Corey Robin

I’ll be speaking at the following venues this semester. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello. Friday, February 24, 5 pm “The Death of American Conservatism.” University of Hawaii, Saunders Hall 624 Friday, March 3, noon “Public Intellectuals: Bringing a Public Into Being.” In conversation with Jedediah Purdy. Duke University, Old Chemistry Building 011 Tuesday, March 28, 5:30 pm “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.” Manhattan College, room TBA Wednesday, March 29, 7 pm Harper’s Forum on Trump. With Masha Gessen, Lawrence Jackson, and Sarah Schulman. McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, New York Friday, April 14/Saturday, April 15 Keynote Address, Princeton Graduate Political Theory Conference Princeton University, room and time TBA In addition to […]

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 […]

Denouncing the federal judge who put a nationwide stay on his Muslim ban, Trump recently tweeted this: Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017 Picking up on how far-reaching Trump’s claim is, New York reporter Eric Levitz had this to say: But we have already become so desensitized to our new president’s 140-character authoritarianism, the fact that Trump characterized the “court system” as a national-security threat did not qualify as headline news Monday morning. We should not gloss over this. This was not merely an intemperate tweet. It was the president instructing the American people to view the […]

Someone recently asked me: if you don’t think Trump is a fascist, what do you think is going to happen? I answered her as truthfully as I could: I don’t know. The fact is: none of us knows. Not even, I suspect, Trump or Steve Bannon. In the course of several argumens and conversations over the last few days—about Trump, what he’s up to, and so on—I’ve sometimes found myself, against my better judgment, drifting into predictions. I start out trying to think about what this current moment means, and I wind up making claims about where we’re going. That’s not a place I want to be. Not simply because my prediction about the election was so completely wrong, not simply because I’m […]

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 […]

1. I pride myself on being that guy on the left who can make meaning out of even the most mindless right-wing text. With The Art of the Deal, I fear I may have met my match. About halfway through the book—chapter upon stultifying chapter about the time he flipped a housing complex in Cincinnati, the time he bought the Commodore Hotel, the time he negotiated with Bonwit Teller, the convention center he wanted to build in the West 30s—it hits me: the book reads like the memoir J. Peterman intended to write, based entirely on stories he bought from Kramer. 2. Thomas Friedman and Trump ought to get on like a house on fire: I do my own surveys and draw my […]

1. About a month before the election, I found myself—don’t ask how or why—in an audience listening to a speech by Jeffrey Wiesenfeld. For those of you who are not CUNY insiders, Wiesenfeld is a former member of the CUNY Board of Trustees. He’s also an ultra-right Zionist who’s got a lot of nice things to say about Meir Kahane (“misunderstood”) and who’s been behind or involved in pretty much every dustup over Israel/Palestine that we’ve had at CUNY these last ten years or so. His most notable effort was trying to deny an honorary degree to Tony Kushner. (I was pleased to find out from his lecture that our massive pushback against him led him to lose a bunch […]

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 […]

One of the things we’ve been seeing more and more of this past decade, and now in this election, is that state institutions that many thought (wrongly) were above politics—the Supreme Court, the security establishment, the Senate filibuster—are in fact the crassest instruments of partisan politics, sites of circus antics of the sort the Framers (and their hagiographers) traditionally associated with the lower house of a legislative body. This, I’ve argued before, has been increasingly the case since the end of the Cold War. Think of the Clarence Thomas hearings, impeachment over a blow job, Bush v. Gore, the manipulation of the security establishment and intelligence (and the sullying of national icon Colin Powell) going into the Iraq War, the […]

Yesterday, the Washington Post revealed that it had obtained a videotape featuring Donald Trump bragging, in the most graphic and ugly terms, about women he’s groped, harassed, demeaned, and more. Within 24 hours, the tape seems to have transformed the political landscape, with legions of Republican leaders now calling on Trump to step down from the ticket. 1. Across social media, people are wondering why this particular story has proven so explosive for Trump. Given that everyone already knew the vileness of his views on women and the viciousness of his behavior toward them—not to mention Muslims and Mexicans—what’s so different about this story? I suspect it’s the profanity. People forget this, but one of the things that most hurt Richard Nixon during Watergate was the release […]

There’s a good AP story this morning on the continuing crack-up of the Republican Party: As he [Trump] skips from one gaffe to the next, GOP leaders in Washington and in the most competitive states have begun openly contemplating turning their backs on their party’s presidential nominee to prevent what they fear will be wide-scale Republican losses on Election Day. … Republicans who have devoted their professional lives to electing GOP candidates say they believe the White House already may be lost. They’re exasperated by Trump’s divisive politics and his insistence on running a general election campaign that mirrors his approach to the primaries. The central weakness of the article—like so much of the reporting on the election this year—is that […]

I’ve been saying that one of the problems with the “Trump is like no Republican we’ve ever seen before” line is that it prevents us from consigning the Republican Party to the oblivion it deserves. In making Trump sui generis, by insisting that he is an utter novelty, you allow the rest of the party to distance themselves from him, to make him extreme and themselves respectable, and to regroup after November. Now a leaked email from DNC Communication Director Luis Miranda, which I stumbled across in Carl Beijer’s excellent discussion here, makes plain just how costly this strategy is. Writing back in May, Miranda protests that the Clinton campaign wants to separate Trump from the GOP so that it can point to all the Republican […]

I’m on record as saying that Clinton is going to win big-time in November. I’ve believed that for months (even when I was rooting for Sanders, I believed Clinton could beat Trump and said so). The latest polls only confirm what we’ve seen, with a few exceptions, for a year now: in a match-up between Clinton and Trump, Clinton wins. If, however, I were a big booster of Clinton and if were at all worried that she wasn’t going to win in November, here’s what I’d be doing: First, I’d get the hell off social media. This is the place where political persuasion goes to die. The whole point is argument and dissensus, conflict and opposition, often over ancillary matters that distract from the […]

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 […]

On Friday, in an email to a journalist with whom I had been discussing the murder of five policemen in Dallas, I repeated a point I had been making since Dallas to various friends in private conversations and on Facebook: We’re going to be seeing more [anti-police] violence. The combination of returning military vets, with real training (and in some, perhaps many, cases, PTSD); the widespread availability of firearms; and the persistence of the fundamental grievance at the heart of all of this: it’s a witches’ brew. On top of that, I just have to believe there are some groups out there — less the lone wolves, more little groups — who are asking themselves these very questions [about the legitimacy […]

Five years ago today—so my wife Laura tells me; I had thought we’d reached this point a couple of weeks ago—this blog was launched. Since then, I’ve written 901 posts, totaling, I’m guessing, about a million words, which has provoked some 16,000 comments. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, my posts are guaranteed to reach at least 30,000 people (there’s overlap in these audiences so I’m subtracting a good amount to try and account for that), and on a good day, anywhere from 10 to 20 thousand readers will come to the blog and read its posts there. I often cross-post at Crooked Timber, where I’m a regular blogger, or Jacobin, so the readership for any one post can be even higher. I started this blog […]

Thomas Nides, former deputy secretary of state under Clinton, offers a perfect summation of the creed (h/t Doug Henwood): Hillary Clinton understands we always need to change — but change that doesn’t cause unintended consequences for the average American. Off the top of my head, here’s a brief list of changes that caused unintended consequences for the average American (whoever that might be): The election of Abraham Lincoln. The passage of Social Security. The entrance of women into factories during World War II. Brown v. Board of Ed. Civil Rights Act of 1964 Asking an unknown state senator from Illinois to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Party convention. Politics is the field of unintended consequences (“Events, dear boy, events.”) Don’t like unintended […]

Brexit’s got people nervous about a possible Trump victory in November. It shouldn’t. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Clinton opening up a double-digit lead over Trump, 51%-39%. Now that she has clinched the nomination, Clinton is beginning to consolidate and expand support—as many observers predicted she would. The poll also shows: First, Trump’s racism and sexism play well with a rump—though never a strong majority—of the GOP. Racism and sexism are a disaster, however, in the general electorate. Roughly two-thirds of those polled think Trump’s comments about Muslims, women, and racial minorities are racist and/or unfair, and an overwhelming majority strongly disapproves his recent comments about a judge whose parents were Mexican immigrants. Only 36% of the electorate thinks that Trump is standing up for their beliefs. While […]

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 […]

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 […]