellent counterpoint to my claim.)

Despite our sense that Americans respond best to warriors and war heroes, it may be the confidence man who commands the most confidence. Something has shifted in this country. Whether it’s the passing of World War II as a touchstone of the political imagination or the end of the Cold War or the rise of neoliberalism, the elections of the last several decades have shown that while the consultant class and the image-makers continue to fantasize about an electorate cobbled together from a Spielberg film and a Sorkin script, the citizenry is far more taken by the conman and the scam artist than they are by the virtuous soldier.

Yet the dream dies hard, particularly among Democrats.

I get that this commercial is supposed to be different: a woman candidate, discriminated against, defending health care and the like. But, still, the main message is in the visuals and voiceover of that first minute of the video—all aircraft carriers and bombers, with the punch line being this: “I flew 89 combat missions bombing Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

My gut sense is: it doesn’t work. It doesn’t even work for Republicans anymore. Just ask Bob Dole. Or John McCain.

The Bane of Bain

Back in 2012, Barack Obama made so much hay out of Mitt Romney’s connection to Bain Capital that a distraught Cory Booker was inspired to cry out, “Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright.” Booker called Obama’s attacks “nauseating” and “ridiculous,” which earned him a supportive tweet from John McCain.

Fast-forward to 2017. The Obama people are now pushing hard for Deval Patrick, the former two-term governor of Massachusetts, to run for the Democratic nomination in 2020. Guess what Patrick has been doing since he left the governor’s mansion? Working at Bain Capital.

It’s something. The combined forces of Wall Street and the Hamptons—sorry, Clinton and Obama—are pushing hard, variously, for Joe Biden (who’s making strong noises that he’ll be running in 2020), Kamala Harris, and Deval Patrick.

What do these three people have in common? None of them is the most popular politician in the United States.

 

Why John Kelly won’t—in fact, can’t—save Trump

Here’s how you know Kelly can’t and won’t impose discipline on the White House, notwithstanding the bold-not-so-bold-out-of-the-gate move of firing Scaramucci. Anyone who would take this job, thinking that he—unlike everyone else before him—can somehow make Trump into what Trump is not, thinking that what Trump really wants is to be saved from himself (remember, Trump is 71 years old; he’s not really in the market for a change of life), suffers from the same magical thinking that is at the heart of Trump’s entire operation. Kelly is not an answer or alternative to Trump; he is Trump.

Chelsea and Me: On the politics—or non-politics or pseudo-politics—of engaging a power player on Twitter

Let me preface this post with a disclaimer: I’m probably as embarrassed as you are—in fact, more embarrassed, I’m sure—that I’ve devoted as much thought to this tempest in a teacup as I have. But having poured this much thought into this little tea, I feel that I should share, lest my cup spilleth over. So here goes.

I’m finding the pushback—at this blog, on Twitter, and across Facebook—about my exchange with Chelsea Clinton super interesting. One of the leitmotifs of the pushback is that it’s somehow unfair of me to engage Clinton about Arendt. Now that it was an act of almost spectral comedy, if not lunacy, to so engage, I’ll freely admit. Which is mostly why I posted the whole exchange. But unfair? That tells me something about my critics. A lot of things, in fact.

But before I tell you about those things, let me say this: I didn’t actually seek out this exchange. I retweeted what Clinton wrote with a comment, a snide comment, as I admitted. I didn’t direct my comment at her, issuing a challenge and expecting a response. I was as surprised as anyone that she would see it, much less respond to it. But having gotten her response, I had a choice: ignore her or respond to her. I opted to respond, but as I said earlier, I deliberated about the proper mode of response. And decided I should respond the way I would to anyone else who gets something wrong. Which is what I did (politely, you’ll see; once she engaged, I tried to keep things on the up and up). I thought democratic manners required nothing less. And it was not I but she who kept the conversation going, returning to it again and again, long after I had assumed it was over.

But here’s what I’m thinking about the pushback.

First, had this exchange occurred with a Republican, or with one of the sons or daughters of a famous Republican, say Eric or Ivanka Trump, I have no doubt that I’d be hearing nothing but lusty cheers and congratulations, particularly from Democratic Party partisans. I mean these are folks who manage to muster a fresh cackle at every prodigy of stupidity the right manages to produce on any given day. But Chelsea Clinton is part of the team, so, well, the obvious. And that’s fine; I don’t begrudge people their partisanship. But I do ask that they cop to it and not pretend that I’ve somehow transgressed a norm they’d never acknowledge if the other party were on the receiving end of it.

Second, there’s a related element that’s worth noting. And that has to do with the politics of intelligence/education, social class, and partisanship. The Democratic Party and its supporters like to think of themselves as the party of the smarties. Obama, Clinton, Clinton, Clinton: all so smart, all so well educated, all so well spoken. That’s why they’re entitled to rule, their supporters think. (Believe me, I’ve had these conversations many times.) And that’s not just about politics; it’s also about social class, or at least the culture and style and markers of a particular kind of social class. Unlike the Trumps and other vulgarians of the right, these are people who know how to carry on a conversation at a cocktail party or on Charlie Rose. (Is that show still on, by the way?) Indeed, a well educated liberal person on Twitter—a professor of political science, in fact—made a point of noting to me that none of the Trump kids had read Hannah Arendt. That Clinton didn’t seem to get Arendt didn’t matter. It was enough that she had read Arendt. Or knew to show that she had read Arendt.

I’ll confess, I find that kind of thing distasteful. (Arendt has a great line in Eichmann about how the well-heeled educated German classes of the postwar era didn’t really have a problem with the fact that the workaday Jews of Germany—little Hans Cohn from around the corner was how, I think, she put it—had been murdered during the Holocaust; it was that Einstein had been sent packing. That was the real crime: the loss of all that wondrous cultural capital.)

My objection is not just academic or aesthetic or cultural; it’s also political. I don’t believe in technocracy. I don’t think I (or people like me) am qualified to lead the country or to have a Clinton-like position in this country because I went to good schools or read a lot of books. There’s a limited place for expertise in a democracy, but it’s limited. I know I’m in the minority here on this, but I get no comfort from the fact that Barack Obama reads great literature (that was a Facebook post a while back) or that Chelsea Clinton knows how to name drop Arendt. For me, that doesn’t reflect the legitimate needs for some limited expertise. Nor does it reflect the requirements of good leadership, and it sure as shit is not about democracy. It’s about social class, social standing, and social signaling.

In any event, a lot of the pushback from certain quarters seems to have more to do with that, with the anxiety around the role of intelligence and social signaling in the Democratic Party and liberal social circles, than it does with the ethics (or aesthetics) of engaging with Chelsea Clinton on Twitter about Arendt. To that extent, I not only think my criticism of Clinton is fair game—after all, if you think a source of liberalism’s cultural and political legitimacy is that liberals know something, it seems only fair to point out when they’re full of shit—but I also now have come to think that, despite the fact that I mostly posted about the exchange because I found it hilariously strange and amusing, it may serve a useful if limited political purpose.

Which brings me to a third point. The celebrity dimension. Some folks on Facebook and elsewhere don’t like that. I get it. Were I reading these posts, I might also think to myself, eh, big deal, he’s talking to Chelsea Clinton, why he’s going on about it? How is that helping The Cause? He should be spending his time on something else.

I guess all I’ll say in my defense is: give me a fucking break. I spend most of my time on social media getting into the minutiae of the politics of the healthcare bill, rounding up folks to make phone calls to their senators, making historical comparisons between Trump and other presidents, writing about whatever books I’m reading, reporting on what I’ve found in a Clarence Thomas opinion or some obscure text in political economy, and for about 18 months there, posting on Hannah Arendt.

For the most part, I avoid virtually every single sectarian intra-left internet spat. I don’t drone on about Chapo or the Jacobins and their haters or whatever bit of leftbook celebrity esoterica is currently preoccupying people on social media. I don’t get caught up in whatever atrocity of the day has the Twitterati chattering. Nor do I chastise other folks who do get caught up in that. I just try to stay focused on the things that matter to me and leave others to their thing.

So I think I’ve earned my right to a moment’s levity, and a slightly self-mocking post about my one-time engagement with a player like Clinton. To me, as I said, it’s funny. You may disagree; that’s fine. But I think we can both agree that the republic will survive these 24 hours of my indulgence. And while I do appreciate all the well-intentioned people who feel duty-bound to tell me that I would be better served spending my time on other things, I do wonder how they square that position with the fact that they’re spending all this time enjoining me not to spend all this time on this thing.

And for those who are simply annoyed that people around you are talking about this when you just couldn’t give a shit, I feel your pain. All I can say is: welcome to my world. That’s just the way it sometimes goes on the internet.

Fourth, the gender dimension. In the initial draft of my blog post, I had a long discussion about mansplaining and why I didn’t think that was what was at play here. After reading it over, I thought, oh, don’t go there. You can’t win this argument, not on the internet; you’ll only generate more accusations of mansplaining. Leave it out, leave it alone. So I did. And I will.

Fifth and final, the power dimension. I get the strong feeling that some people still think Chelsea Clinton is a little kid in the White House, getting her every pre-teen face and every teenage gesture subjected to nasty scrutiny from the right. People, Chelsea Clinton is nearing 40 years old. She’s a high-powered player in New York financial, cultural, and educational circles. She’s the leader of a major global foundation. And she’s increasingly a major player in national political circles. She has elected to be in the public eye. Those more than one million followers of hers on Twitter didn’t just happen. She’s created that audience, that following. I’m not going to play little ole’ me here, but I am in fact a professor at Brooklyn College; I don’t just play one on TV. The idea that I’m somehow this big powerful person who’s victimizing a hapless Chelsea Clinton is, well, a little silly.

I was going to close this post with a line from Smith—where he talks about how odd it is that people lower down on the totem pole always identify with the misery of their social superiors, seeing in abjection of elites some kind of universal state of disrepair or perhaps even their own misery—but I figured, nah, why elevate this like that? Instead, I’ll close with a plea that we all of us grow up and stop pretending that Chelsea Clinton is some poor little lamb who has lost her way and who needs protection from the likes of me. She’s already got Jordan Horowitz playing wing man for her;  I think she’ll survive my tweets.