Corey Robin's Blog, page 7

What Adam Smith and little known Polish Marxist have to tell us about Trump, Musk, and the protests in LA

Where would we be without the market? The stock market, the bond market, the financial markets in general—all of these institutions, journalists tell us, are the ultimate, perhaps only, check on President Trump’s power. Esteemed scholars reassure us of the same—that the world’s oldest constitution is backstopped by Wall Street and the dollar. Investors, the argument goes, need their investments protected. The courts, independent and powerful, can provide that protection. Threaten the courts, and the markets will tumble, and the dollar will drop. It is capitalism, in other words, and not citizens or politicians, that will force the White House into compliance with the courts and the Constitution. This faith in capitalism is both novel and strange. Historically, people have feared that capitalism undermines the sovereignty of the state and […]

What happens when a society that can’t learn uses machines that can?

In 2008 or thereabouts, society launched an experiment: What happens when grownups give smart phones and related technologies to kids? Less than twenty years, and a rampant teenage mental health crisis, later, we have the results, and a majority of states are banning or limiting phones in classrooms. In 2020, we launched an experiment, because we had no other choice, using online technologies for teaching students of all ages, down to kindergarten and pre-k, and dramatically reducing or eliminating in-person instruction and contact entirely. Most of us now back in the classroom, in real life, have a pretty good sense of how that experiment, however necessary it was, turned out. Now, in 2025, the New York Times reports today: OpenAI, […]

On Thomas Mann’s 150th birthday, an essay on covid and late capitalism

Today is the birthday of Thomas Mann, who was born exactly 150 years ago. In honor of Mann, I’m posting this essay I wrote, several years back, about him, The Magic Mountain, covid, the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, and late capitalism. The essay never got published, and I’d forgotten about till I read the notification this morning from Lit Hub, that today is his birthday. I first read The Magic Mountain in the summer of 1990, a year after I graduated college and just before I was starting graduate school. I was house-sitting in New Haven and studying German. I didn’t know anyone, and back in those days, that kind of pervasive, seemingly permanent, solitude, made me anxious (nowadays, I struggle […]

Pluralistic societies can work. If we let them.

Took a break from writing about Marx to walk to the pharmacy in Windsor Terrace, owned by a South Asian family, that never seems to run into supply-chain issues or whatever it is that prevents other pharmacies from having medications when you need them. On the way there and back, I crossed paths with two Orthodox Jews, reading and reciting to each other in Hebrew, as they go to or from shul for Shavuot; a trio of South Asian teenage boys, calling each other “girl” in the informal way that, six months ago, they’d have been calling each other “bro” or “brah”; a chic woman in fancy biking gear, sitting on a bench, speaking Haitian Creole on the phone; two […]

Wagner, Tolkien, and the Tech Bros

A few days ago, Michiko Kakutani (I didn’t even know she was still around) had a long piece in the Times on the Silicon Valley power elite’s embrace of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Kakutani expresses repeated puzzlement over Silicon Valley’s besottedness with these texts. Tolkien had a horror of technology and power politics, after all, which is clearly expressed in the trilogy, and his world seems as far away from Silicon Valley as his was from the Norse sagas he drew upon. I find myself puzzled by Kakutani’s puzzlement. It can hardly be a secret that The Lord of the Rings mirrors in many ways Wagner’s Ring Cycle and that Wagner also expressed horror for technology and power politics, […]

The war on trans people is the war on the modern state is the war on trans people is the war on the modern state is the…

We know two things about Trump’s administration. First, it has declared war on trans people. Second, it has declared war on the administrative state. To my knowledge, nobody has yet figured out what the precise relationship between these two wars is. Till now. In this very stylish debut at The New Yorker, Paisley Currah explains why the war on trans people is not just the “opening move in a battle against vulnerable groups” or a crude attempt to “fan the flames of right-wing moral panic.” Instead, in banning a critical yet flexible tool for deciding the sex of individuals and populations, the right understands that it can completely undermine a major portion of the modern state as we know it. […]

Adam Tooze on Auschwitz and Capitalism

In a bravura of a post, the historian Adam Tooze dismantles a lot of the cliches—so common to a certain style of Marxism associated with Moishe Postone, and to a deep strain of Heideggerianism—about the Holocaust being the telos, the logical triumph and end game, of industrial capitalism and/or industrial modernity. Tooze also addresses a common misconception regarding the genocide of the Jews: that somehow the obsessive transport of Jews to their death entailed such a massive diversion of material resources and personnel, that it ultimately hurt the German war effort, that even on the Nazis’ own terms and plans for imperial conquest, it was irrational to kill all the Jews. Tooze shows that such a view is an evasion […]

The Anxiety of Self-Promotion

My last post, on cringey academic posting, generated a lot of debate on Facebook. In the course of that conversation, we got into a discussion about self-promotion of our work on social media, and why people are so anxious/apologetic about doing it. As I said on Facebook, I don’t really understand the anxiety about self-promotion. And that’s not because I have no anxieties about drawing attention to myself in real life. I do. Big time. I come from a big family. It’s always been hard to get a word in edgewise, when we’re all together, which as a kid, growing up, was every day. My tendency ever since has been to withdraw and watch. But writing is very different for […]

Please, no more of your light in dark times

Why do academics and journalists and writers need to announce their professional good news or that of a friend or colleague or department with these cringey “amid the dark times, a bit of light” introductions? If you think these are dark times, the fact that a journal just accepted your article—or a publisher signed a contract for your co-edited anthology or your friend is now the dean or a favorite writer just got hired by a magazine—well, you can’t really believe any of this illuminates the darkness. Can’t you simply tell us your good news and trust that we’ll be happy for you without our having to run it through the cash register of the universe to see whether and […]

Richard Garwin, 1928-2025

According to the New York Times, the scientist Richard Garwin has died. Garwin, as his biographer wrote, was “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” At the age 0f 23, he built the H-bomb. He advised every president from Eisenhower to, who knows, probably Biden, on everything from nuclear deterrence to the MX Missile to arms control and more. Enrico Fermi said that he was “the only true genius I have ever met.” As it happens, I met him, too. It was the summer of 1985. I had just graduated high school and gotten a scholarship for college from IBM, where my dad worked. As part of my scholarship, I had the option of taking summer jobs with the […]