Corey Robin's Blog, page 30

The Critic and the Clown: A Tale of Free Speech at Berkeley

We seem to have reached a new high, or low, in the academy’s free speech wars. Berkeley’s anthropology department has been compelled to reschedule a talk by Anna Tsing, a well known and highly regarded anthropologist at UC Santa Cruz, in order to make space—a safe space, as it turns out—for Milo Yiannopoulos to speak there on the same day.

Aside from getting us—rightly—infuriated, I hope this incident reminds us that the marketplace of ideas, like all markets, is a highly organized and structured market, privileging some ideas over others. Ideas don’t simply enter and exit a power-less space; speech doesn’t just happen. In any institution, there are gatekeepers who give a pass to some speech but not others, and who insist that the price of entry for some speakers is higher than others. Speech is a material practice: it requires resources (paying a speaker, setting up sound systems, reserving rooms, paying for security, and so on), and resources need to be distributed. In a system of scarcity, which is what an institution is (even in the academy, time and space are finite, as this Berkeley episode reveals), distribution will involve considerations of equity: some interests will be heeded, some will not; some voices will get heard, some will not. While we tend to think of speech as simply additive—I speak, you speak, we all speak—it can be a zero-sum game.

This incident simply makes concrete, albeit in a fairly dramatic way, what all of us see all the time in the academy. Just to give you the easiest sense of that: Most speakers in these fancy, and well paying, circuits of exchange never come to Brooklyn College. We simply don’t have the money to pay them. Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, and Berkeley do. Free speech ain’t free.

But this incident has an additional element of farce: The Berkeley administration has essentially decided that “the free exchange of ideas” requires a critic to make space for a clown. Clowns can sometimes be critics, but that isn’t the case here. Yiannopoulos is a fabulist and a fool. What we’re seeing here is a university administration deploying the rhetoric of high-minded academic ideals—free speech, deliberation, listening and giving answers to one’s critics—in the service of a hustle. Yiannopoulos’s hustle: pretending he has something to say that is of value. And the administration’s hustle: pretending that they are engaging in anything other than pathetic PR for an institution that is terrified of its critics.

Just to be clear: Though I make exceptions for someone like John Yoo, I tend to be extremely dubious of the no-platforming position, for reasons I don’t want to get into here. Nothing in this post should be construed as support for that position. But many of the flat-earth arguments in favor of free speech, particularly in contexts like these, tend to be fatuous in the extreme and deny the most elemental facts of what is going on.

Kate Millett, 1934-2017

I just heard, via Lori Marso, the news that Kate Millett has died.

I remember the very first time I read Sexual Politics. I’m embarrassed to say it was well into my teaching at Brooklyn College. It was for a course on counterrevolution, some time around 2005 or so, and we were doing a lengthy section on the right-wing backlash against the feminist movement.

I was looking for a text that would state the strongest revolutionary argument for feminism, not just substantively but rhetorically. I wanted to give students a sense of the ferocity of the attack—intellectual, political, cultural—that feminism posed in its original incarnation. After reading around a bit, it was obvious that there was only one candidate: Sexual Politics.

In this, Millett reminded me of what I love most about Catharine MacKinnon’s earlier work. Not always the arguments themselves, but the tenacity, the refusal to be cowed by one’s critics or to give them an inch, the categorical unwillingness to give any quarter, to give anyone a sense of calm or comfort or peace, the unbowed buoyancy that makes her and her arguments always rise far above the tide.

These are, for me (I recognize this is a question of taste), the mark of a true writer. Kate Millett was such a writer.

When Political Scientists Legitimate Torturers

The American Political Science Association, which will be meeting next week in San Francisco, will be featuring John Yoo on two panels. Many political scientists are protesting this decision, and will be protesting Yoo at his panels. I am not attending the conference this year, but I wrote the following letter to the two program chairs of the conference.

Dear Professors Jamal and Hyde:

In his celebrated diary of daily life in the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer writes:

If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.

The reason Klemperer reserved such special contempt for the professors and intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s was that professors and intellectuals played a special role in bringing on the horrors of the Nazi regime, as Claudia Koonz and other historians have documented. Not only did those professors and intellectuals provide some of the leading arguments for the rise of that regime, but they also served in that regime: as doctors, population experts, engineers, propagandists. And lawyers.

We now come to the matter of John Yoo, Emmanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, who has been invited to address the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, which will be meeting in San Francisco next week, and whose speech acts while serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Bush administration did so much to bring about the torture regime of that era. While there is no need to rehearse all of those speech acts, we might recall that in his lengthy memo of 2003, Yoo claimed that detainees of the US military could be legally stripped of their clothing “for a period of time” and interrogated naked. If you have trouble visualizing what that might mean, have a look at these photographs from Abu Ghraib. In that same memo, Yoo mooted the possibility that actions ordinarily considered illegal—including gouging an eye, dousing a prisoner with “scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substance,” or biting—might well be legal in time of war: the president’s powers as commander in chief were that broad.

When it comes to torture, our minds often drift to the torturer or his higher-ups in the Pentagon and the CIA. But as Jane Mayer documented in The Dark Side, the torture regime of George W. Bush was very much a lawyers’ regime. As one of Yoo’s colleagues told Mayer, “It’s incredible, but John Yoo and David Addington were running the war on terror almost on their own.” Yoo’s memos were not the idle speculations of a cloistered academic; stamped with the seal of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Justice Department, they had the force of law, issuing binding interpretations of existing statutes that could only be overturned by the Attorney General. As Mayer explains, “For Yoo’s allies in the White House, his position at OLC was a political bonanza. It was like having a personal friend who could write medical prescriptions.” Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, who headed the OLC in 2003, adds that Yoo-type memos were essentially “get-out-of-jail-free cards.” That is why former CIA head George Tenet has written:

Despite what Hollywood might have you believe, in situations like these [the capture, interrogation, and torture of Al Qaeda logistics chief Abu Zubayda] you don’t call in the tough guys; you call in the lawyers.

That’s how powerful John Yoo was.

Since the election of Donald Trump, we have heard much from our profession about “norm erosion” and the ways in which an ostensibly democratic society like our own can devolve into an authoritarian or even fascist society. While the history of the Trump ascendancy has yet to be written, it will be difficult, when the time comes, for future historians to neglect the role of John Yoo in preparing the way for that devolution. As Duke Law Professor Walter Dellinger, who headed the OLC under Bill Clinton, said of the vision of “the embodiment of power for the executive” that lay at the heart of Yoo’s memos: “it’s like Mussolini in 1930.”

I fear that with this invitation to Yoo to address our profession, as if he were simply the author of controversial and heterodox opinions rather than the architect of a regime of torture and barbarity, the American Political Science Association has written itself a chapter in those future histories.

Sincerely,

Corey Robin

Professor of Political Science

Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center

From Buckley to Bannon: Whither the Scribbler Scrapper of the Right

I have a piece in The Guardian on the meaning of Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House:

Once upon a time, conservatives plotted a path that began with the magazines and ended in the White House. With Steve Bannon’s departure from the Trump administration on Friday to head the Breitbart News Network, we seem to be witnessing the reverse: an unspooling of history that begins in power and ends in print.

In 1955, William F Buckley launched National Review, declaring war against liberalism and the Democratic party but also, and more immediately, a civil war on the right.

…

Since Charlottesville, pundits and historians have wondered whether we’re headed for a civil war. With Bannon’s exit, it’s clear that we are. Only it won’t be between North and South or right and left. It will be within the Republican party itself.

The question is: will it be like the war Buckley launched, a purgative struggle as a prelude to a new era of conservative power and rule? Or will it mark the end of the Reagan regime, unveiling a conservative movement in terminal crisis as it strives to reconcile the irreconcilable?

…

In the wake of the Charlottesville controversy, Bannon laughed at liberals and leftists who called for taking down Confederate statues. “Just give me more,” he told the New York Times. “Tear down more statues. Say the revolution is coming. I can’t get enough of it.”

As he explained to the American Prospect, “the longer [the Democrats] talk about identity politics, I got ‘em. I want them to take about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Ironically, as the Republicans flounder in their attempt to get anything done – much less enact a program of economic nationalism – Trump emits tweet after plangent tweet about “the removal of our beautiful statues.” It is the Republicans, in other words, and not the Democrats, who are saddled with identity issues, while their economic program (on healthcare, the debt, and taxes) remains stalled.

Before he left, Bannon’s parting words to Trump were to resist the siren calls of so-called moderates, who were pushing him to soften his stance on things like Charlottesville. Moderation would never win over Democrats or independents. The best thing was to appeal to the base: “You’ve got the base,” Bannon said. “And you grow the base by getting” things done.

But appealing to that base is precisely what is preventing things from getting done. As one top Republican strategist told the Wall Street Journal: “By not speak out against” Charlottesville and the white supremacy of the Republican party, “it is bleeding into the party, and that is going to make it far more difficult to pass anything.”

The right-wing racial populism that once served the conservative cause so well is now, as even the most conservative Republicans are acknowledging, getting in its way. Whatever the outcome of the civil war Bannon intends to fight, it’ll be waged against the backdrop of a declining rather than an ascendant movement, with the tools of yesterday rather than tomorrow.

That is why, having had seven months in the White House to prosecute his populist war on the Republican establishment – something Buckley and his minions could only dream of in 1955 – Bannon now finds himself staring into the abyss of a website, hoping to find there a power he couldn’t find in the most powerful office of the world.

And don’t forget to buy the second edition of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (yes, you read that subtitle correctly), now available for pre-order on Amazon.

Norm Erosion: The President Addresses the Nation about Afghanistan

Tonight, Trump gives an address about Afghanistan. The tone/style will be either trademark bombast (fire and fury) or “presidential” or both. Regardless of the style, it’ll entail a commitment, according to the latest reports, of roughly four thousand US troops, a fraction of the number of troops committed to Afghanistan under Obama, with no mention of private contractors. In the grand scheme of things, it’ll be a status quo operation packaged in high-octane rhetoric.

Social media will focus entirely on the rhetoric. The theme of the commentary will be something like: Trump consolidating his shaky presidency with imperial violence abroad! Media falls for new Trump presidency grounded in imperial violence abroad! And then by Wednesday, it’ll all be forgotten. The discussion will have moved on to Trump’s latest tweet, whatever surge in the polls Trump got from his announcement will be countermanded by whatever barbarity he utters in his tweet.

But while everyone will be talking about the “insanity” of this presidency and this moment, there’ll be almost no discussion of the real insanity of this moment: that yet another US president continues, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, the longest war in US history—a war that shows no sign of being winnable—simply because no US president wants to be the one who lost Afghanistan.

Everyone is aware of the real insanity. We just call it normal politics. Trump frothing at the mouth? That’s norm erosion.

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.