In my last post, I talked about the liberal pundits who see black voters as “Hillary’s Firewall.” Even if Sanders wins in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, which have large white populations, the pundits say he’ll find his support plummeting in a state like South Carolina, where black voters are firm Clinton supporters. I pointed out that in 2008, Clinton saw that firewall in South Carolina quickly melt after Obama’s victory in Iowa and his strong second-place finish in New Hampshire. I also pointed out that South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, who is African American and one of the top Democrats in the House, was cautioning against the notion that black voters were solidly behind Clinton this time around. Turns out, he was right. […]
General David Petraeus has been hired to teach at CUNY at the University of Southern California (h/t Anna Law): David H. Petraeus, the former four-star U.S. Army general who resigned as head of the Central Intelligence Agency last year after confessing to an extramarital affair, will teach part-time at USC and help mentor students who are veterans, officials are announcing Thursday. Petraeus, who commanded coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, will teach and participate in seminars on such issues as international relations, government, leadership, information technology and energy, according to USC… … Petraeus, 60, is supposed to start his faculty position at USC July 1 for an open-ended period, officials said. “I am very grateful to have an opportunity to […]
Up at The New Yorker this morning, I’ve got a double review of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s new book, Tyranny of the Minority, and Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath’s The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, which came out last year. My essay addresses the Constitution and the rise of the right, and asks whether any part of the Constitution might help us counter the right. I come out, surprisingly, thinking that, maybe, yes, it might. That’s what I learned from Fishkin and Forbath’s “wonderfully counterintuitive” book, as I say. The other surprise, for me, is the shift in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s position. Five years ago, you may recall, they were the leading scholarly voices arguing against the norm erosion of Donald Trump […]
Until now, I’ve avoided getting myself worked up about ChatGPT. Prompted by this article by a Columbia undergraduate this past spring, I thought that if a student knows enough about paper-writing to make ChatGPT work for them, in the way this student describes in his piece, without detection by a minimally alert instructor, that student has probably already mastered the skills of essay-writing far more than the author of this piece seems to realize. I at least could rest easy with the knowledge that if a student used ChatGPT to write a paper for me, and it was good, I wasn’t not teaching that student what they needed to learn how to do. But this recent article, by a Harvard […]
One of the most interesting dimensions of our contemporary crisis of democracy discourse and literature is its moralism. If you listen to the talking heads on MSNBC or read more sophisticated academic treatments of the topic, you’ll find a frequent claim that mainstream Republican leaders who are not Trump—people like McConnell or McCarthy—are cowards or careerists. Unlike the Greenes and Gaetzes of the party, goes the argument, these men are not ideologically opposed to democracy. They’re just insufficiently committed to democracy. That’s the problem. If they were ideologically principled, if they were honorable, if they were dedicated, out of conviction, to democracy, these leaders would take on the authoritarians in their midst. In the past, the argument continues, Republican leaders […]
I have a new piece up at The New Yorker. I take stock of the debate over whether Trumpism is an authoritarian/fascist/tyrannical formation. Throughout the Trump years, I consistently argued that that what I call the strongman thesis (just as a catch-all way of describing the various terms that were used for Trumpism) was not the most helpful way of thinking about what was going on with Trump or on the right. In this piece, I try to step back from that debate and examine what was really driving it. Long story short: where liberals and leftists saw power on the right, I saw, and continue to see, paralysis. Not just on the right, in fact, but across the political […]
In September 2017, I got a “cease and desist” email from an organization called outlawbds. They informed me that because of my activism around BDS, I had been put on a “blacklist”—yes, they used that word, twice—and that I had a limited window of time to change my tune on BDS in order to get my name removed from the blacklist and avoid the legal consequences of my advocacy. “You have been marked,” the email warned me. “You have been identified.” Turns out the whole thing was part of an operation of an Israeli intelligence firm called “Psy-Group.” Whose activities have now been exposed in The New Yorker. Here are just a snippet of the items that might be of […]
It’s going to be a busy fall with lots of talks and presentations. Here’s the schedule. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello! Tuesday, September 25 5 pm: “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump” University of Edinburgh (Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History; School of History, Classics, and Archaeology; School of Social and Political Science) Meadows Lecture Theatre, Doorway 4, Medical School, Teviot Place Tuesday, October 2 4 pm: “Invisible Man: The Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas’s Jurisprudence” Rutgers University (Department of History and Raritan) Alexander Library, 4th Floor Auditorium 169 College Avenue, New Brunswick Friday, October 5 6 pm:“On Fear and Governance”: A conversation about Euripides’s The Bacchae with director […]
Mike Allen is reporting this morning: Trump was upbeat and brought up a Kim Strassell column in The Wall Street Journal, “Scalias all the way down,” giving the president credit for “remaking the federal judiciary.”‘ I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. While political scientists warn against the norm erosion of the Trump presidency—and dwell on the importance of the courts, the Constitution, and the rule of law as antidotes—the most far-seeing leaders of the conservative movement and the Republican party understand that long after Trump has left the stage, long after the Republican Party has lost its hold over the political discourse and political apparatus, it will be Trump’s judiciary—interpreting the Constitution, applying the rule of law—that […]
On MSNBC, former Bush White House Communications Chief Nicolle Wallace went after the new White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci and his team: “These are not all the president’s men, these are all of Sean Hannity’s men.” I gather Wallace thinks “all the president’s men” means men of great virtue and talent, the proverbial Wise Men of the early Cold War or the Knights of the Roundtable or something. In reality, the phrase refers to Nixon’s team of White House advisors and convicted Watergate felons, all of whom went to jail: Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell, Colson, Chapin, and Segretti, who literally invented the phrase “ratfucking” for the dirty tricks he was hired to do for the Nixon campaign. It’s also a riff on […]
I have a piece in The Guardian on the Republicans’ stalled healthcare bill in the Senate. Some excerpts: At the beginning of this week, Republican senators were planning to head home for the Fourth of July recess and celebrate the nation’s independence and freedom by enacting their idea of liberty: denying health insurance to more than 20 million people. By the middle of the week, their hopes were dashed. … Once again the Republicans have found themselves in the peculiar position of possessing total control of the elected branches of the federal government, yet unable to act on one of their longstanding dreams: not just slowly destroying Medicaid, a federal program that guarantees healthcare to millions of poorer people, but also forcing […]
Throughout Trump’s time in the White House, I’ve been wondering, like many others, what would it take for the GOP to break with Trump. I never thought for a moment that they’d break with him over a question of law or constitutional principle or democratic norms or political propriety. My working assumption, for most of this time, has been that if they felt like their tax cuts were in jeopardy, they might jump ship, tax cuts being the one thing that unites the party and that they know how to do. But things aren’t looking good for the tax cuts, and I see no signs of any break. So we’re left with the question: why is the GOP sticking with Trump? They’re […]
I’ve been reading David Cay Johnston’s excellent book The Making of Donald Trump. And without mentioning or even alluding to Hitler or fascism, the book raises an interesting—if unexpected—parallel about Trump’s and Hitler’s rise to power. One of the themes in a lot of the historical scholarship about Germany in the 1920s and 1930s is how Hitler and the Nazis were able to take advantage of the systemic weaknesses of Weimar: the cracks in the political structure, the division among elites, the fissures in the parties, the holes in the Constitution, and so on. What Johnston narrates, in almost nauseating detail, is how Trump’s ascension to wealth and fame and power—long before he makes his 2016 run for the presidency—is dependent […]
I’m pulling my daughter Carol out of Hebrew School today so that we can attend this rally, at 5 pm in Washington Square Park, against Trump’s pending declaration that most refugees will no longer be given refuge here and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries will no longer be welcome here. This is my obligation as a citizen and, even more important, as a Jew. A writer once wrote: Four hundred years of bondage in Egypt, rendered as metaphoric memory, can be spoken in a moment; in a single sentence. What this sentence is, we know; we have built every idea of moral civilization on it. It is a sentence that conceivably sums up at the start every revelation that came […]
In August, I blogged about a New York Times story on a corruption investigation of City College President Lisa Coico. On Friday, the Times reported that Coico abruptly resigned. Today, the Times has a long piece on the corruption and potential criminality that led to Coico’s resignation (upon threat of firing). On the one hand, the piece paints a portrait of a college president so fantastically corrupt, it’s almost comical. Ms. Coico, who had an annual salary of $400,000 at that point [2011], was using the college’s main fund-raising vehicle, the 21st Century Foundation, to pay tens of thousands of dollars for housekeeping, furniture, seasonal fruits and organic maple-glazed nuts, among other items….By August 2011, according to an email between two school officials, the college had begun to […]
Five years ago today—so my wife Laura tells me; I had thought we’d reached this point a couple of weeks ago—this blog was launched. Since then, I’ve written 901 posts, totaling, I’m guessing, about a million words, which has provoked some 16,000 comments. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, my posts are guaranteed to reach at least 30,000 people (there’s overlap in these audiences so I’m subtracting a good amount to try and account for that), and on a good day, anywhere from 10 to 20 thousand readers will come to the blog and read its posts there. I often cross-post at Crooked Timber, where I’m a regular blogger, or Jacobin, so the readership for any one post can be even higher. I started this blog […]
The disastrous finances of Donald Trump’s campaign has gotten a lot of attention these past two days. The Times reports: Donald J. Trump enters the general election campaign laboring under the worst financial and organizational disadvantage of any major party nominee in recent history, placing both his candidacy and his party in political peril. Mr. Trump began June with just $1.3 million in cash on hand, a figure more typical for a campaign for the House of Representatives than the White House. He trailed Hillary Clinton, who raised more than $28 million in May, by more than $41 million, according to reports filed late Monday night with the Federal Election Commission. I’ve noticed throughout this election season—it actually long predates this election—just how […]
Since I came online, I’ve been involved in or watched a lot of fights and really bitter campaigns. Over Israel/Palestine, neoliberalism (not the recent tempest in a teacup but the great neoliberalism wars of 2011), Charlie Hebdo, campus speech codes, labor unions and Wisconsin (that was fun!), Occupy, Jacobinghazi, libertarianism. Not just fights where the obvious suspects lined up on the obvious sides but where friends took opposite positions or desperately (and unsuccessfully) tried to avoid taking a position at all—if for no other reason than to avoid alienating someone they cared about. But nothing I’ve seen online (this is entirely impressionistic) has been as divisive, acrimonious, emotional, as the Clinton/Sanders race. Not just among partisans of the two candidates but […]
This semester, I’m teaching our department capstone seminar, on the classics of political economy, in which students are expected to write a lengthy piece of original research. It’s an intense process for the students. We start with a one- to two-page précis. The students then write a detailed outline of the paper. Then they submit a rough draft (I just got the rough drafts yesterday and have begun reading them today). And then the final draft, which is due in a few weeks. My goal is twofold: first, to get the students to really dig into a topic (I’ve written about that here); second, to teach the students that old truism that all writing is just rewriting. I think the fancy ed folks […]
NB: Like the matzoh the Jews prepared in ancient Egypt, this post was written in great haste. A few weeks ago, I invited my friend Lizzie to our seder Friday night. I knew that Lizzie had some ambivalence about the seder, so I stressed in my invitation that she should only come if she wanted to. Her response gave me a big laugh: “Only if I want to? How is it a holiday if there isn’t a little guilt and pressure thrown in?” Which got me thinking about the Passover story and guilt. I originally was going to write something much longer on this, but I’m so exhausted at this point—having been shopping and cooking for a few days, with 26 […]