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 […]
In a probing Substack, John Judis writes, “In ten or fifteen years, it is very possible that the Democratic Party will be known as ‘democratic socialist’ in the same way it is now known widely as ‘liberal.’” Before you dismiss this as ideological patter from a political adventurer, you should know that Judis is a relentlessly unenthusiastic realist, who’s been watching and commenting on the American political scene longer than I’ve been alive. I’d like to take up his thought, with two tweaks. First, I’m less certain if the Democratic Party is going to be the vessel of this transformation. Though it may be at this point the oldest political party in the world—and, as Kevin Phillips famously called it, […]
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Categories
Economies, Political Theory, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Arthur Schlesinger, democratic socialism, John Judis, liberalism, Louis Hartz, New Deal, Philip Roth, Richard Hofstadter
The BungaBunga podcast had me on to discuss my Nation review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global history. It was an excellent conversation. Both interviewers, Alex Gourevitch and Alex Hochuli, pushed me to think beyond what I had written. Among the issues we discovered in our discussion: Anyway, you can listen to it here or below.
Last week, I delivered a paper at a conference about the work of Sheldon Wolin in Lausanne, Switzerland. For those of you who don’t know the name, Wolin was a political theorist who taught at Berkeley and Princeton. I took undergraduate courses with him on modern political thought and radical political thought; many other political theorists, including Wendy Brown, Cornel West, and Hanna Pitkin, studied with him as graduate students. He was one of the most influential teachers of political theory in the United States during the second half of the twentieth-century. Though I’ve always valued him most as a reader and teacher of political theory, he also had a wide audience as a political theorist in his own right. […]
In the June issue of The Nation, I have a review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History. It’s a long review, in part because it’s a long book. While I wound up being quite critical of the book, I’m more than mindful of what it takes to write such a book. I thought I owed the book, and Beckert, the courtesy of giving it its due. Hence the length. The review may be behind the paywall, so if you cannot access it, you can sign up for a subscription to the magazine or email me, and I can send you a pdf. Many thanks to readers of earlier drafts of the review, particularly Lucas Pinheiro, Joan Scott, Greg Grandin, […]
In 1753, Britain considered a bill to allow the naturalization of the country’s 4,000 foreign-born Jews. Formally titled “An Act to permit Persons professing the Jewish Religion to be naturalized by Parliament,” the bill was widely known as the “Jew Bill.” Though it initially passed both houses of Parliament, it was repealed after a vicious campaign of antisemitism and nativism, led by the Tories. Today’s Republican Islamophobes in Congress are more brazen. They don’t wait for the public to do their dirty work of name-calling. They have actually titled a bill that would, among other things, strip Muslim citizens of their citizenship, the “MAMDANI Act.” When people say that the historic Jewish Question, which was about whether Jews could ever […]
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 […]
The New York Times has a decent-enough report tonight on how the US made its decision to go war with Iran. Though it’s filled with sharp reporting and detailed accounting, it fails to identify the big forest amid the trees. That’s this: Despite the differences in personnel between the Bush and the Trump administrations, the parallels between the war in Iraq and the war in Iran are pretty straightforward. First, a hard-right Republican president comes to power denouncing the more “internationalist” and “establishment” Republicans and Democrats who see the United States as the world’s policeman. We often forget that one of Bush’s promises when he ran in 2000 was that he wouldn’t do nation-building, the United States would be “humble,” […]
Donald Trump this morning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” New York Times tonight: “One big question: Experts say Trump’s threatened attacks could be unlawful. It comes down to: What defines a civilian target?”
In June 2013, thirteen years ago, President Obama nominated Samantha Power to serve as US Ambassador to the United Nations. During her Senate hearings, Power was grilled by Marco Rubio, then serving as Republican senator from Florida, about an article she had written many years earlier in The New Republic, suggesting that the United States should take stock of its history and acknowledge with humility some of the mischief it had made in the world. The following exchange ensued. Which makes for some grim reading today, when people wonder how the US got into the mess it has gotten into under Trump in Iran. Reading Power’s words, knowing who became Rubio became, it all seems there, in black and white, […]
I’ve been following the online debate over the slogan “no kings” with some interest. On the one side, critics argue that it’s a normie notion, which obscures all sorts of questions about imperial war, Palestine, oil, and oligarchy. On the other side, defenders say it appeals to a broad set of values and voters, providing the basis for a popular movement against not just Trump but all the ills he stands for and promotes, not to mention the kind of state he is trying to create and consolidate. Interestingly enough, as Bruno Leipold shows in his magnificent book, Citizen Marx, Marx struggled with this very question across the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. While most readers associate Marx with the claim […]
According to this latest NBC News poll, 67% of Democrats say that their sympathies lie with Palestinians over Israelis. This is an astonishing sea change in the opinion of a major part of the electorate. Just thirteen years ago, in 2013, only 18% of Democrats said that their sympathies lay with the Palestinians. This shift, moreover, is not confined to Democrats. Thirty-seven percent of independents claim that their sympathies lie with the Palestinians; only twenty-seven percent claim that their sympathies lie with the Israelis. In 2013, those numbers were nearly reversed: 37% of independent voters claimed that their sympathies lay with the Israelis, while only ten percent of independent voters claimed that their sympathies lay with the Palestinians. As NBC […]
One of the more delightful innovations of the Obama era was the requirement that every full-time employee—or taxpayer, I don’t know—has to provide proof of “health insurance offering and coverage” when filing their taxes. It’s called a 1095-C form. The employer provides it to you, the employee, and you file it with your taxes. The 1095-C form is yet one more way that Americans show to the world our pitch-perfect sense of how to waste time while pretending to do something good. Instead of having the government provide everyone with healthcare or health insurance, our leaders and experts come up with some sort of nudge that somehow or another is supposed to get us somehow closer to some group of […]
Why does one question impinge upon the other? Why does one evoke the other when there is no obvious connection between them? . . . [A]ll the most important questions of Europe and humankind in our day are forever being raised simultaneously. And it’s this simultaneity that is so remarkable. The necessary condition for these questions to appear simultaneously is what constitutes the riddle! —Dostoevsky One of the most powerful insights of Marx’s On the Jewish Question, and the reason we return to it, is that he, almost alone among all the people who set out to answer the Jewish Question in the early 1840s, saw that the question itself was not really about the Jews at all but about […]
On Thursday, my daughter, who’s a high school senior, won first place for the best paper in the National History Day competition for all of New York City. The title of her paper is “Drop Dead University: The Fight for Free Education at the City University of New York.” She worked hard on it, dug deep into the municipal archives about the 1975 Fiscal Crisis and the decision to end free tuition at CUNY, read widely in the secondary literature, and, though I’m obviously not objective, did a good job. Now she goes on to the New York State competition, which will be at the end of April. Aside from proud-parent bragging, I’m posting about this tonight because I just […]
The literary critic George Steiner often mused, almost perversely, on the fact that some of the most wondrous works of twentieth-century literature were produced under conditions of extreme censorship. He especially liked to remark upon the Soviet experience and the literature that came out of it, suggesting that great literature emerged not from societies of freedom but from those of domination. Reading the below list of topics that cannot be discussed in Florida classrooms, I wonder if we might not be in for some decades of intense intellectual ferment and creativity. Imagine all the possibilities for scholars and writers and teachers and students, as they struggle to work their way around the censor. Remember the old theory about the Bukharin […]
In The Holy Family, Marx returns to his critique of Bruno Bauer, which he first mooted in his article “On the Jewish Question.” As he did in the earlier essay, Marx again accuses Bauer of a residual idealism, which he traces back to the essential Christianity (and Hegelianism) of Bauer’s thinking. In the following passage, however, Marx breaks new ground, in ways that seem relevant to the left today. It’s a long passage and more than a little confusing, but bear with me (and it). Yet Absolute Criticism [i.e., Bauer-style thinking] has learnt from Hegel’s Phänomenologie at least the art of converting real objective chains that exist outside me into merely ideal, merely subjective chains, existing merely in me and […]
Many have heard of Hitler’s ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch. It took place in Munich in 1923 and landed Hitler in jail, where he wrote Mein Kampf. Three years before the Beer Hall Putsch there was a much more serious challenge to the Weimar Republic from the right. It was called the Kapp Putsch. Centered in Berlin, led by high-ranking officers of the military, joined by monarchist and conservative elements, speaking for the Freikorps and beyond, it posed a far more immediate threat to the national government than the failed putsch of three years later. It was stopped by a general strike. That general strike was called by the President of the Weimar Republic—the fairly moderate and plodding leader of the […]
Four ICE agents walk into a Mexican restaurant in Minnesota, are served a meal, and return hours later to arrest three of its workers, walking home, in front of a Lutheran church. I can’t remember where it was that I read this, but it was less than 24 hours ago, in one of those big classic histories of the ancient world, about how hospitality cultures arise in opposition to predatory and piratical practices. (One of the genuine advantages and most welcome reforms of Athens’s Delian League was the suppression of piracy.) In seafaring communities, in particular, hospitality becomes the marker of those who are potential friends as against those who are definitive enemies. With ICE, we seem to have pioneered […]
If you’ve ever read Plato’s Republic, you know that one of its central features is the argument, pursued quite sincerely by Socrates, that the state should prohibit the teaching of certain texts, particularly by the poets, by which Socrates (really, Plato) means Homer. Fast forward a couple thousand years and change, and we see the state of Texas discovering what is truly the best way to teach Plato in today’s world: ban him. Back in November, the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System, which is a state body, voted to adopt the following rule: No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and […]
Like many of you, I woke up this morning to the news that the United States government had attacked Venezuela and captured its president, spiriting him out of the country. Though this part of it got hardly got any notice, two days ago, Jumaane Williams, in his inaugural address as NYC public advocate, explicitly invoked Maurice Bishop, the leader of Grenada where Williams’s family is from, as an influence and an inspiration. Bishop, a left-wing revolutionary, came to power in Grenada in 1979. In 1983, his government began building an airport in Grenada, which made the Reagan regime nervous. As rumblings in the US grew, Bishop was toppled in a coup and executed by forces within his own government. Six […]
In addition to what I wrote earlier today, I want to make three other observations about Mamdani’s inauguration speech. First, Trump was almost completely absent from the speech. He came up, by name, only once, when Mamdani referenced the voters who cast their ballots for Trump in 2024 and then for Mamdani in 2025. He came up, by act, only once, when Mamdani made a reference to ICE raids. I don’t think anyone believes Mamdani is not aware of Trump or what Trump can do to New York. So we have to ask why he refused to make Trump a feature of his speech. It’s not because Mamdani was only interested in going positive and being hopeful; he referenced all […]
On July 15, at a congressional hearing, New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik subjected CUNY’s chancellor, Félix Matos Rodríguez, to a humiliating round of questions about the alleged views of the CUNY faculty and staff. The chancellor, unfortunately, did little to defend the people at CUNY who work to make the institution what it is. Instead, he ritually intoned the need to fight antisemitism. When asked about specific people and institutions at CUNY, he deflected, feigned ignorance, or threw his employees under the bus. I particularly remember one moment of the exchange between Stefanik and the chancellor (start at 4:45). Stefanik: Are you familiar with CUNY CLEAR? This is the clinical arm of CUNY School of Law. Rodríguez: CUNY CLEAR. I’m not […]