Corey Robin's Blog, page 11

Joan Robinson, one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century, never won a Nobel Prize. Here she is, in 1962, writing to Robert Solow, a very good economist in the 20th century, who did win the Nobel Prize: Dear Bob, To me you are a fascinating study—A clever man who cannot see a simple point. Here is Robinson, also writing in 1962, in a prescient piece for the New Left Review on what we now call the care economy and Baumol’s cost disease: The services to meet basic human needs (particularly healthcare and education) do not lend themselves to mass production: they are not an easy field for making profits, especially, as with our egalitarian democratic notions, they have […]

There’s a moment in the middle of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America where the family has just learned that the father, Herman, is going to be transferred by his long-time employer, an insurance company, from Newark to somewhere in Kentucky. It’s very clear that the transfer is punitive, punishment for the father having crossed his sister-in-law, who is very connected with the fascist Lindbergh administration. The transfer order also looks a lot like simple ethnic cleansing, except that it’s framed as an “opportunity” that has been opened up by the Department of Interior, along the lines of the Homestead Act, where you get to be a pioneer in empty territory. But it’s all Jews who are being transferred. Though […]

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 […]

Two legal scholars whose work I admire have a useful analysis in the Times of all the steps courts can take during an escalating constitutional crisis. But the last part of their analysis really shocked me, insofar as it really, truly expresses the bankruptcy of the democratic imagination in this country, even by, maybe particularly by, the leading lights of the most liberal parts of the legal professoriate. Say, the authors ask, the courts have run out of all other options, and the administration is still defiant. What then? Their answer: Here, the resolution of an ultimate confrontation between the branches, which would dominate the news, would also depend on the response of a range of actors in the public […]

Far from being something entirely new or novel, Elon Musk embodies something Adam Smith identified in The Wealth of Nations as one of the most pernicious political forms of the modern age: the East India Company. Most people don’t realize this, but Smith’s text, particularly the fourth book, is a sustained critique of the East India Company, which he identified as a monstrous hybrid of merchant and sovereign, “the worst of all governments for any country whatever.” Smith was most concerned about the role of the East India Company in India, but its reach was global and the repercussions revolutionary. The irony here is considerable. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, the same year as the American Revolution. […]

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 […]

A thousand years ago, I wrote a book called Fear: The History of a Political Idea. A big part of that book was struggling to figure out how political intimidation and fear work in America. At the time (this was the 1990s), it seemed to many like a somewhat exotic, if not quixotic, project. “No one cares about fear,” a political scientist told me. Well, time passes, as Virginia Woolf wrote in To the Lighthouse. The United States styles itself the land of the free, home of the brave. Yet, as every observer from Tocqueville to W.E.B. Du Bois has remarked, this country has often been a society of intense fear. And what has been the most persistent, common source […]

Most people on social media (and the left) are not too interested in what Trump does on tariffs. It doesn’t seem to raise the same questions and concerns about human rights that policies on immigration or DEI do. But as a sign of the limits of and constraints on Trump’s power, as well as of conflicts within his coalition, Trump’s moves on tariffs are really important. And I know the left does care about that (the extent of Trump’s power.) Also, don’t forget: outside of (yet related to) slavery, the fight over tariffs was probably the most significant conflict in American politics in the nineteenth century. In any event, Trump has repeatedly promised to impose across-the-board 25% tariffs tomorrow (February […]

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 […]