Corey Robin's Blog, page 8

Pomp and Circumstance

I know this headline and the story it tells are terrible, a sign of how bad things are and how much worse is to come, but, still… But, still, you have to laugh. Here we are, people of conscience everywhere, rallying on behalf of beleaguered universities everywhere, who are fending off this extraordinarily tetchy administration, so quick to take offense at the slightest untoward remark, and what do the leaders of NYU do? Freak out about this student, their commencement speaker, who had the audacity to refer to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine,” and, so, naturally, is having his diploma revoked. Just in case that wasn’t clear enough, NYU issued a statement. Of course. NYU strongly denounces the choice […]

We really are the oldest democracy in the world

A new book about Biden’s decline and the 2024 campaign has tons of damning quotes from Democratic Party insiders. Apparently, Biden’s inner circle did a lot of covering just how far gone he was during the campaign. One insider tells the authors of the book, “It was an abomination. He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.” You’ve got to admire the moxie. Everyone’s always stealing an election from the Democrats. In 2016, it was the Russians. In 2024, it was the candidate they were supporting. This whole discourse is the ne plus ultra of a party that loses and loses yet always finds someone else to blame. Even if that someone else […]

Habeas corpus

Apparently, Stephen Miller thinks that Donald Trump can suspend the writ of habeas corpus. There’s just one problem with that idea, as a little known law professor wrote in the Cornell Law Review in 2014: “Congress alone can suspend the writ.” The name of that professor was Amy Coney Barrett.

You belong to me, er, us

In Capital and Black Reconstruction in America, respectively, Marx and Du Bois devote several passages to the fraught conceptions of ownership over labor in post-emancipation societies, whether the laborer is the Black freedman in the American South or the wage laborer in Western Europe. Though many people know that after emancipation, Black people in the South endured another hundred years of slavery by another name, that whites perceived Blacks as still belonging to some entity, we’re less familiar with a version of that story in Western Europe. Pairing these two passages raises delicate issues of comparison, but there’s no doubt that a similar dynamic is at play in both societies. In both societies, the employers of labor wrestle with the […]

Who’s scared and unwelcome at Harvard?

Harvard today released two reports about the state of life on campus. One is on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias at Harvard. The other is about what has come to be called antisemitism, but which often includes or is nothing more than pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist sentiment and action. Before I say anything else, and because I might lose you as I get into this more, I want to highlight two critical paragraphs from the New York Times article on the two reports. The paragraphs get buried almost two-thirds of the way into the piece: The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 […]

Drop Dead City

My wife and I saw “Drop Dead City” tonight at the IFC in Manhattan. It’s a riveting documentary about the New York City Fiscal Crisis of 1975. I know that statement sounds like a parody of a lecture in a poli sci class, but it happens to be true. The documentary is also riveting just as a cinematic experience. If you love the scene and soundscape of New York City film from the 1970s—from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three to Dog Day Afternoon—you’ll love this documentary. The archival footage alone will bring you back to the feel and time of another place. For me, the film was not just political (more on that below) but also personal. Figures […]

Off to Wisconsin

If you’re in Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow (April 24), I’ll be delivering the Phi Beta Kappa Lecture at the University of Wisconsin, at 5 pm, on “Clarence Thomas’s Radical Race Politics and the Future of the Supreme Court.” It will be at the Elvehjem Building, Room L 150, 800 University Avenue. If you make it, make sure to say hi!

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 […]