Corey Robin's Blog

If you were paying attention on election night, you might have heard Zohran make two claims in his victory speech that often code as conservative: Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception….We will leave mediocrity in our past.  The minute I heard those words, and the talking heads’ murmuring that it was odd for a socialist to talk up excellence and talk down mediocrity (aren’t socialists supposed to care only about equality, and a leveling equality at that, which drives down the quality of everything), I remembered a passage in Marx’s Capital. In the last pages of his chapter on original accumulation, Marx discusses the earliest days of capitalism or last stages of feudalism, when farmers still […]

I’m re-reading J.G.A. Pocock for the first time in many years, and it’s surprising to me how obsessed he is with what used to be called, back in the heyday of the Cold War, “psychological man.” Pocock was a historian of early modern political and historical thought. His great subject was civic humanism, and his touchtones were Machiavelli, Savonarola, Harrington, Hume, Gibbon, and so on. His frames were virtue and rights, commerce and property. But the not-so-latent thread of his writing is anxiety, personality, hysteria, lethargy, melancholia, disintegration, and so on. On the page, he presents himself as the Anglo man of remove. But the writing betrays a midcentury, vaguely closeted Freudian who perhaps had done a stint or two, […]

Why did the Democrats cave in on the shut down? It seems clear that the main issue was not electoral backlash, since most of the senators who caved are not up for reelection, and the politics were trending in the Democrats’ favor, or at least not against them. The main issue was the filibuster. There was growing pressure from Trump on the Republicans to get rid of it, and the Democratic leadership had every reason to fear its elimination. Why? It has very little to do with preserving their power while they are in the minority; that ship has obviously sailed. The Democratic leadership doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster for the same reason the Republican leadership doesn’t […]

When I read Paul Heideman’s Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos in manuscript last year, I instantly recognized it as the most probing, and, likely to be, lasting, analysis of the rise of Donald Trump. The reason is simple. Unlike many analyses of Trump and the right, Heideman takes the political economy and history of big business seriously. Not capitalism, not the working class, though Heideman, as a good democratic socialist cares a great deal about both, but big business. Like no one else thus far, Heideman sees just how fractious are the divisions with the business class and how delicate are the threads binding these factions together, and how that […]

The Hindu, one of the larger newspapers in India, interviewed me about Zohran Mamdani. I spoke at length with Meera Srinivasan, who’s based in Sri Lanka, and was able to give some of my most extensive thoughts on the significance of Mamdani’s campaign and victory, for the left in the United States and beyond. Srinivasan and I spoke about Mamdani’s abilities to bridge the divides of class and identity, the failures of centrism and the Democratic Party, and how Mamdani builds on a legacy of immigrant socialism from the early twentieth century. Have a listen.

I just read an oped in an Ivy League undergraduate newspaper arguing that it is a matter of basic justice for the university to pay for and provide students with access to the most up-to-date AI platforms. Duke University, the oped argues, is already paying for and providing its students with this platform. If this Ivy League university not does follow the example of Duke, Duke students will have an “unfair advantage” over this university’s students. The university must make this technology available to ensure that its students are competing on a “level playing field.” This article, I should say, may be the best reason I’ve yet found for why universities should ban AI. Until you’ve been forced to sweat […]

About fifteen years ago or so, in the pages of Jacobin Magazine, I coined a phrase, with the help of Freud, for what socialism is about. I was thrilled to open the New York Times this morning and see that it’s still getting play, this time as an explanation for the Mamdani movement. You can read the rest of the Times article here. And the original piece in Jacobin here.

Two quick points about Mamdani that we need to remember. First, it’s easy to see Mamdani’s victory as one data point, lost amid a sea of other data points. But Mamdani’s victory is a continuation of what I called the Nevada Moment, back in February 2020. The Nevada Moment was the moment when Bernie Sanders decisively won the Nevada primary, powered by a coalition of Latino, Asian, and union voters, with many younger immigrant voters persuading their parents and grandparents to vote for Bernie, despite their skepticism. That moment was immediately overtaken by Biden’s victory in South Carolina the following week, when an older Democratic establishment rallied behind Biden to close ranks against the left, and then covid, when the […]

The Washington Post, which still runs that increasingly self-parodying banner “democracy dies in darkness,” has an article on the new US citizenship test, which the Trump administration has re-designed to make it longer and harder. From here on out, every journalist who happens to get an interview with any member of the administration, or, hell, with any politician, should be obligated to ask that person at least three of these questions. To see if they get them right. Back in the 1990s, during the heyday of communitarianism, Katha Pollitt ran a wonderful little experiment, where she asked leading academic communitarians what sort of community activities they had engaged in during the previous month or so. The results were clarifying. Beyond […]

If you were to cast your gaze across the America of a hundred years ago, the America of 1925, you would have had many reasons for despair. That was the year that the Second KKK reached its all-time high in membership. The previous year, immigration to the US from all Asian countries was banned, and immigration from southern and eastern Europe (home of Italians, Jews, Poles, and other undesirables) was drastically limited. And behind all that stood the Red Scare, in which Jews, Italians, anarchists, socialists, communists were drummed out of American life in an orgy of violence, mass arrests, and deportations. Just ten years later, those same forces that had been put on their back feet in the 1920s […]