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 […]
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,” […]
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 […]
One of the elements of Du Bois’s argument in Black Reconstruction that surprised me most the last time, or maybe the time before that, that I taught it, was just how much attention he pays to the Radical Republican’ vision of congressional power and congressional government over and against a Constitution based on presidential power and presidential government. Du Bois even suggests that had the Radicals won, we might have had a system more like the parliamentary democracies of Europe, or at least of Britain, where the chief executive is simply the leader of the party in parliament, and not an office completely apart from that party and that parliament. For Du Bois, that vision of parliamentary government, as opposed […]
In early modern Venice and Florence, a new form of pooling capital emerged. It was called the “compagnia,” which translates into English as “company.” The literal meaning of the word is “with bread.” Why and how does “with bread” produce a notion of pooling capital and our modern word for an economic enterprise? Because those capital-pooling efforts were often family efforts. The early modern Italian usage points us forward and backward in time. Forward because, in recent years, there’s been a big literature on the rise or return of “family capitalism” or “dynastic capitalism” or “patrimonial capitalism.” Where the 20th century was supposed to be the realm of the managerial corporation, with control and ownership separated, and ownership in the […]
The magazine n+1 did a long interview with me about Muskism and McCarthyism, where, among other things, I said: One of the claims you often heard during Trump 1.0, which I always thought was misleading, was that “the cruelty is the point.” If you know anything about the history of political intimidation and politically repressive fear, you know that the cruelty is not the point. Silence, obedience, and submission—subjugation for political ends—that’s the point. The goal of McCarthyism was to crush what was left of the New Deal left-liberal alliance, primarily in the labor movement, and it succeeded. The point wasn’t to be cruel. Trump and some of his allies really are just sadists, psychopaths, and sociopaths. There is no […]
New York Times: President Trump, furious about delays in delivering two new Air Force One jets, has empowered Elon Musk to explore drastic options to prod Boeing to move faster, including relaxing security clearance standards for some who work on the presidential planes…He is infuriated that he begins his second term flying around in the same aging planes that once transported President George H.W. Bush. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899: The ideal pecuniary man is the ideal delinquent.
Forty Twenty [aach, basic error] percent of Americans now say that they think flying is very or somewhat unsafe, up from 12% last year. Google searches for “is it safe to fly” are way up from the norm. And Trump just fired 400 workers at the FAA. If an opposition party can’t put these simple stats together to make a political argument about society, government, and our interdependence, it’s neither in opposition nor a party. Update, 3:30 pm On a related note, The Washington Post just reported this: The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that it is moving to correct the accidental firing of several people working onthe federal government’s response to an outbreak of avian influenza, commonly known […]
This afternoon, a federal judge in DC issued a temporary restraining order to stop Trump’s firing thousands of employees at USAID. The judge was appointed by…Trump. I’ve already written about the very real possibility that Trump’s judges may rule against Trump; they did this, after all, repeatedly during his first term. And they’re doing it again, in his second term. But I want to address here a different, more troubling, issue. In their lawsuit against Trump’s gutting of USAID, the unions that brought suit claimed that Trump had exceeded his legal and constitutional authority by firing thousands of employees. “Not a single one of defendants’ actions to dismantle U.S.A.I.D. were taken pursuant to congressional authorization,” the unions claimed. “And pursuant […]
I’m not a big believer in courts and think the left has relied upon them for far too long. But there is an argument afoot on the left that irks me because it’s both factually wrong and, as is so often the case with the left, politically disempowering. The argument is that the courts will pose no check on Trump because Trump stacked them with loyalists during his first term. In today’s Times, legal scholar Deborah Pearlstein effectively dismantles that view. As Pearlstein shows, in 2023, two political scientists analyzed the “win rate” at the Supreme Court of every president since 1937. Despite the fact that Trump had a majority of Supreme Court justices who were either his appointees or […]
A month before Election Day, I posted this on Facebook: As the last three days’ events around the failure of the Republicans and Trump to shape Congress’s most recent spending bill reveal, I got this prediction pretty much right. I should confess right off the bat that I do get a fair number of predictions wrong. Most painfully, I was sure Clinton would win in 2016, a prediction that my critics, understandably, have never let me or my readers forget. But one thing I did get completely right about Trump’s first term, before it even began, was that he would be a spectacularly weak president; failure, rather than success, would be his lot. The reason for that failure and that […]
This blog has been offline for a while, mostly due to technical issues that I think have now been fixed. (Much thanks to Pea Lutz, whose work on the blog has been excellent; if you’re looking for someone to do such work, I highly recommend Pea.) My apologies for the extended silence. I had been posting a lot on Facebook, so much of my commentary on politics and other matters is there. But I’m going to try to return to being more active here. One fascinating phenomenon that I’ve been noticing in the last couple of weeks is how, despite Trump’s winning the election, a fair amount of both reporting and commentary in the media, including on the left, has […]
I have a new piece up at The New Yorker. I take stock of the debate over whether Trumpism is an authoritarian/fascist/tyrannical formation. Throughout the Trump years, I consistently argued that that what I call the strongman thesis (just as a catch-all way of describing the various terms that were used for Trumpism) was not the most helpful way of thinking about what was going on with Trump or on the right. In this piece, I try to step back from that debate and examine what was really driving it. Long story short: where liberals and leftists saw power on the right, I saw, and continue to see, paralysis. Not just on the right, in fact, but across the political […]
I’m in The New Yorker this morning, writing about Richard Evans’s new biography of the historian Eric Hobsbawm, explaining how the failures of Evans the biographer reveal the greatness of Hobsbawm the historian: Hobsbawm’s biographer, Richard Evans, is one of Britain’s foremost historians and the author of a commanding trilogy on Nazi Germany. He knew Hobsbawm for many years, though “not intimately,” and was given unparalleled access to his public and private papers. It has not served either man well. More data dump than biography, “Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History” is overwhelmed by trivia, such as the itineraries of Hobsbawm’s travels, extending back to his teen-age years, narrated to every last detail. The book is also undermined by errors: […]
According to The Washington Post: Former president Barack Obama gently warned a group of freshman House Democrats Monday evening about the costs associated with some liberal ideas popular in their ranks, encouraging members to look at price tags, according to people in the room. Obama didn’t name specific policies. And to be sure, he encouraged the lawmakers — about half-dozen of whom worked in his own administration — to continue to pursue “bold” ideas as they shaped legislation during their first year in the House. But some people in the room took his words as a cautionary note about Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal, two liberal ideas popularized by a few of the more famous House freshmen, including Rep. […]
I find myself in a peculiar position with regard to the Mueller report (assuming—big assumption, I know—that we have a good enough sense at this point of what’s in it). On the one hand, I was part of the Russiagate skeptic circle. I didn’t doubt that Russia had attempted to influence the election, but I didn’t think that attempt had much if any consequence; those who did, I thought, were grasping at straws. Nor did I think there was a strong case for the claim that Trump actively colluded with that effort and had thus put himself and the United States in hock to Putin. The evidence of all the active anti-Russian measures on the part of the US since […]
What does Trump’s pending declaration of a state of emergency, so that he can commandeer funds to pay for his wall, mean politically? What does it tell us about his power or powerlessness? I’ve talked on many occasions about Steve Skowronek’s theory of presidential power. In that account, presidential power is dependent on two factors: the strength and resilience of the existing regime, and the affiliation or orientation (supportive or opposed) of the president to that regime. The strongest presidents are those who come to power in opposition to an extraordinarily weak and tottering regime, who shatter that regime and construct a new one. Think Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. The weakest presidents are those who are affiliated to a weak […]
For the past week, there’s been a lot of discussion on Russia, Putin, Trump, and how leftists are responding to the issue. I’ve been participating in these conversations on social media. This past weekend, the conversation got a little crazy, when Columbia Law lecturer and Harper’s contributor Scott Horton engaged in some wild and irresponsible speculation about how the Russians may be backing certain Democratic primary candidates in the current elections. This morning, Ryan Cooper weighed in on the issue at The Week. I disagree with where he comes out on the issue. I want to say at the outset that I consider Cooper an ally. I don’t know him personally, but I very much admire his work. We follow each other […]
Last week, after Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, Donald Trump declared, “Outside of war and peace, of course, the most important decision you make is the selection of a Supreme Court judge.” As we await Trump’s announcement on Monday of this most important decision, let’s take a gander at the history of nominations past. 1. In 1990, when George H.W. Bush was casting about to replace retired Supreme Court justice William Brennan, the consensus candidate in the White House was Ken Starr. 2. Starr got nixed by Dick Thornburgh, who was Bush’s Attorney General. Thornburgh thought Starr was too much of a squish, not sufficiently hard-right, especially about presidential power. 3. Today, Thornburgh is one of […]
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 […]
“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 […]
I’m glad I’m not a journalist. I don’t think I could handle the whiplash of the ever-changing story line, the way a grand historical narrative gets revised, day to day, the way it seems to change, week to week, often on a dime. Or a $1.5 trillion tax cut. In my Guardian digest this week, I deal with the media’s memory, taxes, the state of the GOP, judges, sexual harassment, and leave you at the end with my assessment of where we are. Here’s a preview: Last week, after the victory of Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama’s senatorial election, the media began reporting that the Republican party was facing an epic disaster. Citing insider talk of a “political earthquake” and a “party in turmoil,” the Washington Post anticipated a […]
Mike Allen is reporting this morning: Trump was upbeat and brought up a Kim Strassell column in The Wall Street Journal, “Scalias all the way down,” giving the president credit for “remaking the federal judiciary.”‘ I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. While political scientists warn against the norm erosion of the Trump presidency—and dwell on the importance of the courts, the Constitution, and the rule of law as antidotes—the most far-seeing leaders of the conservative movement and the Republican party understand that long after Trump has left the stage, long after the Republican Party has lost its hold over the political discourse and political apparatus, it will be Trump’s judiciary—interpreting the Constitution, applying the rule of law—that […]