Corey Robin

This weekend, you can hear me talking about my Harper’s piece on Trump and liberal amnesia with Brooke Gladstone for a segment of her NPR show On the Media. If you live in New York, you can catch the show on WNYC tomorrow (Saturday) at 7 am and Sunday at 10 am. The segment is also parked here. I have to say, having listened to On the Media since sometime around the Iraq War (and this weekend’s show is all about the Iraq War on the 15th anniversary of its launch), this was a bit of a dream come true. To hear that Gladstone sounds in real life exactly as she does on the radio!

Last night, Donald Trump shocked the world, or at least the pundit class, when the New York Times published a wide-ranging interview Trump had given the paper on the subject of foreign policy. Trump said some scary things: that he didn’t think, for example, that the US should necessarily come to the aid of a NATO country if it were attacked by Russia. But he also said some things that were true. Like this: When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger. And while the article makes a muchness of Trump’s refusal to pressure Turkey over its response to the failed coup, the fact is that Obama hasn’t […]

I’ve got a new piece in Harper’s, taking stock of a very American pathology—amnesia—which I analyze with the help of Philip Roth, Barbara Fields, Louis Hartz, and Alchoholics Anonymous. The piece is behind a paywall, but here’s a taste: Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized—it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then. We all […]

1. Donald Trump was handed a major defeat tonight when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate his travel ban. The three-judge panel, which included a George W. Bush appointee, unanimously rejected one of Trump’s key arguments: that when it comes to immigration and national security, the actions of the executive branch are not subject to judicial review. Although our jurisprudence has long counseled deference to the political branches on matters of immigration and national security, neither the Supreme Court nor our court has ever held that courts lack the authority to review executive action in those arenas for compliance with the Constitution. To the contrary, the Supreme Court has repeatedly and explicitly rejected the notion that the political […]

Back in July, I wrote a post about the amnesia of the Vox generation of journalism. This was about the time when young journalists were claiming that no presidential candidate in modern American history ever posed the kind of threat to American democracy that Donald Trump did. I went through the specific claims, and cited example after example of comparable threats. I concluded thus: So many of them seem to lack the most basic gut impulse of any historically minded person: if you think something is unprecedented, it’s probably not. Check your amnesia, dude. … I know this is nothing deep or fancy, but it does make me wonder if today’s generation of commentators, raised as so many are on […]

One of the most storied, Aaron Sorkin-esque moments in American history—making the rounds today after Donald Trump’s indecent comment on Khizr Khan’s speech at the DNC—is Joseph Welch’s famous confrontation with Joe McCarthy. The date was June 9, 1954; the setting, the Army-McCarthy hearings. It was then and there that Welch exploded: Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? People love this moment. It’s when the party of the good and the great finally stared down the forces of the bad and the worst, affirming that this country was in fact good, if not great, rather than bad, if not worse. Within six months, McCarthy would be censured by the Senate. Within three […]

In the past few weeks, as the campaign has intensified, I’ve gotten a lot of questions (and pushback) about why I keep arguing for the non-newness of Donald Trump, why I keep resurrecting the multiple precedents for his candidacy against those who would argue for its novelty and innovations. Part of the reason, of course, is that it is an offense against history and memory to pretend that the GOP of the past was somehow a party of reasonable men, clear-headed and basically decent moderates who were taking the car out for a Sunday spin when it got suddenly hijacked by crazies and yahoos. For years, I’ve been making the claim that the GOP radicals and extremists of today are consistent with conservatives […]

1. Christ on a stick, this is what I didn’t count on with the Kaine pick as VP. The problem isn’t the pick itself: it is what it is (see #2 below). The problem is the ejaculations of joy it prompts among the pundit class and the Twitterati, who now have to sell it to us as the greatest choice of a second since Moses appointed Aaron. And not because the pundits are on the Clinton payroll: I’d have a lot more respect for them if they were. No, they do this shit for free. Out of love. Rapture. And bliss. 2. I’m not one of those people who cares much about a VP pick. I don’t think it tells you […]

My post on neoliberalism is getting a fair amount of attention on social media. Jonathan Chait, whose original tweet prompted the post, responded to it with a series of four tweets: The four tweets are even odder than the original tweet. First, Chait claims I confuse two different things: Charles Peters-style neoliberalism and “the Marxist epithet for open capitalist economies.” Well, no, I don’t confuse those things at all. I quite clearly state at the outset of my post that neoliberalism has a great many meanings—one of which is the epithet that leftists hurl against people like Chait—but that there was a moment in American history when a group of political and intellectual actors, under the aegis of Peters, took on […]

1. At last night’s debate, Trump said of Rubio, “And he referred to my hands—if they are small, something else must be small—I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.” Lest you think we’re tumbling down a new rabbit hole here, it’s important to remember that once upon a time, the king’s body and the body politic were one and the same. Trump’s reference is more pre-modern than post-modern. Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic book on the topic, The King’s Two Bodies, was subtitled “A Study in Medieval Political Theology.” In any event, I’d rather hear Trump’s opinions about his penis than his views on Muslims and Mexicans. 2. The rhetorical brutality of Trump is unprecedented. Never before have we seen a candidate so cruel.   […]

I’ve been posting about the presidential primaries on Facebook and Twitter, and neglecting the blog. I thought I’d gather all the posts here. Some notes on an often dismal—and sometimes delightful—campaign… 1. Amid all the accusations that Hillary Clinton is not an honest or authentic politician, that she’s an endless shape-shifter who says whatever works to get her to the next primary, it’s important not to lose sight of the one truth she’s been telling, and will continue to tell, the voters: things will not get better. Ever. At first, I thought this was just an electoral ploy against Sanders: don’t listen to the guy promising the moon. No such thing as a free lunch and all that. But it […]

David Brooks is fed up with the GOP. Today’s conservative, he says, is not yesterday’s conservative. What happened? Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own. I’ve been trying to combat this argument by amnesia for years. As he has done before, Paul Krugman valiantly takes up my critique today in his response to Brooks. Yet the argument keeps popping back up. So let’s take it apart, piece by piece. Brooks says the rot set in 30 years ago, in the wake of Reagan. Let’s see how today’s conservatism compares to those loamy vintages of more than three decades past. The bolded passages are all from […]

Greg Grandin writes in The Nation: Born in 1927, Gabriel García Márquez was 87 when he died last week. According to his younger brother, Jaime, he had been suffering from complications caused by chemotherapy, which saved his life but accelerated his dementia, a disease that apparently ran in his family. He’d call his brother and ask to be reminded about simple things. “He has problems with his memory,” Jaime reported a few years back. Remembering and forgetting are García Márquez’s great themes, so it would be easy to read meaning into his senility. The writer was fading into his own solitude, suffering the same fate he assigned to the inhabitants of his fictional town of Macondo, in his most famous […]