Corey Robin's Blog

I’m always struck by how terrified the left is of political confidence, enthusiasm, and enjoyment of victory. Particularly at moments like this one. Leftists fear that leaning into victory will somehow lead to complacency and relaxation, our collectively settling into an easy chair of do-nothing and yield-more. It doesn’t matter if the leftist is a Marxist, socialist, anarchist, Democrat, or liberal. They’re all Lockeans: When a man is perfectly content with the state he is in—which is when he is perfectly without any uneasiness—what industry, what action, what will is there left, but to continue in it?…A little burning felt pushes us more powerfully than greater pleasure in prospect draw or allure. (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ch. 21) I couldn’t […]

If there’s one person who saw yesterday’s repudiation of the right coming, long before everyone else did, it’s Zohran Mamdani. In one way or another, he and the movement that created him are the architects of the Democrats’ victory. Two years ago, the day after after the 2024 election, the mood was grim, the future was bleak. Nobody saw the possibility for regrouping. What did Mamdani do? Just one week after Trump’s victory, he went out and interviewed Trump voters all across the city. He spoke to white, Black, brown, Muslim, Asian, but above all working class, men and women, and above all, in the Bronx and Queens. Everyone now thinks of Mamdani’s victory a year later, first in the […]

Am I wrong or is this is the first election in a long while where the left is not being subjected to a class versus identity discourse of distraction and division? If I am right about that, what might be the reasons? First, DSA and other left groups have pushed for candidates who easily traverse that divide, either in their person or their politics. Second, by making it so easy to see the grift behind right-wing identity politics, Trump and the Republicans have unveiled the oligarchy that has profited from so many dead-end debates within the left. And with that, the right has helped delegitimate the entire enterprise. Third, the weaponization of Jewish identity politics by the right and the […]

Fatherland, the new Paweł Pawlikowski film about Thomas Mann’s 1949 trip to Germany, may be the most powerful film about the current moment—really, the last ten years—that I’ve seen. In part because it’s not about the current moment at all, but about Mann’s olympian yet doomed effort to remain a man of culture, of European humanism, in the face of humanist culture’s total collapse. As he and his daughter, Erika Mann, played by the brilliant Sandra Hüller, tour a Germany struggling to get back on its feet, though already divided between east and west, they confront both the detritus of the barbarism that has consumed Europe and the gentility of the collaborators who helped destroy it. The relationship of the […]

The New York Times has a typical New York Times article this week on affordability and cost of living. Here’s the premise: Economists argue that, overall, life is more affordable now. Our wages are far higher and we pay far less for many basic goods than we did 40 years ago. But sober economic assessments don’t necessarily affect how people feel when they’re staring at the skyrocketing costs of the big items needed to achieve a middle-class life, like housing or education. Got that? Economists give us facts. Our “feelings” say otherwise. That’s the peg of the piece. The reporters then discover the darndest thing. There are four big—there’s a politician who might call them “huge”—drivers of the affordability crisis. […]

The distinction between “Athens and Jerusalem” plays a large role in literature (Matthew Arnold and Eric Auerbach), political theory (Leo Strauss), and philosophy (Hegel, Nietzsche). It plays little, if any, role in economics, or at least in making sense of the history of economics. If we think about some critical theorists—Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Keynes, Friedman, Mises, Ricardo—it actually seems central. Not for nothing, but Marx, Polanyi, Friedman, and Ricardo were all Jewish (not to mention figures like Abba Lerner, Kenneth Arrow, Paul Samuelson). How, you might ask, does this distinction play out in economics? To a surprising degree, in much the same way that Hellenism versus Hebraism plays out in Arnold, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Strauss. Instead of questions of reason […]

If you’re roughly of my generation or older, you might remember Saul Bellow’s telling a New York Times journalist, back in the 1980s, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read them.” It quickly became a notorious remark, which one of my later housemates loved to hilariously mock. It was also one of the many opening shots of the canon wars, which continued into the 1990s, when those arguments finally sputtered out, only to be revived with the backlash against Barack Obama. It says something about the state of things today that back then it was one of the most esteemed men of American letters, a Nobel Laureate to boot, who […]

Three weeks after Jane Doe was gang raped at a frat house at Cornell, she phoned one of her alleged rapists, sophomore Winston Lee. According to records released to the New York Times, Lee allegedly forced oral sex upon Jane Doe and snorted ketamine off her body. He was suspended for two years, put on probation upon his return, and required to write an essay about what he had learned from the experience. Yesterday, we learned that this is what Lee said to Jane Doe on the phone: I’m so sorry about all, like, the backlash you’re getting from this, by the way…Oh, dude, I’m, I’m so sorry. Like, I feel so bad for you, dude. Almost immediately after the […]

At the New York Review of Books, I talk with the novelist Karan Mahajan about literature and politics. Karan’s got a wonderful new novel, The Complex, which I highly recommend. It’s about a right-wing Indian politician, who hails from an illustrious family of Indian founders. It’s an uncommonly subtle, at times sympathetic, account of a man, and his family, who are charming, ugly, lovable, impossible, cruel, selfish, narcissistic, people who live in a complex, both architecturally and psychologically, and who are complexed by that living. What I love about Karan’s writing is that he’s absolutely unafraid to go places where a lot of other writers would hold back or judge or feel the need to remind the reader that they’re […]