Corey Robin's Blog, page 28

If taxes are the thunder of world history, what kind of history did the GOP make this past week?

Schumpeter famously said that taxes are the “thunder of world history.” So what kind of history did the Republicans make this past week?

Here I am in The Guardian, answering that question with four takeaways on the GOP tax bill.

The piece is a kind of digest of some of my posting on social media this past week; increasingly as some of you have noted, I’m doing more of my posting on social media rather than on the blog. If you’re not on Facebook and/or Twitter—and who can blame you if you’re not?—you’ll have missed these posts, so The Guardian piece is a good digest to look out for.

When Libertarian Judges Rule

Prominent libertarian jurist Alex Kozinski has been accused of sexual harassment by six women, all of them former clerks or employees. One of the women is Heidi Bond. In a statement, Bond gives a fuller description of Judge Kozinski’s rule, sexual and non-sexual, in the workplace.

One day, my judge found out I had been reading romance novels over my dinner break. He called me (he was in San Francisco for hearings; I had stayed in the office in Pasadena) when one of my co-clerks idly mentioned it to him as an amusing aside. Romance novels, he said, were a terrible addiction, like drugs, and something like porn for women, and he didn’t want me to read them any more. He told me he wanted me to promise to never read them again.

“But it’s on my dinner break,” I protested.

He laid down the law—I was not to read them anymore. “I control what you read,” he said, “what you write, when you eat. You don’t sleep if I say so. You don’t shit unless I say so. Do you understand?”

The demands may seem peculiar, but the tyranny is typical. Employers control what workers read, when workers shit, all the time.

But Judge Kozinski has the added distinction of being one of the leading theoreticians of the First Amendment. And not just any old theorist but a libertarian theorist—he has a cameo in the film Atlas Shrugged: Part II—who claims that the First Amendment affords great protection to “commercial speech.”

Where other jurists and theorists claim that commercial speech—that is, speech that does “no more than propose a commercial transaction”—deserves much less protection than political or artistic speech, Kozinski has been at the forefront of the movement claiming that the First Amendment should afford the same levels of protection to commercial speech as it does to other kinds of speech. Because, as he put it in a pioneering article he co-authored in 1990:

In a free market economy, the ability to give and receive information about commercial matters may be as important, sometimes more important, than expression of a political, artistic, or religious nature.

And there you have it: Watching a commercial about asphalt? Vital to your well-being and sense of self. Deciding what books you read during your dinner break? Not so much.

Government regulations of advertising? Terrible violation of free speech. Telling a worker what she can read? Market freedom.

 

Trump and the Princeton Tory

Robert Kelner, the attorney for Former-National-Security-Advisor-For-A-Day Michael Flynn, just notified Trump’s people that Flynn will no longer be discussing Mueller’s investigation with them. People are taking this as a sign that Flynn is ready to cooperate with Mueller and tell all.

I hadn’t heard or thought of the name Robert Kelner in over 25 years. But when I checked, I discovered it’s the very same Rob Kelner I graduated with from Princeton in 1989. For some reason, that one “l” in Kelner always stuck with me. Kelner was a wiry, intense little guy, as I recall him, a College Republican who wrote for (and maybe helped found) a right-wing paper called The Sentinel, whose alums include Ramesh Ponnuru.

Kelner was one node in an extended network of Princeton conservatives I sometimes chatted with, one of the less intellectual but no less intelligent nodes, if memory serves. There were some super, self-consciously intellectual types in that crowd, so the competition was stiff. His profile says he won the Atwater Prize, which the Princeton politics faculty awards to the best senior thesis in poli sci. After he graduated Princeton, Kelner worked as Jack Kemp’s speechwriter for a couple of years. Then he did some time in Moscow, back during the early Yeltsin years. He’s now a member of the Federalist Society and teaches legal ethics at Georgetown.

People often ask me why I focus so much on the elite dimensions of conservatism, particularly in the Trump era, and why I insist on the continuities between the conservatism of the Reagan era and that of today. Kelner’s just one of many reasons why.

There’s a fascinating piece from 1989 in the Los Angeles Times on right-wing campus papers. It features a young Kelner, along with a young Marc Thiessen, a senior at Vassar who had graduated from the Taft School and would go on to serve as a speechwriter for George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, as part of this young, up-and-coming generation of conservatives at elite schools. It gives you a good flavor of their style and substance. Read it and ask yourself how much has changed.

 

I’ll be on The Leonard Lopate Show tomorrow—and here are a bunch of reviews and interviews

I’m going to be on The Leonard Lopate Show tomorrow, Wednesday, November 22, talking about the new edition of The Reactionary Mind. The show starts at noon, at least in New York. So while you’re readying for the Thanksgiving holiday, have a listen!

The book has begun to get reviews!

The inimitable Sarah Jones, one of my favorite journalists, gave it a thoughtful endorsement in The New Republic:

The book’s second edition, eagerly awaited, now swaps out Palin for the commander-in-chief.

Palin and Trump both demand some sort of unifying theory. How can it be that the party of Senator Ben Sasse—who enjoys a mostly-unearned reputation as a moderate—is also the party of Trump? The answer is even less difficult to discern than it was in 2011, yet the center-left seems befuddled by Trump, unable to describe his actions in any way more precise than in the mantra “this is not normal.”

The Trump presidency invited a re-evaluation of The Reactionary Mind: In 2016, a New Yorker headline called it “The Book That Predicted Trump,” while in March Bookforum recommended it as an “indispensable guide to how adeptly conservatives looked upon the age of Obama.” But the second edition is more truly a book for our time.

…

Robin’s new edition leaves Trump for the end, and builds inexorably up to his presidency through a combination of old material and newer essays….Robin’s second edition ties Burke’s conviction that the market, and the “monied men” who control it, should determine value to Nietzsche’s passionate attachment to the idea of an aristocratic, cultural taste-making class and both, eventually, to Trump.

In Salon, Paul Rosenberg had this to say:

Conservative intellectuals have led the way in denouncing Donald Trump as not a “true conservative.” Perhaps the most powerful rebuttal comes from the heavily revised second edition of political scientist Corey Robin’s book “The Reactionary Mind,”…

If the core of Robin’s argument remains unchanged from the first edition, the explication and implications are not. The new edition brings much deeper scrutiny to the economic side of conservatism, which Burke himself helped initiate (more on this below), including illustrations of internal tensions and ambiguities similar to those seen in Trump, who is the subject of the book’s concluding chapter. Trump’s contradictions and confusions may be more extreme, more outlandish, than those of most other prominent figures who have come before him, but they are not without precedent, as conservative intellectuals would like to pretend….

In this sense, Robin’s account challenges progressives as well. There have been recent progressive movements, he acknowledges, but they haven’t cohered to the point of scaring conservatives the way that Hobbes, Burke, Nietzsche, Hayek and even Antonin Scalia were scared by earlier movements.

…

In addition to these sorts of suggestions, there are others that cross over into different kinds of intellectual endeavors. Robin’s explanation of conservatism sheds a whole new light on the work of political scientists. His account helps provide a deeper explanation for why — as Grossman and Hopkins argue in “Asymmetric Politics” (Salon review here), the Republican Party is driven by conservatism as an ideological movement, in contrast to the Democratic Party, which they describe as a coalition of interest groups. In turn, the fragmented nature of that coalition helps provide a partial explanation for the weakness of the left Robin notes. That’s not to equate either party with left or right entirely — the messy world of party politics never works like that. But it does provide some insight into what’s been going on for the last 50 years or so of American party politics.

Another realm Robin’s work connects to is political psychology…

None of this proves anything more than tendencies and correlations, which is why Robin’s work based on close readings of classic conservative texts remains singularly important. Almost without exception, he is not imputing anything to conservatives that they have not said about themselves. But the clearer he manages to make the nature of conservatism, the more he makes it possible for other approaches to shed even further light, ask better questions and open more fruitful lines of inquiry. It’s why he deserves to be read carefully by people in multiple related fields.

Last, Damon Linker, a moderate centrist, had a more critical yet equally thoughtful take in The Week:

As a political centrist in a sharply polarized time, I’m sometimes asked by progressive friends to recommend contemporary conservatives they should read and wrestle with. Then there are the conservative friends who pose the equal and opposite question: Which writers on the left should I seek out to challenge my assumptions?

My answer is usually Corey Robin.

A blogger, essayist, and political science professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, Robin is the author of an erudite, bracing, and productively infuriating book about conservatives titled The Reactionary Mind.

…

Could Robin actually intend to draw continuities between such wildly disjunctive figures?

When skeptical readers opened the book, they found that he could and did exactly that….In the significantly revised second edition of the book that’s just been published by Oxford University Press, Robin has strengthened his case, rearranging the chapters and adding three new ones, including one on Donald Trump (who’s now replaced Palin in the subtitle)….

That few self-described conservatives will recognize themselves in this account doesn’t mean that Robin is wrong. Sometimes it takes the perspective of an outsider — and the sensibility of a synthesizer — to perceive certain foundational assumptions and motives buried deep within an ideology, and this is one of those cases. Robin marshals too much evidence from too many seemingly disparate writers and politicians to dismiss his case entirely. He’s identified something real and important that readers from all points on the political spectrum would do well to take seriously.

But not too seriously.

And then Linker gets into his criticisms.

Jon Wiener, the estimable historian of the US, did a brief interview with me, posing some tough questions for my thesis about Trump.

The interview I did with Dan Denvir, which I mentioned in an earlier post, has now been transcribed over at Jacobin. It gives you a flavor of some of the new material in the book:

Denvir: You write about his [Burke’s] concern with reconciling market and manor, capitalism on the hand and the old regime of aristocracy on the other. Explain how Burke dealt with these and tried to mold them into one conservative movement that could take on the upstart revolutionaries on the Left.

Robin: This is a very rich and complicated terrain. Before the French Revolution — which is really the crucible in which conservatism is born as an ideology — and throughout the eighteenth century, there is this struggle between conceptions of virtue and commerce.

Burke himself was involved in some of these pre-revolutionary struggles, particularly over the East India Company. He was a scorching critic of some parts of the East India Company, and he often invokes the threat of these new men of money as low men of character who are degrading the political virtues — what they were doing in India, in the British colony, was representative of the threat that money posed to this polity of virtue.

When the French Revolution happens, it throws established hierarchies into question. It shows that hierarchies don’t exist from time immemorial, they’re really created and they’re uncreated. As the counterrevolutionary argument gets going — and Burke is very much part of this counterrevolutionary argument — there is this notion that hierarchies can be recreated. They are not traditional or ancient; they are plastic, they are contingent, they are artificial.

Once the revolution happens, there is also a new round of popular contestation around questions of economics, both in France and Britain. Burke is at the center of debates about what we call today a “living wage.” Burke begins to articulate what we think of as a very modern free-market idea, whereby wages should not be regulated or supplemented by the state but should be settled completely by the free market.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is there’s an awful lot of scholarship and popular understanding of Burke that says that he was always hostile to the free market, money, and what today we’d call libertarianism.

Denvir: Not based on the passages you quote.

Robin: Yeah, that’s just simply not the case. Burke really was in the front of a movement on behalf of very aggressive free-market policies, particularly when it came to labor and wages.

Here is where he begins to lay out a very modern vision: that the men of the market — not the landed aristocracy, not the inherited aristocracy (who he becomes very critical of toward the end of his life) but the men of money in the market, setting the value of things at the market — that this can be a new kind of ruling class that will arise in this new revolutionary age to contest the Jacobins.

Now, as I say in the chapter, he doesn’t ultimately go there — he kind of pulls back from this vision for a lot of different reasons. But I do think you see the beginnings of this vision that I argue is going to find its fulfillment in the twentieth century.

John Holbo, one of my brilliant (truly truly brilliant) co-bloggers at Crooked Timber, had a lengthy post on the second edition, which was super-interesting, and it’s provoked a lengthy—and ongoing, as of this afternoon!—debate in the comments section. Have a read and join in!

Last, the historian Andrew Seal, who reviewed the first edition for n+1, offers a really fascinating take (and re-framing) on the second edition here:

The new edition of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind marks a leap forward in the scholarly understanding of modern conservatism. This is both because of what Robin has added—long and rich chapters on Edmund Burke’s late-career experimentations with a new theory of value, on the Nietzschean origins of Austrian economics, and on Donald Trump—and to some extent because of what he subtracted—mostly chapters that looked backward to the neoconservative moment of the 2000s. The removal of chapters mainly focused on war didn’t delete a concern with violence and with toxic masculinity: instead, it shifted and refocused it within the frame of the market. The market as war; the captain of finance or real estate as a warrior-prince.

…

But I would like briefly to try to put the book’s changes in contact with some of the historiographic changes that have occurred since the book’s first edition came out in 2011. The Reactionary Mind sparked some of those changes, of course, and so retracing this recent history is to follow something of a helical or dialectical path,  but it also means, I think, that we can look ahead and guess at some of the ways this second edition may come to inform emerging scholarship (and, hopefully, punditry) on conservatism, neoliberalism, and the Republican Party.

 

Stokely Carmichael and Clarence Thomas

“This [the opposition to segregated schools] reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that ‘white’ is automatically superior and ‘black’ is by definition inferior.”


 


—Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power


 


“This position [against segregation in schools] appears to rest upon the idea that any school that is black is inferior, and that blacks cannot succeed without the benefit of the company of whites.”


 


—Clarence Thomas, Missouri v. Jenkins

Reminder: Talk tonight with Keith Gessen, and Wednesday night with Eddie Glaude

Just a reminder…

Tonight (Monday), I’ll be talking with Keith Gessen about the new edition of The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be talking at 7 pm at McNally Jackson, 52 Prince Street in Manhattan.

On Wednesday, I’ll be talking with Eddie Glaude about The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be be talking at 7:30 pm at Dweck Center in the Brooklyn Public Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

I hope to see any and all of you who live in the NYC area either tonight or Wednesday night. And if you come, please make sure to say hi.

And make sure to buy the new edition. It’s already gotten its first review and there are more to come.

Upcoming Events in LA and NYC with Keith Gessen and Eddie Glaude

I’ll be doing several speaking events in Los Angeles and New York City.

On Tuesday, November 7, I’ll be delivering the E. Victor Wolfenstein Memorial Lecture at UCLA. The title of my talk is “White State, Black Market: The Political Economy of Clarence Thomas.” The talk will be at 6 pm in the Charles Young Grand Salon in Kerkhoff Hall.

On Monday, November 13, I’ll be in conversation with Keith Gessen, a founding editor of n+1 and a contributor to The New Yorker, about the new edition of The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be talking at 7 pm at McNally Jackson, 52 Prince Street in Manhattan.

On Wednesday, November 15, I’ll be in conversation with Eddie Glaude, William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University, also about the new edition of The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be be talking at 7:30 pm at the Brooklyn Public Library (Dweck Center), 10 Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

Hope to see you at any one of these events! If you come, make sure to say hello.

Also, since my last update, I’ve done some new interviews about the new edition of the book. Sam Seder got in deep about Trump and The Art of the Deal. My interview with Sam starts at the 14:40 mark. I also did a lengthy interview with Dan Denvir; he and I talked about the right’s ambivalence about capitalism and politics, and how that has played out from Burke to Hayek to Trump.

And the new edition is now out and available for purchase.

Because of her, it went well with him: Weinstein, Wieseltier, and the Enablers of Sexual Harassment

Part of this week’s Torah portion, from Genesis 12, tells the story of a famine in Canaan that drives Abram and Sarai (the names of Abraham and Sarah before they became Abraham and Sarah) to Egypt. As they near Egypt, Abram fears that Sarai will be sexually desired there and that he’ll be killed so that she can be taken. Abram devises a plan. Sarai should pretend to be his sister. That way, she’ll be taken but he won’t be killed in the process. “Please say that you are my sister,” he says, “that it may go well with me because of you.”

And that’s what happens. Sarai is taken by Pharaoh (none of this is described as rape; it’s all part of the Bible’s euphemistic traffic in women), who then amply rewards Abram—with herd animals, slaves, and the like—for the gift of Sarai. “And because of her,” the text says, with a nod to the earlier formulation, “it went well with Abram.”

When God learns of this transgression, God punishes Pharaoh greatly. Pharaoh returns Sarai to Abram. Abram, the enabler who served up his wife to Pharaoh, keeps his reward; indeed, it is the mustard seed of his later wealth and retinue. Because of her, it went well with him.

(According to our rabbinic intern, who delivered an amazing drash on this passage this past weekend in shul, there is a midrash or some other medieval commentary that says that the later bondage of the Jews in Egypt was in fact a punishment for Abram’s sin with Sarai. But there’s nothing in the Torah itself, I don’t think, that suggests that. Instead, it is the rapist/harasser who gets punished, not the enabler.)

Reading this story, I couldn’t help thinking, as did our rabbinic intern, of all the sexual harassment and sexual assault stories we’re now hearing about. Only I was thinking less of the pharaonic harassers and their victims than of the collaborators and bystanders, figures who have long concerned me: in this case, the assistants to Harvey Weinstein (some of them women), who helped serve up the women he harassed or raped, or the silent staffers at The New Republic who, according to the Times, witnessed some of Leon Wieseltier’s behavior—”never an ‘open secret,'” Michelle Cottle has written, just “simply out in the open”—but said nothing.

And I couldn’t help thinking that all of those enablers, those collaborators and bystanders, were motivated not simply by confusion or uncertainty, which many of us feel when confronted with injustice, not simply by timidity or fear, which many of us also feel, but also by a fear laden and laced with ambition, which, again, many of us feel—a sense that if I cooperate with this monster, or if I keep quiet, if I look away, maybe I’ll be okay, even advance; if I don’t, my career will be ruined. “Covetousness begets fear,” declared the radical Gerrard Winstanley during the English Civil War, “and this makes a man to draw the creatures to him by hook or crook, and to please the strongest side.”

And I couldn’t help thinking, finally, that though Pharaoh was punished, it went well with Abram.

What’s wrong with the discourse of norm erosion?

We’ve now had, in less than 20 years, two presidents elected over and against the expressed preferences (not in a poll, but in actual ballots) of the majority of the voters. I think most Democrats, liberals, and leftists would agree that both of these presidents were or are disasters. So these two elections were democratic catastrophes on both procedural and substantive grounds.

Yet the single most important determinant of these two disasters—the fact that we have a Constitution that creates an Electoral College that privileges the interests of states over persons—cannot, by the terms of the discourse, be counted as a norm erosion. Indeed, when it comes to this main determinant of the Electoral College and how it works, there was no norm erosion in 2000 or 2016; the system worked exactly as it was designed by the text (I’m deliberately setting aside the Supreme Court decision in 2000 because that would get us into a whole other realm of controversy).

So we have a discourse of norm erosion that allows us to reel in shock at the way that Trump talks to senators, governors, and citizens, but that discourse has nothing to say about the very system, the very text, that produced this president that talks in this terrible and shocking way.

Indeed, insofar as some of the peddlers of that discourse believe that these cherished norms ultimately issue from the system and the text itself, and that it is that system and that text that need protecting, one can say that the discourse of norm erosion actually prevents us from tackling the very system, the very text, that produced this president that talks in this terrible and shocking way.

Forty Years of The Firm: Trump and the Coasian Grotesque

In his classic article “The Nature of the Firm“—which I wish would be put on the list of required reading for political theorists; it really should be in our canon—the economist R.H. Coase divides the economic world into two modes of action: deal-making, which happens between firms, and giving orders, which happens within firms. Coase doesn’t say this, but it’s a plausible extrapolation that making deals and giving orders are, basically, the two things businessmen know how to do.

In the last year, it’s occurred to me, on more than one occasion, that Trump is a Coasian grotesque. Making deals and giving orders: that’s all he knows how to do. Except that he doesn’t. As we’re seeing, he’s really bad at both.

Regardless of whether he’s good or bad at the ways and means of the firm, what Trump definitely doesn’t know is politics. Authority, legitimacy, persuasion, leadership: these are arts that Trump is completely unpracticed at, and it shows. When it comes to wielding power in the political sphere—I’m not talking about executive orders, of which Trump has issued many, and which are a sign of his weakness, not his strength; I’m talking about exercising power that requires the assent and cooperation of other political actors—he’s completely out of his league.

There’s a reason for that: the conception of he power has—such as it is and however bad he is at it—is drawn from the Coasian world of the firm. To that extent, we can read Trump’s failure not simply as a referendum on Trump, not simply as a referendum on the Republican Party, but more largely and more importantly, as a verdict on 40 years of politics in the United States. For what neoliberalism has meant, among other things, is not simply the rise of markets and money and all the rest; it has also meant, as Wendy Brown has argued so compellingly, the rise of economic modes of reason and their insertion into politics. Not just their insertion, but their domination. Such that our entire conception of political leadership is drawn from the world of the firm (that’s not Brown’s argument; it’s my tangent to her argument).

This is not a story of the rise of Reagan or the Republican Party. It’s a completely bipartisan story. It was Jimmy Carter, in 1975, who helped begin the story, when he launched his presidential campaign with the claim: “I ran the Georgia government as well as almost any corporate structure in this country is run.” Four decades later, managing a firm no longer provides a standard of leadership. It is the substance of leadership.

A substance, as we are now seeing, that is increasingly irrelevant to the challenges of our age. Trump’s problem is not that he’s bad at making deals or giving commands. Even if he were good at that, it’d not be sufficient to manage the crises of his coalition. A different sort of art is called for, one that is not drawn from the firm.

If we had a real political opposition, if we had a real left, they’d be using Trump not as an example of right-wing lunacy or Republican perfidy; he’d be Exhibit A of Forty Years of the Firm.