Month: January 2012

A Most Delightful Fuck You

Pardon my French, but there really are no other words to describe this letter, written by Jourdan Anderson, an ex-slave, to his former master in 1865. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. […]

Anti-Semite and Jew

As someone who identifies as Jewish—who periodically goes to shul, celebrates some if not all of the holidays, and tries at least some (ahem) of the time to get off the internets for shabbos—yet opposes Zionism, I thought I’d heard all the charges that have been and could be made against me and my tribe. But yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic writer and one of the leading voices of liberal Zionism in this country, threw a new one into to the mix. In my experience, those Jews who consciously set themselves apart from the Jewish majority in the disgust they display for Israel, or for the principles of their faith, are often narcissists, and therefore seem to suffer from an […]

Gossip Folks

    The New York Times did a lengthy piece about about The Reactionary Mind and the controversy it has aroused. Favorite line: “To Mr. Robin there is no actually existing Burkeanism anywhere.” The book continues to be a subject of much discussion on the blogs: positive, negative, and much else.  This is just a sampling of what’s been said about it: hates it; likes it; doesn’t like it but thinks about it; writes about it a lot (as in five times a lot, but with a lot of interesting historical counterpoint and information); uses it for contemporary analysis; and situates it within the contemporary literature of the left. I’ve also done a few more interviews that you might want to […]

From the Slaveholders to Rick Perry: Galileo is the Key

In honor of Rick Perry’s decision to quit the race, I’m reprinting one part of this blog post from September, which discusses what I still think is the most memorable moment of the entire campaign: when, in one of the early debates, Perry invoked Galileo in defense of his position on climate change.     The most arresting moment of the debate was when Rick Perry invoked Galileo in defense of his skepticism about climate change.  Here’s what he said: The science is not settled on this.  The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just nonsense.  Just because you have a group of scientists who stood […]

Easy To Be Hard: Conservatism and Violence

This is the second post in my (very) occasional series of excerpts from The Reactionary Mind. (You can read my first, on Justice Scalia, here.) This excerpt is from chapter eleven, “Easy to Be Hard,” in which I examine the relationship between conservatism and violence. I’ve removed all the footnotes; if you want to follow them up, buy the book! (Fun fact: an earlier version of this chapter appeared two years ago in The Chronicle Review.  It drove Jonah Goldberg crazy: “This piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education may be one of the uniformly dumbest piece [sic] of intellectual claptrap I’ve read in a good long while.”)   I enjoy wars. Any adventure’s better than sitting in an office. […]

The Real Martin Luther King

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical […]

John Schaar, 1928-2011

For political theorists like me, Jack Schaar is one of the vital presences of the last half-century. He and his wife Hanna Pitkin—along with Sheldon Wolin, Norman Jacobson, and Michael Rogin—helped define the “Berkeley School” of political theory, which not only introduced generations of students to the western canon but also made it relevant to contemporary politics. Though I seem to know more people than I count—including my wife—who were touched by his teaching and writing, it’s a shame still more don’t know about Schaar and his work. Schaar recently died. Joshua Miller, a political theorist at Lafayette College, wrote this brief obituary, which he has not been able to place in the press. I am reprinting it here with […]

You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me

  “And while the mavens of the right would probably prefer four more years to four good books, they might want to rethink that. They wouldn’t be in the position they’re in—when, even out of power, they still govern the country—had their predecessors made the same choice.” That’s the conclusion to my latest article, “The Conservative Mind,” just out in the The Chronicle Review.  The piece is basically an adaptation of the introduction to my book, framed around the rise of Occupy Wall Street and what it means for the conservative movement.  Punchline of the piece: “Occupy Wall Street may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the right.” Check it out here.

Words Like Freedom

There are words like Freedom Sweet and wonderful to say. On my heartstrings freedom sings All day everyday.   There are words like Liberty That almost make me cry. If you had known what I know You would know why. — Langston Hughes   This poem originally appeared under the title “Refugee in America” in the Saturday Evening Post. It often goes by the name “Words Like Freedom.” It also appears on a sidewalk plaque on an E. 41st St. promenade, between Park and 5th, leading up to New York Public Library. I used it as the epigraph to chapter 7 of my first book Fear: The History of a Political Idea.

Another prize! And other news of the blog and the book

The blog has won another award!  Cliopatra, the history blog at the History News Network, has awarded me its “Best Writer” award.  Here’s what the judges said: Corey Robin’s new blog, CoreyRobin.com, has rapidly become a *tour de force*. Robin joins battle with contemporary issues by way of a deep engagement with the history of political thought. Although he is a passionate partisan of the left, he takes conservative thinkers seriously. Several of them have returned the favor, including Andrew Sullivan, who regularly uses Robin’s provocative posts as a launching pad for his own blogging, and Bruce Bartlett, who recently debated Robin at CoreyRobin.com. All that, and Robin’s words sparkle with a crafty combination of intelligence and wit. He is […]

Houston, We Have a Problem. A Jacob Heilbrunn Problem.

I see the New York Times is still assigning book reviews to Jacob Heilbrunn.  I guess they never read this 2008 piece I wrote in The Nation. Or this follow-up from John Palattella about the same issue: Heilbrunn’s problem with acknowledging his sources and with not producing prose that doesn’t track the prose of others. Here’s what I had to say about all this in The Nation (apologies for the long quote): These are simple errors, and though one wishes that Heilbrunn didn’t make them so often or with such confidence, they don’t detract from his overall argument. The same cannot be said of the book’s two other problems. The first is that They Knew They Were Right leaves the […]

A Trotsky for Our Time

On his schooldays: “The class was henceforth divided into distinct groups: the talebearers and the envious on one side, the frank and courageous boys on the other, and the neutral and vacillating mass in the middle. These three groups never quite disappeared even in later years. I was to meet them again and again in my life.” —Leon Trotsky, My Life, cited in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (h/t Connor Kilpatrick)

Ron Paul has two problems: one is his, the other is ours.

Ron Paul has two problems.  One is his and the larger conservative movement of which he is a part.  The other is ours—by which I mean a left that is committed to both economic democracy and anti-imperialism. Ron Paul’s problem is not merely the racist newsletters, the close ties with Lew Rockwell, his views on abortion, or even his stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act—though these automatically disqualify him from my support.  His real problem is his fundamentalist commitment to federalism, which would make any notion of human progress in this country impossible. Federalism has a long and problematic history in this country—it lies at the core of the maintenance of slavery and white supremacy; it was consistently invoked […]

Still Batshit Crazy After All These Years: A Reply to Ta-Nehisi Coates

Jumping off from Mark Lilla’s negative review of my book in the New York Review of Books—about which more later, though if you’re looking for a hard-hitting response, check out Alex Gourevitch’s demolition at Jacobin—Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a helpful corrective to Lilla’s claim that “political apocalypticism” is a recent development on the right. It’s interesting that Lilla raises Buckley here. People often bring him up as foil to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, as an example of a time when conservatism was sane. But that Buckley joke has always struck me (a college dropout) as batshit crazy. I constantly hear about the sober-minded Buckley, but it’s tough for me to square that with the man who posited that the bombing […]

My Appearance on Up With Chris Hayes

Here’s the video of my appearance on New Year’s Day on Up With Chris Hayes. I got to talk Reactionary Mind with Chris and a panel of guests that included Amanda Marcotte, feminist blogger extraordinaire; Noah Kristula-Green, managing editor of FrumForum; and Michael Brendan Dougherty, political editor of Business Insider. Amanda’s on the left, Noah and Michael are on the right. Politically speaking. [vodpod id=Video.15898452&w=425&h=350&fv=launch%3D45840921%5E581803%5E2531331%26amp%3Bwidth%3D420%26amp%3Bheight%3D245]