1. A king who enjoins inhuman deeds Will find enough retainers, who for grace and payment Avidly accept half the anathema. —Goethe, Iphigenia in Taurus 2. In 1942, Albert Speer drafted a decree that made it a crime, punishable by death, to provide false information about raw materials, labor, machinery or products. Himmler thought it was too harsh. 3. So contemptuous of bureaucracy and paperwork was Speer that he welcomed the Allied bombing raids on Berlin in November 1943, which partially destroyed his ministry’s offices. In a memo, he wrote: I believe that thanks to this [raid] the question of the bureaucratic treatment of problems that should best be dealt with in a manner free from administrative restraints, is automatically resolved. In a speech, […]

Reading the news of the latest police murders of African Americans in this country, I’ve been wondering how much state violence American elites believe African Americans are supposed to tolerate before they take matters into their own hands. I suspect most officials, intellectuals, and journalists don’t think much, if at all, about that question. Back in the 1960s, they did. From the Kerner Commission to Hugh Graham’s and Ted Gurr’s lengthy two-volume study Violence in America, which was a report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Michael Walzer’s essay, “The Obligations of Oppressed Minorities,” which first appeared in Commentary in 1970, is an interesting document in this regard. For two reasons. First, Walzer’s description of African Americans as an oppressed […]

The Clinton campaign made a major announcement today: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will pursue a debt-free college for all policy, including a proposal to eliminate the cost of college tuition for a significant portion of the public. … Clinton’s new proposals move her beyond previous statements that she would try to make college “as debt-free as possible“ and toward making “debt-free college available to all.” Clinton is adding three features to her plan for higher education policy, called the “New College Compact.“ They include eliminating tuition at in-state public universities for families making under $125,000 by 2021 and restoring year-round Pell Grant funding so students can take summer classes to finish school quicker. The plan isn’t great. I think […]

James Traub—last seen in the 1990s (when it was fashionable to shit all over public institutions that helped advance the cause of black and brown people) attacking Open Admissions at CUNY, which had done so much to make higher ed accessible to students of color—is back, calling, in the wake of Trump and Brexit, for a global realignment of political forces. In a blog post at Foreign Policy titled, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” Traub writes: One of the most brazen features of the Brexit vote was the utter repudiation of the bankers and economists and Western heads of state who warned voters against the dangers of a split with the European Union. … That is, chunks […]

A few days ago, I had a strange experience. I got trolled—some might say gaslighted—by the person who many think will be Hillary Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff. Her name is Neera Tanden. Tanden is the head of the Center for American Progress, the Democratic Party think tank that works closely with the Clintons. Though you may know of Tanden for other reasons. I’ll come back to that. It began on Tuesday afternoon, when I tweeted this. Take six minutes to watch Cornel West take on the DNC re Israel/Palestine, while Neera Tanden rolls her eyes. https://t.co/XZkQ5Moe4V — corey robin (@CoreyRobin) June 22, 2016 Cornel West represents Bernie Sanders on the DNC Platform Committee. Tanden represents Clinton. Electronic Intifada had excerpted some clips from the Committee’s […]

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 […]

Michael Tomasky today, seven days after the attack in Orlando: I want to advance a theory: Americans in 2016 may have a less reactive response to terrorism than they had 15 years ago….We may also have figured out, or most of us may have, that the bluster and gasconade of the fear-mongers hasn’t really done us much good. Michael Tomasky in December, four days after the attack in San Bernadino: …the rights you [Muslims] have as Americans have to be earned, fought for….If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech that tells them: If […]

In Lorillard Tobacco Company v. Reilly, the Supreme Court struck down a Massachusetts ban on tobacco advertising on First Amendment grounds. In his concurring opinion, Clarence Thomas writes: The State misunderstand the purpose of advertising. Promoting a product that is not yet pervasively used (or a cause that is not yet widely supported) is a primary purpose of advertising. Tobacco advertisements would be no more misleading for suggesting pervasive use of tobacco products than are any other advertisements that attempt to expand a market for a product, or to rally support for a political movement. Any inference from the advertisements that business would like for tobacco use to be pervasive is entirely reasonable, and advertising that gives rise to that inference […]

When Muhammad Ali famously said, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong…they never called me nigger,” he wasn’t just refusing to serve in Vietnam. He was also challenging the ability of the state to define for its citizens whom they should fear and who were their enemies. As Ali said to a group of white college students, who had challenged his position on serving in Vietnam, “You my enemy. My enemy is the white people, not Viet Congs or Chinese or Japanese.” From the time of Hobbes, one of the leading attributes of sovereignty has been the right of the state to define what threatens a people and how that threat will be responded to. In the state of nature, Hobbes wrote in Elements […]

According to the Washington Post: Sen. Bernie Sanders was given unprecedented say over the Democratic Party platform Monday in a move party leaders hope will soothe a bitter split with backers of the longshot challenger to Hillary Clinton — and Sanders immediately used his new power to name a well-known advocate for Palestinian rights to help draft Democratic policy. The senator from Vermont was allowed to choose nearly as many members of the Democratic Party platform-writing body as Clinton, who is expected to clinch the nomination next month. That influence resulted from an agreement worked out this month between the two candidates and party officials, the party announced Monday. Clinton has picked six members of the 15-member committee that writes […]

Hillary Clinton, in her 2003 memoir, on the Clintons’ decision to push for welfare reform: The sixty-year-old welfare system…helped to create generations of welfare-dependent Americans. Clinton is talking there about AFDC, a New Deal social program. It’s fascinating—given the recent fights on Twitter, social media, and elsewhere, about the racism of the New Deal—to recall this language of Clinton. Back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, that kind of talk—”generations of welfare-dependent Americans”—was code for black people, who were thought to be languishing on the welfare rolls for decades, addicted to the drug of free money, living off the hard work of hard-working white Americans. That’s the kind of language that was used to attack the New Deal. Not only by Republicans but also […]

Now that they’ve discovered the notion that a political party, faced with a dangerous political enemy, should suppress all internal criticism of its putative leader lest she be “harmed” by that criticism, and that the party should refrain from fractious internal debates lest it be ill-equipped to defeat the enemy, I wonder if liberals are rethinking their views on Lenin. The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party. Actually, by the standards of today’s liberal, Lenin’s strictures come off as relatively benign. He at least called […]

Robert Kagan has an oped on Donald Trump in yesterday’s Washington Post. It’s called “This is how fascism comes to America.” It’s got the liberal chattering classes chattering. It blames Trump on democracy and the mob, it cites Tocqueville, it gives a hand job to the Framers. For the liberal imagination, it’s the equivalent of a great massage. And it’s got critics on the left clucking. Kagan, you see, is a neocon who supported the Iraq War, so he’s not above suspicion as a commentator on the American way of violence. But if you say that, liberals will cry, Ad hominem! So let’s pay closer attention to what Kagan says, while being mindful of who he is. The two points, as we’ll see, are not unrelated. Trump, […]

This a terrible loss. Michael Ratner, the president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, died today in New York City. For the past four decades he has been a leading champion of human and civil rights, from leading the fight to close Guantánamo to representing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to holding torturers accountable, at home and abroad. Michael was a prince. Whenever we had a civil liberties crisis at Brooklyn College—which is to say, all the time: a former student held on material support for terrorism charges; an adjunct fired for his views on the Middle East; a panel discussion that almost got canceled because of threats from politicians—I’d email Michael. No matter where he was (one time, I remember, […]

Since the 1990s, legal conservatives have been engaged in a two-front war against legal liberalism. Throughout the twentieth century, the Commerce Clause was the primary constitutional instrument of American liberalism. It underwrote the New Deal, the right to organize unions, the Civil Rights Act, and anti-discrimination in the workplace. Beginning in the 1990s, conservatives have beaten back the Commerce Clause. Where legal liberals expanded the meaning of commerce to include not only the entirety of the economy but also what affected that economy—whether it be racial segregation, violence against women, or handgun possession near schools—legal conservatives have sought to radically restrict the meaning of commerce to, in some cases, simple trade or “exchange for value.” In taking away this constitutional instrument from American liberalism, […]

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 […]

I’ve been saying for months that Donald Trump is the George McGovern of the GOP, the fractious leader who so alienated the elders of his party that they deserted him in droves, handing the election to his opponent. We’re already seeing the signs. From Talking Points Memo: A former aide to John McCain, who served both as the Arizona senator’s chief of staff and a senior advisor on his 2008 presidential campaign, made clear Tuesday that he would vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the general election. “I’m with her,” Mark Salter tweeted, referring to Clinton’s campaign slogan, after noting the likely nomination of Trump, “a guy who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it’s on the level.” From the […]

What did we learn today? Clinton’s big money supporters are trying to kill single payer in Colorado. Her possible VP pick has “a more nuanced position on abortion than many liberals.” John McCain’s right-hand man declared, literally, “I’m with her.” And the Jewish socialist from Brooklyn just won the Indiana primary. All the rest is commentary.

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 […]

My eight-year-old daughter Carol and I went to hear Bernie in the park today. We went with our friends Greg Grandin, Manu Goswami, their daughter Eleanor, Manu’s mom Toshi, and thousands of others. Three highlights. First, New York City Council Member Jumaane Williams, who’s a former student of mine, stole the show. For me at any rate. He gave a great opening speech for Bernie (see the 8 minute mark here). After quoting a Daily News editorial that accused Bernie of being at “war with reality,” Williams responded, “You’re goddam right!…Maybe if you’re not at war with reality, you’re not focused enough.” Perfect. And then Williams added, “So all we’re asking is: The people who say that it cannot be done, please move out of the way of the people who are doing it.” Exactly. […]