Corey Robin's Blog, page 6

Department of Perversity

In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman argues that reactionaries make three kinds of claims. One of those claims Hirschman calls the “perversity” thesis. Arguing from perversity, the reactionary claims that whatever it is that progressives are trying to do—reduce poverty, increase housing—they inevitably will produce the opposite effect. In the last 24 hours, it’s been reported that: 1. Kristi Noem, head of the Department of Homeland Security, had her bag stolen. 2. Pete Hegseth, head of the Department of Defense, shared military secrets involving American attacks on foreign enemies. Who’s doing perversity now? On a related note, the Trump administration is taking over the renovation of Penn Station and looking into policies to encourage women to have more babies. […]

Where did the Framers go wrong?

One of the continuing puzzles I come back to is the separation of powers: Where did the Framers go wrong? Political scientists often claim that it is norms that undergird the Constitution, but this is not at all the view of the Framers. If anything, the idea that norms underpin the Constitution, and maintaining its delicate balance of separated and limited powers, is an almost pre-Founders, naive, view of things. If you read Madison—whom nobody would accuse of having a rosy view of human nature—in the Federalist Papers, he makes it clear that what preserves liberty and constitutionalism more generally is the separation of powers, and what preserves the separation of powers is…the ambition of individual politicians. Madison makes constant, […]

The very right-wing judge taking on Trump

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals just issued a blistering attack on Trump’s decision not to do anything about Abrego Garcia, who’s stuck in a hellhole in El Salvador that Trump sent him to. This is not why this decision is interesting, but listen to the language: The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still […]

It’s not what is new, but what is old, that’s so depressing in the current moment

One of the elements of the current moment that has made me most depressed is not its novelty but its familiarity, its recursion to a kind of politics I thought we were moving past. For many of us on the left—and I’m being ecumenical in my usage here, including everyone on the left left to more liberal and mainstream Democrats—the case of Abrigo Garcia is a straightforward human rights atrocity, which needs to be fought tooth and nail. If you read the press, the right and the media are using this story to reprise a very familiar game that the right knows all too well how to play, pitting the security and safety of ordinary Americans against those crazy proceduralist […]

On Teaching Adam Smith in Ohio

Last month, the Republican-controlled Ohio state legislature passed a bill requiring all institutions of higher education to institute a mandatory course in “American civic literacy.” The bill specifies that this course: I can’t tell if the Republicans are serious about this stipulation regarding students’ reading “all the following”: The complete writings of Adam Smith alone come to 3,529 pages, which, over the course of 13 weeks of instruction (the typical number of weeks at Ohio State University), works out to 271 pages per week. Throw in the other writings the legislature is requiring on top of that, and well, that’s a lot of reading for one class. But I’m a believer in the great books, and the more reading students […]

Yale faculty defend academic freedom—sort of

According to the Yale Daily News, nearly 900 faculty at Yale have signed a letter calling on the president and provost to protect academic freedom at Yale. It’s a strong letter, organized by the faculty senate and a local chapter of the AAUP, but I couldn’t help noticing a glaring omission in it. The letter identifies four threats to academic freedom at Yale (and calls upon the university to take two affirmative steps for academic freedom), but all four of the threats come solely, in the letter’s formulation, from the government. This seems like an odd position, to me, because since Trump’s second ascension to power, the most severe violation of academic freedom at Yale has come from the University […]

To prove a strike

There’s a moment in chapter 12 of Capital where Marx describes a critical phase of glassmaking in a manufacturing workshop. Five workers gather at “the hole” of the furnace, each focused on an individual task that, taken together, will produce a bottle. “These five specialized workers represent the individual organs of a working organism that can function only as a unit.” Those five workers can only function as a unit “when all the workers are directly cooperating with one another.” That need for working cooperatively gives each and every one of those workers a tremendous amount of power: “When one member is missing, the whole body is paralyzed.” If just one worker withdraws their cooperation, the working organism ceases to […]

What does Chad Gadya mean this Passover?

At Passover, we sing Chad Gadya, a silly but spooky song that children at the seder love. It starts with a verse about a father buying a goat for two zuzim. As a kid, I loved thinking about those two zuzim, which, for some reason, I thought was the currency of Prague during the Middle Ages. My grandfather had given me a storybook about a boy in medieval Prague, and that’s probably the source of my association. The other thing I remember about Chad Gadya, which translates into “An Only Kid,” as in a goat, is my dad heroically leading us through the song. It’s a long song, requiring a lot of breath, because after the father buys the goat […]

Every road leads to the tariff

In the New Left Review, I think out loud about the longue durée of the tariff question in American politics. Tariffs occupy an outsized place in the American imagination. The first proposal entertained by Congress was a tariff. The slaveholding South first pondered secession, in 1832, over a tariff. After the Civil War, Republicans declared the tariff ‘the foundationstone’ of their crusade against the Democrats. In 1896, William McKinley ran on the slogan ‘Protection and Prosperity’. In 1930, Herbert Hoover destroyed whatever chance he had at reelection for the sake of the tariff. Teddy Roosevelt caught the crazed drift of the country when he declared that, in any discussion of the tariff, ‘I am not meeting a material need but a mental […]

Face it, Gen Xers, we are the Horriblest Generation