Corey Robin's Blog

I hesitate to give this issue any attention, lest it suck out more oxygen than it already has from Abdul El-Sayed’s inspiring campaign and yesterday’s victory in Michigan. But here goes. This morning, in his victory speech, El-Sayed stated: To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters. Usually, campaign rhetoric doesn’t tell us much. But in the context of other conventional political statements about American Jews and Israel, what El-Sayed says here speaks volumes. Simply compare it […]

I’ve been fighting the Nietzsche Wars for nearly two decades now. For those of you not familiar with this epochal struggle, the Nietzsche Wars are the deep disagreements between liberal and left scholars about whether Nietzsche should be considered a right-wing conservative, which is how some of us think of him, or a serious left-wing thinker (few people actually think this anymore) or, short of that, a freeingly apolitical or antipolitical or ambiguously political thinker whose insights are useful to the left. It just occurred to me, however, that all this time we’ve been arguing about the wrong person. The person Team Nietzsche really wants to conscript for its side, and could legitimately conscript, is Heinrich Heine. Now, before everyone […]

For Americans my age or older, Ravel’s Boléro will always be the music of Blake Edwards’ film “10,” which came out in 1979. Starring Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews, the romantic comedy introduced Bo Derek, she of the braids and breasts, to the world. Thanks to Bo and Blake, Boléro came to be associated with sex of the pure fucking sort, so much so that Allan Bloom singled the music out for criticism (along with “rock ‘n roll”) in The Closing of the American Mind. More innocent times, those were. Last night, at the New York City Center, my daughter and I saw Boléro performed as a ballet. A ballet is what the music was originally commissioned as, but it’s […]

Ashley Parker, a journalist in DC, posted the comment I’ve screenshotted below on social media. Read her post carefully and remember that the person who wrote it is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a veteran reporter of the New York Times and the Washington Post, has won a Pulitzer Prize, and is now a writer at The Atlantic and an analyst at MSNBC. Parker has hit all the familiar markers of status and success in an industry where is not so easy to succeed or acquire status. She’s obviously smart and skilled. She’s not a conservative. She’s more of a vacant lot, a person whose profession is devoted to words yet pays little attention to her own, […]

As everyone in the country who’s not a fanatical Trumpist breaths a sigh of relief over yesterday’s Supreme Court affirmation of birthright citizenship, it seems like a useful moment to reflect on Israel. The principle of birthright citizenship states that it matters not a whit who your parents are or where they’re from; you are a citizen of the United States merely by the fact that you were born on its soil. That’s it. Birthright citizenship is based on the principle of jus soli—Latin for “right of the soil.” The opposite of jus soli is jus sanguinis—”right of blood.” Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neal Gorsuch, who dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision, were arguing against jus soli, and much […]

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 […]

In a probing Substack, John Judis writes, “In ten or fifteen years, it is very possible that the Democratic Party will be known as ‘democratic socialist’ in the same way it is now known widely as ‘liberal.'” Left you’re inclined to dismiss this as the starry-eyed patter of an ideological adventurer, Judis is a relentlessly unenthusiastic realist, who’s been watching and commenting on the American political scene longer than I’ve been alive. He’s nothing if not judicious, John Judis is. I’d like to take up his thought, with two tweaks. First, I’m less certain if the Democratic Party is going to be the vessel or container of this transformation. Though it may be at this point the oldest political party […]

Anxious about DSA’s recent victories, centrist House Democrats have issued a manifesto: “We are capitalist, not socialist.” Worried perhaps that that message may not be clear enough, Long Island Democrat Tom Suozzi elaborates in the New York Times: The people that don’t agree with their [DSA] philosophies wring their hands at cocktail parties, but they’re not organized. So we have to get organized. The cocktail party circuit, in other words, has to get organized. Suozzi, by the way, represents the two peninsulas where West Egg and East Egg, of Great Gatsby fame, were set.

The BungaBunga podcast had me on to discuss my Nation review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global history. It was an excellent conversation. Both interviewers, Alex Gourevitch and Alex Hochuli, pushed me to think beyond what I had written. Among the issues we discovered in our discussion: Anyway, you can listen to it here or below.

Last week, I delivered a paper at a conference about the work of Sheldon Wolin in Lausanne, Switzerland. For those of you who don’t know the name, Wolin was a political theorist who taught at Berkeley and Princeton. I took undergraduate courses with him on modern political thought and radical political thought; many other political theorists, including Wendy Brown, Cornel West, and Hanna Pitkin, studied with him as graduate students. He was one of the most influential teachers of political theory in the United States during the second half of the twentieth-century. Though I’ve always valued him most as a reader and teacher of political theory, he also had a wide audience as a political theorist in his own right. […]