Corey Robin's Blog, page 46

Robert Kagan, Donald Trump, and the Liberal Imagination

Robert Kagan has an oped on Donald Trump in yesterday’s Washington Post. It’s called “This is how fascism comes to America.”

It’s got the liberal chattering classes chattering. It blames Trump on democracy and the mob, it cites Tocqueville, it gives a hand job to the Framers. For the liberal imagination, it’s the equivalent of a great massage.

And it’s got critics on the left clucking. Kagan, you see, is a neocon who supported the Iraq War, so he’s not above suspicion as a commentator on the American way of violence.

But if you say that, liberals will cry, Ad hominem!

So let’s pay closer attention to what Kagan says, while being mindful of who he is. The two points, as we’ll see, are not unrelated.

Trump, says Kagan, is not “a normal political candidate.” His appeal has nothing to do with “policy or ideology.” It has little to do with the economic anxieties of the middle class. So what is it about? According to Kagan:

What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence.

This, remember, is what makes Trump not a normal political candidate. It’s what makes him a candidate whose appeal and program “has transcended the party that produced him.”

What’s interesting about that claim is that it describes, almost to a tee, the sensibility of the extended circle of intellectuals, academics, think tankers, government officials, and journalists, radiating out of the inner circle of Robert Kagan and William Kristol, who not only pushed for the Iraq War and the War on Terror but who pushed for these violent adventures with arguments that he, Kagan, claims are peculiar to Donald Trump.

Many forget just how contemptuous these neoconservatives were about the America that emerged victorious from the Cold War, but I haven’t. For the neoconservatives, the America of Bill Clinton was a horror. In that “that age of peace and prosperity,” David Brooks would write after 9/11, “the top sitcom was Seinfeld, a show about nothing.”

The major problem of post-Cold War America was precisely that it was too consumed by “the niceties of democratic culture.” In an influential manifesto, Donald and Frederick Kagan (Robert Kagan’s father and brother) wrote—their pens dripping with bitter irony—that “the happy international situation that emerged in 1991” was “characterized by the spread of democracy, free trade, and peace.” Such a situation was “congenial to America,” with its love of “domestic comfort.”

Added Brooks: “The striking thing about the 1990s zeitgeist was the presumption of harmony. The era was shaped by the idea that there were no fundamental conflicts anymore.” Fellow traveler Robert Kaplan went even further. In The Coming Anarchy, he could barely restrain his criticism of the “healthy, well-fed” men and women of “bourgeois society.” Their love of “material possessions,” he concluded, “encourage docility” and a “lack of imagination.”

Many of these writers were equally contemptuous of the Republican Party, as Gary Dorrien documented in his Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana. Bill Kristol, Kagan’s co-conspirator and frequent co-author, derided the “brain-dead Republican Party” of the 1990s. Borrowing the language of the antiwar left of the 1960s, he called for “one, two many insurrections” against a party whose motto was “No agenda. No fireworks. No nothing.” He lambasted the “fearful complacency” that “characterizes the mood of the American establishment today.”

During the 2000 election, Kagan heaped criticism on the GOP frontrunner and eventual presidential candidate. He complained that George W. Bush’s support for the Kosovo War was “hedged, careful.” Once Bush was elected, he and Kristol complained that Bush “campaigned more as an Eisenhower than as a Reagan. Believing Americans did not want radical changes, either at home or abroad, he proposed none.” Bush was too solicitous of the “soccer moms,” whom he didn’t want to “unnerve.”

Lest we think this was a temporary blast at the virtues of prudence and restraint (or women) that Kagan now claims to champion against the adventurer Donald Trump, Kagan would repeat the same charges against Colin Powell, once he was installed as Bush’s Secretary of State. Powell liked “diplomatic pressure” and “coalition building.” That was his fatal flaw, a theme Kagan returned to ten days later, when he teamed up with Kristol to urge Bush not to listen to his secretary of state. Because Powell “was preoccupied with coalitions,” they claimed, he sought to avoid war with Saddam in 1991 and then refused to march to Baghdad to finish the job. It was his obsession with “compromises” that got the US into trouble then and would get the country into trouble now. Best to ignore his “timidity disguised as prudence.”

But the biggest charge Kagan and Kristol could think of to leverage against George W. Bush during the 2000 election was simply that he didn’t scare people enough.

Reagan in 1980 scared people, to the point where he had to spend the last few weeks of his campaign assuring everyone he did not intend to blow the whole world to pieces. Bush’s campaign from the beginning was designed not to scare anyone, anywhere, on any issue.

Well, now we’ve got a candidate who scares the shit out of people, including Robert Kagan. And what is Kagan’s response?

This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities,…

That “not with jackboots and salutes” is convenient. It severs any connection between the song of war Kagan has been singing all these years—with its descant of hostility to restraint, compromise, coalition, and prudence—and Trump’s candidacy. It refuses the possibility that Trump’s domestic belligerence is the transposition of Kagan’s international belligerence, that Trump’s “aura of crude strength and machismo” would appeal to a country that had achieved such untrammeled and uncontested mega-power, as Kagan once kvelled, that its citizens could be rightly be characterized as hailing from militaristic Mars. Small powers, Kagan sneered, like the constraint of an international order because its protects them; great powers, he cheered, “often fear rules that may constrain them.” Likewise the would-be leaders and citizens of those great powers.

It makes perfect sense for Kagan to opt for this explanation of Trump. Why liberals, many of whom opposed the Iraq War (though not the War on Terror), would applaud him, well, that’s a different story.

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Ratner, 1943-2016

This a terrible loss.

Michael Ratner, the president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, died today in New York City. For the past four decades he has been a leading champion of human and civil rights, from leading the fight to close Guantánamo to representing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to holding torturers accountable, at home and abroad.

Michael was a prince. Whenever we had a civil liberties crisis at Brooklyn College—which is to say, all the time: a former student held on material support for terrorism charges; an adjunct fired for his views on the Middle East; a panel discussion that almost got canceled because of threats from politicians—I’d email Michael. No matter where he was (one time, I remember, he responded to me from Oaxaca), or what he was doing, he was ever ready, available, and willing to help.

It did not go unnoticed, not to me at any rate, that he was helping out a non-elite institution, where he wouldn’t get a lot of headlines (though somehow we wound up getting those, too!) but would be doing a lot of good.

When I think on the fact that mine was but one of hundreds, if not thousands, of emails that he was getting every day—and that I was competing with the many high-profile causes that Michael was identified with—I’m even more in awe.

He was a fighter’s fighter. But always buoyant. A happy warrior.

Conservatism’s Constitutional Agenda

Since the 1990s, legal conservatives have been engaged in a two-front war against legal liberalism.

Throughout the twentieth century, the Commerce Clause was the primary constitutional instrument of American liberalism. It underwrote the New Deal, the right to organize unions, the Civil Rights Act, and anti-discrimination in the workplace. Beginning in the 1990s, conservatives have beaten back the Commerce Clause. Where legal liberals expanded the meaning of commerce to include not only the entirety of the economy but also what affected that economy—whether it be racial segregation, violence against women, or handgun possession near schools—legal conservatives have sought to radically restrict the meaning of commerce to, in some cases, simple trade or “exchange for value.” In taking away this constitutional instrument from American liberalism, legal conservatives seek to restrict the ability of the government to regulate or involve itself in the economy as it had under the New Deal.

In tandem with this effort to restrict the meaning of commerce, legal conservatives have radically sought to expand the First Amendment protections of commercial speech. Commercial speech—think advertising, though it extends far beyond advertising—was initially deemed by the Court not to be worthy of First Amendment protection. Then, in the 1970s, it acquired some First Amendment protection on the grounds that consumers were entitled to receive information about products of interest and concern to them. This, it should be noted, was an argument pioneered by liberals on the Supreme Court; Justice Rehnquist, the Court’s staunchest conservative, resisted that move. More recently, however, conservatives have discovered the utility of the argument. If commercial transactions can be re-described as either modes of speech or involving significant elements of speech—and, when you think about it, what commercial transaction does not involve speech?—and if that speech is deserving of First Amendment protection, the state’s ability to regulate virtually every part of the economy will be radically restricted.

That, in a nutshell, is the conservative constitutional agenda against the liberal state: restrict the meaning of commerce and the scope of the Commerce Clause, expand the meaning of commercial speech and the scope of the First Amendment’s protections.

Was Carl Schmitt Right After All?

Since I came online, I’ve been involved in or watched a lot of fights and really bitter campaigns. Over Israel/Palestine, neoliberalism (not the recent tempest in a teacup but the great neoliberalism wars of 2011), Charlie Hebdo, campus speech codes, labor unions and Wisconsin (that was fun!), Occupy, Jacobinghazi, libertarianism. Not just fights where the obvious suspects lined up on the obvious sides but where friends took opposite positions or desperately (and unsuccessfully) tried to avoid taking a position at all—if for no other reason than to avoid alienating someone they cared about.

But nothing I’ve seen online (this is entirely impressionistic) has been as divisive, acrimonious, emotional, as the Clinton/Sanders race. Not just among partisans of the two candidates but also among leftists who reject the entire premise of this intra-Democratic contest.

It makes me wonder whether Carl Schmitt wasn’t right after all:

The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.

In political theory, we often take that “political” to be a free-floating site or signifier. The political need not be located at the level of the state or involve government at all; it is merely the force field of this antagonism.

But for all our fancy talk about “the political,” it may be the most old-fashioned form of electoral politics that rouses the “most intense and extreme antagonism.” It may be this oh-so-familiar, almost pedestrian contest for state power that is indeed the site of the political.

Respect for Three Administrators at Brooklyn College

I spend virtually all of my time here bashing CUNY administrators, so I feel it incumbent upon me to acknowledge their contributions when they come. As it happens, this year Brooklyn College is going to be losing three administrators whom I’ve come to have a great deal of respect for: Karen Gould, our president; Natalie Mason-Kinsey, our Director of Diversity and Equity Programs; and Mel Pipe, our Acting Assistant Provost.

I’ve known Mel as both a fellow member of the faculty—she was professor and chair of psychology—and as the Acting Assistant Provost. What I really appreciated about her was her steadfast dedication to excellence and professionalism. Over the years, Mel has set a high standard of expectations for other chairs like myself, as well as for the faculty, and she worked tirelessly, and skillfully, in this past year as acting assistant provost to get Brooklyn College through a series of hoops.

I’ve worked with Natalie on several faculty searches and have consulted her on other matters. At every step of the way, she managed to balance the bureaucracy’s almost pathological need for documentation and pseudo-proceduralism with excellent judgment and common sense. I’ve seldom met someone at CUNY who is as on top of their game as Natalie is. I don’t think I ever was in a meeting or phone conversation with her where she wasn’t completely prepared, totally in command of the facts, ready to give sage advice, and one step ahead of me. She was no-nonsense, tough, and also extraordinarily gracious and professional. Working with her was a joy.

Karen and I have tangled over many issues. We’ve disagreed more than we’ve agreed. We’ve had some very heated conversations. But on a couple of key issues—some public, some not so public—she showed tremendous courage and determination, taking stands that were not only the right thing to do but that also tangibly improved life on campus. Even though there are mounting pressures on college presidents to remove themselves from the on-the-ground needs of the faculty and students, I found Karen to be willing, when she felt the issue warranted, to dig in and commit herself in ways I’ve never seen other college or university presidents do. Again, we disagreed about a great many things, but in academia, talk is cheap. Professors like to take stands and positions. Karen did more than that: she took risks, she made sacrifices, often at great cost to her reputation and peace of mind, and no amount of disagreement I might have with her decisions can diminish the respect and admiration I have for that.

These three women made life better—in some critical respects—at Brooklyn College. I’ll be sorry to see them go.

If Donald Trump is the George McGovern of the GOP, what does that make Hillary Clinton?

I’ve been saying for months that Donald Trump is the George McGovern of the GOP, the fractious leader who so alienated the elders of his party that they deserted him in droves, handing the election to his opponent. We’re already seeing the signs.

From Talking Points Memo:

A former aide to John McCain, who served both as the Arizona senator’s chief of staff and a senior advisor on his 2008 presidential campaign, made clear Tuesday that he would vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the general election.

“I’m with her,” Mark Salter tweeted, referring to Clinton’s campaign slogan, after noting the likely nomination of Trump, “a guy who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it’s on the level.”

From the Associated Press:

Already, aides say, a number of Republicans have privately told Clinton and her team they plan to break party ranks and support her as soon as Trump formally captures his party’s nomination.

“We have an informed understanding that we could have the potential to expect support from not just Democrats and independents, but Republicans, too,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. “There’s a time and place for that support to make itself known.”

…

Clinton has begun casting her candidacy in recent days as a cry to unify a divided country. After a series of victories last week, which all but ensured she will capture her party’s nomination, Clinton called on Democrats, independents and what she called “thoughtful Republicans” to back her bid.

Guy Cecil, chief strategist of Priorities USA Action, the super PAC backing her campaign, echoed that language Tuesday night, calling on “Democrats, independents and reasonable Republicans” to reject Trump’s “outdated ideas.”

While a vocal segment of the Republican Party has denounced Trump, few have been willing to go as far as saying they would back Clinton in the fall.

Ben Howe, a Republican strategist who has worked for Cruz, said he’d be actively working against Trump — a decision he recognizes means backing Clinton.

“Anything right now that would allow Donald Trump to become president is the wrong move, so the de facto result is that Hillary would win,” he said. “I don’t agree with Hillary Clinton. What I think is Hillary Clinton is more honest than Trump, and that’s saying a lot.”

Endorsements from prominent GOP backers could potentially pave the way for Republican voters to back Clinton, particularly woman.

In the same way that McGovern prompted an exodus from the Democratic Party—most visibly and prominently among elites, but also among rank-and-filers—so will Trump. Indeed, it has already begun. And it will only gain strength in the coming months.

But if Trump is the McGovern of the Republicans, what does that make Hillary Clinton? As the Associated Press notes:

There is some irony in Clinton playing the role of a unifier: She’s long been one of the most divisive figures in American politics. But while 55 percent of Americans said they had a negative opinion of Clinton in an Associated Press-GfK poll released last month, 69 percent said the same of Trump.

The same was true of Richard Nixon. Long before Watergate, Cambodia, and the Plumbers, Nixon was widely viewed, and loathed, as one of the most divisive figures in American politics. People forget, but Nixon had been on the front lines—and in the headlines—of partisan warfare since his days on HUAC. Indeed, if there is any precedent for today’s conservative hatred of Hillary, it is yesterday’s liberal hatred of Tricky Dick.

That moniker raises another parallel.

Not unlike Clinton, Nixon had trouble in the authenticity department.

In his 1960 Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?, Arthur Schlesinger devoted several pages to the proposition that Nixon was perhaps the most inauthentic man in American politics. The book features Evelyn Houston claiming that Nixon suffered from a “pervasive and alchemic falsity,” that Nixon had “a veritable Midas touch for making ersatz of the real.” Schlesinger even resorts to David Riesman’s famous theory of the “other-directed man” to explain Nixon’s being “obsessed with appearances rather than the reality of things, obsessed above all with his own appearance, his own image, seeking reassurance through winning, but never knowing why he is so made to win or what he will do with his victory.” Sound familiar?

In fairness to Clinton—and Nixon—such charges of inauthenticity and shiftiness often dog what Steve Skowronek calls “preemptive” presidencies. That is, presidents who are opposed, at least in a partisan sense (ideologically, they are more ambivalent and ambiguous), to the dominant, still-resilient regime. (In Clinton’s case, the regime is Ronald Reagan’s.) Classic trimmers, these are presidents who must nip and tuck, constantly maneuvering between a restive base that wants to see an overthrow of the dominant regime and an opposition that is still strong enough to call the shots. These are presidents who never make anyone happy, least of all their own supporters. That is why, in their moments of crisis, they often find themselves deserted, without any friends or allies. That is also why I don’t envy Clinton, who’s about to face one of the biggest shitstorms of her already shitstorm-ridden career, once she wins the election in November. (Yes, if she wins the nomination, which it seems she will, she’ll most definitely win the election.)

Despite all these deficits, Nixon was able to repackage himself in 1972—with the aid of an extraordinarily unpopular opponent, who couldn’t muster the support of his own party (sound familiar), and a robust economy—as the great unifier. Indeed, he went on to defeat McGovern in one of the all-time greatest landslides in American history.

And we all know how that ended. As I said, I don’t envy Clinton.

A final word from the pages of history: There’s going to be an awful lot of Clinton liberals trying to present Clinton’s candidacy as the second coming of the Popular Front, that hoary moment in progressive history when all the forces of the good and the gallant on the left gathered together to defeat the forces of fascism on the right.

However you cast your ballot in November, please remember this: Léon Blum was and ran as a Socialist, and the Popular Front was not simply about defeating fascism, but about defeating fascism through socialism.

“He who does not wish to speak of capitalism,” Max Horkheimer famously said, “should also remain silent about fascism.” I’m not exactly sure how that translates into the present moment, but of this I am certain: Don’t talk about Clinton and the Popular Front in the same breath.

What did we learn today?

What did we learn today?

Clinton’s big money supporters are trying to kill single payer in Colorado. Her possible VP pick has “a more nuanced position on abortion than many liberals.” John McCain’s right-hand man declared, literally, “I’m with her.” And the Jewish socialist from Brooklyn just won the Indiana primary.

All the rest is commentary.

Today, I voted to authorize my union at CUNY to call a strike

This semester, I’m teaching our department capstone seminar, on the classics of political economy, in which students are expected to write a lengthy piece of original research.

It’s an intense process for the students. We start with a one- to two-page précis. The students then write a detailed outline of the paper. Then they submit a rough draft (I just got the rough drafts yesterday and have begun reading them today). And then the final draft, which is due in a few weeks.

My goal is twofold: first, to get the students to really dig into a topic (I’ve written about that here); second, to teach the students that old truism that all writing is just rewriting. I think the fancy ed folks like to call that “iterative writing” (google that phrase and you get 16.2 million results). But to me, it’s just writing. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you snake oil.

This kind of teaching, that kind of intensive feedback, of going over sentence after sentence, is a lot of work. It can be grueling and challenging for the student. I remember last semester, in a different class, where we also do rough drafts, writing on the student’s paper (she’s a recent immigrant from Nigeria), after she had submitted multiple drafts, this:

This is an exemplary sentence. Do you see how clear and concrete it is? How perfect and precise its attack? It says what it needs to say and, then, moves on. The fact that you had to carve this out of so many drafts is a testament to how hard won such a sentence is. This is how you always want to be writing.

This kind of work can also be challenging for the professor. But it’s work we have to do. It’s our payback, our part of the social contract. Mr. Damon did it for me in high school; I have to do it now for my students.

I don’t mind doing it. But I do mind when the institution that employs me takes that work for granted. And CUNY—and behind CUNY, Governor Cuomo and the New York State Legislature—has been taking that work for granted.

Since 2009. That was the last time we got a raise. The last time. Our union has been struggling to negotiate a contract since then. The best our chancellor can do is to offer us a pay cut. Our teaching loads are high: at the senior colleges, we teach 4/3; at the junior colleges, it’s 5/4. And the best the chancellor can do is offer us a pay cut.

Make no mistake about it: This isn’t just an assault on the work I do as a professor; this is an assault on our students. Like I said, Mr. Damon did this work with me in the fancy Westchester suburb that I grew up in, where the Clintons now live. Sheldon Wolin and John Murrin and Lawrence Stone did it with me at Princeton, where I was an undergraduate. But our society doesn’t want the kids I teach to get that education. So it pays me to give them less than I got. Not because they’re any less smart or talented than I was when I was their age. But simply because they’re not white, or wealthy, or privileged, the way I was when I was their age.

We have two choices: I can give those students less, or CUNY can pay me to give them more.

Today, I voted for the second option. I voted to authorize my union to call a strike or some other job action if the union’s leadership decides, after exhausting all the possibilities at the negotiating table, that a job action or strike is necessary. I joined thousands of my co-workers who have pledged to do the same.

I didn’t do it lightly. I’ve been on strike before; it’s no picnic. Not for the people who teach, not for their students.

But, as the song says, something’s gotta give. And it’s not going to be me.

Daniel Aaron, 1912-2016

Daniel Aaron, the literary scholar, has died.

Though Aaron was one of the last of the greats who made American midcentury letters what it was, I only truly came to his work (after dipping in and out of it for years) recently. This past summer, in fact. I was preparing for my talk on public intellectuals, so I read Writers on the Left. I thought I knew the broad outlines of American writers and the left in the first half of the twentieth century. Ten pages into the book, I realized I didn’t know anything.

I remember long rides on the subway, from Coney to Forest Hills and back, taking notes on the back pages of the book. I felt like I was in a race against time: the pages were crumbling apart, as was the binding, and all I could do was write faster and more sparingly, hoping the book wouldn’t come undone by my marginalia.

I also remember feverishly texting friends—with my primitive phone, that’s all I could do on the subway—about some nugget I found in Aaron’s book: a tidbit for Jason Frank about Whitman being the most translated American writer of the Russian Revolution (am I misremembering this?), another tidbit on the Patterson silk workers’ strike for Alex Gourevitch, text after text about the bloody crossroads of literature and politics.

There are fastidious works of scholarship, and there are intellectual adventures. Aaron’s book was both.

John C. Calhoun at Yale

Part of the problem with Yale’s position in the is the assumption that John C. Calhoun’s sins are exhausted by the institution of slavery, that his crimes belong to the first half of the 19th century.

Yale President Peter Salovey’s recent email message about this controversy, in which he affirms Yale’s decision to keep the name “Calhoun College,” constantly invokes the terms “slavery”, “history,” “reminder,” and “past.”

Calhoun’s real contribution to the canon of American evil, however, is not as a defender of slavery but as a theorist of white supremacy. His was less the voice of a dying institution than a vision of the future that was only just being born.

Nearly a century before DuBois coined the notion of the “psychological wage,” Calhoun envisioned racism as a way of cleaving the American polity in two, of eliding the divisions of class by emphasizing the divisions of race, of folding class into race:

With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

To hear in this statement a voice of the past is to miss all the ways in which Calhoun was part of a theoretical avant-garde, whose labors would come to fruition only after slavery was abolished and would persist into our own time as well.