Corey Robin's Blog, page 9

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

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 […]