Corey Robin's Blog, page 57

Sometimes You Can Smell the Scotch Coming Off the Web Page (Updated)

Dear Professor Bruce Frohnen:

I set out this morning to read your critique of my work on conservatism “The Left’s Caricature of Conservatism.” I was stopped at the outset, however, by this lengthy quotation you attribute to me at the top of your post.

Conservatism is the attempt to prevent emancipation of the lower orders. It is a creed for those with privilege and a taste for violence who see their power being threatened and are willing to do almost anything to put down calls for freedom and equality whenever they begin to make headway. If forced to exist within a mass democracy, conservatives face the constant threat of marginalized groups seeking a true voice within public space, and respond by doing whatever it takes to instill fear in those groups. Conservatives for the most part have succeeded in the United States, driving leftist unions and intellectuals underground during the red-baiting McCarthy era and undermining calls for economic justice, especially in the Reagan era, but throughout the last several decades in which they have unleashed heartless capitalism.

Initially, you claim that this statement appears in my book The Reactionary Mind, but later in your post, you claim to have read it in a transcript of an interview with me that a “friend” sent to you.

Because I couldn’t recall ever writing or saying any of this—the garbled syntax bears little resemblance to how I speak or write—I googled each of the four sentences in the quotation. Lo and behold, there is only one site on the entire internet on which I can find any of them: your post.

While I have some experience with the phenomenon of fabricated quotations, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered one quite like this. Then again, you did write it for a website called “The Imaginative Conservative.”

I trust that you will issue a correction with, if not the requisite decency or embarrassment, then at least the necessary haste.

Sincerely,

Corey Robin

Update (2:30 pm)

A few hours after my post appeared, Professor Frohnen’s post was revised to remove the various errors. The quotation marks around the alleged quotation were removed, as was the attribution to The Reactionary Mind (Error 1). And then the sentence that attributed the quotation to a transcript of an interview with me (Error 2) was substantially revised to remove any reference to any statement of mine. None of these edits was initially acknowledged. And then the following acknowledgment appeared at the bottom of the post:

Editor’s note: The opening block quotation was originally misattributed to Corey Robin. We apologize for this error, which was our mistake and not that of Mr. Frohnen, the author of this essay.

Needless to say, that’s not quite the whole story. There were two errors, not one, and while both errors were fixed, only one—the one that can easily be blamed on the editors of the website rather than Frohnen—is admitted. Despite my writing Frohnen directly, I never received any apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing from him. But this, I guess, is how imaginative conservatives roll. Their website, incidentally, is dedicated to “those who seek the True, the Good and the Beautiful.”

Update (3:45)

Within an hour of my posting the update above, Professor Frohnen sent me the following email:

Prof. Robin. Am traveling, but saw your email, checked website, saw the attribution. Apologies, it was added by the editors as they apparently thought it a quote, not my intention to imply such. Contacted editors. Correction and note should be posted momentarily. BPF

Flaubert on Kissinger/Nixon

Speaking of Kissinger/Nixon, less flat-footed defenders of the Dynamic Duo like to take a tack that goes like this: “Yes, yes, massive violence at the periphery—Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and elsewhere—but what about their more prosaic and peaceful achievements at the center: detente, the treaties with the Soviet Union, opening relations with China, and so on?”

Flaubert had their number many decades ago: “Be regular and orderly in your life,” he is supposed to have to said, “so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Birds of a Feather

Nixon to Kissinger:

We’ve got to destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.

Mao to the Red Guards:

Bombard the headquarters.

Machtpolitik

From Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow:

Douglas Brinkley: You called Henry Kissinger a genius, and you get a kind of twinkle whenever you mention Kissinger. What is it about Henry Kissinger that you found so—

Alexander Haig: You don’t think there is something between us, I hope.

Brinkley: I don’t know.

Greg has the best footnotes.

When Henry Edited Hannah

In the early 1950s, Henry Kissinger edited the journal Confluence. Among the writers he published there was Hannah Arendt. Their editorial relationship was fraught. His edits were heavy; her resistance, strong. Here she responds to his attempted edits on August 14, 1953:

I fear you will be disappointed to see from the galleys all sentences which you wrote were eliminated and quite a few of my own sentences re-instated….I realize that your editorial methods—re-writing to the point of writing your own sentences—are quite current….I happen to object to them on personal grounds and as a matter of principle. If we had given this matter a little more thought, you might have decided not to want to this, or any of my manuscripts, which I would have regretted. But it certainly would have saved us both some time and trouble. (Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow, p. 24)

Truth be told, I bet Kissinger’s editorial instincts were right.

No Safe Havens: From Henry Kissinger to Barack Obama

Thomas Schelling at a meeting of 12 prominent Harvard professors with Henry Kissinger in May 1970, just after Nixon had announced the invasion (though not the secret bombing) of Cambodia:

As we see it, there are two possibilities: Either, one, the President didn’t understand when he went into Cambodia that he was invading another country; or two, he did understand. We just don’t know which one is scarier.

As Greg Grandin​ points out in Kissinger’s Shadow, from which I got this quote, Kissinger/Nixon’s justification for invading (and secretly bombing) Cambodia was to ferret out the “sanctuaries” that this neutral country was providing to the enemy in Vietnam. Today, that doctrine is widely accepted among America’s ruling and chattering classes: no “safe havens” for terrorists. That was the justification for George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan and Obama’s drone attacks on Yemen and Pakistan and his military operations in Syria and Iraq. But in 1970 it was considered so radical as to terrify Schelling and these other Establishment worthies from Harvard.

On Sunday, October 4, at 12:30, I’ll be interviewing Greg about his book at the Brooklyn Public Library. Stay tuned!

Smells Like Mean Spirit: Conservatism Past and Present

From the New York Times:

“Today, conservatism is much more meanspirited, angry, not optimistic and much more viscerally divisive,” said Matthew Dowd, a former top strategist for President George W. Bush.

From The Wayback Machine:

In the vast domain of living things, there reigns an obvious violence, a kind of prescribed rage that arms all creatures to their common doom….There is no instant of time when some living thing is not being devoured by another. Above all these numerous animal species is placed man, whose destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to nourish himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills to kill….His tables are covered with corpses. (Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues)

 

On the Other 9/11: Pinochet, Kissinger, Obama

Today is the anniversary of two 9/11’s. The one everyone in the US talks about, and the one not everyone in the US talks about. Greg Grandin, who’s got a new book out on Kissinger that everyone should read, writes in The Nation today about Pinochet’s violent coup against Allende—fully backed by Kissinger and Nixon—and how Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is completing the work that Kissinger, Nixon, and Pinochet began. Forty-three years ago today.

The TPP includes one provision that will, if activated, complete the 1973 coup against Allende: its Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism. ISDS allows corporations and investors to “sue governments directly before tribunals of three private sector lawyers operating under World Bank and UN rules to demand taxpayer compensation for any domestic law that investors believe will diminish their ‘expected future profits.’”…

The principle behind the ISDS—that corporations have an inherent right to demand compensation for any regulation that might impinge on their “expected future profits”—is a perfect negation of a major principle of Allende’s socialist program: that poor nations not only had a right to nationalize foreign property but that they could deduct past “excess profit” from compensation for that property, calculated as anything above 12 percent of a company’s value.

Allende and his Popular Unity coalition not only seized the operations of the Anaconda and Kennecott mining companies but, once the sums were done, handed them overdue bills for even more money. On September 28, 1971, Allende signed a decree that tallied the “excess profit” owed by these companies to be $774,000,000 (as might be expected, US and Canadian mining companies, including the current version of Anaconda, are strong for the TPP.) This decree was a turning point in the history of international property rights, when Washington (which, since the Mexican Revolution, had grudgingly accepted the idea of nationalization) decided that its tolerance of Third World economic nationalism had gone on long enough.

In an October 5, 1971 meeting in the Oval Office, Treasury Secretary John Connally complained to Nixon: “He’s [Allende] gone back and said that the copper companies owe $700 million. It’s obviously a farce, and obviously, he’s a—he doesn’t intend to compensate for the expropriated properties. He’s thrown down—He’s thrown the gauntlet to us. Now, it’s our move.”

Nixon then said he had “decided we’re going to give Allende the hook.”

Connally: “The only thing you can ever hope is to have him overthrown.”

…

This September 11th, as the Obama administration makes its final push for the TPP, it’s worth taking a moment to realize why all those people in Chile—and in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, and throughout Latin America—died and were tortured: to protect the “future profits” of multinational corporations.

Greg’s conclusion raises another issue: the why of torture. Coming out of the Dirty Wars of the 1970s and 1980s, a generation of political theorists and literary critics and journalists began to talk a lot about torture, framing their inquests around the cruelty regimes perpetrated against the “human body.” The target of torture, in other words, was not a political movement or a political being; it was a bodily subject, a physical abstraction. In tandem with revelations of the rampages of Communism in Eastern Europe and China (they weren’t really revelations but they got renewed attention from French intellectuals and their camp followers in the waning days of the Cold War), torture ceased to be treated as political weapon, an instrument of specific political purpose, the close cousin of war and other conventional political means. It (and its associates in evil) became a stand-in for the predations of the human condition. It was the summum malum of politics, a generalized other, an ultimate evil from which every decent person—even Admiral Mayorga—was to shrink with horror.

The further removed that writing became from the immediacy of the Dirty Wars, the less it focused on the substance and politics of those conflicts: which, as Grandin shows, were often about the particular policies and mundane interests that fall today under the rubric “neoliberalism.” It’s one of the many virtues of Grandin’s work that he restores to our memory of those horrors the specificity of that politics. And to remind us that the house that neoliberalism built rests atop a graveyard.

 

Richard Flathman, 1934-2015

Richard Flathman, the eminent political theorist who helped create what is sometimes called “the Hopkins School,” has died. I only read one of his books—on Hobbes—and never met him. From afar, he seemed like one of those austere planets around which the rest of us orbit. Bonnie Honig was one of his students. She provides here a more intimate portrait of the man, noting how his reserve made for a place of greater safety, and that behind or beneath it lay the warmth of another sun.

* * * * *

I co-edited a book about Richard Flathman’s work and have used his work in my research and teaching throughout my career. On the occasion of his passing, therefore, I comment not on his scholarship but on his personal example.

Flathman was a true intellectual, eager to enter and explore the world of any new thinker or writer. He read Proust and Montaigne as readily as Hobbes and Locke. As widely read and accomplished as he was, he was never superior. In fact, he was always an egalitarian. He was quick with a riposte to bring down the smug or the arrogant. He never did that to anyone who was down. He had a keen sense of justice and a fine moral compass. I am sad to say he was a rarity in the academy.

I showed up in Baltimore in the early 80’s very green, completely unprepared and, without realizing it, an outlier. I was the first person in my family to finish college. Going on to graduate studies was seen by my relatives as an act of insanity bound to lead to ruin. Although I had some first rate teachers at Concordia University in Montreal, undergrad study there did not compare with the prominent liberal arts college and research university backgrounds of those around me at Hopkins.  One year at the LSE with Oakeshott and co. had not been enough to change that, though it surely helped me get in to grad school.

It took me a while to understand how much WORK graduate school required. Flathman was my advisor. He watched me and waited.  I never felt judged, though I was encouraged. I flailed a lot (though I did not know it at the time) and he waited.  I was lost, I did stupid things, I got political; he stayed on the surface of all that, never volunteered a comment and, throughout, offered the reassurance of his remoteness.

I left Baltimore at one point to move in with a partner. I came back a few months later when that didn’t work out. I saw Flathman, who knew all about it, and I just said, jokingly, that it seemed like no matter how much I tried to get out of Baltimore, I always ended up back there. He leaned back in his swivel chair and said, “I guess that’s why they call it Charm City.” And that was that. He could have asked about what happened. He could have warned me about putting my studies first. But he didn’t. Eventually I settled in. It took a long time, maybe five years. He was patient.

The first day I was there a 3rd year grad student told me the aim in grad school was not to get A’s but to write publishable papers. I was 22. Flathman made it clear the aim was to read and to learn. So much of what he had to offer was by example.  He opposed professionalization, though he understood the reasons for it. He was, for example, ambivalent about the PhD examinations process. He told me that if the faculty could set exams so that we would prepare for them, and then cancel the exams, they would do that and that would be the best way to proceed. But that would not work more than once, he said.  So there we were.

I heard some people in the program complain about Flathman, that he did not offer the intimacy that some advisors did. He did not hang out, go out for drinks after seminar (his classes were in the morning), or play squash with students. This reserve is precisely what I needed and valued. He had great boundaries. This spelled aloofness to some. To me it spelled safety.

The only time we talked about something personal was toward the end of my time in graduate school. I was on the job market.  I went to a conference. A powerful senior male faculty member approached me improperly and whispered his hotel room number in my ear. It shook me up. I had seen at the same conference a powerful woman political theorist give a great talk. She was formidable. I came back to Hopkins from the conference and went to see Flathman. I did not want to talk about what happened but I needed his guidance. Senior Male was in a position to influence a job I wanted. I told myself that if Flathman was going to advise women grad students, he was going to have to know how to deal with this sort of thing. So I told him what happened with Senior Male. I also told him how fabulous Senior Female had been, and then I mentioned how sure I was that Senior Male would never do to Her what he had done to me. Flathman looked me in the eye and said, “Don’t be so sure.” That was it. He broke the spell with those four words, which aligned me with Her and made Senior Male the problem, not me. (In later years, he would confide to me about how a (not-so-) Senior Female Theorist came on to him!)

When I left Hopkins, I went to see Dick to say good-bye. We had a great talk and then he shifted gears, moving to say some things about our time together at Hopkins. Maybe he had prepared some sort of summing up; I will never know. I interrupted him and said (because I was still an unprocessed asshole), “I don’t do the good-bye thing.” He didn’t blink, waved to the door, and said, with his characteristic abruptness (so jarring and so reassuring at the same time): “OK. See you around.”

When I served as a discussant for the Tanner Lectures in Berkeley, in 2014, Dick came (by then he had moved to the area). He was a great presence. We took time for lunch together and we had a good talk. He had been taking his leave from all of us for a while. On this occasion he said that I had found more in Arendt than he had ever thought was there. There were a few other things like that, that he said. I guess that was us doing the good-bye thing after all.

I loved his reliable reserve, his faith in me, his dry anti-establishment humor, and his finely tuned bullshit detector. He was an incredible person, not larger than life, but large as life.

The Laggards of Academe

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time:

Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession [Brown v. Board of Education] would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters.

It took about four decades, but academic scholarship did finally catch up.