05.11.17 One Bernie With One Stone
05.07.17 Trump is a Tyrant: The Devolution of an Argument
05.05.17 His Mother’s Son
05.04.17 What we talk about when we talk about Susan Sarandon
04.29.17 A wise psychoanalyst once told me (sort of): look at what Trump does, not what he says
04.27.17 On liberals, the left, and free speech: Something has changed, and it’s not what you think it is
04.26.17 The Language of Pain, from Virginia Woolf to William Stanley Jevons
04.22.17 Events, dear boy, events
04.22.17 Have You Never Been Mello? On Bernie and Abortion in Omaha
04.05.17 Eichmann in Jerusalem is a better guide to Trump Time than is Origins of Totalitarianism
04.02.17 Why, when it comes to the Right, do we ignore events, contingency, and high politics?: What Arno Mayer Taught Me
03.26.17 Trump’s Bermuda Triangle: Obamacare, Taxes, and the Debt
03.22.17 What we’re hoping for with the Obamacare repeal vote: that the rage of the GOP will overwhelm its reason
03.18.17 Why are there no great thinkers on the right today?
03.17.17 Trump’s Budget and the Fiscal Crisis of the State: Something’s Gotta Give
03.16.17 What Michael Rogin means to me, particularly in the Age of Trump: Traditional politics matters!
03.14.17 The real parallel between Hitler and Trump
03.12.17 At this year’s seder, don’t turn Trump into Pharaoh: treat him as a plague
03.01.17 Political Criticism in the Age of Trump: A How-To, or A How-Not-To
02.16.17 It’s time to start thinking about a realignment: 2 things for the left to do
02.15.17 Stop freaking out about Pence
02.14.17 3 Ways Forward For Trump
02.13.17 Welfare Reform from Locke to the Clintons
02.11.17 On the Yahrzeit of Talia Goldenberg, 1991-2014
02.11.17 Once upon a time, Trump was against extreme vetting
02.10.17 Beauty and the Beast: Donald Trump as the Interior Decorator in Chief
02.10.17 Upcoming Talks and Other Things
02.09.17 Trump: 0. Democrats: 0. The People: 1.
02.07.17 No lawyering this thing to death: Conservatives and the courts, from Nixon to Bush to Trump
02.06.17 Peggy Noonan Speaks Truth: The Circuits Are Overloaded
02.05.17 If you’re willing to support a boycott of US academic conferences over Trump’s ban, why not BDS?
02.04.17 What if Trump Turns Out To Be…
02.04.17 God Is an Accelerationist
02.03.17 Trump was the best the Republican Party could do
02.01.17 Morbid Thoughts in Time of Trump
01.31.17 The American Terrible
01.29.17 If Trump is a fascist, he may be the most backassward fascist we’ve ever seen
01.28.17 Migrants and refugees detained at JFK Airport, which is named after a passionate defender of immigration
01.27.17 Share the Earth
01.27.17 David Hume in Defense of Judith Butler’s Writing Style
01.27.17 Named and Inhabited Evil
01.27.17 January Journal
01.25.17 Rally today against Trump’s Plan for Refugees and Muslims
01.22.17 Donald Trump: His Mother’s Son
01.21.17 Donald Trump: Six Theses
01.20.17 Trump’s Inaugural Address versus Reagan’s Inaugural Address
01.20.17 Trumpland, Day 1: What effect will Trump have on phone sex?
01.20.17 David Hume on the Inauguration of Donald Trump
01.18.17 On how and how not to resist Trump
01.11.17 Where did I go wrong? Or, why Trump may be like Jimmy Carter
01.07.17 Trump and the Intelligence Agencies: On the Slow Collapse of Imperial Republics
12.26.16 Defend George Ciccariello-Maher
12.26.16 December Diary: From the Political to the Personal
12.11.16 Against the Politics of Fear
11.05.16 Viva Las Vegas!
11.04.16 The US: Is She Becoming Undun?
10.26.16 Edmund Niemann, 1945-2016
10.26.16 The Limits of Liberalism at Harvard
10.24.16 1980 v. 2012
10.23.16 Six Reasons for Optimism (and one big one for pessimism)
10.22.16 Private Goods, from Florence Nightingale to Wendy Brown
10.15.16 Why I Won’t Be Appearing at the Brooklyn Commons on Wednesday
10.12.16 Upcoming Gigs
10.12.16 My Colin Kaepernick Moment: On not standing for the State of Israel in shul
10.10.16 Trump is the ringmaster and the liberal media his unwitting clowns
10.10.16 CUNY, All Too CUNY: Or, What Happens When Higher-Ed Hoodlums Aren’t Brought to Heel?
10.10.16 Trump and Tomasky: Where Liberalism and Conservatism Meet
10.08.16 Sex, Dice, and the Trump Tapes
10.06.16 A Good Time for Revolution: On Strikes and the Harvard Man
10.05.16 Harvard, In Theory and Practice
10.05.16 Bowling in Bratislava: Remembrance, Rosh Hashanah, Eichmann, and Arendt
10.01.16 When a Worker Freezes to Death in a Walk-In Freezer at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Downtown Atlanta
09.27.16 Donald Trump’s one strength: He understands that we are a nation of conmen (and women)
09.27.16 Donald Trump: The Michael Dukakis of the Republican Party
09.18.16 Capitalism in the Age of Revolution: Burke, Smith, and the Problem of Value
09.12.16 Anti-Semitism at CUNY? At Brooklyn College? In the Department of Political Science?
09.10.16 What happens when a history professor at Yale opposes a grad union but doesn’t know her history?
09.05.16 Phyllis Schlafly, 1924-2016
09.05.16 Sheldon Wolin: Theoretician of the Present
09.03.16 Save UMass Labor Center
08.30.16 On Corruption at CUNY
08.25.16 Honey, I’ve been slowly boring hard boards longer than you’ve been alive.
08.24.16 Great Minds Think Alike
08.19.16 Positions Available at Brooklyn College
08.17.16 September Songs
08.15.16 Donald Trump is the least of the GOP’s problems
08.14.16 On Neoliberalism. Again.
08.11.16 How Clinton Enables the Republican Party
08.10.16 If I were worried that Clinton might lose, here’s what I would—and wouldn’t—do…
08.09.16 Sam Tanenhaus on William Styron on Nat Turner: Have we moved on from the Sixties? The Nineties?
08.09.16 My First Seven Jobs
07.31.16 Trump’s Indecent Proposal
07.30.16 Why does it matter that Donald Trump is not a novelty?
07.29.16 Philadelphia Stories: From Reagan to Trump to the DNC
07.29.16 The Other Night at Philadelphia
07.27.16 Gag Me With Calhoun
07.27.16 Booing and Nothingness
07.26.16 Liberalism and Fear: What Montesquieu has to teach us about Clinton’s Use of Trump
07.25.16 Trump knows how to rattle cages, without setting anyone free
07.24.16 Power Behind the Throne
07.24.16 Tim Kaine, and Other Faith-Based Politics
07.21.16 Check Your Amnesia, Dude: On the Vox Generation of Punditry
07.20.16 The Two Clarence Thomases
07.18.16 What’s Going On? Thoughts on the Murder of the Police
07.17.16 Bad Books
07.11.16 We can get rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but not the Speers
07.11.16 Clarence Thomas: I was never a liberal, I was a radical
07.08.16 It Has Begun
07.06.16 Why Clinton’s New Tuition-Free Plan Matters
07.06.16 Season of the Bro
07.05.16 Still Blogging After All These Years
07.03.16 My Resistance to Elie Wiesel
07.02.16 From the Talmud to Judith Butler: Audiences as Co-Creators with—and of—the Public Intellectual
07.01.16 Trains, Planes, and Automobiles: On the Left’s Ideas about Money and Freedom
06.30.16 From God’s Lips to Clarence Thomas’s Ears
06.29.16 Judith Butler as a Public Intellectual
06.29.16 The Second Time Around: James Traub on Neoliberal Technocracy
06.27.16 Unintended Consequences
06.26.16 Clinton Opens Double-Digit Lead in National Poll
06.25.16 Neera and Me: Two Theses about the American Ruling Class and One About Neera Tanden
06.21.16 Maybe Money Is Speech After All: How Donald Trump’s Finances Measure His Legitimacy as a Candidate
06.21.16 Writer’s Block
06.19.16 Michael Tomasky, from June to December
06.15.16 If you want Trump-ism to go, you have to reform the Democratic Party
06.10.16 When Advertising is Action: Clarence Thomas Channels Hannah Arendt and Friedrich von Hayek
06.04.16 Muhammad Ali, Thomas Hobbes, and the Politics of Fear
06.03.16 8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension
06.03.16 History’s Great Lowlifes: From McCarthyism to Twitter
05.29.16 The Relentless Shabbiness of CUNY: What Is To Be Done?
05.24.16 What Bernie Sanders’s choices for the DNC platform committee tell us about the Israel/Palestine debate in the US
05.21.16 Race Talk and the New Deal
05.19.16 Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, I’m a Leninist
05.19.16 Robert Kagan, Donald Trump, and the Liberal Imagination
05.11.16 Michael Ratner, 1943-2016
05.11.16 Conservatism’s Constitutional Agenda
05.10.16 Was Carl Schmitt Right After All?
05.06.16 Respect for Three Administrators at Brooklyn College
05.04.16 If Donald Trump is the George McGovern of the GOP, what does that make Hillary Clinton?
05.03.16 What did we learn today?
05.02.16 Today, I voted to authorize my union at CUNY to call a strike
05.02.16 Daniel Aaron, 1912-2016
04.30.16 John C. Calhoun at Yale
04.29.16 Neoliberalism: A Quick Follow-up
04.27.16 When Neoliberalism Was Young: A Lookback on Clintonism before Clinton
04.25.16 John Palattella: A Writer’s Editor
04.21.16 What’s a Jewish holiday without a little pressure or guilt? Maybe it’s not a holiday at all.
04.17.16 Maybe if you’re not at war with reality, you’re not focused enough: Bernie in Brooklyn
04.15.16 CUNY and NYS hypocrisy on academic freedom: okay to boycott North Carolina and Mississippi, but not Israel
04.15.16 Magical Realism, and other neoliberal delusions
04.13.16 Once upon a time, leftists purged from American academe could find a refuge abroad. Not anymore.
04.09.16 What’s going to happen to liberals when the Right begins to give way?
04.07.16 I love my students
04.06.16 Upcoming Talks on Hannah Arendt and Clarence Thomas
04.06.16 Homo Politicus ≠ Homo Wonkus
04.03.16 True confession: Sometimes I feel bad for Hillary Clinton
04.02.16 A Very Brief Intellectual Autobiography
04.01.16 In Bill Buckley’s apartment, there were trays of tissues and cigarettes
03.31.16 What Donald Trump Can Learn From Frederick Douglass
03.30.16 The arc of neoliberalism is long, but it bends toward the rich
03.29.16 The Bernie Sanders Moment: Brought to you by the generation that has no future
03.20.16 Historically, liberals and the Left have underestimated the Right. Today, they overestimate it.
03.19.16 We’re Still in Nixonland: 20 theses about the state of politics today
03.13.16 The Definitive Take on Donald Trump
03.12.16 Are We Dying of History?
03.11.16 Local 33, Yale, and the Spirit of Conservatism
03.10.16 Liberalism and the Millennials
03.06.16 “Two entries on Nancy Reagan’s birth certificate are still accurate—her sex and her color. Almost every other item was invented then or later reinvented.”
03.04.16 Same as it ever was: From Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump, “This man scares me.”
03.04.16 Trump Talk
03.02.16 Super Tuesday: March Theses
03.01.16 Notes on a Dismal and Delightful Campaign
02.27.16 Why You Should Never Listen to the Pundits
02.27.16 Hillary Clinton and Welfare Reform
02.26.16 If Europeans are from Venus, and Americans from Mars, where’s Trump from?
02.24.16 The Realist
02.22.16 Slow Boring of Hard Boards
02.15.16 See You in September
02.14.16 Hillary Clinton: Still a Goldwater Girl After All These Years
02.14.16 Law has flourished on the corpse of philosophy in America
02.14.16 Scalia: The Donald Trump of the Supreme Court
02.10.16 Is Hillary Clinton Running the Most Cynical Campaign in Recent History?
02.09.16 The Blast That Swept Him Came Off New Hampshire Snowfields and Ice-Hung Forests
02.08.16 To My Friends Who Support Hillary Clinton
02.06.16 On Electability
02.04.16 90% of what goes on at The New Yorker can be explained by Vulgar Marxism
02.02.16 Every Movement Fails. Until It Succeeds.
01.31.16 Hillary Clinton: The Ultimate Outsider
01.31.16 For Any Leftist Who Has Spent Too Much Time in Meetings…
01.28.16 Six Things You Need to Read About Donald Trump
01.26.16 Abraham Lincoln on the More Realistic, Experienced Candidate…
01.25.16 What the Clintons Mean to Me
01.25.16 What is Hillary Clinton Up To When…
01.24.16 On Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cass Sunstein, and Other Public Intellectuals
01.23.16 Clinton’s Firewall in South Carolina is Melting Away…
01.22.16 Bile, Bullshit, and Bernie: 16 Notes on the Democratic Primary
01.22.16 First They Came For…
01.20.16 Chickens Come Home to Roost, Palin-Style
01.14.16 Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1942-2016
01.09.16 On Islamist Terror and the Left
01.08.16 When White Men Complain…
01.07.16 Clarence Thomas on the One-Party State that is our Two-Party System
01.06.16 Goodbye, Lenin
01.04.16 Economics is how we moderns do politics
01.01.16 K Street in Nazi Germany
12.30.15 Hitler’s Furniture
12.27.15 This Muslim American Life: An Interview with Moustafa Bayoumi
12.22.15 Democracy’s Descent
12.20.15 Fiddler on the Roof: Our Sabbath Prayer
12.17.15 Another Victory for BDS: Doug Henwood Refuses To Sell Translation Rights
12.13.15 Another Question Raised by Benedict Anderson: What Makes an Idea Exciting for You?
12.13.15 Benedict Anderson, 1936-2015
12.10.15 What if Donald Trump is the Lesser Evil?
12.10.15 If You Were in Hell, How Would You Know It?
12.09.15 How Will the Professors Act When Fascism Comes to America?
12.09.15 Counterrevolutionary Internationale
12.08.15 Trump and the Trumpettes: In Stereo
12.04.15 We Need to Pay More Attention to Politics When We Talk about the Politics of Fear
12.03.15 Catholic University Declares 1st Amendment Right To Ignore Catholicism
11.25.15 Richard Cohen in Black and White
11.24.15 On “The Takeaway,” I Talk about the Politics of Fear, Post-Paris
11.22.15 When Universities Really Do Destroy the Past, We Don’t Care
11.22.15 On Sentimentality and College
11.21.15 What We Owe the Students at Princeton
11.18.15 The Moloch of National Security
11.17.15 Black Alumni at Yale Weigh In With Major List of Demands
11.14.15 A Prayer For Peace
11.13.15 How to Honor the Settlement Between UIUC and Steven Salaita
11.12.15 UIUC Reaches Settlement with Steven Salaita
11.12.15 What in God’s Name is the Head of PEN Talking About?
11.10.15 Belated and Inadequate: My Thoughts on Carl Schorske
11.06.15 Liberalism = Conservatism + Time
11.01.15 A Patience With Your Own Crap: Philip Roth on Writing
10.30.15 When We Betray Our Students
10.28.15 John Kasich, Meet Ronald Reagan
10.23.15 Sheldon Wolin, 1922-2015
10.21.15 Ecce Douchebag: Richard Cohen on Tipping
10.14.15 How Harvard Fights Unions: By Conceding the Union’s Most Basic Claims
10.14.15 You’ve Changed, You’re Not the Angel I Once Knew: David Brooks on the GOP
10.12.15 Publics That Don’t Exist and the Intellectuals Who Write For Them
10.09.15 When Conservatives Invoke Lincoln: From Dred Scott to Obergefell
10.02.15 NYT Public Editor Says NYTBR Conflict of Interest Is a Conflict of Interest
09.30.15 Clusterfuck of Corruption at NYT Book Review
09.28.15 Sometimes You Can Smell the Scotch Coming Off the Web Page (Updated)
09.24.15 Flaubert on Kissinger/Nixon
09.24.15 Birds of a Feather
09.20.15 Machtpolitik
09.19.15 When Henry Edited Hannah
09.19.15 No Safe Havens: From Henry Kissinger to Barack Obama
09.13.15 Smells Like Mean Spirit: Conservatism Past and Present
09.11.15 On the Other 9/11: Pinochet, Kissinger, Obama
09.09.15 Richard Flathman, 1934-2015
09.08.15 The Laggards of Academe
09.08.15 The Petty Pilfering of Minutes: Wage Theft in Contemporary America
09.07.15 Prometheus Bound: A Labor Day Story for the Left?
09.04.15 A Story for Labor Day
08.29.15 Duke, Berkeley, Columbia, Oh My: What are our students are trying to tell us
08.28.15 Security Politics, Anti-Capitalism, Student Activists, and the Left
08.23.15 After Three Weeks of Terrible Publicity, 41 UIUC Leaders Call on Administration to Resolve Crisis (Updated)
08.22.15 No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy
08.21.15 Ta-Nehisi Coates: Three Not-So-Easy Pieces
08.16.15 Family Values Fascism, from Vichy to Donald Trump
08.14.15 Why I’m Not Crying Over the Fate of Chancellor Wise
08.14.15 On the Cult of Personality and the Tolerance of Rich People
08.14.15 Wise throws down the gauntlet, consults with lawyers over her legal “options” against UIUC
08.10.15 Academic Freedom at UIUC: Freedom to Pursue Viewpoints and Positions That Reflect the Values of the State
08.08.15 Keeping Kosher and the Salaita Boycott
08.08.15 New Questions Raised About Who Exactly Made the Decision to Fire Salaita
08.07.15 Chancellor Wise Forced To Release Emails From Personal Account
08.06.15 On the One-Year Anniversary of the Salaita Story, Some Good News
08.02.15 Capitalism Can’t Remember Where I Left My Keys
07.31.15 The Bullshit Beyond Ideology
07.25.15 On the New York Intellectuals
07.24.15 Foreign Policy is Domestic Policy is Foreign Policy is Domestic Policy is…
07.17.15 When David Brooks Knows He May Not Know Whereof He Speaks
07.14.15 Monday Morning at the Wagners
07.10.15 American Ambivalence: The Limitations of the Writer in the US
07.10.15 Walt Whitman, Bolshevik
07.09.15 Mary McCarthy on the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
07.08.15 Nietzsche on the Situation in Greece
07.05.15 Aladdin and Value
06.29.15 From Whitney Houston to Obergefell: Clarence Thomas on Human Dignity
06.29.15 Out in Texas: Where public is private and private is public
06.24.15 Mi Casa Es Su Casa
06.24.15 Why Do We Fear the Things We Do: Maybe the Wrong Question (Updated)
06.21.15 Thoughts on Charleston
06.19.15 You Have to Go: Dylann Roof in Historical Perspective
06.17.15 The Liberating Power of the Dismal Science
06.15.15 If Only Chancellor Wise Read John Stuart Mill…
06.09.15 Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth: Parallel Lives
06.07.15 How Corporations Control Politics
06.06.15 Poetry and Power: Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Left
06.05.15 The Narcissism of Our Metaphors
05.25.15 Fight Racism. Confirm Clarence Thomas. (Updated)
05.19.15 Joseph de Maistre in Saudi Arabia
05.13.15 Arendt, Israel, and Why Jews Have So Many Rules
05.05.15 From the Department of You Just Can’t Make This Shit Up
05.03.15 Frederick Douglass in and on Baltimore
04.26.15 Splendor in the Nordic Grass
04.26.15 When George Packer gets bored, I get scared: It Means he’s in the mood for war
04.25.15 Why the Left Should Support Star Wars: It’ll Never Work
04.24.15 Columbia University Bans Workers From Speaking Spanish
04.23.15 A military operation so vital to US interests they forgot to name it: What would Hobbes say?
04.23.15 Is the public intellectual a thing of the past? What do I think of Cornel West?
04.22.15 Checking Your Privilege At Auschwitz
04.21.15 Primo Levi, “For Adolf Eichmann”
04.20.15 Conservatism is not about time, the past, tradition, or history
04.20.15 The Avoidance of the Intellectual
04.19.15 To Extend the Word Art to All the Externals of Our Life
04.17.15 Yom HaShoah: Three Readings
04.14.15 Before you get that PhD…
04.06.15 From the Lefty Profs Use Lefty Buzzwords to Break Strikes Department
04.05.15 Alumni Diplomacy
03.31.15 Counterrevolutionary Backsliding, from the Golden Calf to Keynes
03.29.15 More on Biden and the Jews: A Response to Critics of My Salon Column
03.29.15 Do the Jews Not Belong in the United States?
03.27.15 Employment Contracts versus the Covenant at Sinai
03.27.15 Sam Fleischacker’s Followup
03.26.15 Why Is So Much of Our Discussion of Higher Ed Driven by Elite Institutions?
03.25.15 Nakba, the Night of Bad Dreams
03.22.15 Biden to American Jews: We Can’t Protect You, Only Israel Can
03.19.15 “It breaks my heart to say this, but today I don’t feel I can call myself a Zionist any longer.”
03.19.15 Readings for Passover: Rousseau on Moses and the Jews
03.18.15 What Every Reporter Should Be Asking John Kerry Between Now and April 18
03.13.15 British Government Tries to Dershowitz Southampton University
03.13.15 Without Getting Into History
03.09.15 The Lives They Touched
03.09.15 Irony Watch
03.08.15 My new column at Salon: on racism, privilege talk, and schools
03.07.15 Thomas Hobbes on Daylight Saving
02.28.15 Awakening to Cultural Studies
02.27.15 What do Hannah Arendt and Mel Brooks Have in Common?
02.27.15 Darkness at Noon: The Musical
02.19.15 Human Rights, Blah Blah Blah
02.18.15 We Won! UMass Backs Down!
02.16.15 These are the Terrorists Whom UMass Will No Longer Allow to Apply
02.16.15 The Real Mad Men of History
02.15.15 I am a Communist, not an Idiot
02.14.15 State Department Expresses Surprise Over UMass policy
02.13.15 I, the Holocaust, Am Your God
02.12.15 U. Mass. Will Not Admit Iranian Students to Schools of Engineering and Natural Sciences (Updated)
02.12.15 Kristin Ross on The Paris Commune
02.12.15 How Will It End?
02.11.15 When Conservatives Didn’t Get Tough on Crime: National Review on the Eichmann Trial
02.09.15 How to Fight for Human Rights in the 21st Century
02.08.15 Arendt LOL
02.08.15 Reading the NYT, I Begin to Sympathize with Clarence Thomas
02.06.15 Blog Redesign
02.04.15 The Epic Bureaucrat
02.01.15 A Tale of Two Snowballs
01.27.15 On International Holocaust Remembrance Day
01.27.15 Gleichschaltung
01.26.15 On Public Intellectuals
01.21.15 Let’s Make a Deal
01.14.15 Thoughts on Violence
01.13.15 The Touchy Irving Howe
01.11.15 The Internationalism of the American Civil War
01.08.15 NYPD Goes Full Mario Savio
01.07.15 The Age of Acquiescence
01.04.15 Baghdad, Yesterday, Jerusalem, Tomorrow
12.29.14 Even the liberal New Republic…
12.28.14 From Galicia to Brooklyn: Seven Generations of My Family
12.26.14 The one thing Leon Wieseltier ever got right
12.23.14 Golda Meier Saw the Future
12.22.14 Can it be? A New Republic that’s not self-important?
12.22.14 A Weimar-y Vibe
12.22.14 Because you were strangers in the land of Egypt
12.15.14 NYT Weighs in on Civility and the Salaita Case
12.14.14 “True, it all happened a long time ago, but it has haunted me ever since.”
12.14.14 Final Thoughts on The New Republic
12.13.14 In Defense of Taking Things Out of Context
12.12.14 Three Thoughts on Liberal Zionism and BDS
12.12.14 Lenin Loved the New York Public Library. Why can’t we?
12.07.14 Alfred Kazin on The New Republic in 1989: Parvenu Smugness, Post-Liberal Bitterness, and Town Gossips
12.06.14 Saskia Sassen…Willem Sassen…Adolf Eichmann
12.05.14 The problem with The New Republic
12.05.14 More News on the Salaita Case
11.22.14 Why are you singling out my posts on Israel/Palestine?
11.21.14 In Response to Pending Grad Strike at U. Oregon, Administration Urges Faculty to Make Exams Multiple Choice or Allow Students Not to Take Them
11.20.14 Steven Salaita at Brooklyn College
11.13.14 Israel, Palestine, and the “Myth and Symbol” of American Studies
11.13.14 The Labor Theory of Value at the University of Illinois
11.13.14 David Ricardo: Machiavelli of the Margin
11.11.14 A Palestinian Exception…at Brooklyn College
11.11.14 Contemporary liberalism: minimalism at home, maximalism abroad
11.10.14 Sign Petition for Princeton to Divest from Companies Involved in the Israeli Occupation
11.10.14 Multicultural, Intersectional: It’s Not Your Daddy’s KKK
11.09.14 Thoughts on Migration and Exile on the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
11.08.14 From Berlin to Jerusalem
11.08.14 Send in the Couch Brigades: A Palimpsest of Freud, Phillip Rieff, and the Sandinistas
11.04.14 Adjunct Positions at Brooklyn College
11.02.14 The Bad Stats of Adolph Eichmann
11.02.14 Jews, Camps, and the Red Cross
10.29.14 The Problem with Liberalism Today
10.27.14 Liberalism Then and Now
10.26.14 Dayenu in Reverse: The Passover Canon of Arendt’s Critics
10.25.14 On Arendt and Jewish Collaboration with the Nazis
10.23.14 What’s the point of having a political theory of American insanity when American insanity so seamlessly theorizes itself?
10.23.14 Sheldon Wolin’s the reason I began drinking coffee
10.23.14 David Brooks, Edmund Burke, and Me
10.22.14 Adolph Eichmann: Funny Man?
10.21.14 Ah, Princeton: Where the 1950s never died
10.21.14 Congratulations, John Adams: You Got CUNY’d
10.19.14 When I draw comparisons between libertarians and slaveholders…
10.17.14 George Lakoff and Me
10.17.14 Of Collaborators and Careerists
10.16.14 Princeton Hillel Ponders Barring Princeton Professor from Speaking at Event on His Own Campus
10.14.14 David Greenglass, 1922-2014
10.13.14 There’s got to be a better way to prep for class
10.13.14 That’s Not Nice!
10.12.14 Von Mises to Milton Friedman: You’re all a bunch of socialists
10.07.14 Violence Against Women and the Politics of Fear
10.06.14 Cynthia Ozick and the Palestinians
10.04.14 Two-Year Visiting Professor Position at Brooklyn College
10.03.14 Forgiveness, Yom Kippur, and Arendt
10.02.14 References No One Seems to Have Checked
10.02.14 Did Hannah Arendt Ever See Eichmann Testify? A Second Reply to Richard Wolin
10.01.14 The Arendt Wars Continue: Richard Wolin v. Seyla Benhabib
09.30.14 Why I’m always on the internet…
09.29.14 O, Adam Smith, Wherefore Art Thou?
09.29.14 Smith/Brecht
09.29.14 Is the Boycott of the University of Illinois Illiberal?
09.28.14 It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Cover-up
09.27.14 What Is Wrong With Zionism
09.26.14 Copyrights and Property Wrongs
09.24.14 Thinking about Hannah Arendt and Adolph Eichmann on Erev Rosh Hashanah
09.20.14 From the Arms Race to Climate Change, Conservatives Have Never Cared Much About the Day After
09.19.14 Chronicle of Higher Ed Profiles Me and My Blog
09.18.14 Barack Obama’s Upside-Down Schmittianism
09.17.14 Forget Pinkwashing; Israel Has a Lavender Scare
09.15.14 I have here in my hand a list of 205
09.15.14 How Do I Deal With Israel/Palestine in the Classroom? I Don’t.
09.14.14 You could listen to Chancellor Wise on civility…
09.14.14 Settler Society, Global Empire: Aziz Rana and Nikhil Singh on the American State
09.13.14 It’s directly against company policy for an employee to use blood to write “revenge” on the conference room walls
09.12.14 Six Statements on Salaita in Search of a Thesis
09.12.14 Why Arendt might not have read Benito Cereno (if she did indeed not read Benito Cereno)
09.11.14 The Personnel is Political
09.10.14 One last chance to send a BRIEF email to the Board of Trustees
09.09.14 A Palestinian Exception to the First Amendment
09.09.14 Over 5000 Scholars Boycotting the UIUC
09.08.14 Salaita to Speak at Press Conference Tomorrow at UIUC
09.08.14 Civility, One Chair to Another
09.07.14 The Reason I Don’t Believe in Civility is That I Do Believe in Civility
09.07.14 Academic Mores and Manners in the Salaita Affair
09.07.14 Who is Steven Salaita?
09.06.14 More Procedural Violations in Salaita Case (Updated)
09.05.14 Political Scientists: Boycott UIUC!
09.05.14 A UI Trustee Breaks Ranks! We Have an Opening!
09.05.14 Breaking: Chancellor Wise Disavows Her Own Decision as Her Administration Unravels
09.04.14 A Palestine Picture Book
09.04.14 Chancellor Wise Speaks
09.03.14 More Votes of No Confidence, a Weird Ad, and a Declaration of a Non-Emergency
09.03.14 E-Mail the University of Illinois Board of Trustees (Updated)
09.02.14 Reading the Salaita Papers
09.01.14 Breaking News! Wise to Forward Salaita Appointment to Trustees!
09.01.14 Labor Day Readings
08.31.14 Salaita By the Numbers: 5 Cancelled Lectures, 3 Votes of No Confidence, 3849 Boycotters, and 1 NYT Article (Updated Thrice)
08.26.14 What Would Mary Beard Do? Bonnie Honig On How a Different Chancellor Might Respond to the Salaita Affair
08.25.14 Follow the Money at the University of Illinois
08.24.14 A Letter from Bonnie Honig to Phyllis Wise
08.24.14 Sneaking Out the Back Door to Hang Out With Those Hoodlum Friends of Mine
08.24.14 A Modest Proposal
08.23.14 Cary Nelson Was For Fairness Before He Was Against It
08.23.14 More than 3000 Scholars Boycott the University of Illinois!
08.21.14 2700 Scholars Boycott UI; Philosopher Cancels Prestigious Lecture; Salaita Deemed Excellent Teacher; and UI Trustees Meet Again (Updated) (Updated again)
08.18.14 Breaking: UI Trustees meeting, as we tweet
08.15.14 What is an Employee?
08.15.14 Top Legal Scholars Decry “Chilling” Effect of Salaita Dehiring
08.14.14 Over 1500 Scholars to University of Illinois: We Will Not Engage With You!
08.13.14 New Revelations in the Salaita Affair; Two New Statements of Refusal
08.13.14 More Than 275 Scholars Declare They Will Not Engage With University of Illinois
08.12.14 Russell Berman is against one-sided panels…
08.12.14 Calling all English Professors
08.12.14 Calling All Political Scientists (and Philosophers)
08.10.14 The Cary Nelson Standard of HireFire (Updated) (Updated again)
08.08.14 A Next Step in the Fight for Steven Salaita?
08.08.14 What Exactly Did Steven Salaita Mean By That Tweet?
08.07.14 Shit and Curses, and Other Updates on the Steven Salaita Affair (Updated)
08.06.14 Would the University of Illinois HireFire Nathan Glazer?
08.06.14 University of Illinois Chancellor Comes out in Favor of Academic Freedom! Oh, wait a minute…
08.06.14 Six Statements Cary Nelson Thinks Should Get You Unhired at the University of Illinois
08.06.14 Another Professor Punished for Anti-Israel Views
08.01.14 Capitalism and Slavery
07.31.14 Operation Firm Cliff
07.29.14 It’s On!
07.28.14 I’m joining Norm Finkelstein tomorrow to commit civil disobedience in protest of Israel’s war on Gaza
07.28.14 The Higher Sociopathy
07.27.14 A Gaza Breviary
07.16.14 An Archive For Buckley, Kristol, and Podhoretz Interviews?
07.12.14 The Limits of Libertarianism
06.30.14 Why Go After Women and Workers? The Reactionary Mind Explains It All For You.
06.30.14 A Reader’s Guide to Hobby Lobby
06.28.14 The Disappointment of Hannah Arendt (the film)
06.27.14 When the CIO Was Young
06.25.14 Supreme Court rules: the government can’t search your cellphone without a warrant; the boss can.
06.19.14 An Imperial Shit
06.17.14 When Presidents Get Bored
06.16.14 Why Aren’t the Poor More Responsible?
06.14.14 My Dirty Little Secret: I Ride the Rails to Read
05.30.14 Going to My College Reunion
05.30.14 What Made Evangelical Christians Come Out of the Closet?
05.26.14 When Intellectuals Go to War
05.26.14 Free-Market Orientalism
05.24.14 These Housekeepers Asked Sheryl Sandberg to Lean In with Them. What Happened Next Will Not Amaze You.
05.22.14 And now, for another view of Hitler
05.21.14 All the News That Was Fit to Print Ten Years Ago
05.20.14 Stalinism on the Installment Plan
05.19.14 The War on Workers’ Rights
05.16.14 Mr. Carter’s Missive
05.13.14 Reality Bites
05.13.14 The Gender Gap in Political Theory
05.08.14 Machiavelli: The Novel
05.05.14 Clarence Thomas’s Counterrevolution
05.05.14 The Calculus of Their Consent: Gary Becker, Pinochet, and the Chicago Boys
05.01.14 Queering the Strike
04.30.14 The Closer You Get
04.30.14 Clarence X?
04.29.14 What is Enlightenment when the State is Schizophrenic? It’s The Jewish Question!
04.27.14 How Long Do You Have to Practice Apartheid Before You Become an Apartheid State?
04.27.14 Has There Ever Been a Better Patron of the Arts Than the CIA?
04.26.14 Schooling in Capitalist America
04.25.14 How We Do Intellectual History at the New York Times
04.25.14 NYU: where Socratic dialogue is a Soviet-style four-hour oration from the Dear Leader
04.25.14 My Intro to American Government syllabus…
04.25.14 On Writerly Historians
04.24.14 Speaking on Clarence Thomas at the University of Washington
04.23.14 On the death of Gabriel García Marquez
04.22.14 Classical Liberalism ≠ Libertarianism, Vol. 2
04.22.14 Tyler Cowen is one of Nietzsche’s Marginal Children
04.22.14 Three Theses (not really: more like two graphs and a link) on Nazism and Capitalism
04.20.14 Why Does the Winger Whine? What Does the Winger Want?
04.20.14 Next time someone tells you the Nazis were anti-capitalist…
04.17.14 Eleven Things You Did Not Know About Clarence Thomas
04.13.14 Being in Egypt: When Jews Were a Demographic Time Bomb
04.12.14 Wherever you live, it is probably Egypt: Thoughts on Passover
03.27.14 Upcoming Talks and Events
03.25.14 Is the Left More Opposed to Free Speech Today than It Used to Be?
03.22.14 Hannah Arendt, Lawrence of Arabia, and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
03.20.14 The Uncharacteristically Obtuse Mr. Chait
03.12.14 Further Thoughts on Nick Kristof
03.11.14 David Brooks: Better In the Original German
03.04.14 There’s no business like Shoah business
03.02.14 Vanessa Redgrave at the Oscars
03.01.14 Gaza: A Tower of Babel in Reverse
02.20.14 Backlash Barbie
02.19.14 James Madison and Elia Kazan: Theory and Practice
02.16.14 Look Who Nick Kristof’s Saving Now
02.14.14 Valentine’s Day
02.14.14 Silence and Segregation: On Clarence Thomas as a Lacanian Performance Artist
02.13.14 Death and Taxes
02.08.14 Did Bob Dahl Really Say That? (Updated)
02.06.14 But for the boycott there would be academic freedom
02.05.14 Peter Beinart Speaks Truth About BDS
02.04.14 Why this NYS bill is so much worse than I thought
02.04.14 The NYT Gets It Right — and, Even More Amazing, We Have an Open Letter For You to Sign!
02.03.14 Columbia University to NYS Legislature: Back Off!
02.02.14 An Unoriginal Thought About the Israel/Palestine Conflict
02.01.14 Why You Should Worry More About NYS Legislation than the ASA Boycott of Israel
01.31.14 Jewfros in Palestine
01.29.14 The Beauty of the Blacklist: In Memory of Pete Seeger
01.24.14 Where Would the Tea Party Be Without Feminism?
01.22.14 O Yale…(Updated, Again and Again and Again)
01.18.14 The Poetics and Politics of Time
01.17.14 I’ve Looked at BDS from Both Sides Now. Oh, wait…(Updated)
01.16.14 The N Word in Israel
01.15.14 Aristocrats of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your…shame.
01.13.14 More News on Charges Involving Brooklyn College Worker Education Center
01.12.14 The Lights of Jaffa
01.12.14 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem
01.11.14 The Implication of “Why Single Out Israel?” Is Do Nothing At All
01.10.14 A Challenge to Critics of BDS
01.09.14 Alan Dershowitz Wants You!
01.08.14 The New McCarthyites: BDS, Its Critics, and Academic Freedom
01.06.14 From Here to Eternity: The Occupation in Historical Perspective
01.02.14 A Very Elite Backlash
01.01.14 Are Israeli Universities Critics of or Collaborators with the Israeli Government?
12.29.13 A Very Bourgeois Post on Buying a House
12.28.13 NYU President John Sexton Supports the Boycott of Israel. Just Not the ASA Boycott.
12.23.13 Does the ASA Boycott Violate Academic Freedom? A Roundtable
12.19.13 My Christmas Picks
12.18.13 When it comes to the boycott of Israel, who has the real double standard?
12.18.13 Freud on Global Warming
12.18.13 David Brooks Says
12.13.13 A Response to Michael Kazin on BDS and Campus Activism (Updated)
12.11.13 Must Malcolm Gladwell Mean What He Says?
12.10.13 Socialism: Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness for a Hundred Years
12.09.13 We Are an Open Hillel (Updated Again)
12.07.13 Albert Camus Dancing
12.06.13 Jumaane Williams and Dov Hikind
12.04.13 When Professors Oppose Unions
11.24.13 Can I Come Back into the Tent Now, Rabbi Goldberg?
11.23.13 Adam Smith ♥ High Wages
11.21.13 What a F*ing Scandal the Senate Is
11.16.13 Only Bertrand Russell could ever write something like this
11.16.13 My Life
11.12.13 Socialism would mean…
11.08.13 A Footnote to History
11.08.13 ALEC supports worker collectivism and redistribution of wealth
11.08.13 Speak, Memory
11.07.13 Right to Work Laws are Good for Unions, but not for the Chamber of Commerce
11.02.13 LBJ on Black Power
10.31.13 Dayenu at Yale
10.30.13 The Right to an Education: This Won’t Hurt a Bit
10.30.13 When Richard Nixon Met Karl Polanyi
10.28.13 For the New Intellectual…
10.24.13 Burke in Debt
10.23.13 The Moderate and the McCarthyite: The Case of Robert Taft
10.20.13 How I Met Your Mother, or, When Unions Disrupt the Disruptors
10.19.13 Eric Alterman v. Max Blumenthal
10.17.13 The History of Fear, Part 5
10.15.13 Nozick: Libertarians are “filled…with resentment at other freer ways of being”
10.11.13 Same As It Ever Was
10.09.13 WTF Does Obama Think They Were Doing at Stonewall?
10.08.13 Upstairs, Downstairs at the University of Chicago
10.08.13 Study Finds Grad Student Unions Actually Improve Things
10.07.13 The only people who cared about literature were the KGB
10.05.13 David Grossman v. Max Blumenthal
10.04.13 The Washington Post: America’s Imperial Scribes
10.03.13 Mark Zuckerberg, Meet George Pullman
10.03.13 Adam Smith on the Mobility of Labor v. Capital
10.02.13 Adam Smith Was Never an Adjunct
09.30.13 The History of Fear, Part 4
09.30.13 Yes, You Can Be Fired for Liking My Little Pony
09.29.13 The History of Fear, Part 3
09.28.13 The History of Fear, Part 2
09.27.13 The History of Fear, Part 1
09.25.13 Classical Liberalism ≠ Libertarianism
09.24.13 Van Jones Does Gershom Scholem One Better
09.24.13 The Voice of the Counterrevolution
09.24.13 If things seem better in Jerusalem, it’s because they’re worse
09.22.13 I was on NPR Weekend Edition
09.21.13 David Petraeus: Voldemort Comes to CUNY
09.19.13 Faculty to University of Oregon: Oh No We Don’t!
09.18.13 When Kafka was NOT the rage
09.15.13 University of Oregon to Faculty: You Belong to Me!
09.13.13 Adam Smith: The Real Spirit of Capitalism?
09.12.13 Marshall Berman, 1940-2013
09.11.13 I feel about Henry Kissinger the way Edmund Burke felt about Warren Hastings
09.11.13 It’s 9/11. Do you know where Henry Kissinger is?
09.06.13 Jews Without Israel
09.01.13 When it comes to Edward Snowden, the London Times of 1851 was ahead of the New York Times of 2013
08.24.13 Jesus Christ, I’m at Yale
08.15.13 Jean Bethke Elshtain Was No Realist
08.01.13 Robert Bellah, McCarthyism, and Harvard
07.31.13 Benno Schmidt, what university are you a trustee of?
07.30.13 More Information on Brooklyn College Worker Ed Center
07.28.13 Islam Is the Jewish Question of the 21st Century
07.26.13 Please do not sign Brooklyn College Worker Ed Petition
07.24.13 ACLU Demands Loyalty of Its Employees
07.22.13 When it comes to our parents, we are all the memoirists of writers
07.19.13 Jackson Lears on Edward Snowden
07.19.13 Libertarianism, the Confederacy, and Historical Memory
07.16.13 If you’re getting lessons in democracy from Margaret Thatcher, you’re doing it wrong
07.15.13 What the Market Will Bear
07.15.13 CUNY Backs Down (Way Down) on Petraeus
07.12.13 Next Week in Petraeusgate
07.11.13 Paul Krugman on Petraeusgate
07.11.13 Petraeus Prerequisites
07.10.13 This is What We’re Paying $150,000 For?
07.10.13 More Coverup at CUNY?
07.08.13 NYC Councilman Initiates Petition to CUNY re Petraeus
07.07.13 A Debate on Petraeusgate
07.07.13 When Philip Roth Taught at CUNY
07.07.13 Charles Murray Meets Dr. Mengele in the California Prison System
07.07.13 Thomas Friedman: You Give Clichés a Bad Name
07.06.13 Not Even a Bourgeois Freedom: Freedom of Contract in John Roberts’s America
07.06.13 An Interview with Cynthia Ozick
07.05.13 When CUNY Hired Lillian Hellman
07.05.13 Mayoral Candidate Bill de Blasio Calls on CUNY to Renegotiate Petraeus Deal
07.05.13 Even Don Draper Went to CUNY
07.04.13 Petraeusgate: Anatomy of a Scandal
07.04.13 Bourgeois Freedoms
07.03.13 It’s Official: CUNY Scandal Upgraded to “Petraeusgate”
07.03.13 In a Hole, CUNY Digs Deeper
07.02.13 NYS Assemblyman (and Iraq War Vet) Blasts CUNY Over Petraeus: Says Administrators Are Lying
07.02.13 Talking about Nietzsche and the Austrians
07.01.13 Pay us like you pay Petraeus
06.26.13 If Reagan Were Pinochet…Sigh
06.25.13 The Hayek-Pinochet Connection: A Second Reply to My Critics
06.24.13 Nietzsche, Hayek, and the Austrians: A Reply to My Critics
06.18.13 Edward Snowden’s Retail Psychoanalysts in the Media
06.17.13 Rights of Labor v. Tyranny of Capital
06.14.13 Bob Fitch on Left v. Right
06.14.13 Think you have nothing to hide from surveillance? Think again.
06.13.13 Theory and Practice at NYU
06.11.13 David Brooks: The Last Stalinist
06.10.13 Snitches and Whistleblowers: Who would you rather be?
06.06.13 Jumaane Williams and the Brooklyn College BDS Controversy Revisited
06.03.13 Panel discussion tonight: Hayek’s Triumph, Nietzsche’s Example, the Market’s Morals
05.27.13 Arbeit Macht Frei
05.20.13 Obama at Morehouse, LBJ at Howard
05.16.13 Everything you know about the movement against the Vietnam War is wrong
05.13.13 Critics respond to “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children”
05.10.13 Ronald Reagan: Ríos Montt is “totally dedicated to democracy”
05.09.13 The Leopold and Loeb of Modern Libertarianism
05.07.13 Brooklyn BDS Saga Continues: NYC Councilman Lewis Fidler Demands Poli Sci Hire Pro-Israel Faculty
05.05.13 The False Attribution: Our Democratic Poetry
05.05.13 In the new issue of Jacobin…
05.04.13 Edmund Burke to Niall Ferguson: You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole theory is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
05.02.13 What the F*ck is Katie Roiphe Talking About?
05.02.13 Petraeus may not be quite all in at CUNY
04.29.13 Look Who’s Teaching at CUNY!
04.29.13 Petraeus is Coming to CUNY. Just “like the invasion of Iraq.”
04.25.13 Would It Not Be Easier for Matt Yglesias to Dissolve the Bangladeshi People and Elect Another?
04.25.13 Among Friends
04.23.13 How Two Can Make One: Nietzsche on Truth, Mises on Value, and Arendt on Judgment
04.21.13 God Bless Benno Schmidt
04.19.13 The Idle Rich and the Working Stiff: Nietzche von Hayek on Capital v. Labor
04.17.13 Nietzsche von Hayek on Merit
04.17.13 From the Annals of Imperial Assymetry: Greg Grandin on the Venezuelan Election
04.17.13 The Price of Labor: Burke, Nietzsche, and Menger
04.15.13 One Newspaper, Two Elections: The New York Times on America 2004, Venezuela 2013
04.10.13 Nietzsche and the Marginals, again
04.09.13 Shulamith Firestone and the Private Life of Power
04.08.13 From the Mixed-Up Files of Mr. Jon Lee Anderson
04.08.13 The Lady’s Not for Turning
04.02.13 Market Morals: Nietzsche on the Media, Adam Smith and the Blacklist
03.30.13 Anne Frank’s Diary Should Have Been Burned
03.30.13 Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?
03.28.13 The Libertarian Map of Freedom
03.28.13 Why Noam Chomsky Can Sound like a Broken Record
03.27.13 Black Panthers v. Reactionary Minds
03.25.13 Why Did Liberals Support the Iraq War?
03.20.13 Ezra Klein’s Biggest Mistake
03.20.13 Edmund Burke on the Free Market
03.17.13 George W. Bush did not always lie about Iraq
03.17.13 On the anniversaries of My Lai and Iraq, we say “for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
03.16.13 Educate a Straussian: Support the Workers at Pomona College
03.14.13 I am not a racist. I just hate democracy.
03.12.13 The US Senate: Where Democracy Goes to Die
03.11.13 Wendy Kopp, Princeton Tory
03.10.13 The Smartest Guy in the Room
03.07.13 Guess How Much I Love You
03.05.13 I Debate a Reagan Administration Official about Freedom and the Workplace
03.04.13 The Wizard of Oz
03.03.13 Israel v. Palestine, Plessy v. Ferguson
03.02.13 Lucille Dickess (1934-2013): American Radical
02.27.13 What do Glenn Greenwald, Alan Dershowitz, and the Israeli UN Ambassador have in common?
02.23.13 “Corey Robin, if he’s watching this, is losing his mind.”
02.19.13 New Information on that False Shout of Fire in a Theater
02.17.13 Falsely Shouting Fire in a Theater: How a Forgotten Labor Struggle Became a National Obsession and Emblem of Our Constitutional Faith
02.12.13 Israeli Ambassador: I Balance Myself
02.08.13 Who Really Supports Hate Speech at Brooklyn College?
02.08.13 Tonight at Brooklyn College
02.06.13 They All Fall Down: “Progressives” Back off From Their Demands to Poli Sci
02.06.13 Bloomberg to City Council: Back the F*ck Off!
02.05.13 A Sinking Ship? 2 politicians jump, there may be a 3rd.
02.05.13 The CUNY Talks and Panels Christine Quinn Supported When She Wasn’t Running for Mayor
02.05.13 One politician doubles down, one politician backs down, and one student stands up
02.04.13 The Tide Turns: Letitia James Backs Off From Threats to CUNY
02.04.13 Where Does Mayor Bloomberg Stand on Academic Freedom?
02.03.13 The Question of Palestine at Brooklyn College, Then and Now
02.03.13 NYC Council Threatens to Withdraw $ if Poli Sci Doesn’t Withdraw Cosponsorship
02.02.13 Keith Gessen, Joan Scott, and others weigh in on Brooklyn College controversy
01.21.13 The White Moderate: The Greatest Threat to Freedom
01.15.13 The State Should Not Pardon Aaron Swartz
01.02.13 The fiscal cliff is just Act 2 of a 3-Act Play
12.27.12 Highlights from Jacobin
12.26.12 My Top 5 Posts of the Year (and a little extra)
12.22.12 Rimbaud Conservatism
12.19.12 Statement of Support for Erik Loomis
12.17.12 Taxes, and Cuts, and Drones: Obama’s Imperialism of the Peasants
12.14.12 The Four Most Beautiful Words in the English Language: I Told You So
12.12.12 An Open Letter to Glenn Greenwald
12.06.12 New York Times: It’s Not Like Bradley Manning is O.J. Simpson or Something
12.04.12 A Question for A.O. Scott and Ta-Nehisi Coates
12.02.12 Jefferson’s Race Obsession is a Response to Emancipation, not Slavery
12.01.12 Thomas Jefferson: American Fascist?
11.30.12 Brian Leiter on Nietzsche and Ressentiment
11.30.12 Dwight Garner: Meet George Orwell
11.29.12 When Katie Roiphe and Dwight Garner keep me up at night
11.28.12 When It Comes to Lincoln, We’re Still Virgins
11.26.12 There are no libertarians on flagpoles.
11.25.12 Steven Spielberg’s White Men of Democracy
11.20.12 Conservatives: Who’s Your Daddy?
11.18.12 Barack Obama, Ironist of American History
11.17.12 Nietzsche, the Jews, and other obsessions
11.14.12 Doris, we’re in (with Paul Krugman)!
11.09.12 AIDS in the Age of Reagan
11.09.12 Will Obama not only take us over the fiscal cliff but also keep us there?
11.08.12 Bertolt Brecht Comes to CUNY
11.07.12 Testing the Melissa Harris-Perry Thesis
11.07.12 An Army of Rape Philosophers
11.07.12 Conservatism is Dead…Because It Lives
11.05.12 I’m a libertarian. Which is why I’m voting for Mitt Romney.
11.03.12 The Fine Print: Produce Urine in a Timely Fashion or We’ll Charge You
11.02.12 Held With Bail
10.31.12 All that good, expensive gas wasted on the Jews!
10.27.12 Suffer the Children
10.26.12 American Feudalism: It’s Not Just a Metaphor
10.25.12 My Media Empire Expands
10.25.12 Dictatorships and Double Standards
10.23.12 In Hollywood Hotel, Maids are Watched by a Dog Named Rex
10.23.12 Kai Ryssdal, Call Me!
10.22.12 I Speak Out for Athletes Everywhere
10.21.12 Things Obama Says When Famous People Die
10.21.12 The Army as a Concentration Camp
10.20.12 How Could Mere Toil Align Thy Choiring Strings? A Breviary of Worker Intimidation
10.18.12 Forced to Choose: Capitalism as Existentialism
10.17.12 Age of Counterrevolution
10.15.12 The Kochs’ Libertarian Hypocrisy: It’s Worse Than You Think
10.15.12 The Koch Brothers Read Hayek
10.13.12 Libertarianism in Honduras
10.04.12 I Have the Most Awesome Students in the World. And You Can Help Them.
10.02.12 I am so loving that lesser evil!
10.01.12 Getting on Board
09.24.12 Matt Yglesias’s China Syndrome
09.18.12 Hurting the Kids
09.18.12 NPR Says Karen Lewis is Too….Something to Speak for Teachers
09.12.12 Why Do People Hate Teachers Unions? Because They Hate Teachers.
09.11.12 Every Time Terry Moran Speaks, a Butterfly Flaps Its Wings and a Chicago Teacher Makes 1/2 Her Salary
09.10.12 Terry Moran: How much fucking money do you make a year?
09.07.12 Might We Not Want a GOP Congress Come November?
09.06.12 NYPD in Israel: Hannah Arendt on the Best Police Department in the World
09.05.12 Will Work for Free: The Democratic Mantra
08.31.12 Not Your Father’s Labor Movement
08.30.12 We’re Going To Tax Their Ass Off!
08.30.12 Never Can Say Goodbye
08.28.12 Coal Miners Forced to Attend Romney Rally: “Attendance at the event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend.”
08.26.12 My appearance on Up With Chris Hayes
08.24.12 I’m going to be on TV
08.23.12 Montana: State of Exception
08.21.12 Don’t Let the Workers Drive the Bus!
08.16.12 AT&T: What Part of “Lunch Break” Do You Not Understand?
08.15.12 Crackdown on Occupy Probably Not Organized by the Obama Administration
08.14.12 The Vulgarity of Sylvia Nasar’s Beautiful Mind
08.11.12 Ryan, and Mises, and Rand! Oh, my!
08.08.12 If you’re a customer, you get to make noise; if you’re a worker, you don’t.
08.06.12 9 Ways to Get Yourself Fired
08.06.12 If Only We Knew How to Decrease Unemployment…
08.03.12 Who’s the Greater Threat to Freedom? Chicago or Chick-fil-A?
08.03.12 I Respect Michele Bachmann
07.31.12 Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
07.30.12 Águas de Março
07.30.12 The Drone: Joseph de Maistre’s Executioner
07.27.12 Lunch Break Utopia (Cont.)
07.26.12 A Caribbean-born Gay Jew Leading the US Confederacy?
07.24.12 Liberalism Agonistes
07.23.12 More on Alexander Cockburn
07.21.12 Alexander Cockburn, 1941-2012
07.20.12 Eli’s Comin’—Hide Your Heart, Girl: Why Yale is Going to Singapore
07.19.12 Desperate Housewives
07.18.12 When Hayek Met Pinochet
07.17.12 Viña del Mar: A Veritable International of the Free-Market Counterrevolution
07.17.12 The Road to Viña del Mar
07.16.12 When lunch breaks disappear, where do they go?
07.13.12 Wow, Tyler Cowen, How Much Paper Do They Steal at GMU? And Other Responses to the Libertarians
07.11.12 Kissinger: Allende More Dangerous Than Castro
07.11.12 Friedrich Del Mar*: More on Hayek, Pinochet, and Chile
07.09.12 But wait, there’s more: Hayek von Pinochet, Part 2
07.08.12 Hayek von Pinochet
07.07.12 When Utopia Becomes a Lunch Break
07.07.12 Thank You For Smoking
07.06.12 Mini-Wars
07.04.12 Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Endless Arguments about It on the Internet
07.03.12 Gordon Lafer Weighs in on Wisconsin, again
07.01.12 Libertarianism’s Cold, Cold Heart
06.29.12 Nino! Now Playing at the Schubert Theater
06.28.12 Affirmative Action Baby
06.27.12 Adolph Reed Speaks Truth on Wisconsin
06.27.12 Justice Scalia: American Nietzsche
06.26.12 Diva of Disdain: Justice Scalia in Three Parts
06.22.12 Labor was once central to the liberal imagination; today, not so much.
06.20.12 What Might Have Been: One Report from Madison, Wisconsin
06.15.12 Whither Wisconsin: A Guide to the Perplexed (Left)
06.08.12 A Solidarity of Strangers
06.08.12 The Militant Minority: Untimely Meditations from David Montgomery
06.07.12 A Challenge to the Left
06.07.12 Wisconsin: WTF? A Facebook Roundtable on Labor, the Democrats, and Why Everything Sucks
06.04.12 I See London, I See France…
06.02.12 Was Mohamed Atta Gay?
06.01.12 Careerism: Prolegomena to a Political Theory
05.28.12 Things I Did and Didn’t Know About Marilyn Monroe and Leon Trotsky
05.27.12 Law and Order Among the 1%
05.05.12 In the 4th Year of the Obama Administration, the Health and Safety of American Workers Remains “Open”
04.25.12 Obama Awards Billions in Government Contracts to Labor Law Violators
04.25.12 The American Creed: You give us a color, we’ll wipe it out.
04.24.12 Ex-Cons Make the Best Workers!
04.23.12 Boss to Worker: Thanks for Your Kidney. And, Oh, You’re Fired!
04.23.12 Fighting Them There Rather than Here: From Hitler to Bush
04.22.12 Protocols of Machismo, Part 2: On the Hidden Connection Between Henry Kissinger and Liza Minnelli
04.22.12 Protocols of Machismo: On the Fetish of National Security, Part I
04.20.12 In Which I Pour More Fuel on the Cory Booker Fire
04.20.12 Stephen Colbert Agrees with Me about Cory Booker
04.19.12 What Katha Said
04.14.12 The Thunder of World History
04.13.12 The Freedom, the Freedom!
04.13.12 In Which I Rain on Everyone’s Cory Booker Parade
04.09.12 Ending Dependency As We Know It: How Bill Clinton Decreased Freedom
04.08.12 The Wide World of Sports
04.04.12 Fancy Dress at Fancy Law Firms? You’re Fired!
04.02.12 Twin Peaks: The Tea Party’s Economic and Social Agenda
03.31.12 More Facebook Fascism
03.30.12 News of the Book
03.26.12 My Bloggingheads Debut!
03.24.12 What Happens to a Bathroom Break Deferred?
03.24.12 Reactionary Mindz
03.21.12 Sluts!
03.20.12 The Private Life of Power
03.19.12 Is That All There Is?
03.18.12 All Children Under 16 Years Old Are Now 16 Years Old: Workplace Tyranny at the Gates Foundation
03.16.12 Rick Perlstein Schools Mark Lilla
03.14.12 Birth Control McCarthyism
03.11.12 The Prison House of Labor
03.08.12 For anyone who’s ever despaired of arguing with her critics…
03.08.12 Lavatory and Liberty: The Secret History of the Bathroom Break
03.07.12 When Libertarians Go to Work…
03.04.12 Black Money: On Marxism and Corruption
03.03.12 Isn’t It Romantic? Burke, Maistre, and Conservatism
03.01.12 Just My Imagination
02.29.12 Julie London, Political Theorist
02.25.12 Even Narcissists Have Enemies
02.25.12 Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t*
02.20.12 Probing Tyler Cowen, or: When Libertarians Get Medieval on Your Vagina
02.15.12 Love for Sale: Birth Control from Marx to Mises
02.06.12 Graduate Student Employee Fired for Union Activism
02.05.12 Mark Lilla and I Exchange Words
02.01.12 The New York Times Takes Up The Reactionary Mind…Again
02.01.12 I’m a Jacobin
01.31.12 A Most Delightful Fuck You
01.27.12 Anti-Semite and Jew
01.21.12 Gossip Folks
01.20.12 Something’s Got a Hold On Me
01.19.12 From the Slaveholders to Rick Perry: Galileo is the Key
01.19.12 Easy To Be Hard: Conservatism and Violence
01.16.12 The Real Martin Luther King
01.10.12 John Schaar, 1928-2011
01.08.12 You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me
01.08.12 Words Like Freedom
01.05.12 Another prize! And other news of the blog and the book
01.04.12 Houston, We Have a Problem. A Jacob Heilbrunn Problem.
01.04.12 A Trotsky for Our Time
01.03.12 Ron Paul has two problems: one is his, the other is ours.
01.03.12 Still Batshit Crazy After All These Years: A Reply to Ta-Nehisi Coates
01.02.12 My Appearance on Up With Chris Hayes
12.30.11 I’m going to be on TV
12.26.11 Fight Club, or That’s the Year That Was
12.20.11 Reactionary Minds
12.19.11 My Blog Wins 3rd Prize
12.18.11 “Yes, but”: More on Hitchens and Hagiography
12.16.11 Christopher Hitchens: The Most Provincial Spirit of All
12.04.11 It Was 20 Years Ago Today
12.03.11 Ross Douthat Channels Georges Sorel
12.03.11 My Response to Bruce Bartlett
12.01.11 Reality Bites: Andrew Sullivan’s Utopian Conservatism
11.27.11 The Occupy Crackdowns: Why Naomi Wolf Got It Wrong
11.17.11 Shop Talk with John Podhoretz
11.15.11 More News of the Book
11.11.11 I’ll be on C-SPAN this weekend
11.09.11 Whenever I read a professional Chomsky-basher…
11.03.11 When the Right Hand Doesn’t Know What the Right Hand is Doing
11.03.11 From the American Slaveholders to the Nazis…
11.03.11 In Which I Talk to a Conservative about His Reactionary Mind
11.01.11 Our Negroes and Theirs: When Ann Coulter Tells the Truth, It’s Worth Listening to Her
10.26.11 News of the Book
10.25.11 Fear, American Style: What the Anarchist and Libertarian Don’t Understand about the US
10.17.11 To Play the Part of a Lord: A Reply to Andrew Sullivan about Conservatism
10.15.11 A Last Word on My Exchange with Sheri Berman
10.14.11 Where Is the Love?
10.12.11 I Got a Crush on You
10.11.11 It’s Good to Be the King
10.07.11 The New York Times Review of The Reactionary Mind: My Response
10.02.11 We’ll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy.
10.01.11 Baubles, Bangles, and Tweets: Reactions to The Reactionary Mind
09.27.11 Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism
09.26.11 Melissa Harris-Perry’s Non-Response Response to Her Critics
09.23.11 Melissa Harris-Perry: Psychologist to the Stars
09.22.11 The Page 99 Test
09.19.11 Shitstorming the Bastille
09.18.11 If Everybody’s Working for the Weekend, How Come It Took This Country So Goddamn Long to Get One?
09.13.11 The Mile-High Club: What the Right Really Thinks About Sex
09.08.11 The Republican Debate: 5 Theses
09.08.11 That Old Centrist Magic: Jonathan Stein Responds to Jonathan Chait
09.04.11 The Politics of Fear is Dead. The Politics of Fear is alive and well.
09.03.11 What’s so Liberal about Neoliberalism? An homage to my sister’s father-in-law*
08.19.11 Why I’m Not Laughing with Jon Stewart
08.18.11 My Own Munchings (that’s for you, Mom)
08.16.11 One Less Bell to Answer: Further Thoughts on Neoliberalism By Way of Mike Konczal (and Burt Bachrach)
08.15.11 Sam’s Club Republicanism Died Because It Never Had a Life to Live
08.13.11 3 Reasons Why It Doesn’t Matter if Rick Perry is the New George W. Bush and 1 Reason Why It Does.
08.09.11 Ten Years On, We’re Still Getting Nickel and Dimed (and Still Can’t Pee on the Job)
08.07.11 The Economic Cure That Dare Not Speak Its Name
08.01.11 Obama: WTF? A Facebook Roundtable of the Left
07.30.11 The Great Neoliberalism Debate of 2011 Has Now Been Resolved ( I Think This is What They Call Beating a Dead Horse)
07.28.11 America, Where Selling Out is the Right Thing to Do
07.25.11 Making Love to Lana Turner on an Empty Stomach (and Other Things That Caught My Eye)
07.24.11 Norwegian Terrorist Knows His Conservative Canon
07.22.11 If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, Come Sit Next to Me
07.21.11 Why Aren’t There More Union Members in America? A Reply to Will Wilkinson
07.19.11 Why the Left Gets Neoliberalism Wrong: It’s the Feudalism, Stupid!
07.19.11 Ronald Reagan: Magic Man
07.16.11 Doug Henwood: His Taste in Music is a Little Doctrinaire, but His Economics is Outta Sight
07.16.11 The Way We Weren’t: My Response to Yglesias’ Response to My Response to His Response to My Response
07.15.11 Mike Konczal Responds to Me and Yglesias (and Yglesias responds yet again)
07.14.11 Matt Yglesias Responds to My Post
07.13.11 Other People’s Money
07.13.11 A Fistful of Crazy, Starring Jonathan Rauch, in Which Our Hero Argues that Primo Levi was an American Enemy
07.12.11 QED
07.12.11 Things You Get to Do When You’re a Great Writer
07.09.11 The Financialization of Political Discourse (or more on David Frum)
07.09.11 All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Freshman English. Or So Says the NYT.
07.07.11 David Frum, Regular Pain in the GOP Ass, Writes the Most Honest Sentence In Journalism I’ve Seen
07.06.11 I knew Abe Lincoln, Abe Lincoln was a friend of mine. Mr. President, you’re no Abe Lincoln.
07.06.11 I Say a Little Prayer for You
07.05.11 Persistence of the Old Regime
07.04.11 In Which the NY Times Suddenly Decides It Respects Noam Chomsky
07.04.11 A Princeton First
07.03.11 When Conservatives Read Conservatives
07.02.11 What We Don’t Get
06.24.11 You Are Not Historians!
06.23.11 Known Unknowns
06.20.11 Tax and Spend
   

One Bernie With One Stone

05.11

There really is something rotten about the discussion of abortion and the Democratic Party. In a Washington Post oped, the leader of a reproductive rights coalition calls out Democrats who would sideline abortion rights in the effort to build a big tent. Oddly, the author doesn’t cite or link to statements by Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking elected official in the Democratic Party, who, within the last several weeks, came out against making abortion a litmus test not once, but twice. Not does the author cite or link to the statement by Tom Perez, the official head of the Democratic Party, chosen by the members of the Democratic National Committee, who supported Mello for the sake of electing Democrats, even if […]

Trump is a Tyrant: The Devolution of an Argument

05.07

I’ve noticed an interesting evolution—perhaps devolution—in the “Trump is a tyrant” line of argument. Originally, the claim was robust and ambitious: Trump was like the classic fascist rulers of the twentieth century, readying to lead not only a repressive and violent state apparatus, under the unified control of his party, but also a street-based mass movement that channeled a broad and scary consensus of the majority of the nation. It soon became apparent that despite his electoral victory, Trump in fact had very little ability to control popular opinion. Not only has he had the worst approval ratings of any president at this point in his term, but he’s also been singularly incapable of moving the needle of public opinion toward his positions. As […]

His Mother’s Son

05.05

“Looking back, I realize now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother. She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand. She was a very traditional housewife, but she also had a sense of the world beyond her. I still remember my mother, who is Scottish by birth, sitting in front of the television set to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and not budging for an entire day. She was just enthralled by the pomp and circumstance, the whole idea of royalty and glamour. I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently. ‘For Christ’s sake, Mary,’ he’d say. ‘Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.’ My […]

What we talk about when we talk about Susan Sarandon

05.04

Susan Sarandon says Trump’s election may help the revolution. Liberals scream, “IRRESPONSIBLE!” The Democrats say that Trumpcare’s victory in the House will help the Democrats in 2018. Liberals say, “Strategy.” Bernie Sanders says abortion shouldn’t be a litmus test. Liberals cry, “SOCIALIST CLASSBRO HATES WOMEN!” Nancy Pelosi says—twice, second time even more strongly—abortion shouldn’t be a litmus test. Liberals say…almost nothing at all. It’s almost as if we’re not really having an honest conversation about our disagreements.

A wise psychoanalyst once told me (sort of): look at what Trump does, not what he says

04.29

A wise psychoanalyst once told me, “Stop looking at what you’re saying, look at what you’re doing.” I wish journalists applied a similar rule to Trump. Yesterday, Trump said some whatever about the “archaic” rules of Congress, and this is what Aaron Blake, a journalist at The Washington Post, has to say in response: Whether this is just him [Trump] blowing off steam or signaling what lies ahead, it’s significant. Because it suggests a president, yet again, who doesn’t agree with his own powers being limited or even questioned. Remember when senior policy adviser Stephen Miller declared “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned?” This is more of that kind […]

On liberals, the left, and free speech: Something has changed, and it’s not what you think it is

04.27

When I was in college and in graduate school (so the 1980s and 1990s), the dividing line on free speech debates was, for the most part, a pretty conventional liberal/left divide. (I’m excluding the right.) That is, self-defined liberals tended to be absolutists on free speech. Self-defined leftists—from radical feminists to radical democrats to critical race theorists to Marxists—tended to be more critical of the idea of free speech. What’s interesting about the contemporary moment, which I don’t think anyone’s really remarked upon, is that that clean divide has gotten blurry. There were always exceptions to that divide, I know: back in the 1980s and 1990s, some radical feminists were critical of the anti-free speech position within feminism; some liberals, like Cass […]

The Language of Pain, from Virginia Woolf to William Stanley Jevons

04.26

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill: English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache…The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself… William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy: In this work I have attempted to treat Economy as a Calculus of Pleasure and Pain… I hesitate to say that men will ever have the means of measuring directly the feelings of the […]

Events, dear boy, events

04.22

Events, dear boy, events. That’s what Harold Macmillan is supposed to have said when he was asked what it was that a prime minister most feared. Like most of these famous statements, Macmillan probably never said it. But these days, events are, for me, something, on the whole, that I welcome rather than fear. Our political conversations are so stuck, with people rehearsing the same lines of the same arguments; it doesn’t matter how bitter those arguments are, the familiarity of the lines are a comfort. It’s like a church hymnal. But then something comes along—an Occupy, a Black Lives Matter, a Sanders, a BDS, and long before that, a Seattle—that no one who was not involved in the planning […]

Have You Never Been Mello? On Bernie and Abortion in Omaha

04.22

I think Sanders’ defense on NPR of supporting candidates who are anti-abortion is completely wrongheaded. The bottom line commitment of the left is to freedom, to emancipation from all manner of domination, and reproductive freedom is a critical part of that program of emancipation. I simply don’t see how the state or a parent or a husband or a boyfriend or anyone can force a woman to carry a fetus to term and bear a child against her will. I don’t think the left should compromise on that. At all. (Though the left makes all manner of ugly compromises all the time, so it would be a big mistake to cast this entire discussion as strictly about political morality. Like […]

Eichmann in Jerusalem is a better guide to Trump Time than is Origins of Totalitarianism

04.05

I’ve argued many times that I think Eichmann in Jerusalem is a much better guide to fascism—and, to whatever extent that mode of politics is relevant today, to our times as well—than is Origins of Totalitarianism. There are many reasons I believe this, but three stand out. First, Origins sees totalitarianism as essentially a mass phenomenon, by which Arendt means not only the rise of the mass but also the liquidation of all familiar institutions, established elites, and traditional hierarchies. Eichmann completely dispenses with that view, emphasizing instead how fascism is much more of an elite affair dependent upon long-standing social hierarchies. Second, Origins sees totalitarianism as the liquidation of the individual agent and individual action; even the regime’s leaders, Arendt argues […]

Why, when it comes to the Right, do we ignore events, contingency, and high politics?: What Arno Mayer Taught Me

04.02

One of the many reasons I resist the Trump-as-fascist argument is that it often leads to (or accompanies) an inattention to or eclipse of matters of high politics and elite action: the jockeying for position at the highest levels of state, the coalitions and fractures within the dominant regime, the day-to-day events in which policy gets formed and unformed. There’s no intrinsic reason that an invocation of fascism should require that inattention; the best historical studies of fascism don’t ignore these questions at all. In the American context, however, the invocation of that parallel—whether to McCarthyism or now to Trump—often does. The reason for that, I suspect, is that most people tend to think of fascism as primarily a form of mass politics, that […]

Trump’s Bermuda Triangle: Obamacare, Taxes, and the Debt

03.26

I’ve got an oped in the Times today on the GOP meltdown over Obamacare. While pundits and journalists focus on the problems of personality (Trump’s or the GOP’s as a whole) and policy (the Republican bill was a terrible bill, the assumption being that Republicans somehow never pass terrible bills), of timing (the GOP should have waited to do healthcare until after they dealt with taxes, an analysis that gets things backward) and tactics (Trump negotiated badly, Ryan led badly), the real story, I argue, is deeper and more structural: Movements long ensconced and habituated to power — such that when their leaders are out of office, their ideas still dominate — get out of that practice. They lose touch with that external reality of […]

What we’re hoping for with the Obamacare repeal vote: that the rage of the GOP will overwhelm its reason

03.22

I totally understand—I especially understand—the desire not to be over-confident that the GOP will fail to repeal Obamacare tomorrow. (Although the Unfreedom Caucus did announce about an hour ago that 25 of its members directly told Trump today that they would not vote to repeal; that right there, if they stick to their position, is enough to sink the bill.) And I genuinely have no idea how this is going to go down tomorrow: the bill could pass, it could fail, it could be postponed a few days, though Ryan has said he won’t do that. So no predictions from me. But we all should be clear about whence whatever hope we might have for tomorrow’s outcome comes: not from a sense that the GOP […]

Why are there no great thinkers on the right today?

03.18

Franz Neumann famously wrote, “No greater disservice has ever been rendered by political science than the statement that the liberal state was a ‘weak’ state. It was precisely as strong as it needed to be in the circumstances.” An analogous point could be made, I think, about the relationship between ideas and conservatism. While it’s fashionable to bemoan the lack of great thinkers and deep thinking on the right today—the passing from the scene of a Friedman or a Hayek, a Kristol or a Buckley, and their replacement by whatever it is that passes for conservative thinking and writing today—the truth is that conservative ideas are precisely as strong, its thinkers always as deep, as the movement needs them to be in the […]

Trump’s Budget and the Fiscal Crisis of the State: Something’s Gotta Give

03.17

The Washington Post has a good article this morning on the response on Capitol Hill to Trump’s budget. The big news is that the biggest opposition to Trump’s budget is coming from—it’s almost getting predictable, at this point—not the Democrats but the Republicans. Some of President Trump’s best friends in Congress sharply criticized his first budget Thursday, with defense hawks saying the proposed hike in Pentagon spending wasn’t big enough, while rural conservatives and others attacked plans to cut a wide range of federal agencies and programs. The bad mood among Republican critics was tempered by a consensus that the president’s budget wasn’t going very far on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers reminded everybody that they ultimately control the nation’s purse strings. “While […]

What Michael Rogin means to me, particularly in the Age of Trump: Traditional politics matters!

03.16

A Facebook post by Lisa Duggan reminds me of the power of Michael Rogin’s book The Intellectuals and McCarthy. Though it’s less famous and influential than Rogin’s later book Ronald Reagan, The Movie, The Intellectuals and McCarthy was a formative text in my own development. It came at a critical moment in my thinking—either the year before I went to graduate school or in my first year of graduate school—and permanently left its mark. In his book on McCarthy, Rogin took aim at historians like Richard Hofstadter and social theorists like Daniel Bell who had argued that McCarthyism was essentially a form of irrational mass politics, a midcentury American populism that, though right-wing, was the inheritor of left-wing movements like the Populists or Young Bob LaFollette’s movement in the 1920s […]

The real parallel between Hitler and Trump

03.14

I’ve been reading David Cay Johnston’s excellent book The Making of Donald Trump. And without mentioning or even alluding to Hitler or fascism, the book raises an interesting—if unexpected—parallel about Trump’s and Hitler’s rise to power. One of the themes in a lot of the historical scholarship about Germany in the 1920s and 1930s is how Hitler and the Nazis were able to take advantage of the systemic weaknesses of Weimar: the cracks in the political structure, the division among elites, the fissures in the parties, the holes in the Constitution, and so on. What Johnston narrates, in almost nauseating detail, is how Trump’s ascension to wealth and fame and power—long before he makes his 2016 run for the presidency—is dependent […]

At this year’s seder, don’t turn Trump into Pharaoh: treat him as a plague

03.12

Today is Purim, and so we begin the spring cycle of Jewish holidays that will culminate in Shavuos (the subject of my favorite line in all of Martin Scorsese’s films, but I digress). Naturally, I’m thinking about Passover, which we’ll be celebrating in about a month, and the meaning of the Passover story this year. At progressive and liberal seders in the US this year, there’ll be a tendency to interpret the story through the current political moment. How could there not be? Immigrants will be cast as the ancient Hebrews; Trump as Pharaoh. And just as Pharaoh is depicted in the story as a sudden appearance out of the blue—remember, for years, things had been good for the Hebrews, and then a […]

Political Criticism in the Age of Trump: A How-To, or A How-Not-To

03.01

At some point in the coming weeks, I’d like to write an essay, a brief essay, on political criticism in the Age of Trump—a how-to, or a rules-of-the-road, for the way we ought to be doing analysis right now. One of the counters I often get to the various claims I make about the weaknesses or vulnerabilities or incoherences of the Trump regime—or when I point out policy moments when I think those weaknesses, vulnerabilities, or incoherences are being expressed—is this: Well, even if Trump pulls back from position x or even if he does action y (where y is not as a bad as z), he’s still awful, he’s only doing it to save his ass, he’s not giving […]

It’s time to start thinking about a realignment: 2 things for the left to do

02.16

I really don’t know how long this disaster can last. Every day, the crisis and chaos expand, geometrically. If it continues like this—that is, gets worse and worse, in ways we can’t anticipate—it’s critical that we on the left do two things.   First, make the connection between Trump and the Republican Party. The GOP tied themselves to this man; do not allow them to slip out of the noose they designed for themselves. I don’t simply mean they embraced Trump. I mean that he comes out of 50 years of their politics, and we have to make sure everyone remembers that. Do not make the same mistake Clinton made in the campaign.   Which brings me to the second […]