Corey Robin

In his classic article “The Nature of the Firm“—which I wish would be put on the list of required reading for political theorists; it really should be in our canon—the economist R.H. Coase divides the economic world into two modes of action: deal-making, which happens between firms, and giving orders, which happens within firms. Coase doesn’t say this, but it’s a plausible extrapolation that making deals and giving orders are, basically, the two things businessmen know how to do. In the last year, it’s occurred to me, on more than one occasion, that Trump is a Coasian grotesque. Making deals and giving orders: that’s all he knows how to do. Except that he doesn’t. As we’re seeing, he’s really bad […]

This campaign commercial for Amy McGrath, who is running for Congress in Kentucky, has got the Twitterati excited.   The campaign of McGrath seems in line with a decision, leaked last June, by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to field candidates who had seen combat, along with “job creators” and “business owners.” The question is: does it work? In the last ten presidential elections, only one candidate who actually fought in a war has won: George HW Bush. All the rest either served their country by shooting flicks (Reagan) or manipulating family connections or deferments to avoid combat (Clinton, George W. Bush, Trump) or simply weren’t eligible for a draft (Obama). Meanwhile, enlistees, soldiers, and war heroes, Republican and Democrat alike, […]

Yesterday, I noted my exasperation, in the face of the economic desperation of the younger generation, with the Clintonites in the Democratic Party. Young men and women are drowning in massive debt, high rent, low pay, and precarious jobs, and what do the Democrats have to offer them? In today’s Times, Chuck Schumer, the highest elected official in the Democratic Party, gave an answer: Right now millions of unemployed or underemployed people, particularly those without a college degree, could be brought back into the labor force or retrained to secure full-time, higher-paying work. We propose giving employers, particularly small businesses, a large tax credit to train workers for unfilled jobs. This will have particular resonance in smaller cities and rural areas, […]

One of the interesting things about the great realignment elections—1860, 1932, 1980—is that the presidents who win them (Lincoln, FDR, Reagan) never run simply against the losing candidate. Nor do they run simply against the party of that candidate. They run against a decades-long regime, which is never simply a party or political regime, but always, also, a social regime. Lincoln ran against the slaveocracy, who had nested in the Democratic Party. FDR ran against the economic royalists, who had found their protectors and agents in the Republican Party. Reagan ran against a complex of “special interests” (civil rights organizations, unions, feminist groups, poverty programs) that had captured the Democratic Party. In repudiating Carter, Hoover, Breckinridge/Douglas—and the Democrats of 1980, […]

There really is something rotten about the discussion of abortion and the Democratic Party. In a Washington Post oped, the leader of a reproductive rights coalition calls out Democrats who would sideline abortion rights in the effort to build a big tent. Oddly, the author doesn’t cite or link to statements by Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking elected official in the Democratic Party, who, within the last several weeks, came out against making abortion a litmus test not once, but twice. Not does the author cite or link to the statement by Tom Perez, the official head of the Democratic Party, chosen by the members of the Democratic National Committee, who supported Mello for the sake of electing Democrats, even if […]

Events, dear boy, events. That’s what Harold Macmillan is supposed to have said when he was asked what it was that a prime minister most feared. Like most of these famous statements, Macmillan probably never said it. But these days, events are, for me, something, on the whole, that I welcome rather than fear. Our political conversations are so stuck, with people rehearsing the same lines of the same arguments; it doesn’t matter how bitter those arguments are, the familiarity of the lines are a comfort. It’s like a church hymnal. But then something comes along—an Occupy, a Black Lives Matter, a Sanders, a BDS, and long before that, a Seattle—that no one who was not involved in the planning […]

The Washington Post has a good article this morning on the response on Capitol Hill to Trump’s budget. The big news is that the biggest opposition to Trump’s budget is coming from—it’s almost getting predictable, at this point—not the Democrats but the Republicans. Some of President Trump’s best friends in Congress sharply criticized his first budget Thursday, with defense hawks saying the proposed hike in Pentagon spending wasn’t big enough, while rural conservatives and others attacked plans to cut a wide range of federal agencies and programs. The bad mood among Republican critics was tempered by a consensus that the president’s budget wasn’t going very far on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers reminded everybody that they ultimately control the nation’s purse strings. “While […]

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 […]

As some of you know, more and more of my commentary now appears on Facebook rather than on this blog. If you’re not averse to joining Facebook, you can catch it there; I encourage you to do so, as the conversations can be quite lively and good, involving lots of different folks. I’m maxed out on friends, but you can follow me. But since a lot of readers don’t want to join Facebook, I’m going to try to make it a regular feature—monthly or semi-monthly—to catch you up to speed on what I’ve been saying there. I’m going to collect various Facebook posts and post them here as a kind of regular journal or diary. Some will be out of date […]

As we head into the final days of the election, some thoughts, observations, and provocations—by turns, cantankerous, narrow, and crabby, and, I hope, generous, capacious, and open to the future. 1. As the polls tighten, there’s a lot of left-blaming and left-fretting among Clinton supporters. That fits with a long-standing psycho-political syndrome among liberals of attacking the left—a syndrome in which the left often plays its own not so healthy part. But there’s little basis for that syndrome in reality, at least in this election. Not that this particular reality has much impact on the self-styled reality-based community. But it’s important to register that reality nonetheless: “The problems Hillary Clinton is having do not have to do with the left,” says Matt Grossmann, a political scientist […]

I’ve got an essay in Raritan about Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the problem of value. The essay is part of my long-term book project, on the political theory of capitalism, which I’ll be coming back to once I’m done with my book on Clarence Thomas (though I’ve been periodically teaching on the topic at the Graduate Center as a preparatory to writing the book). You could read the essay as a kind of prequel to this other essay I wrote on Nietzsche and Hayek and the problem of value. The idea of the book is to look at how theorists and philosophers (and even some economists) conceived of capitalism less as an economic system and more as a political system, […]

At the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, which met in Philadelphia this past weekend, I participated in a panel commemorating the life and work of Sheldon Wolin, who died last year. Here’s my contribution. * * * * As a political commentator and witness of his moment, Sheldon Wolin is primarily identified with the 1960s. With the passage of time and recession of those years, that identification—coupled with his partiality to the local and penchant for the past—has earned Wolin a reputation for quaintness and nostalgia. Yet what has struck me most, in re-reading some of his archive these past few months, is how alert and alive Wolin was to what came after the 1960s: not only the conservative backlash […]

The New York Times reports this morning: The City University of New York is investigating whether a recent $500,000 donation intended to bolster the humanities and arts at its flagship school may have been improperly diverted. The inquiry was prompted by senior faculty members at the school, the City College of New York, who learned that an account that should have contained roughly $600,000, thanks to the donation, had just $76. Faculty members asked City College officials for an explanation, but were met with “silence, delay and deflection” before appealing directly the university’s chancellor, James B. Milliken. Mr. Milliken then asked Frederick P. Schaffer, the university’s general counsel and senior vice chancellor for legal affairs, to look into the “the expenditure […]

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 […]

A thought. One of the reasons that big business hasn’t been able to step in and reverse the electoral train wreck that is the Trump campaign is not that the racist rank and file of the GOP base has so much power that big business is helpless. It is instead that big business feels relatively assured that even if the GOP goes down to defeat, it will have a friend and ally in Hillary Clinton’s administration and neoliberal elites within the Democratic Party. Clarence Thomas, of all people, gives us a clue that this may be the thinking among these elite sectors of the business class. In his concurring/dissenting opinion in the 2003 case McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, which upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign […]

Some quick thoughts on Emmett Rensin, who was just suspended from Vox because of his tweets. This is the second case in two weeks of a leftist being fired or punished by a liberal outfit because of the content of his tweets. Political publications have the right to impose a line in order to maintain the political line of the publication. The American Conservative gets to conserve, Jacobin gets to Jacobin, and Dissent gets to dissent (or assent, as old joke goes). Vox, however, claims not to be that kind of publication. As Ezra Klein says in his statement on Rensin’s suspension: “We at Vox do not take institutional positions on most questions, and we encourage our writers to debate and disagree.” In disavowing the sort of political line that avowedly political magazines take, Vox […]

The lead story in today’s New York Times is a devastating attack on CUNY, where I’ve been teaching for nearly two decades, and the state’s criminal under-funding of a once-great institution. An above-the-fold photograph of a library at one of CUNY’s senior colleges features students studying at tables, surrounded by buckets strategically placed to catch the gallons of water dripping down from the ceiling. It’s a near perfect tableau of what it’s like to teach at CUNY today: excellent, hard-working students, encircled by shabbiness, disrepair, and neglect. Though you should read the entire piece, here are some of the highlights. The infrastructure is collapsing The piece begins thus— On the City College of New York’s handsome Gothic campus, leaking ceilings have turned hallways into obstacle courses of buckets. […]

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 […]

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 […]

So much of liberals’ orientation these past five decades has been shaped by the rise of the right; by the sense that the US is really, truly, in its heart of hearts, a center/right country; that the people who elected Nixon, Reagan, and Bush really are the permanent majority. But a lot of demographic research is showing that this is radically changing among younger voters. Not just what we’re seeing in the Democratic Party, where younger voters are moving, galloping, to the left, but also among younger Republican voters, who are far less conservative than their Republican elders. As this Vox piece reports: Piles of research had already indicated that the youngest generation is much more liberal than its predecessors. But it […]