Corey Robin's Blog, page 35

3 Ways Forward For Trump

Looking beyond Flynn, it seems like there are three ways forward.

First, status quo: we have four years of this stand-still, in which a dysfunctional presidency keeps the entire nation in a permanent state of high drama and anxious alert, punctuated by the occasional act of brutality without a lot getting done.

Second, someone takes charge: either a James Baker-type fixer is brought in to stabilize the White House and regularize its operations so that Trump has the semblance if not reality of a functional presidency OR the Republican leadership steps in and figures out a way to sideline Trump either through resignation or impeachment.

Third, war.

I don’t see any other options. Am I missing anything?

Welfare Reform from Locke to the Clintons

In a draft of his “Essay on the Poor Law,” Locke writes:

Now no part of any poor body’s labour should be lost. Things should be so ordered that everyone should work as much as they can.

That passage, which Locke ultimately deleted, came right after his complaint that women were staying home with their kids and not working. As a result, he wrote, “their labour is wholly lost.”

Locke follows this observation up with a complaint about the existing poor laws in England: the problem with them is that “they are turned only to the maintenance of people in idleness, without at all examining into the lives, abilities, or industry, of those who seek for relief.”

That is what a reformed poor law must do: examine into the lives, abilities, and industry of those who seek public assistance.

 

On the Yahrzeit of Talia Goldenberg, 1991-2014

Ever since I became a parent, I’ve found it impossible to read, watch, or hear about children dying or being killed.

But this is the story of my friend Rachel Kirtner’s niece, Talia Goldenberg, whose life was cut short by an extraordinarily arrogant doctor, a Dr. Johnny Delashaw at one of Seattle’s top hospitals (Swedish Cherry Hill), who didn’t listen to his patient and whose team didn’t listen to his patient’s family.

I seldom if ever ask for this kind of thing, but I ask you to do this today, to read this whole article through to the end. As a kind of lighting of the yahrzeit candle: Talia went into a coma three years ago today; she died, after being taken off life support, nine days later.

Please read the whole story here. And share it widely.

May her memory be a blessing.

Once upon a time, Trump was against extreme vetting

From The Art of the Deal:

To buy an apartment in a condominium, all you need is the purchase price. To buy a cooperative—which is what most buildings in New York were at the time—you need approval from its board of directors, who have ridiculous, arbitrary powers, including the right to demand all kinds of financial data, social references, and personal interviews. They can reject you for any reason they choose, without explanation. It’s a license to discriminate. The worst part is that many people on these co-op boards get their kicks from showing off their power. It’s absurd and probably illegal, but it happened to be great for Trump Tower. Many wealthy foreigners didn’t have the proper social references for these cooperatives, or didn’t want to put themselves through the scrutiny of a bunch of prying strangers. Instead, they came to us.

Beauty and the Beast: Donald Trump as the Interior Decorator in Chief

Given the latest news about these immigrant raids, this post will seem out of touch, tonally off. I apologize in advance, though I wonder if there’s a connection.

Like all of you, I’ve been thinking a lot about Trump. His The Art of the Deal has been sitting with me, in my head, for the last several weeks. The book’s salient theme, the thing that marks Trump most, is not, as many people have noted, that he’s any kind of great capitalist or builder of buildings.

Nor is it that he’s any kind of great dealmaker. When you read about his deals, you feel as if he is as bored as you are, though, God, can he drone on about the details.

But there is one type of moment when you really feel like you’re in the presence of the man himself, when you feel as if the response he is registering is genuine. And that is when he’s decorating.

Trump seems to be sincerely moved by the surface of things. The surfaces are garish and gauche, but you sense some kind of inner stirring in him when he writes about those surfaces, a stirring you otherwise never feel.

This is just one representative passage, where he’s talking the atrium in the Trump Tower:

Der, Ivana, and I looked at hundreds of marble samples. Finally, we came upon something called Breccia Perniche, a rare marble in a color none of us had ever seen before—an exquisite blend of rose, peach, and pink that literally took our breath away… it was a very irregular marble. When we went to the quarry, we discovered that much of the marble contained large white spots and white veins. That was jarring to me and took away from the beauty of the stone. So we ended up going tot he quarry with black tape and marking off the slabs that were the best….

The effect was heightened by the fact that we used so much marble—on the floors and for the walls six full floors up. It created a very luxurious and a very exciting feeling. Invariably, people comment that the atrium—and the color of the marble particularly—is friendly and flattering, but also vibrant and energizing—all things you want people to feel when they shop:…

Of course, the marble was only art of it. The whole atrium space was very dramatic and different. Rather than making the railings out of aluminum, which is cheap and practical, we used polished brass, which was much more expensive but also more elegant, and which blended wonderfully with the color of the marble. Then we used a lot of reflective glass, particularly on the sides of the escalators. That was critical, because it made a fairly small core space look far larger and more dramatic.

Notice the specificity of his observations, his eye for certain details. Notice the irrepressible joy, almost awe, he experiences and expresses. Notice how loving, wistful, aroused he is, by the play of surfaces. It’s hard to believe he’s faking any of this. It seems, to me at least, quite real.

As I said, these are the only types of moments when you feel as if he’s truly present, engaged with what is happening around him.

What’s more, he seems to have brought the same sensibility into the White House. When he’s not fretting about his ratings or ranting about what’s being said about him on Twitter or TV, decorating is the only thing that captures his attention:

To pass the time between meetings, Mr. Trump gives quick tours to visitors, highlighting little tweaks he has made after initially expecting he would have to pay for them himself.

…He will linger on the opulence of the newly hung golden drapes, which he told a recent visitor were once used by Franklin D. Roosevelt but in fact were patterned for Bill Clinton. For a man who sometimes has trouble concentrating on policy memos, Mr. Trump was delighted to page through a book that offered him 17 window covering options.

Again, in building after building that he describes in The Art of the Deal, it’s a similar story: not a mention of plumbing, electricity, basic architectural or engineering design; instead, there are long, loving descriptions of the various window treatments he’s considering.

It’s that Wildean obsession with surface effects, that almost tender regard for the beauty of appearances, that marks the man.

That, and his brutality.

Upcoming Talks and Other Things

I’ll be speaking at the following venues this semester. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello.

Friday, February 24, 5 pm

“The Death of American Conservatism.”

University of Hawaii, Saunders Hall 624

Friday, March 3, noon

“Public Intellectuals: Bringing a Public Into Being.” In conversation with Jedediah Purdy.

Duke University, Old Chemistry Building 011

Tuesday, March 28, 5 pm

“The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.”

Manhattan College, room TBA

Wednesday, March 29, 7 pm

Harper’s Forum on Trump. With Masha Gessen, Lawrence Jackson, and Sarah Schulman.

McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, New York

Friday, April 14/Saturday, April 15

Keynote Address, Princeton Graduate Political Theory Conference

Princeton University, room and time TBA

In addition to these talks, I wanted to alert you to the fact that, all this week, The New Republic has been running a five-part series of excerpts from my book Fear: The History of a Political Idea, a topic that has sadly achieved a new prominence of late. In case you missed the series, here are the posts:

Monday, February 6: “How Political Fear Works.” A decade ago, few Americans were interested in the risks dissidents face. Trump has changed that.

Tuesday, February 7: “Beware of Self-Censorship.” It takes a whole society to create an atmosphere of fear: elites and collaborators, bystanders and victims alike.

Wednesday, February 8: “Who Benefits from Trump’s Chaos.” Elites have always used a climate of fear to push their own agendas.

Thursday, February 9: “What’s In It For the Collaborators.” The U.S. government has enlisted powerful informants in the past without difficulty. Here’s why.

Friday, February 10: “There Are No Good Reasons Not to Fight.” We would do well to remember the costs of keeping quiet.

Finally, the writer Daniel Oppenheimer wrote a very thoughtful essay putting my work on conservatism in conservation with that of Mark Lilla. Oppenheimer offered these generous words, not only about me and my work but also about all of you, the readers of this blog and other places where I write:

Very much because of this very big argument, and the force with which Robin made it, The Reactionary Mind has emerged as one of the more influential political works of the last decade. Robin himself has become, since the book’s publication, one of the more aura-laden figures on the intellectual left. Paul Krugman cites him and the book periodically in his New York Times columns and on his blog. Robin’s Facebook page, which he uses as a blog and discussion forum, has become one of the places to watch to understand where thinking on the left is. Another key node of the intellectual left is Crooked Timber, a group blog of left-wing academics to which Robin is a long-time contributor, and another is Jacobin, an au courant socialist magazine that often re-publishes Robin’s blog posts sans edits, like dispatches from the oracle. The book itself, in the aftermath of November’s earthquake, is being revised, republished and re-subtitled, with Trump subbing in for Sarah Palin as the avatar of 21st century reaction.

 

Trump: 0. Democrats: 0. The People: 1.

1.

Donald Trump was handed a major defeat tonight when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate his travel ban. The three-judge panel, which included a George W. Bush appointee, unanimously rejected one of Trump’s key arguments: that when it comes to immigration and national security, the actions of the executive branch are not subject to judicial review.

Although our jurisprudence has long counseled deference to the political branches on matters of immigration and national security, neither the Supreme Court nor our court has ever held that courts lack the authority to review executive action in those arenas for compliance with the Constitution. To the contrary, the Supreme Court has repeatedly and explicitly rejected the notion that the political branches have unreviewable authority over immigration or are not subject to the Constitution when policymaking in that context.

FDR was handed defeat after defeat by the courts, yet managed to turn their intransigence—which was arrayed against what a clear majority of the nation wanted—into a symbol of the old regime that needed to be gutted and into a source of even greater power for him and his party.

That’s a little hard to do when:

a) you were put into office by a minority of the electorate;

b) your policies are unpopular;

c) you and your voters belong to the party that is both creator and custodian of that old regime;

and

d) your proposals are being struck down by judges appointed by your party.

That signifies not an opportunity for you to wrestle that old regime to the ground—since in so many respects you don’t want to touch the old regime—but instead a crisis within the old regime, which you were elected to reform and save, not destroy.

Sad.

2.

It seems as if Trump’s campaign promises about immigration—his rhetoric about Muslims and refugees, his willingness to say what so many people in his party thought but were too polite or smart to say—will continue to come back to haunt him in court. If that overtly racist rhetoric turns out to sink him, or at least these policies, it’ll be another nail in the coffin not just of Trump but of conservatism and the GOP.

Throughout the campaign, I said that Trump’s rhetoric was a sign of the weakening of the conservative cause: a racist or nativist dog whistle used to be enough to mobilize majorities. No more: now the party needs a megaphone, just to mobilize an ever dwindling base. But if it turns out that that megaphone is precisely what sinks the policies the base wants, there’s going to be major turmoil within the party, from top to bottom.

This is the kind of political incoherence that weak parties in weak regimes find themselves in. Again, this is not a symptom of Trump, his erratic-ness, or his incompetence. This is a symptom of the impasse the Republican Party has found itself as the premises of the Reagan regime start to get shaky.

3.

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, there’s been a marked shift in public opinion on immigration.

Back in November, Americans were asked:

Do you support or oppose suspending immigration from ‘terror prone’ regions, even if it means turning away refugees from those regions?

At the time, respondents favored suspending immigration by 50-44%.

As of two days ago, those numbers have flipped. Now respondents oppose suspending immigration by 50-44%. That’s a 12-point flip in public opinion—against the president’s position.

With new presidents, and presidents we think of as politically potent, you expect to see the exact opposite trend line: that is, policies and proposals getting more popular, not less. Yet the opposite seems to be happening with Trump.

What so many on the left fear about Trump—wrongly, in my view—is his allegedly intuitive feel and appeal to the masses, particularly on these issues of nationalism, immigration, race and religion. Yet it seems that that is precisely where he is falling down. And not merely because of the incompetence of his administration. But also, critically, because of the opposition and resistance so many people have mounted. Making his policies chaotic, disruptive, and a big hot mess, actually turns people off to those policies because it shows that they (the policies) can’t deliver what most people want: a sense of a calm and stability.

4.

This piece by Marc Tracy about Steven Bannon’s reading habits is really interesting and smart.

Tracy ran into Steven Bannon at an airport. Bannon was reading The Best and the Brightest.

At first glance, that makes sense: Bannon loathes the liberal Ivy League technocrats who populated the Obama administration and whose predecessors got us into Vietnam.

But what defined those Johnson-era technocrats, Tracy shows, is not that they knew what they were talking about; half the time, they hadn’t a clue. They were just part of the smart set, who by virtue of a certain temperament and repertoire of skills and attitudes, were presumed to be the natural leaders of the nation (not unlike the Vox set today, but I digress).

As Tracy argues, though, “Mr. Bannon seems less a repudiation than a reincarnation of the tragic protagonists of ‘The Best and the Brightest.'”

Indeed.

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to NPR, and one of Trump’s flunkies, Sebastian Gorka—who has a plummy English accent of the sort that got Dean Acheson into so much trouble with the McCarthyite right; autres temps—was heralding Bannon as a strategic genius who thinks strategically and strategizes like no other strategist. The man needn’t know anything specific; it’s just his cast of mind that matters.

And Trump himself, I would add, is just the CEO version of the best and the brightest, peddling what he allegedly learned from the art of the deal as somehow the Rosetta Stone to governing a nation.

5.

Jonathan Chait thinks Obamacare may survive, and Matt Yglesias itemizes all the ways in which Trump has met defeat thus far.

If they’re right—and I’ve suggested that I think they are—Trump is going to start to look less and less appealing to his base.

It’s hard to overstate how devastating it can be to a president not to be able to win on signature campaign promises. Whatever ideological fervor he can muster, he starts looking weak. Very weak. And that is something that no president—least of all Trump, who has made a fetish of his efficacy and strength—can afford.

6.

Listen to this story from Sunday’s Weekend Edition on NPR.

A California Republican congressman, who was reelected with more than 60% of the vote, thought he’d convene a friendly little conversation at a town hall. Hundreds of hostile constituents showed up, and after failing to respond adequately to their concerns, he had to have a police escort on his way out. One woman, who has never been politically active before, is quoted saying something like, “Apparently, this is now what I do on weekends.” And, apparently, these are being organized across the country.

So two takeaways:

First, this is happening in Republican districts. There’s a lot of criticism of the left—and frankly a lot of self-flagellating criticism on the left—about how we’re in a bubble, we’re only speaking to ourselves, and so forth. These types of events are happening in Republican districts, sometimes in Republican states. Criticize away, but don’t let your lefty angst blind you to the great organizing that is actually happening in these areas.

Second, also pay attention to all these people who were previously apolitical or not involved who are now getting involved. I’m seeing this everywhere, sometimes with people I know personally. This is not a movement of the usual suspects. People are changing right before our eyes: not because they’re getting lectured to or talked at with the right political line, but because they’re acting, getting out there in the streets, and doing things and learning things while and through they’re doing them. That’s what matters.

7.

Apparently,

Establishment Democrats have been surprised by the longevity and ferocity of grassroots opposition to President Trump…

Longevity? The man has been in office for exactly 20 days.  I guess neoliberalism has fucked with the time horizon of these people more than I realized.

8.

Back in the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher took stock of her party’s failure at the polls, took a close look at the opposition’s successes, and came to a realization: “The other side have got an ideology. We must have one as well.”

Nancy Pelosi? Not so much.

Pelosi, asked if Dems will face primaries the way the GOP did from Tea Party:

“We don’t have a party orthodoxy. They are ideological.”

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) February 9, 2017

9.

It still amazes me, when you consider how massive the racial wealth gap is in this country, that Hillary Clinton managed to present herself in the primary as the candidate concerned with racial equality while simultaneously claiming, “Not everything is about an economic theory.”

I hope, the next time we have to fight this fight on the left, people realize that when a candidate is saying something like that, she’s not signaling an intention to confront racial inequality. She’s actually telling you, in no uncertain terms, that she won’t.

10.

About a month ago, we were hearing a lot about how the problem with democracy is that it mobilizes the masses, who then threaten democracy by making it difficult for elites to preserve liberal principles like the rule of law and the integrity of institutions. Now we’re seeing that it may be those very masses who actually save democracy and those liberal principles.

No lawyering this thing to death: Conservatives and the courts, from Nixon to Bush to Trump

Denouncing the federal judge who put a nationwide stay on his Muslim ban, Trump recently tweeted this:

Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017

Picking up on how far-reaching Trump’s claim is, New York reporter Eric Levitz had this to say:

But we have already become so desensitized to our new president’s 140-character authoritarianism, the fact that Trump characterized the “court system” as a national-security threat did not qualify as headline news Monday morning.

We should not gloss over this. This was not merely an intemperate tweet. It was the president instructing the American people to view the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil as an indictment of the judiciary….

This is an argument for allowing our fear of terrorism to overwhelm our commitment to the rule of law — a line of reasoning that poses a far greater threat to the American form of government and way of life than any closeted-jihadist refugee ever could.

I’m not sure we have become so desensitized to this authoritarianism, but if we have, I don’t think our analysis can begin and end with Trump. For what Trump says here, however outrageous, is a continuation, or at least an intensification, of a long-standing conservative argument that the court system in the United States is one of the great threats to security, domestic and national. Beginning with the Nixon Administration, which saw liberal judges and Supreme Court justices as coddling criminals with their talk of constitutional rights, the conservative denunciation of the courts and judges and lawyers as a fundamental threat to the nation’s safety reached a crescendo after 9/11.

We often forget—particularly now, with Trump in charge—just how ferocious was the Bush-era assault on the very idea of law, the Constitution, lawyers and judges. John Ashcroft, Bush’s Attorney General, the highest law-enforcement officer in the land, said that legal rights were “weapons with which to kill Americans.” Orrin Hatch said that terrorists “would like nothing more than the opportunity to use all our traditional due protections to drag out the proceedings.”

That’s why, after 9/11, Bush sought to dramatize how hard and how ruthlessly he would fight terrorism by pounding the table with this promise: “No yielding. No equivocation. No lawyering this thing to death.” And why Ashcroft mocked liberals who thought the US government should read Al Qaeda their “Miranda rights, hire a flamboyant defense lawyer, bring them back to the United States to create a new cable network of Osama TV.”

That’s why also Antonin Scalia, who I called “the Donald Trump of the Supreme Court,” declared before his death his love of the television show 24, with its tough guy terrorism-fighter Jack Bauer. 24 showed how threatening the liberal conceit of the rule of law and the fetish of the Constitution was to basic security:

Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles….He saved hundreds of thousands of lives…Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? You have the right to a jury trail? Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so. So the question is really whether we really believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes?

It’s true that Bush and his allies didn’t denounce the courts as a whole. But that’s probably because the courts mostly cooperated with Bush’s early dictates. Indeed, it wasn’t until the Hamdi decision—after the Iraq War had started to south—that the Supreme Court began to put a (limited) check on the Bush Administration’s expansive claims about what national security entitled it to do.

Trump, no doubt, is more extreme in this assault than Bush and his allies were. But that’s because, so far, he’s losing, and it is a difference of degree rather than kind.

Peggy Noonan Speaks Truth: The Circuits Are Overloaded

Peggy Noonan’s in the Wall Street Journal today with a genuine and useful insight:

Mr. Trump has overloaded all circuits. Everything is too charged, with sparks and small shocks all over. “Nothing feels stable,” I mused to a longtime Washington media figure at a dinner the night before the Prayer Breakfast. “Nothing is stable,” she replied.

Noonan captures here, I think, a truth about the current moment, particularly how it feels. Every night, my wife and I look at each other and ask, How long can this go on. This constant sense of disruption, this sense that every day is a decade, a minute a year.

But stepping back from the feeling of the moment to its politics, I think Noonan is also revealing a truth in spite of herself. For while she insists on distinguishing a conservatism of prudence and care, of caution and slowness, the truth is conservatism is almost always hostile to stability, and often favors overloading all circuits, making everything feel charged.

But it does so—or at least can get away with doing so—in a very specific context: when it is encountering an insurgent movement from below that threatens to overturn long established relations of authority and power. At such moments, rhyme and reason coincide. At such moments, the “generous wildness of Quixotism,” as Burke put it, “the madness of the wise” can seem like the greatest sobriety of all. At such moments, audacity can appear in the cover of prudence, wildness in the garb of caution and care. (Noonan need only read some of the speeches of her hero, Ronald Reagan, to see how skillfully he was able to walk this fine line.)

What Trump is running up against is the fact that we don’t live in such a moment, and the reason we don’t is because the conservative movement has been so successful in defeating the left.

For decades, Trump’s base was ginned up on this lethal cocktail of strategic madness and intelligent wildness, but now it’s late, and the bar is closed. The left has been crushed—even our new progressive insurgencies have a long long way to go before they can generate the kind of panicked genius and intelligent anxiety that traditionally provoke the right—and Quixotism now seems, well, Quixotic; madness, mad.

What was once strategy is now surplus.

And that’s why Peggy Noonan feels like the circuits are overloaded: They are.

If you’re willing to support a boycott of US academic conferences over Trump’s ban, why not BDS?

Over 6,000 academics across the world have announced that they will boycott any academic conference held in the US until Trump’s travel ban—on refugees, and on men and women from seven Muslim-majority countries—is lifted. This has drawn widespread and mostly positive attention in the media. Even the more critical responses have been self-questioning and exploratory rather than hostile and negative.

This is all to the good and as it should be.

It should also answer what I always found to be one of the stranger critique of BDS: namely, people ask me and other supporters of BDS, if you think Israel is so bad, why don’t you support a boycott of the US? As if proponents of BDS like myself would suddenly, in the face of an academic boycott of the US, get worked up into a self-righteous defensive lather on behalf of American academe.

But let me push the comparison a little further because I see that a lot of people who support this type of boycott of US academic conferences over the Trump refugee/Muslim ban drawing a line against the wider academic boycott of Israel. (Truth be told, most of these folks wouldn’t even support a more limited type of boycott, in the case of Israel, of the sort that Trump’s ban has provoked.)

What these folks on social media say is this: This type of boycott of US academic conferences is more contingent and small-scale. It’s not a boycott of US academia tout court or of the US as a whole. And the reason it’s more limited is that it recognizes that the action that provoked this limited boycott—Trump’s refugee/Muslim ban—is itself a contingent feature of the American polity, specific to one presidency. It is not a feature of the American whole. It acknowledges that the majority of the people voted against Trump and that the ban might one day, perhaps even soon, be overturned.

But doesn’t that argument provide the very reasons for why we should undertake a more comprehensive academic boycott of the State of Israel?

Since its founding, Israel has had a ban on the return of Palestinian refugees—initially, some six to seven hundred thousand; now, in the millions—to the State of Israel. The older among these refugees are not seeking admission to a new home; they are seeking a return to their original home. That is not a contingent feature of the State of Israel, peculiar to one bad hombre like Netanyahu, opposed by the great majority. That is a permanent feature of the State of Israel, constitutive of its founding and identity as a Jewish state, enforced by politicians and state officials across the political spectrum for nearly seven decades now.

Wouldn’t the simplest rules of proportionality suggest that if you support a boycott of conferences held in the US—or don’t think it’s a bad thing—because of the Trump travel ban that a far more comprehensive academic boycott of the State of Israel is warranted? Or at least should be considered a legitimate topic of rational debate?