Corey Robin

The staff of The New Yorker—the people behind the scenes: editors, fact checkers, social media strategists, designers—are unionizing. They’ve even got a logo: Eustace Tilly with his fist raised. If you’re a loyal reader of the magazine, as I am, you should support the union in any way you can. Every week, they bring us our happiness; we should give them some back. They’re asking for letters of solidarity; email them at newyorkerunion@gmail.com. If you look at their demands, they read like a tableaux of grievances from today’s economy: no job security, vast wage disparities, no overtime pay, a lot of subcontracting, and so on. The creative class used to see itself and its concerns as outside the economy. Not […]

National Review just ran a review of my book, which Karl Rove tweeted out to his followers. The review has some surprisingly nice things to say. It describes The Reactionary Mind as “well researched and brilliantly argued” and praises my “astonishingly wide reading…masterly rhetorical abilities…wizardry with the pen.” But on the whole the review is quite critical of the book. Which is fine. I’ve gotten worse. But I couldn’t help noticing the appositeness of this. Here’s the National Review on my book: At no point in his book does Robin make any effort to account for the influence of Enlightenment-era classical liberalism on modern conservatism….[Adam] Smith’s influence on later conservatives is ignored. And here’s Bill Buckley, the founder of National Review (and […]

Chris Hayes, the MSNBC anchor, has launched a new podcast Why Is This Happening? The idea is to go beneath the headlines, to take the long view, to examine current events against the long arc of history. I’m really thrilled that Chris chose me as his first guest. We talked about Trump, conservatism, and The Reactionary Mind. Have a listen!

I have a piece in The Chronicle Review about a genre that has annoyed me for some time: Every few years an essay appears that treats the question of sexual harassment in the academy as an occasion to muse on the murky boundaries of teaching and sex. While a staple of the genre is the self-serving apologia for an older male harasser, the authors are not always old or male. And though some defend sex between students and professors, many do not. These latter writers have something finer, more Greek, in mind. They seek not a congress of bodies but a union of souls. Eros is their muse, knowledge their desire. What the rest of us don’t see — with our roving […]

This morning, in shul, we read Leviticus 24, where, building up to the famous eye for an eye passage, the text says: “And he that kills any man shall surely be put to death. And he that kills a beast [belonging to another man] shall make it good; beast for beast.” This afternoon, at home, I read the story of the Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, killed in 1942. Schultz, who lived in the Polish city of Drohobych, had come under the protection of Felix Landau, an officer in the SS. Schultz painted murals on the bedroom walls of Landau’s little boy. Landau liked to go on Jew-killing sprees in the Drohobych ghetto. On one such expedition, he murdered a Jewish dentist […]

I was on Democracy Now! this morning, talking about Paul Ryan’s retirement, the fate of conservatism, and the teachers’ strikes across the country. My segment starts at the 39 minute mark.

Just a reminder for those of you in the Boston area.. I’ll be at Harvard Divinity School tonight (Tuesday, April 10), speaking at Andover Chapel on 45 Francis Avenue, at 7 pm. Zachary Davis of the Ministry of Ideas series will be interviewing me about Trump and The Reactionary Mind. Tomorrow, Wednesday, April 11, at noon, I’ll be giving a talk on Trump and conservatism at Harvard Law School. The talk will be in Room 1010 at the Wasserstein Campus Center.  

As I head into the home stretch of Clarence Thomas, I’m poring over the more than three-thousand-page transcript of Thomas’s Senate Confirmation hearings in 1991. One of the eeriest revelations from that reading is not how much the Senate in 1991 was an old boys’ club; that we already knew from Anita Hill. Nor is it how much the Senate in 1991 was a white old boys’ club; that we already knew from Thomas. No, what really comes out from the hearings is how much the Senate of 1991 was a goyisch, even WASP-y, old boys’ club. Some of the most uncomfortable moments of the hearings, for me as a Jew, is to see the subtle, almost invisible, ways in […]

Vote on the Reagan Tax Cuts of 1981 House: 321-107 (131 of those 321 yes votes are Democrats; one Republican votes no) Senate: 89-11 (37 of those 89 yes votes are Democrats; one Republican votes no) Vote on the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001 House: 240-154 (28 of those 240 yes votes are Democrats; no Republican votes no) Senate: 58-33 (12 of those 58 yes votes are Democrats; two Republicans vote no) Vote on the Trump Tax Cuts of 2017 House: 227-205 (none of those 227 yes votes are Democrats; 13 Republicans vote no) Senate: 51-48 (none of those 51 yes votes are Democrats; 1 Republican votes no)

I’ve been amazed—in a good way—at how positive is the media coverage of all these teacher wildcat strikes and actions in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Particularly from liberal media outlets. I say this because it was just six years ago that the teachers in Chicago struck. Even though their cause was just as righteous as that of the teachers in these southern states, featuring many of the same grievances you see in the current moment—the Chicago teachers’ final contract included a guarantee of textbooks for all students on the first day of class; a doubling of funds for class supplies; $1.5 million for new special education teachers; and so on—the hostility from media outlets, including liberal media outlets, […]

This weekend, you can hear me talking about my Harper’s piece on Trump and liberal amnesia with Brooke Gladstone for a segment of her NPR show On the Media. If you live in New York, you can catch the show on WNYC tomorrow (Saturday) at 7 am and Sunday at 10 am. The segment is also parked here. I have to say, having listened to On the Media since sometime around the Iraq War (and this weekend’s show is all about the Iraq War on the 15th anniversary of its launch), this was a bit of a dream come true. To hear that Gladstone sounds in real life exactly as she does on the radio!

I’ve got a new piece in Harper’s, taking stock of a very American pathology—amnesia—which I analyze with the help of Philip Roth, Barbara Fields, Louis Hartz, and Alchoholics Anonymous. The piece is behind a paywall, but here’s a taste: Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized—it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then. We all […]

Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, has an article in the current issue of New York making the case for the impeachment of Clarence Thomas. I don’t have any problems with the substance of the piece, though I don’t think Abramson breaks much new ground on the Thomas sexual harassment front or with respect to the fact that Thomas committed perjury in his Senate confirmation hearings. (Having co-authored, with Jane Mayer, the book on Thomas and Anita Hill, Abramson knows this case better than almost anyone.) My problem is that Abramson seems to have lifted, sometimes word-for-word, an extended passage from a October 2016 blog post by Ian Milhiser. Here is Milhiser: He [Clarence Thomas] joined the majority […]

I’m doing a bunch of public events this semester. Here’s the schedule. On Tuesday, February 13, at 6 pm, I’ll be joining Ruthie Wilson Gilmore and Tom Sugrue on a panel about Nikhil Singh’s new book, Race and America’s Long War, which I highly recommend. Singh puts the current moment in a broad historical context, tracing Trump’s licensing of new states of cruelty back to the earliest days of America as a settler society. The book is full of surprises, which will shock even the most jaded observer of American life. The panel will be at NYU, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor. On Thursday, February 22, at 4:30 pm, I’ll be delivering the Oscar Jászi Memorial Lecture at Oberlin College. Jászi, […]

If you’re looking for an excellent television series to watch, I highly recommend The Same Sky, a German production about Berlin in 1974, which you can now stream on Netflix. I had been complaining on Facebook about how amid all the new detective shows from abroad—especially the noirish/Anglo/Nordic TV series —it was hard to find a series that didn’t rely for its suspense and thrills on either the sexual abuse and rape of women or harm to children. The series Fortitude is one of the worst offenders on this score.  At one point I thought I was going to literally throw up and had to run out of the room to the bathroom. I didn’t throw up, but I didn’t go back […]

You hear a lot of talk on Twitter these days about a constitutional crisis. The thing about previous moments of constitutional crisis in the US is that they were never strictly about institutions and narrowly political questions; they were always about something socially substantive, something larger than the specific issue itself. The crisis provoked by the election of Lincoln in 1860, which led to secession and then the Civil War, was, of course, about slavery. The crisis of FDR’s Court-packing scheme was about the New Deal and whether the American state could be used to bring American capitalism to heel. Watergate was about the Cold War and a murderous US foreign policy. What strikes me about the current crisis over […]

Two or three weeks ago, I had an intuition, a glimpse of a thought that I pushed away from consciousness but which has kept coming back to me since: The discourse of norm erosion isn’t really about Trump. Nor is it about authoritarianism. What it’s really about is “extremism,” that old stalking horse of Cold War liberalism. And while that discourse of norm erosion won’t do much to limit Trump and the GOP, its real contribution will be to mark the outer limits of left politics, just at a moment when we’re seeing the rise of a left that seems willing to push those limits. That was my thought. And now we have this oped by Steven Levitsky and Daniel […]

“As soon as Trump became a serious contender for the presidency, journalists and historians began analogizing him to Hitler. Even the formulator of Godwin’s Law, which was meant to put a check on the reductio ad Hitlerum, said: ‘Go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump.’ After Trump’s election, the comparisons mounted, for understandable reasons. “But as we approach the end of Trump’s first year in power, the Hitler analogies seem murky and puzzling, less metaphor than mood…. “There’s little doubt that Trump’s regime is a cause for concern, on multiple grounds, as I and many others have written. But we should not mistake mood for moment. Even one that feels so profoundly alien as ours does now. For that, too, has a history in America. “During […]

A question for the political theorists, intellectual historians, and maybe public law/con law experts. The question comes at the very end of this post. Forgive the build-up. And the potted history: I’m writing fast because I’m hard at work on this Clarence Thomas book and am briefly interrupting that work in order to get a reading list. In the second half of the 1980s, Clarence Thomas is being groomed for a position on the Supreme Court, or senses that he’s being groomed. He’s the head of the EEOC in the Reagan Administration and decides to beef up on his reading in political theory, constitutional law, and American history. He hires two Straussians—Ken Masugi and John Marini—to his staff on the […]