As everyone in the country who’s not a fanatical Trumpist breaths a sigh of relief over yesterday’s Supreme Court affirmation of birthright citizenship, it seems like a useful moment to reflect on Israel. The principle of birthright citizenship states that it matters not a whit who your parents are or where they’re from; you are a citizen of the United States merely by the fact that you were born on its soil. That’s it. Birthright citizenship is based on the principle of jus soli—Latin for “right of the soil.” The opposite of jus soli is jus sanguinis—”right of blood.” Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neal Gorsuch, who dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision, were arguing against jus soli, and much […]
Stepping back from today’s Supreme Court rulings to consider the broad cast of the year, there seem to be three main areas in which the Court significantly pushed back on Trump. They are: 1) independence of the Fed; 2) tariffs; 3) birthright citizenship. As it happens, these were three of Trump’s biggest challenges to prevailing conservative and Republican orthodoxy. And on each one, he failed. How to read that failure? I think the simplest explanation is that the Roberts Court is, above all, a neoliberal Court. Trump’s challenge to free trade and independent monetary policy—as well as the idea of the United States being a nation of the people who are born there, not a nation of blood but a […]
The first appearance of the phrase “Jewish question” was in not in Germany, France, or anywhere on the Continent. It was in Britain, in 1754. In 1753, Parliament passed a bill allowing for the naturalization of Jews living in Britain. The bill, publicly called the “Jew-Bill,” provoked a massive controversy, leading to its repeal the following year. Joseph Grove wrote his “Reply to the Famous Jew Question” in response to the bill and the controversy. In 2026, nearly 275 years later, Stephen Miller, a Jewish American, is spearheading the most potent revival of today’s version of the original Jewish Question—that is, whether a religious, ethnic, or national minority can belong to a polity or not—in Britain’s most successful colony. And […]
Reading this New York Times report on Eric Adams’ dropping out of the race—where Adams is described, with no sense of irony, as “politically moderate” and is quoted as warning against Mamdani’s desire to “destroy the very system we built together over generations” while Cuomo is quoted as saying, “We are facing an existential threat in an extreme radicalism that threatens the existence of this city as we know it”—it dawns on me that we on the left are being presented with a golden opportunity. An opportunity that reminds me, seriously, of something only Lincoln was able to pull off. Zohran Mamdani is running now against Andrew Cuomo, a corrupt sexual harasser, who has been aided from the start by […]
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Economies, Law, The Left, The Right
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Tags Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Cuomo, Donald Trump, Eric Adams, Greg Grandin, James Oakes, Matt Karp, Zohran Mamdani
I hate to be that guy on the left, but I’m going to be that guy on the left. One of the arguments Republicans are making tonight about the firing of Jimmy Kimmel is that while they’re unhappy and uncomfortable with the head of the FCC’s threatening to pull ABC’s license, they’d be absolutely fine if the network simply made its own decision, sans government pressure, to fire Kimmel. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said to NBC, “Well, my preference would always be to let the companies make economic market decisions.” Senator Mike Rounds, Republican from South Dakota, said, “I understand that right now it’s an employer-employee issue, and that’s the way I would approach it.” As if there were […]
I understand the impulse, at moments like these, for politicians and public spokespersons to say that we need to talk across the divide, to acknowledge our similarities amid our differences, that we need leaders who understand there is no red America, no blue America, just America. It’s not my way of writing or speaking, but it runs deep in our political tradition. So it’s not surprising that people would turn to it. Looking for precedents, people will often invoke Lincoln, particularly his First and Second Inaugurals (or least the conciliatory part of the Second). The leader who bound up our wounds, who bore malice toward none and charity for all. But Lincoln is an instructive case for a different reason. […]
Judith Butler is one of 160 faculty, students, and staff members at UC Berkeley whose name the University of California has turned over to the Trump administration to help with the federal government’s investigation into alleged antisemitism on the Berkeley campus. Let’s slow that statement down so we can understand its components more clearly. Since February, Trump’s Department of Education has been investigating universities, including Berkeley and other UC campuses, for their handling of alleged antisemitism on their campuses. In March, the Justice Department announced a separate but parallel investigation of the UC campuses. In July, a House congressional committee called three university leaders to testify about alleged antisemitism on their campuses. One of the summoned was the chancellor of […]
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Education, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
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Tags Brooklyn College, CUNY, Ellen Schrecker, James Milliken, Judith Butler, McCarthyism, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of California, Zohran Mamdani
The Forward has been running a series of articles about a group in northern Arkansas that owns adjacent tracts of land that Jews and non-whites are forbidden to purchase or live on. On Thursday, the attorney general of Arkansas said this was legal. The details are complicated—mostly focused on the fact that there’s been no purchase or sale or business transaction yet, so nothing formally violating the law—but the significance of this story for thinking about Israel and Zionism is not. The Arkansas group is called Return to the Land, and it is part of a larger national movement. Focusing on people’s proof of “ancestral heritage,” it seeks, according to its mission statement, to “put land [in the United States] […]
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Economies, Jews, Law, Palestine and Israel, Race, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Arkansas, Jewish National Fund, Return to the Land, The Forward
Where would we be without the market? The stock market, the bond market, the financial markets in general—all of these institutions, journalists tell us, are the ultimate, perhaps only, check on President Trump’s power. Esteemed scholars reassure us of the same—that the world’s oldest constitution is backstopped by Wall Street and the dollar. Investors, the argument goes, need their investments protected. The courts, independent and powerful, can provide that protection. Threaten the courts, and the markets will tumble, and the dollar will drop. It is capitalism, in other words, and not citizens or politicians, that will force the White House into compliance with the courts and the Constitution. This faith in capitalism is both novel and strange. Historically, people have feared that capitalism undermines the sovereignty of the state and […]
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Economies, Labor/Workplace, Law, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
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Tags Adam Smith, Donald Trump, East India Company, Elon Musk, Michał Kalecki, William Douglas
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.
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!
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
1. Like other top law firms, the law firm at which Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, is a partner, has cut a deal with Trump. 2. Among various concessions, the firm has agreed to gut its DEI programs and to take on, pro bono, clients fighting alleged antisemitism. 3. Emhoff was brought into the firm, as a partner, in January. His specific portfolio was to advise corporations about “matters with significant reputational concerns.” 4. Emhoff’s firm announced its deal with Trump just hours after Emhoff told Georgetown Law students that “the rule of law is under attack. Democracy is under attack. And so, all of us lawyers need to do what we can to push back on that.” “Us lawyers […]
“The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.” That was historian Ellen Schrecker’s devastating conclusion in her classic study, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, which came out in 1986. Columbia University, while not the worst in Schrecker’s account, was certainly not the best. Today, as the New York Times has revealed, it’s probably the worst. At the height of the Second Red Scare, just as HUAC was beginning its first of many hearings on the threat of communism in higher ed, a group of 37 university presidents, from the nation’s most prestigious and elite institutions, including Columbia, gathered to make a statement of principles on academic freedom and the Cold War. The year was 1953. The […]
After reading my interview in n+1 on “Muskism and McCarthyism,” the producers at On the Media, the weekend show on NPR hosted by Brooke Gladstone, contacted me for a follow-up conversation. It’s airing this weekend. We ranged widely, from the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil to how Humphrey Bogart betrayed himself to HUAC, from why the term McCarthyism is so misleading to what kind of people and institutions a regime of fear can create. At the end of the interview, Brooke reminded me of a conversation we had had, on her show, during Trump 1.0 on the question of fascism and authoritarianism. She asked me where I stood on that question today. You should have a listen. Speaking of having a […]
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Jews, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Right, The State
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Tags Brooke Gladstone, fascism, HUAC, Humphrey Bogart, Mahmoud Khalil, McCarthyism, Michel Martin, Muskism, NPR
Two legal scholars whose work I admire have a useful analysis in the Times of all the steps courts can take during an escalating constitutional crisis. But the last part of their analysis really shocked me, insofar as it really, truly expresses the bankruptcy of the democratic imagination in this country, even by, maybe particularly by, the leading lights of the most liberal parts of the legal professoriate. Say, the authors ask, the courts have run out of all other options, and the administration is still defiant. What then? Their answer: Here, the resolution of an ultimate confrontation between the branches, which would dominate the news, would also depend on the response of a range of actors in the public […]
This afternoon, a federal judge in DC issued a temporary restraining order to stop Trump’s firing thousands of employees at USAID. The judge was appointed by…Trump. I’ve already written about the very real possibility that Trump’s judges may rule against Trump; they did this, after all, repeatedly during his first term. And they’re doing it again, in his second term. But I want to address here a different, more troubling, issue. In their lawsuit against Trump’s gutting of USAID, the unions that brought suit claimed that Trump had exceeded his legal and constitutional authority by firing thousands of employees. “Not a single one of defendants’ actions to dismantle U.S.A.I.D. were taken pursuant to congressional authorization,” the unions claimed. “And pursuant […]
I’m not a big believer in courts and think the left has relied upon them for far too long. But there is an argument afoot on the left that irks me because it’s both factually wrong and, as is so often the case with the left, politically disempowering. The argument is that the courts will pose no check on Trump because Trump stacked them with loyalists during his first term. In today’s Times, legal scholar Deborah Pearlstein effectively dismantles that view. As Pearlstein shows, in 2023, two political scientists analyzed the “win rate” at the Supreme Court of every president since 1937. Despite the fact that Trump had a majority of Supreme Court justices who were either his appointees or […]
I did a lot of writing this year. This is a brief list of some of my favorites. My book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, came out. It got some pretty great reviews. You should buy it. I began writing for The New Yorker Online, which has been a joy. My first piece was on political converts, men and women who make the journey from one ideology to another, and why the move from left to right has mattered more, over the course of the last century, than the move from right to left. My second piece was on Eric Hobsbawm, a Communist and a historian, and how his failure at the first made possible his success at the second. […]
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Economies, Education, Law, Media, Race, The Left, The Right
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Tags Adam Smith, Alex Gourevitch, Clarence Thomas, Hayek, Jodi Dean, Max Weber, New Yorker, Obama, Vivian Gornick
If you missed my conversation with Jamelle Bouie at the New York Public Library about The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, not to worry: it will be aired tomorrow night, Saturday, October 12, at 9 pm (East Coast time) on C-SPAN. Also, if you want to see a conversation in person, I’ll be talking with Rebecca Traister about the book at the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, on Thursday, October 24, at 7 pm. Really looking forward to that event. Doug Henwood interviewed me about the book on his show Behind the News. We talked about how Thomas’s views echo some of the arguments set out by Max Horkheimer in his famous 1936 essay “Authority and the Family,” and why it’s the […]
The Enigma of Clarence Thomas goes on sale today, with the help of a rave review in this morning’s New York Times. In the Times, Jennifer Szalai writes: It’s a provocative thesis, but one of the marvels of Robin’s razor-sharp book is how carefully he marshals his evidence. He doesn’t have to resort to elaborate speculation or armchair psychologizing, relying instead on Thomas’s speeches, interviews and Supreme Court opinions. Just as jurists make ample use of the written record, Robin does the same. … The result is rigorous yet readable, frequently startling yet eminently persuasive. … It isn’t every day that reading about ideas can be both so gratifying and unsettling, and Robin’s incisive and superbly argued book has […]