Corey Robin's Blog, page 7

There’s a moment in chapter 12 of Capital where Marx describes a critical phase of glassmaking in a manufacturing workshop. Five workers gather at “the hole” of the furnace, each focused on an individual task that, taken together, will produce a bottle. “These five specialized workers represent the individual organs of a working organism that can function only as a unit.” Those five workers can only function as a unit “when all the workers are directly cooperating with one another.” That need for working cooperatively gives each and every one of those workers a tremendous amount of power: “When one member is missing, the whole body is paralyzed.” If just one worker withdraws their cooperation, the working organism ceases to […]

At Passover, we sing Chad Gadya, a silly but spooky song that children at the seder love. It starts with a verse about a father buying a goat for two zuzim. As a kid, I loved thinking about those two zuzim, which, for some reason, I thought was the currency of Prague during the Middle Ages. My grandfather had given me a storybook about a boy in medieval Prague, and that’s probably the source of my association. The other thing I remember about Chad Gadya, which translates into “An Only Kid,” as in a goat, is my dad heroically leading us through the song. It’s a long song, requiring a lot of breath, because after the father buys the goat […]

In the New Left Review, I think out loud about the longue durée of the tariff question in American politics. Tariffs occupy an outsized place in the American imagination. The first proposal entertained by Congress was a tariff. The slaveholding South first pondered secession, in 1832, over a tariff. After the Civil War, Republicans declared the tariff ‘the foundationstone’ of their crusade against the Democrats. In 1896, William McKinley ran on the slogan ‘Protection and Prosperity’. In 1930, Herbert Hoover destroyed whatever chance he had at reelection for the sake of the tariff. Teddy Roosevelt caught the crazed drift of the country when he declared that, in any discussion of the tariff, ‘I am not meeting a material need but a mental […]

This is the moment of the conservative crackup I’ve been waiting for. It’s going to sound small, but it’s the wedge of a wider fissure. A legal nonprofit just filed a lawsuit against Trump’s declaration of tariffs on China, claiming that the emergency authority he’s invoked gives him no such authority to impose these tariffs. Underneath or alongside that claim is a much deeper argument that it’s time for Congress to claw back its delegation of tariff authority, which it has effectively handed over to the president for decades now. But here’s what is politically significant about this lawsuit: the nonprofit filing the suit is funded, in part, by Leonard Leo, the longtime leader of the Federalist Society. By most […]

The United States Navy announced tonight that, following Trump’s anti-DEI orders, it has purged 381 books from the US Naval Academy Library. The press coverage focuses on some familiar titles: Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and so on. I went through the entire list, and noticed something quite different. First, to call this a DEI purge is to miss the forest for the trees: This is a wholesale assault on knowledge as we know it. Charles Mills’s book is purged. Two books on Henry James are purged. A book on Eliot, Joyce, and Proust is purged. Books on Elizabeth Bishop, on Thomas Pynchon, on Richard Wright: purged. Barbara Fields’s and Karen Fields’s Racecraft is […]

In chapter 8 of Capital, Marx wrote: The working day does have a maximum limit…Not only do purely physical needs limit the extension of the workday; moral limits play a role here, too. A worker requires time to satisfy his intellectual and social needs, which are determined…by the general state of the culture. Curious what the general state of the culture has to say about workers’ intellectual needs, I turned to the news, and stumbled on this report. One could say a lot more about all this, but beyond the simple and obvious point, I’d point out that discussions of culture in this country are often removed from discussions of the economy. There’s one conversation about the assault on the […]

1. Like other top law firms, the law firm at which Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, is a partner, has cut a deal with Trump. 2. Among various concessions, the firm has agreed to gut its DEI programs and to take on, pro bono, clients fighting alleged antisemitism. 3. Emhoff was brought into the firm, as a partner, in January. His specific portfolio was to advise corporations about “matters with significant reputational concerns.” 4. Emhoff’s firm announced its deal with Trump just hours after Emhoff told Georgetown Law students that “the rule of law is under attack. Democracy is under attack. And so, all of us lawyers need to do what we can to push back on that.” “Us lawyers […]

Step 1 Democrats say they plan to ask the parliamentarian to rule that Republicans must use a current law baseline for projecting the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts. Step 2 Republicans are set to make the audacious play of bypassing the Senate parliamentarian and moving forward with a budget resolution based on a scoring baseline set by Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that would allow them to argue extending President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts won’t add to the deficit. There are three types of people in this world. Type 1 sees this sequence of events and thinks, darn those Republican rascals, why can’t they get some principles! Type 2 sees this sequence of events and thinks, darn […]

One of the claims that you often hear on the left is that fundamental violations of human rights in the United States are a case of chickens come home to roost. That is, vicious policies that the government enacts abroad or on non-citizens on native soil eventually migrate to how the state treats its own citizens. Yet, listening to the Press Secretary of the White House deal with the administration’s vicious treatment of immigrants, it’s clear that in the right’s imagination, the causality often works in the opposite direction. Here’s the NYT: Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, took aim at the media’s reporting on deportation cases Tuesday, accusing journalists of caring more about the due process rights of […]