Corey Robin's Blog, page 7

Is the Conservative Crackup Finally Here?

This is the moment of the conservative crackup I’ve been waiting for. It’s going to sound small, but it’s the wedge of a wider fissure. A legal nonprofit just filed a lawsuit against Trump’s declaration of tariffs on China, claiming that the emergency authority he’s invoked gives him no such authority to impose these tariffs. Underneath or alongside that claim is a much deeper argument that it’s time for Congress to claw back its delegation of tariff authority, which it has effectively handed over to the president for decades now. But here’s what is politically significant about this lawsuit: the nonprofit filing the suit is funded, in part, by Leonard Leo, the longtime leader of the Federalist Society. By most […]

We’re Committing Cultural Suicide

The United States Navy announced tonight that, following Trump’s anti-DEI orders, it has purged 381 books from the US Naval Academy Library. The press coverage focuses on some familiar titles: Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and so on. I went through the entire list, and noticed something quite different. First, to call this a DEI purge is to miss the forest for the trees: This is a wholesale assault on knowledge as we know it. Charles Mills’s book is purged. Two books on Henry James are purged. A book on Eliot, Joyce, and Proust is purged. Books on Elizabeth Bishop, on Thomas Pynchon, on Richard Wright: purged. Barbara Fields’s and Karen Fields’s Racecraft is […]

The general state of the culture

In chapter 8 of Capital, Marx wrote: The working day does have a maximum limit…Not only do purely physical needs limit the extension of the workday; moral limits play a role here, too. A worker requires time to satisfy his intellectual and social needs, which are determined…by the general state of the culture. Curious what the general state of the culture has to say about workers’ intellectual needs, I turned to the news, and stumbled on this report. One could say a lot more about all this, but beyond the simple and obvious point, I’d point out that discussions of culture in this country are often removed from discussions of the economy. There’s one conversation about the assault on the […]

And Justice For All

1. Like other top law firms, the law firm at which Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, is a partner, has cut a deal with Trump. 2. Among various concessions, the firm has agreed to gut its DEI programs and to take on, pro bono, clients fighting alleged antisemitism. 3. Emhoff was brought into the firm, as a partner, in January. His specific portfolio was to advise corporations about “matters with significant reputational concerns.” 4. Emhoff’s firm announced its deal with Trump just hours after Emhoff told Georgetown Law students that “the rule of law is under attack. Democracy is under attack. And so, all of us lawyers need to do what we can to push back on that.” “Us lawyers […]

But the parliamentarian!

Step 1 Democrats say they plan to ask the parliamentarian to rule that Republicans must use a current law baseline for projecting the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts. Step 2 Republicans are set to make the audacious play of bypassing the Senate parliamentarian and moving forward with a budget resolution based on a scoring baseline set by Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that would allow them to argue extending President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts won’t add to the deficit. There are three types of people in this world. Type 1 sees this sequence of events and thinks, darn those Republican rascals, why can’t they get some principles! Type 2 sees this sequence of events and thinks, darn […]

Chickens don’t come home to roost

One of the claims that you often hear on the left is that fundamental violations of human rights in the United States are a case of chickens come home to roost. That is, vicious policies that the government enacts abroad or on non-citizens on native soil eventually migrate to how the state treats its own citizens. Yet, listening to the Press Secretary of the White House deal with the administration’s vicious treatment of immigrants, it’s clear that in the right’s imagination, the causality often works in the opposite direction. Here’s the NYT: Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, took aim at the media’s reporting on deportation cases Tuesday, accusing journalists of caring more about the due process rights of […]

Where is Our Tank Man?

Everyone’s waiting for that one person to stand up to Trump. Not just that one person. There are a lot of such people. You can read about them in every newspaper. But that one person with real power who’s willing to risk something costly in defiance. That one university president who’ll say, fuck you and your money. That one Democrat who’ll say, fuck you and your threat to my reelection or that of my party. Everyone’s looking for our Tank Man, staring down a column of tanks, all by himself, in Tiananmen Square. Why don’t we see that person? Where is our Tank Man? (And, no, I don’t think Cory Booker doing a marathon-length filibuster counts.) The reason we see […]

A Tale of Two Letters

Tonight, I read two academic letters of public protest against What Is Going On—one from 2,000 of the nation’s top scientists and one from more than 80 Harvard Law School professors. The first letter is about the threat to scientific research, the second about the threat to the rule of law. Despite being in a discipline adjacent to the teaching and study of law, I felt that it was the letter of the scientists that truly spoke to me about what is politically at stake in this moment. And that was because it was the scientists who spoke the clearest, most direct, most forceful, and least artful, language of political alarm. At the simplest level, the scientists know how to […]

Punishment and Purification at Columbia

My friend Alex Gourevitch alerted me to Columbia’s statement on combatting discrimination, harassment, and antisemitism, which I had somehow missed. Alex points out how it’s essentially DEI from the right—new sensitivity trainings, for what the university calls antisemitism; new diversity hiring initiatives, for pro-Israel scholars; new administrators, to oversee the hiring—with a lot more coercion. On that question of coercion, have a read of the statement and simply count how often words like “sanction” (as in punish) and “suspension” and “expulsion” appear. It’s hard not to read this as new constitutional order for universities, in which the onerous apparatus of crime and punishment that this country has veered to over the decades is simply dropped onto the university campus. Is […]

On the decision of Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley to leave the United States

Earlier this week, Yale professors Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley announced that they were leaving the United States to take up academic positions in Canada. Ordinarily, this would not be considered news. Academics move all the time. Sometimes from the United States to other countries. But since both Snyder and Stanley have been, since 2017, the two leading proponents of the thesis that the United States is sliding precipitously toward fascism or authoritarianism, if we’re not already there, their announcement has attracted a considerable amount of attention. Snyder’s reason, and the timing of his decision, has been somewhat murky. But Stanley has been forthright: He’s moving his family out of the country because the political climate has grown intolerable, and […]