Corey Robin

New York

Contributing Editor at Jacobin

Distinguished Professor, Political Science, Brooklyn College. Author of Fear; The Reactionary Mind; and The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. At work on King Capital.

Articles

How the Constitution’s Framers Got It Wrong

6 days ago | jacobin.com | Corey Robin

One of the continuing puzzles I come back to is the separation of powers: Where did the framers go wrong? Political scientists often claim that it is norms that undergird the US Constitution, but this is not at all the view of the framers. If anything, the idea that norms underpin the Constitution, maintaining its delicate balance of separated and limited powers, is an almost pre-founders, naive view of things.
Recovering Our Power

6 days ago | znetwork.org | Corey Robin

There’s a moment in chapter 12 of Capital where Karl 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.
Recovering Our Power

1 week ago | jacobin.com | Corey Robin

There’s a moment in chapter 12 of Capital where Karl 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.
Corey Robin, Notifications - Sidecar

1 week ago | newleftreview.org | Corey Robin

Tariff, Donald Trump has said, ‘is the most beautiful word in the dictionary’. He won’t be pleased to learn that it comes from Arabic. Ta‘rīf is a notification; ‘arrafa means to make known. Despite his many notifications, Trump hasn’t really made known why he’s imposing the tariffs – or why, as of Wednesday, he has put a pause on them. Trumpologists believe they know. Trump hates the rules-based international order. He loves the masculinity of manufacturing.
Tariffs Are Splintering Donald Trump’s Coalition

2 weeks ago | jacobin.com | Corey Robin

This is the moment of the conservative crack-up 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 Donald Trump’s declaration of tariffs on China, claiming that the emergency authority he’s invoked gives him no such authority to impose these tariffs.
Tariffs Are Splintering Donald Trump’s Coalition

2 weeks ago | rsn.org | Corey Robin

One of the Right’s biggest funders and most important strategists, longtime Federalist Society head Leonard Leo, seems to be breaking with Donald Trump over tariffs. This is the moment of the conservative crack-up 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 Donald Trump’s declaration of tariffs on China, claiming that the emergency authority he’s invoked gives him no such authority to impose these tariffs.
Where is our Tiananmen square ‘Tank Man’ who can stand up to Trump? | Corey Robin

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Corey Robin

Everyone’s waiting for that one person to stand up to Donald Trump. Not just that one person. There are a lot of such people. You can read about them in every newspaper. But that one person with real power who’s willing to risk something costly in defiance. That one university president who’ll say, fuck you and your money. That one Democrat who’ll say, fuck you and your threat to my re-election or that of my party.
When History Rhymes: Muskism and McCarthyism

3 weeks ago | truthdig.com | Alan Dean |Charles Petersen |Corey Robin

The early days of the second Trump Administration have been greeted with both shock and a search for lessons from history. Journalists have turned to the Nixon Administration’s attempts to “impound” congressionally allocated funds as both a precedent for Trump’s actions and evidence of their illegality.
McCarthysim in the Ivory Tower

1 month ago | jacobin.com | Corey Robin

“The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.” That was historian Ellen Schrecker’s devastating conclusion in her classic study No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, which came out in 1986. Columbia University, while not the worst in Schrecker’s account, was certainly not the best. Today, as the New York Times has revealed, it’s probably the worst.
Non-Jews Banning Jewish Texts to Protect Jews

1 month ago | jacobin.com | Corey Robin

Three days ago, the New York Post reported that Hunter College was looking to hire a scholar in Palestinian studies. The job ad read:We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.