Corey Robin's Blog, page 48

Upcoming Talks on Hannah Arendt and Clarence Thomas

I remember reading once, somewhere, that when Amos Oz was a child, it took his neurotic parents six months to prepare for a trip to the pharmacy, so taxed were they by the idea of an outing. I feel like I’ve become those parents. Even so, I seem to be taking three trips in the coming ten days to give three talks. If you’re around at any of these places, stop by and say hello.

On Friday, April 8, at 3:30 pm, I’ll be delivering the Somers Lecture at Georgia State University. The topic is “White State, Black Market: What Clarence Thomas Sees in Capitalism.” Location is 25 Park Place, Room 2150, in Atlanta.

On Tuesday, April 12, at 12:15, I’ll be speaking in the Department of History at Cornell University. The topic is “Eichmann in Jerusalem, Three Readings: Hobbesian, Kantian, Arendtian.” Location is KG70 Klarman Hall on the Cornell campus in Ithaca.

On Saturday, April 16, at 3:15, I’ll be speaking on a panel at a conference, “Progressive/Conservative: A Common Ground Summit,” at Grand Valley State University. My topic is, again, Clarence Thomas and capitalism. Location is the Charles Loosemore Auditorium, 401 Fulton Street W, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

 

Homo Politicus ≠ Homo Wonkus

I’m always amused by the bien pensant recoil at politicians who don’t have Kennedy School-level mastery of policy details. You’d think the last half-century of American politics hadn’t seen candidates like Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, or Al Gore, wonks all who knew more about policy than your average PhD, yet whose intimacy with the arcana of state was somehow insufficient to propel them to—or keep them in—the White House. Or Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, whose relationship to policy details was, how shall we say?, attenuated, yet who nevertheless managed to completely rearrange the political furniture of our lives. Maybe, just maybe, mastery of policy detail does not a successful political actor make. And if you think Reagan or Bush would have been less disastrous as presidents if they knew the details of what they were doing, I suggest you pick up any introductory text on the workings of political ideology. To understand theirs—and yours.

As it turned out, Bernie Sanders really didn’t botch that interview with Daily News, which has prompted this latest wave of policy tut-tutting in the media. And his answers about Dodd-Frank and banking regulation were basically right. That said, he does seem to be relatively clueless about the transhistorically significant fact that New Yorkers pay for their subway rides with swipe cards rather than tokens.

True confession: Sometimes I feel bad for Hillary Clinton

Went to Russ & Daughters early this morning to pick up some smoked fish.

Riding back on the F train, I got engrossed in this piece in the LRB about, among other things, the relationship between Margot Asquith—about whom the only thing I had previously known was that she supposedly once said to Jean Harlow, after Harlow kept incorrectly pronouncing the “t” in Margot, “No, no, Jean. The ‘t’ is silent, as in Harlow.”—and Virginia Woolf.

After Woolf killed herself, Asquith wrote:

When I last wrote to her I felt lonely and depressed. I told her that at one time I was arrogant enough to think that I was the hostess at the festival of life, but that now I was not even a guest, and there was no ‘festival.’ I added that when I died I hoped she would write my obituary notice in The Times, as that might make me famous.

And I just sat there, feeling intensely moved by how sad a statement that was. Here was a woman of wit and intelligence, thwarted by constraints internal and external, constraints too formidable to overcome. Earlier in her life Asquith had written in her diary:

When I read of Parnell or Lasalle or smaller men who have arrested attention, I feel full of envy, and wish I had been born a man. In a woman all this internal urging is a mistake; it leads to nothing and breaks loose in sharp utterances and passionate overthrows of conventionality.

Which made her friendship with Woolf all the more poignant, as the writer I was reading in the LRB pointed out:

Her [Asquith] own achievements, first as a waspish socialist socialite and later as an unsuitable political wife, seemed to confirm this as a bitter truth; but Virginia’s, now set out cleanly before her, showed that a woman’s genius, however embattled, could assert itself in lasting accomplishment.

I sat some more, lost in thought. Then I turned a few more pages, and stumbled across this piece by Terry Castle, one of my favorite writers, about going to a Silicon Valley fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.

Still thinking about Asquith, and all those wealthy women past, denied their place in the sun, I was prepared to feel sad for Clinton as well. True confession: I often feel sad for Clinton. I know it’s politics, and I’m a Sanders supporter, and I loathe everything Clinton stands for, and there’s no human right to be president of the United States. But, still, I find it hard sometimes not to empathize with someone possessing such obvious talent and ambition, doing everything right, yet finding the prize she seeks so elusive. Though this time, of course, she may get the prize, and my sads will be neither here nor there. Besides, pity can be an ugly emotion, and Clinton—a powerful agent in her own right, with plenty of accomplishments to be proud of—neither needs nor wants mine.

In any event, I know Castle to be too shrewd and funny a writer for this kind of sentimentality. I switched gears.

I read the first couple of paragraphs, and found myself laughing out loud. Then, just as I was settling in to my new mood, the announcement came: 7th Avenue. My stop. Time to get off the train.

 

A Very Brief Intellectual Autobiography

Reading Samuel Freeman’s review of Roger Scruton in the latest NYRB, I had a mini-realization about my own work on conservatism, which features Scruton quite a bit.

In the mid-1970s, conservatism, which had previously been declared dead as an intellectual and political force, began to have a major impact on liberalism. Politically, you could see that influence in the slow, then sudden, retreat from traditional New Deal objectives, culminating in the election of Bill Clinton. What that meant was a massive turnaround on economic issues (deregulation, indifference to unions, galloping inequality) and a softer turnaround on social issues. While mainstream Democrats today are identified as staunch liberals on so-called social or moral issues like abortion and gay rights, the truth of the matter is that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they really beat a retreat on that front (not only on abortion but also, after an initial embrace by Clinton of gays and lesbians, on gay rights as well).

Among academics, particularly liberal political theorists, the impact of conservatism was equally strong. Where a generation of Rawlsian political theorists had cut their teeth on the economic questions of redistribution and the welfare state, suddenly the questions on the table had to do with how a liberal democracy can deal with intractable differences of religion and morality, whether and how men and women could argue over fundamental questions of “the good” rather than hide or subsume their disagreements under more seemingly neutral rules of “the right.”

You could see this shift most visibly in the Rawlsian turn toward political liberalism. In the earlier work, “difference” meant the Difference Principle, which was a Rawlsian rule about whether to accept economic inequalities in the polity and how they might be arranged. Now “difference” came to be associated with religious differences, deep disagreements over questions like sexual morality that liberals had previously thought belonged to the realm of private belief and practice.

It wasn’t just Rawlsians and liberals who felt the impact of this turn; so did more radical and left theorists, for whom questions of difference and deeper modes of pluralization began to loom large.

One of the reasons I wrote my book on conservatism, I now realize in retrospect, was not to contest these Rawlsian or more radical arguments about difference and pluralization. It was instead to try and take a step back, to show how the landscape in which these liberal arguments were occurring had been shaped, deeply shaped, by conservatism, often in ways liberals did not understand. Where academic liberals and leftists had accepted the simple distinction between economic and social conservatives—as did I, for a very long time—and had believed that the social conservatives were driven by moral questions, I wanted to show that conservatism was, yes, a deeply moral and ideological praxis, only that it rotated around a different set of principles from the ones liberals seemed to think the right held dear. The real axis of rotation, I claimed, was domination and hierarchy, particularly in the private realms of power, and it was that axis that united social conservatives, economic conservatives, and national security conservatives. (I had already begun to broach some of these questions of domination in my first book on fear, which tried to use the liberal interest in fear and emotion more generally as a way of inching the left toward a more robust engagement with questions of social domination in the family and the workplace, but since that was written in shadow of 9/11, it got little traction or play.)

To be clear: domination and hierarchy are not, to my mind, non-moral issues, neither for the left nor the right. They’re deeply moral. Only they are also part of a social and material practice. We cannot and should not separate the moral from the economic in conservatism any more than we would in socialism.

While I believe my account can help us understand conservatism across the ages, it would be nice to think that it is also suited to explain the right today, not only in the Age of Trump but also in the Age of Bernie. Increasingly, we’ve seen, these questions of social domination are coming to the fore. As the left begins to move into a position where it can not only get a clear view of its enemies but also to take aim at them—both the hard right revanchism of the GOP and the soft neoliberalism of the Democrats—my hope is that a generation of academic political theorists, who learned their trade against the backdrop of a mistaken view of conservatism, might now begin to see the conflicts of the day in a different light.

Indeed, judging from what I see among younger political theorists, I believe that turn has already begun.

In Bill Buckley’s apartment, there were trays of tissues and cigarettes

In Bill Buckley’s Park Avenue duplex—which seemed to take up almost an entire quarter of a city block—on every table and side table, by every chair, there were lovely, tiny silver trays, almost out of a dollhouse, each one containing tissues or cigarettes. On the walls, there were lots of portraits of his wife Pat.

What Donald Trump Can Learn From Frederick Douglass

As a scholar of conservatism, I’m finding this Trump-wants-to-punish-women-who-get-abortions moment fascinating. At its heart, I’ve argued, “conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.”

It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves….Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.

Though certainly hostile to women’s agency, Trump’s position recognizes it. He’s saying women make the choice to get an abortion, abortion is a crime, so do with women who get an abortion what we do with anyone who commits a crime: hold them accountable, punish them.

Trump’s detractors in the GOP refuse to recognize women’s agency. It’s the abortionist’s fault, they say! Hold the doctor accountable, not the poor unsuspecting women, who’s just an innocent victim of the doctor’s evil ways. (After much outcry, Trump seems now to have come around to this position.)

Seting aside the obvious politics of and maneuvering around this argument—the anti-abortion forces recognize what an electoral disaster Trump’s position is (as does he now, apparently) because they’ve been running from that position for decades—there’s some complicated stuff being worked out here about how to deal with the agency of a subordinate class, particularly when that class is insubordinate, when it defies your will.

If the goal is simply to constrain the agency of the subordinate class, the simplest thing to do is to punish the disobedient so that she doesn’t act disobediently again. But in doing so, you implicitly recognize her agency, particularly if your punishment is tied to a set of laws and rules you expect her to learn. And then you run into the problem that Frederick Douglass so shrewdly made a muchness of in his attack on the inconsistencies of the slaveholder’s position:

Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write.

If the goal is not simply to constrain the agency of the subordinate class, but to deny it altogether, the far better move is not to hold the disobedient accountable all but instead to blame her disobedience on some external force: Satan, the serpent, the doctor. She then becomes a vessel, the implement of another’s will (preferably a man’s will), which is precisely what so many in the conservative movement want women to be.

On a related note, it’s amazing to me how the anti-abortion crowd has managed to claim they are the inheritors of the abolitionist movement. Though the analogy is admittedly imperfect, if anyone has the right to the anti-slavery mantle, surely it is those who believe that women should not be compelled to have their bodies used against their will. There is a reason it’s called labor, after all.

The arc of neoliberalism is long, but it bends toward the rich

Neoliberals pitted the deserving poor against the undeserving poor in order to abolish welfare.

Neoliberals pitted third-world workers against American workers in order to pass NAFTA.

Neoliberals pit black Democrats against white Democrats in order to elect Hillary Clinton.

In each instance, neoliberals claim to be speaking on behalf of a group at the bottom or near bottom in order to pursue a politics that benefits those at the top.

The Bernie Sanders Moment: Brought to you by the generation that has no future

Last week I met with a group of ten interns at a magazine. The magazine runs periodic seminars where interns get to meet with a journalist, writer, intellectual, academic of their choosing. We talked about politics, writing, and so on. But in the course of our conversation, one startling social fact became plain. Although all of these young men and women had some combination of writerly dreams, none of them—not one—had any plan for, even an ambition of, a career. Not just in the economic sense but in the existential sense of a lifelong vocation or pursuit that might find some practical expression or social validation in the form of paid work. Not because they didn’t want a career but because there was no career to be wanted. And not just in journalism but in a great many industries.

The future was so uncertain, they said, the economy so broken, there simply was no point in devising a plan, much less trying to execute it. The best one could do, one of them said, was to take whatever came your way, without looking more than six months ahead of you.

They even dreamed of the Chilean example, where an activist a few years ago burned what he claimed was $500 million in student debt. Sadly, they pointed out, that option wasn’t available in the US, where all of the debt is up in the cloud. (How strange, I thought to myself: once upon a time, utopian philosophers had their heads in the clouds; that was where they found a better world. Now it is the most dreary and repressive forces of society—drones, surveillance cameras, debt collectors—that take up residence there, ruling us from their underworld in the sky.)

I obviously had some sense of this millennial experience of futurelessness from reading newspapers and magazines, and have even written about it myself. But still, it was jarring to be confronted with it, to hear a dispatch from a generation that was so completely different from my own. (Perhaps the single most important marker of the difference between Gen Xers like myself and the millennials  is that we thought we could make a career; if we didn’t, it was because we had chosen not to.)

For a moment, my mind drifted back to those reports of Edmund Wilson from 1930-1931, first gathered in The American Jitters and, later, in The American Earthquake. There, the sense of vertigo is palpable, as the economic bottom suddenly drops out from everyone. All of society is shocked into a catatonia of mass unemployment and systemic deprivation, interrupted by periodic fits of anxiety and explosions of violence.

But then I was snapped back to today’s world, where there’s no shock. For the last 40 years, we’ve been preparing for this generation without a future. We’ve weaned and fed them on the idea that life doesn’t get better, that there are no plans to be made, no futures to be had. So that when that reality actually hits, when they inherit the world they’ve now inherited, they’ve been readied for the nothing that lies ahead. There’s no shock of recognition, no violent recoil from the new. There’s just this slow descent into systemic immobility and unreliability.

Strangely, this is the generation that is now making the Bernie Sanders moment. Which, whatever else it may be, is a bid on the promise that the future can be better. Radically better. For the millennials, this is not a promise born from any economic experience. It is a purely political promise, distilled from the last decade and a half of failed protest against neoliberalism and austerity, and some strange phantom of socialism conjured from who knows where. Progress is an idea that has died a thousand deaths, none more permanent, it seemed, than the one it suffered at the hands of There Is No Alternative. Yet here it is, brought back to life by a generation that has the least reason to believe in it.

We desperately need a chronicler, or chroniclers, of this eruption, an army of Edmund Wilsons and Martha Gellhorns to send us news from the front, to give us the deep reports of the texture and feel, the sensibility, of this completely unexpected revolt of the new.

Historically, liberals and the Left have underestimated the Right. Today, they overestimate it.

I’m going to float a series of vast and quick historical generalizations in order to try and get at something that is distinctive about the present moment in US politics.

Beginning in Europe in the 19th century, liberalism has been engaged in an on-again, off-again, two-front war: against the right and against the left. Against the right’s revanchism and the left’s radicalism, liberalism has held itself up as the original Third Way. It is the reasonable and moderate alternative to the extremes, offering men and women the promises and profits of a capitalist, vaguely democratic, modernity but without its revolutionary perils and reactionary mystique.

Though it has on occasion entered into a more productive, albeit tension-filled, front with the left, liberalism has always been uneasy about the left. For a variety of reasons, among them a doubt about the left’s commitments to the rule of law, civil liberties, the norms and procedures of parliamentary democracy, and the institutions of the capitalist market. (Which is ironic since it was the left that historically fought hardest for civil liberties and the right to vote, but I digress.) Liberalism and the left thus have been either uneasy partners or outright antagonists.

While liberalism has often loathed the right, it has not always been sufficiently attuned to developments on the right. Its attentions are too often focused in the other direction. So fraught has been its relationship to the left, it has often ignored or overlooked the shape-shifting power of the right. Till it was too late.

The left has not been entirely blameless in this. It, too, has been engaged in a two-front war: against liberalism and the right. On the ground, and in the streets, the left has understood the power of the right, but up in the more rarefied precincts of political theory, intellectual debate, and elite party argument, the left has often, and catastrophically, construed liberalism to be its greatest and only enemy. Even at a moment like the present in the United States—when liberalism, at least as it has been historically understood in the United States, has been in abeyance, or at best, has played second fiddle—the left has tended to focus on the failures and betrayals of liberalism.

What liberalism and the left have in common, in other words, is an insufficient appreciation of the right. What made that lack of appreciation understandable, historically, was that the left—whether in the form of socialist parties, communist internationals, militant trade unions, social movements, and the like—had some real power and traction on the ground. It was understandable for liberals to be more focused upon—and fearful of—the left, which often seemed ready to march right over the liberal middle. So was it understandable for leftists to be more focused upon—and pissed off at—liberalism, which often seemed ready to betray the left.

But that is not the situation we are in right now. In fact, we haven’t been in that situation for some time.

Since the 1970s, virtually all the political momentum has been on the right. Three elections—of Richard Nixon in 1968, Ronald Reagan in 1980, and George W. Bush in 2000—mark the right’s long march to ascendance, with the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq War signifying its arrival at the peak.

As I have argued, both in my book and in various articles, that peak of power is a perilous position for the right (indeed, for any movement) to be in. From their apex of power, movements can only go in one direction. The only question is: What can they take with them, how much damage can they do, as they plummet from power?

Think of it this way: the landslide election of Lyndon B. Johnson marked the peak of Democratic Party liberalism. It was a moment when the Democrats were able to deliver on their most basic commitments (to the extent that they could): Medicare, civil rights, the War on Poverty. But it was also the moment, we now know, that liberalism and the Democrats began their precipitous descent. Likewise, on the other side, the election of George W. Bush. (Johnson and Bush, incidentally, are classic examples of what Steve Skowronek calls articulation presidents: they radically extend the existing regime’s commitments, but in the course of doing so, set the stage for shattering that regime.)

This does not mean that Republicans or conservatives can’t get elected now. Jimmy Carter got elected in 1976. But his presidency signaled not a resurgence of liberalism but its end: his deregulation was an early warning signal of the morphing of Democratic liberalism into Reaganite neoliberalism; his funding of the Salvadoran regime, building of the MX Missile, and support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, were the first act of Reagan’s Second Cold War. So will there be elections—perhaps one, maybe more—of Republicans and conservatives that signal not a resurgence of conservatism and the GOP but their end.

Donald Trump, I believe, is a symptom of that Republican free-fall. Should he be the nominee of the Republican Party—and I have every reason to believe that he will be—he will occupy the role, as I have argued, of George McGovern in the 1972 election.

And that is why I think all the concern—particularly among centrist liberals and some leftists—over the anti-Trump protests is so misplaced.

Writing at In These Times, David Moberg gave these concerns a particular historical spin:

Any greatly disruptive protests at the Cleveland Republican Convention would only feed into Trump’s plans. It is worth remembering the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (where both Katz and I were participants) ended up losing popular support for both the Democratic party and for the protesters. It was a turning point in the eventual unraveling of the New Left.

A repeat of Chicago 1968 outside the Cleveland Republican convention could simply reinforce Trump’s image as the strong man needed to control chaos at home and abroad.

Ultimately, Trump will win or lose through elections. (No putsch seems in the wings.) When people act in the streets they must conceive those actions in terms of how that will hurt him at the polls.

As I said, liberals and leftists have often failed to appreciate the power of the right. The converse of that failure, in the current moment, is that they don’t appreciate the weaknesses and limitations of the right. (Which is ironic, given that Moberg is writing in a publication called “In These Times.”)

That’s an occupational hazard among liberals and leftists of a certain generation—those, like Moberg, who may have participated in the protests at the 1968 DNC Convention or who watched them from afar. Either in support, which they’ve since come to reconsider, or in horror. These are men and women who remember, perhaps too well, the fratricide on the left, and between liberals and the left, and who now fear that they’re seeing a repeat performance, with irresponsible ultra-radicals in the streets antagonizing the virtuous silent majority in the suburbs who will simply run headlong into the arms of the right.

But what these liberals and leftists forget is that the right has been in the driver’s seat for the last four decades. No one—save some on the left—is under the illusion that the left has much if any real power. When there is violence or disruption at a Trump rally, it is not a referendum on a fraying postwar liberal consensus. It is instead a judgment on the Reagan regime: a regime that is on the ropes, and whose warriors now seem to be the ones who are pushing for violence, who are embracing lawlessness, who seem so disorderly. (Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination certainly seem to understand this; would that liberals and the left did as well. But the reason Trump’s rivals get it is because they’ve not given the left much thought in recent years. They don’t see us as a threat, and rightly so. One day they will. But we’re not there yet.) And should something similar happen at the Republican Party convention in Cleveland this summer, it will not be a replay of the Democratic Party convention of 1968—that moment when liberalism, at its greatest point of power, fractured so wildly and perilously. It will be a replay in reverse: as that moment when conservatism, at its greatest point of power, fractures so wildly and perilously. Again, this is something that conservatives of all stripes understand. And why they are so fearful about the future—and are mooting ever more desperate fantasies of escape.

When I tried to make some of these points on Facebook last night, a reader thought I was insane. He pointed out that Republicans are today in control of 31 governorships and 30 state legislatures; have total control (the “trifecta” of the governorship and both houses of the legislature) of 22 state governments (to the Democrats’ 7); and control both branches of Congress (54-44 in the Senate—it’s really 54-46 because the two independent caucus with the Democrats—and 247-188 in the House). How could I possibly think conservatism or the GOP is not a wildly popular banner under which Trump will march into the White House?**

For this simple reason: In 1972*, the Democrats were in control of 31 governorships and 23 state legislatures (to the GOP’s 16; the rest were split); had total control of 17 state governments (to the GOP’s 9); and controlled both branches of Congress (54-44 in the Senate, 255-180 in the House). Not entirely dissimilar from today, only in the opposite direction. And what happened? The largest landslide in American electoral history. In favor of the Republican candidate.

* Much thanks to Phil Klinkner for access to the data and Seth Ackerman for the calculations.

** I made an error about the House numbers in the first published version of this post; thanks to reader Charles Komanoff, I’ve corrected it now.

 

 

We’re Still in Nixonland: 20 theses about the state of politics today

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Here’s my summary of these weeks that were.

Merrick Garland

1. President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland as the replacement to Antonin Scalia was accompanied by this tweet from the White House.

“Merrick Garland would take no chances that someone who murdered innocent Americans might go free on a technicality.” —@POTUS #SCOTUSnominee

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 16, 2016

Last Sunday I said we were still in Reaganland. Now I think we’re still in Nixonland.

2. That tweet was no errant message. When it comes to the rights of criminal defendants, Garland is no judicial liberal:

The former prosecutor also has a relatively conservative record on criminal justice. A 2010 examination of his decisions by SCOTUSBlog’s Tom Goldstein determined that “Judge Garland rarely votes in favor of criminal defendants’ appeals of their convictions.” Goldstein “identified only eight such published rulings,” in addition to seven where “he voted to reverse the defendant’s sentence in whole or in part, or to permit the defendant to raise a argument relating to sentencing on remand,” during the 13 years Garland had then spent on the DC Circuit.

3. Speaking of Garland’s position on criminal rights, Daniel Denvir