Factually! with Adam Conover - What Liberals Get Wrong about the Right with Corey Robin

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

It's easy to caricature those on the political far right as outlandish, cartoonish, and bizarre, and easier still to dismiss their agendas as irrational or uninformed. This, however, can be a tremendous mistake. Assessing political rivals requires not just learning the history of their influences and principles, but also remembering that they are real people. In this episode, Adam speaks with Corey Robin, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, to learn the history of where the far right movement emerged from, and what we can learn from evaluating them honestly. Find Corey's books at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me again. You know, we have all different types of folks who listen to this podcast and watch on YouTube. People from all different walks of life. I'm very proud of that. But I'm going to hazard a guess that if you're listening or watching right now, you're probably not a hard right winger, right? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're not a theocratic conservative. You're not one of those people who's trying to kick the trans kids out of the bathroom. I've been doing this for a little while and I know my audience. Now, for those of us who are not those people who are not on the far right of political discourse in this country, it's really easy to caricature those who are, you know, the far right can make for easy comedy. You know,

they're outlandish, cartoonish and bizarre. Make fun of Lauren Boebert for, you know, grabbing the guy during the Beetlejuice show. It's funny, but it's often a real mistake to do that because right wingers are in fact real people and understanding how they think, what their influences are, what their principles are, why they do what they do, and why it seems rational from their perspective. Well, that's very important. And we make a mistake when we do not treat them with that level of, frankly, respect. Take Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for instance.

He's really easy to caricature. I've done it myself. You can talk about him as a cranky, corrupt old man. He doesn't even bother to ask questions. He just always votes on the side of the people who want to erode some basic right or take rights away from people who've had them for a century. But that's an enormous mistake because Clarence Thomas is not just some random old man who's doing shit because he hates you. He actually has a judicial philosophy that is rooted in the intellectual currents of the world that he grew up in. philosophy that is rooted in the intellectual currents of the world that he grew up in.

And to understand him, and more importantly, to understand the broader right-wing movement and why it does what it does, you have to analyze those currents. You have to look into them. You have to do the basic respect of taking them seriously if you want to fight back against them, which you might want to do, depending on who you are. And today, to help us understand those currents, we have an absolutely incredible guest on the show. But before we get to him, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. And if you love stand-up

comedy, I hope you'll come see me. I just announced some brand new tour dates. I'm going to New York, me. I just announced some brand new tour dates. I'm going to New York, Chicago, Boston, D.C., Portland, Maine, Nashville, Atlanta, a bunch of other places. Head to AdamConover.net for tickets and tour dates. And now let me introduce today's guest. His name is Corey Robin, and he's a political theorist and a professor of political science at Brooklyn College. I have been reading his work for years, and he is one of the most insightful, thoughtful, and provocative thinkers writing today. His books include The Enigma of Clarence Thomas and The Reactionary Mind, Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. He is an absolutely fascinating thinker. I love this interview, and I know you will, too. So let's get to my conversation with Corey Robin. Corey, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. I have been such an avid reader of your writing for ever since 2016,

because you, I think more than anybody, really try to understand the conservative, the right wing, the reactionary mind. You have a famous book called The Reactionary Mind. But that sort of politics, where it comes from, and I think that's really unique because a lot of people who either officially or unofficially are associated with the left don't put that effort in. Why do you do that? Why do you think it's important?

It's a good question. I think, you know, in a way you just answered it, it's because a lot of people on the left don't do that. And there's a lot of misconceptions about the right um a lot of thinking that the right is just stupid that they don't have any ideas um and i feel like that has hampered the left and its ability not simply to understand the right but also to combat the right so i feel like understanding the enemy is is is important what do you think is most often misunderstood by people who would characterize themselves as enemies of the right? I think the first is that, first of all, they think the right is stupid. They think that the right is crazy or irrational or doesn't understand what it's doing and that the right doesn't have a real set of values, that it's all pure power all the way down, that they don't have principles, that they don't have a coherent ideology. So I think that's probably the biggest thing.

I'd say the second biggest is that insofar as anybody even thinks about the right having a tradition, that it's a tradition that remains unchanged, that they're static. And that is really not the case. The right is very adaptive. They've evolved through time. They are historically great students of the left. They develop a lot of their ideas in response to the left, cribbing from the left, imitating the left. So there's a lot of things that the left doesn't know about the right that, as I say, have made it very hard for the left to deal with the right in a smart way. made it very hard for the left to deal with the right in a smart way. So my questions, I was trying to come up with a question and then it led me to wait,

hold on a second. What is the right like at all? Right. Cause I was like, okay, well the right, the reason people think it's static is because it's associated with traditionalism and with the old ways, the old ways don't change,

or at least we don't think that they do. So therefore it would stay the same. But then I started to go, wait, is that a good way to say? Okay, so yeah, how would you even describe, because there's so many ways to break down what the division is.

Yeah, I mean, I think the right begins in the 1790s in reaction to the French Revolution. And you see there the template for what the right remains despite all the changes across time. And what the right has always been since the beginning is a counter movement or reactionary movement against movements for freedom and equality. The right really believes in its heart of hearts that there are people that are, some people that are better than other people and that those better people ought to rule. And

that the job of the right is to defend the right and the prerogative of those ought to rule and that the job of the right is is to defend the right and the prerogative of those people to rule and i think that's basically been the principle of the right since the beginning how it does that is a story of improvisation and change and and that's why it's it's more complicated i imagine there might be other theorists who would describe it a different way but that's very different but that's your version of it. I think you mentioned earlier that the right is a theory of traditionalism, that the right is about free markets, that the right is an opposition to state power. All of those accounts have been what many other scholars and writers about the right have emphasized. My argument is that none of those things characterize the right across time.

They might be temporary approaches of the right, but they don't explain the right across time. Now, when you say it started in France during the French Revolution, I've heard that before. And actually, the right and the left corresponds to a particular legislative body in France? Can you tell me? Yeah, the Legislative Assembly. You know, there was the left that sat on one side of the assembly and the right sat on the other side. And that's kind of where we have the origins.

But the first great conservative thinker who really led the opposition to the revolution in France was Edmund Burke, who was an Englishman. And I think that there and then tells you something very, very interesting, that the right was from the very start an internationalist movement. It wasn't a local or a nationalist movement at all. Its greatest defender was somebody who wasn't British at all. Another little interesting thing about Burke, he became the spokesman for England. He himself, however, was an outsider. He wasn't English. He was Irish, of kind of vaguely Catholic parentage on one side of his family. So this is another really important feature of the right that we've never really understood, which is that its most forceful, you know, political and intellectual spokespersons are oftentimes outsiders themselves, which leads to a whole interesting question.

Like, how can these people who are outsiders be the defenders of insiders? And I think that's been the secret of the right is it's managed to kind of provide this outsider gloss on what is in the end a very establishment um defense of hard old power i think if you look at american politics you can probably find a lot of examples of that absolutely but what i'm curious about is what you just you described as being the soul of the right movement of um some people are better than others those people should be in power and this also sort of general opposition to any kind of progressive movement towards equality, et cetera. That to me doesn't sound like something that would be limited to France in the years since. That sounds like it would be something that would lurk in the human heart.

And I would wonder if, you know, if we go look at the history of imperial China, can you find, oh, there was a right there and there was or et cetera. Or do you or did something genuinely new happen in France? Something new did happen, which is that the French revolutionaries declared themselves that the revolution, there were revolutions in the ancient world, but revolutions were always thought to be a kind of a cyclical repetitive process. And what the French revolutionaries famously declared is this is the year one, We are beginning something new here and that this is a universal principle that everybody, you know, the rights of man, that everybody is entitled to rights and freedom of equality. right different then, and very modern, is that people like Burke, people like Joseph de Mest, who was another great counter-revolutionary in France, understood was that the world had irrevocably changed. You could no longer rely upon a static sort of eternal God presiding over the

great chain of being, that the natural world did not provide a kind of support for the political world, that in order to defend things like hierarchy, in order to defend inequality, you had to come up with novel, new, adaptive arguments that also spoke to a mass audience. This was no longer a world of just aristocrats. And so what makes the right to me so interesting and so distinctive and modern is that they are defending privilege to a mass audience. And they develop a mass movement on behalf of privilege that is new. And that explains a lot of the things that we find so puzzling about things like Trumpism and the modern Republican Party, that they speak this populist language, that they speak in the language of outsiders. And yet, of course, they're the party of millionaires and billionaires. And, you know, Donald Trump is by no means, you know, a poor man or anything like that. That is in the DNA of the modern right going back to the French Revolution. Again, just, you know, Joseph the french revolution um again just you know joseph demest he you know when he talks about returning the king to power this is not a king who is the

you know a spokesperson for god this is not a king who is a defendant it's just some dude some dude who has gone to the school of hard knocks who has seen adversity who has been overthrown who has experienced that sense of loserdom, of what it means to be an ordinary person. And that's what connects him. And so there is this- That was the pitch for that, re-restoring that king. That was the pitch. And it was this pathos of this man, kind of a man who had been knocked down into the street. Edmund Burke, famously, in one of his defenses of the establishment, he says, he's addressing what we would call today a kind of limousine liberal,

the Earl of Bedford, or I think that was the Earl of Lauderdale, to the manner born defenders of the French Revolution. And Burke, he's got that resentment of the outsider. He said, I wasn't like you guys. I wasn't just given a pass. I had to – you checked my passport at every turnpike. You never would let me in. And I'm the one here defending the true aristocracy. And it's that weird fusion of the outsider, the Arabist, the person who had to work their way up, who becomes the strongest defender of the established forms of power. And that is so similar to politics today, where you've got the wealthy person on the right saying, I hate the liberal elitists in Hollywood,

the folks who kept me down, who always laughed at me, and here I am. That's the sort of weird psychosexual back and forth between the two of resentment and lust and envy and hatred was present in the French Revolution and is present now. Yeah, it's a straight through line. But I see your point about how the right was new in the French Revolution, because in the example of imperial China or anywhere else, maybe you would have had people who felt in their heart that some people are better than others, but they were in power and nothing was going to dislodge them because it was part of a structure or any kind of aristocracy in any other country around the world. But once you have

democracy of any kind, now you need to make that case to people. You actually need a movement where you didn't before. Exactly right. Exactly right. that's fascinating um i want to get into the word reactionary again in title of one of your most famous books um and there have been there have been times in my life when i'm you know i've gotten more involved in politics in la where i live and there are times where there'll be a movement brewing and people go those people are right wing and i go no, no, they're not. They're not right wing because they're all democratic party people or something.

You know what I mean? You can tell it's not right wing, but there's something else. It's not quite conservative. What is it? And I find myself reaching for the word reactionary. These are people who say the city is falling to pieces, throw all the homeless people in jail,

you know, like that sort of. And it all seemed apt to me because they're having a reaction to something. Um, and so I found myself feeling for the word, but I've never had a strong academic understanding of what it meant. So how do you use it? Well, I mean, as you point out, uh, the, the idea of reaction is that it's born in response to something else, but I think we have to make a really important distinction about reactionary thinking and reactionary politics. It is reactionary, but it is not reactive.

And that might sound like a very academic kind of a distinction. But what I mean by that is, you know, you punch me and I flinch. That's a reaction. That's automatic. That's reflexive. That's unthinking. That's instinctive. Reactionaries, however, have been punched, right?

They lost the old regime in France. The slaveholders were divested of all their privileges. The corporate oligarchs during the New Deal, these are people who have seen their world destroyed and lost. So, they have, they're reacting to something. But what's interesting about the reactionary is they witness that experience. And the first thing they do is to say, why did this happen? What did we do wrong? So, what happens from that is that there's a kind of critique of the established powers. They say there's something about us that allowed this to happen. Right.

And so, what we need to do, if we're going to defeat this movement that has defeated us or recover power, is we need to examine ourselves and recreate ourselves and our regime in a way by taking from what the revolution or the reform movement did successfully, cribbing from it and changing our kinds of arguments. Now, in the French Revolution, as I said, you know, the idea was to build a mass movement for monarchy, a kind of a democratic movement for monarchy, if you will. And you see that over and over again.

After the Civil War, the slaveholders, actually, even before the Civil War, excuse me, John C. Calhoun, who's one of the great defenders of the U.S. slaveholders, he talks about creating racial hierarchy as a way of getting around distinctions between rich and poor. With us, he says in the South, there's no rich and poor. There's just white and black. That's the major distinction. And it's a way of creating a kind of a mass movement for privilege. And it's a way of creating a kind of a mass movement for privilege. So what reactionaries are is they are responding to a real challenge, to an overthrow of their power.

But it's a two-step whereby they have to reconstruct the old regime, get rid of all of its rotten, corrupt elements that they think have led to their own decline, and then borrow bits and pieces from the opposition that they're dealing with. You're describing the Trump movement exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, just so people don't think I'm kind of describing the right in light of Trump. I mean, I wrote all this in 2010, 2011 before, you know, I mean. At frankly, the height of in the U.S., the liberal new order where, oh, my God, there'll never be another Republican elected again. Race in America has been solved. We're in the shining light. Oh, the Affordable Care Act was just passed and all this stuff. And we didn't know what was coming five or six years down the pipe. The white people who had been deposed, you know, been deposed by the not just white people, but the the previous group that had been deposed by the Obama regime, like came back, but also took on that populist message that like we're doing it for the people and we're against the elites and we have to drain the swamp and You know, we have to take on the Republican Party establishment and, you know, we have to identify a new enemy. Yeah, this is exactly it's a it's a perennial

process of reinventing hierarchy in the wake of some kind of a defeat or challenge. And I can see it again. I think it does apply to the example I was using of local politics, because you have situations where, for instance, you know, people who really like it when folks they don't like are locked up and thrown in jail and that doesn't happen anymore, or the jail system is overwhelmed and it can't happen anymore. They said, something's been taken from me, my, my comfortable city street where I never had to see any poverty. I want to fix that. And then they adopt, they do adopt the language of the sort of progressive movement where they, they say things like,

it's not compassionate to let people live on the street. That's not compassion. Right? No, I want to get people housed. They never say what they actually want to do, which is again, put people in.

Eventually you let these people talk long enough. They'll say, why can't we just find some cheap land in the desert and move and they can live there. Resettle them. Yeah. Like in a, like in a camp where they're all concentrated in one. Is that what you're, oh, you, you don't, and you never actually get that far, but like

it's you sort of see people sort of fall down this path, but in, in your view, because sometimes I think, again, it's a personality trait that causes people to behave that way. You know, like I live in the same neighborhood as some people. And, you know, if it sort of feels to me sometimes, hey, if an encampment pops up on your corner or someone shot on your block or something happens, right? You don't actually know how you and your neighbors are going to react because you've never had that tested. And so sometimes it feels like it sort of comes out of you. Or if you're not one of the people who comes out of, you're like, did, did these people have a chip in their head that was just activated? Right. Sometimes it just feels like there's this transformation. Um, do you feel that there's any sort of, you know, truth to that,

that, that it's a personality thing, uh, that you either arrive at or you're born with or something, or is it because what you described was hierarchy, when people are on top and their position is removed and it causes them to think this way. Yeah, I don't think it's about personality because I think, I mean, when what you were describing earlier, there is a truth that, you know, if progressive movements are doing their job right,

some people are going to experience a loss. They are going to experience a loss of power, a loss of privilege. They were hoarding it before. Yeah. And it's not to say that that's an unjust thing. It is just. But people don't like it when they are divested of the things that they have.

And I don't think that's a specific personality trait. You see it in all kinds of social groups all across the world in different ways. trait. You see it in all kinds of social groups all across the world in different ways. And so, I think it's really important because when we start focusing on personality or psychology, we start moving away from the world, from the material world, and we start moving into people's heads. And the truth of the matter is, is that, you know, lots of people have been swept up into reaction. One of the most interesting things about the history of reactionary movements is that many of their strongest recruits and leaders originally came from the left. That was certainly true of European fascism. Happens today.

It happens. It was the whole neoconservative movement where people who were on the left. And so what are you going to say, that they had a different personality 20 years before? No, the personality is the same. you know, a different personality, you know, 20 years before. No, the personality is the same. But the mix of material reality and political possibilities have been such that they make that migration. So I think it's, I try to really stay focused on ideas and material realities as opposed to individual psychology. Yeah. And I think it helps you understand if you're involved in politics at all, you're thinking about, Hey, where do these movements come from? Just to understand that,

well, if we make a change, right, that disempowers some people, which unfortunately is, is what we might need to do because some things in this country might be zero sum to some extent, and someone might have too much of something and we're trying to give it to other people that is always going to create a movement like that, that it's, that it's unavoidable. You're going to have, there's always going to be a backlash. Backlash has always come and they're very powerful and you need to,

I mean, a really revelatory thing for me was reading Rick Pearlstein's book, Nixon land a couple of years ago, which is the story of backlash and a story that was never taught to me in, you know, about the history of the sixties. And I read it. I was like, this is exactly what's happening now. And it's very clear. This is going to happen anytime you have a civil rights movement of any kind, you're gonna have an enormously powerful backlash and you just got to be fucking ready for it. And if you're not, you're going to get swept away. Like, and if you think it's just, oh,

it's just bad people. It's just stupid people. They, those are the ones who feel that way, you're missing something. Yeah, and if you look at the history of the United States or of Europe and all the mass movements for equality, there was not a single one that I can think of that did not generate incredible amounts of opposition from the defenders of the old regime. And the only question was how, how able were they to capitalize upon a wider scale of resentment on behalf of their own defensive privilege and power? Like that's the real dynamic. And, but I, you know, and then the other side of the point is the one, you know, that you just made, which is, you know, left, the left have to always be prepared and there is in fact a fairly small window to make the kind of changes that you want to make and the key is to institutionalize them because institutions state institutions are a lot harder as ronald reagan discovered you know time and again trying

to get rid of social security it proved to to be the cornerstone of the New Deal. It proved to be an extraordinary difficult thing to get rid of. So it's not enough just to have a movement. It's not enough just to sort of do the right things. You want to institutionalize these things in such a way that they're very hard to undo. Yeah, you have to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act

and then build a bunch of concrete ramps everywhere that people are going to have trouble taking out. You can't just say, hey, guess what? We're going to hold you accountable for X, Y, Z. You need to put that shit in place. Before we go to break, I just want to ask though, you know, we're talking about these, these social movements, civil rights movements. I've, something that always stuck with, I wish I could remember the first person who put it to me this way, but that, you know, the hardest thing about making civil rights progress in America is, you know, we can get white people to read the book

and we can get them to agree, but can we get them to give up anything, to give up any amount of power or any amount of advantage whatsoever, even just sending your kids to a public school instead of a private school, like just that amount of giving up a little bit of something. And that seems to be the essential ingredient in actually making progress. But as you describe it,

that's the actual thing that causes the political backlash to occur that can potentially sweep away all the progress. That seems to be a very pessimistic view of how this works, because it means that the exact thing you want to do is always going to cause a huge reaction in the other direction. Is that, are you pessimistic about that or how do you view it? I'm less so because in part because I feel like the left has internalized, particularly when it comes to issues of race, because I think there is a weird way in which the left thinks there's some kind of almost instinctive biological desire of white people to hold on to their own. And the truth is, is that the creation of white people as white people who want to defend their privileges, that was a project that took an awful long time. It doesn't just happen automatically.

What I'm more impressed by, I mean, you could, let's take the story of slavery. The United States had probably the largest sort of slave economy, I think, in the modern world in terms of, you know, money and all the rest of it. But what it also had that never gets mentioned, that never gets mentioned, is the largest mass movement against slavery in the modern world. The United States was one of the few societies, and people don't know this about

the Republican Party, but it really formed as an anti-slavery party, and it won an election. And W.E.B. Du Bois famously said that the destruction of slavery was authorized by the vote. You know, the British monarchy, the British empire got rid of slavery, you know, through imperial rule. In France, it was, you know, an extraordinarily violent slave rebellion. But, you know, the Republican Party was a multiracial party made mostly of white people, and all of them understood that, you know, the project was to extinguish slavery one way or another. and that are dedicated to the destruction of a form of privilege. And how I think we have the left has a lot to learn from how those movements did that. And just quickly, because I know we're going to go to a break.

One of the things they did was to not make this just a moral thing about your virtue, that just, you know, we're good people who are. But to connect. I don't buy slave made stuff. Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, that's what one group of abolitionists did, I don't buy slave made stuff. I get the, yeah, exactly. Because, you know, that's what one group of abolitionists did and they didn't get very far. You know, the secret of the Republican party was to make this about, no, this is in your self-interest. This is, we're going to create a whole new set of institutions that you will benefit from. And, you know, that's a whole complicated argument. We don't need to get into that, but, but I think

that's something that the left really can learn from. That's a really fascinating story. I mean, the story of abolition is, I think about it all the time, because on the one hand, it was amazing that it worked. On the other hand, it took 400 years or so. It took more than twice the amount of time that slavery has even been, you know, ended in the United States. there were abolitionists hundreds and hundreds of years ago who, who were born and died. And then their kids and their grandkids were born and died before slavery was ended. But at the same time, maybe that's an optimistic story because like, you know, the, the faith was kept. And for all those, you know,

hundreds of years must've been, Hey, this will never change. We'll never end this. This is our economy is built on it. Like, what are you talking about? Yeah. And there are so many issues today that I know activists are fighting for that people have that same relationship. Well,

we're not going to abolish the police, pick whatever it is you want. That's a fantasy. Well, you know, four, 400 years from now, maybe we're,

you know, maybe we could get there. When we get back, I want to ask you more about some of today's right-wing political figures and get your view on them. But we'll be right back with more Corey Robin. Okay, we're back with Corey Robin talking about the reactionary mind, right-wing politics, the movement, and its history. Let's talk about some of the figures that we deal with today. What do you say to people who argue that, you know, Trump is somehow different than

other figures in the conservative movement? You know, that there's, oh, there's regular conservatives or regular right-wingers. And then Trump is something altogether new. You hear that argument a lot. There are things about Trump that are new. I think what's interesting to me, though, is that the things that people focus on as new and novel are, in fact, very much part of the DNA of the right going way, way back. So, for instance, the use of racist populism. That's a very old story about the modern conservative movement. And what's ironically significant about Trump in just that regard alone is how diminishing the returns are of racist populism. So we forget about, you know, Richard Nixon was one of the real pioneers of the kind of the backlash politics.

You brought up earlier Rick Perlstein's book, The Silent Majority, which was a white majority. And what we forget is that Richard Nixon was reelected with something like 65 percent of the vote. It was that's close to what we call a super super majority. Donald Trump never received even the majority. He lost both of the elections in terms of the popular vote. That is significant. And I know sometimes that can feel like cold comfort but i think if you start looking at the trajectory um the things that we are most fearful about trump in in terms of those types of things uh show diminishing returns what um what's like like how so like you mean in terms of

election interference that kind of thing like is it it's working less well over time or yeah i mean i was just thinking particularly about racist populism and that kind of thing. And then the election interference is a pretty fascinating thing because again, we forget this, but the modern conservative movement, Irving Kristol, who was one of the great sort of intellectual godfathers,

he said, the task of neoconservatism today is to turn conservatism into a mass democratic movement of the majority. And they really tried to do that and they were successful at it. The reason now that we see all of this reliance upon the Senate, reliance upon the Supreme Court, reliance upon gerrymandering, all of what, you know, consider what are called by political scientists, counter-majoritarian state institutions. They usually are undoing democratic stuff that the voters voted for.

Exactly. That is a novel feature of the Republican Party, precisely because it is losing rounds in democracy. And so one of the things that used to drive me crazy when Trump was elected was a lot of progressives and liberals and the kind of resistance movement, you know, defend the Constitution against Trump. Well, the truth of the matter is the Republican Party and Donald Trump depend more on the Constitution than any other political party or any other group in the United States, because where does their power come from? The Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and traditionally the United States Senate. These are all creatures of the Constitution that were they not to have those constitutional supports, the Republican Party would be a far more diminished political operation. If you're leaning on those are almost institutional crutches in a way that are holding you up,

Those are almost institutional crutches in a way that are holding you up that you can buttress your power with versus a movement that is if you have the power of the people on your side, if you have a majoritarian movement, you actually can overrun the banks of whatever the institutional barriers are. That makes me think about, I don't know, in my in my union work, there's always conversations about like, oh, do we need this or that in the contract to get our power? It's like, well, actually, if you have all the members working together, it doesn't matter what's in the contract. It doesn't matter what labor law says. If you have the power, then you can do what you want. And so that's a good point. If you're leaning on the rules, then that's maybe an indication you don't have that much power. And so you argued that the modern conservative movement is a lot weaker than a lot of people think it is. That's one of the reasons why.

Why else? Exactly. And then, you know, I mean, a couple of things. As I say, if you look at the electoral returns, both at the level of the presidency and in Congress, you see a diminishing amount of popular support. see a diminishing amount of popular support. But then the other important half of this, which I feel like is maybe starting to get a certain amount of attention, but did not get nearly enough under Trump, was how, I mean, we forget Donald Trump for the first two years in power, the Republicans had all the elected branches of the federal government. And the truth of the matter is, despite a lot of the scary rhetoric that came out of Trump, they were unable to accomplish

so much of their legislative agenda. They did tax cuts and that was about it. That was tax cuts and the Supreme Court appointments, which are important. But compared to what George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon, the kind of achievements that they were able to enact, it was astounding.

So now we see today this whole fiasco with the speaker election. Nixon, the kind of achievements that they were able to enact, it's been, it was astounding. So now we see today this whole fiasco with this, the speaker election, where they can't, you know, and people are like, oh, well, you know, they're just incompetent. The truth of the matter is that's the way they were. They were like Keystone cops when they had all the power, when they had all the power. And so I think, you know, it's both the diminishing electoral majority, popular majorities, the increasing reliance upon constitutional apparatuses that benefit, you know, white rural types of people. And then finally, their inability to translate whatever electoral returns they do get into any kind of legislative or political action.

It's just been astounding. They can use it to, in the case of judicial appointments, buttress more of that sort of rule-based power and keep themselves in power longer. I guess the counter I would say is that that that sort of weakness based uh you know clinging on to power that can last for a long time if you look at you look at like the the you know white uh democratic party in the south absolutely that was ruling it was an apartheid state you know this entire area where it's being ruled by white people and then the senators from those states

ran you know basically ran the entire federal government because they were they voted in such a block. And that, you know, there was the American government couldn't even couldn't even get an anti lynching law passed for like 100 years. Yeah, absolutely. You can have a lot of power. Absolutely. And there's you know, these people, that the right is actually far more vulnerable, far less able to kind of control the political discourse than they once did. And that's an opportunity for the left. Whether the left is able or willing to take it, that's a whole other kettle of fish.

What would it mean to take it? fish. What would it mean to take it? I think what the left needs to be doing is to not just simply, you know, pass some good pieces of legislation. It needs to do what we periodically see in American politics, which is kind of a vast realignment kind of politics, where you're not only creating a sort of a permanent, when I say permanent, I mean for several decades, an electoral majority, but you're institutionalizing changes, the kinds of things we were talking about earlier that are just very hard to undo and that are not just good for people, but create real forms of power. And you've brought up periodically your work in the labor union. I mean, the Wagner Act really was not just something that was good for workers and fair

and whatever. It completely transformed the American political universe. And it institutionalized worker power. Exactly. So now there is worker power built into the American political system and it can't really be removed easily. Yeah, easily. Exactly. And I mean, and that's what I think we're trying to grapple with right now is what would be the kinds of things. I mean, you know, this is why things like voting things i mean you know this is why things like

voting rights are so important this is why things like labor law reform are so important and this is why things like creating um new states in the union to undo the kind of republican i mean these are i get it these are very tall order you know and all the rest of it um what has stopped it well the refusal to get rid of the filibuster by a couple of senators that are Democrats. And, you know, the United, you know, progressive movements have faced, you know, far bigger mountains than, I can't even remember her name from Arizona, Kirsten Sinema. And what's his name? Manchin from West Virginia. So, you know, in a way it's, if it weren't so tragic, it's comical, you know, like these little fleas So, you know, in a way, if it weren't so tragic, it's comical. You know, like these little fleas

are, you know, sort of in the way and that's all that's stopping it. And so I kind of feel like, you know, this is just something that the left should be able to kind of figure out and work its way around. Well, I think maybe the Obama years are a good example of what happens

if you don't do this. Exactly. You put things into place. I mean, the Affordable Care Act, in fact, did last. So I mean, it's an example of what you're talking about, although insufficient in many ways. But if you don't put those structural, you don't like hard-code it in.

Exactly. You can end up with, you know, there's the famous, well, now more famous case of like right after, you know, reconstruction when, oh, we had, you know, black senators and elected officials all across the South for, you know, eight to 10 years. And then it was all washed away by, you know, the tide of of white backlash that can that that is what will happen if you do not sort of entrench those entrenching those gains. That is really fascinating and a really a really powerful lesson. Let's talk about Clarence Thomas. Your most recent book is about Clarence Thomas. He is somebody who is often, uh, caricatured very much. I mean, the character caricature Ivo has received of him is, Oh, he, he never speaks. He's which sort of the implication is that he's sort of

thoughtless and lazy about it. He just is like reflexively, um, uh, originalist and, and just says no to everything, et cetera. You make the case that there's something much deeper going on with him. Yeah. Um, so, you know, the basic argument of my book is that Clarence Thomas, he, well, he has, uh, he was originally a black nationalist on the left, um, when he was a younger man. Like a Black Panther? Oh, yeah.

Supporting Malcolm X and the Black Panthers and, you know, black power, the whole bit. Wow. And what's interesting about him is as he moved to the right in the 1970s, he kept a lot of those tenets from his time on the black nationalist left. So first and foremost, he really is what we call a kind of racial pessimist. He believes that black people are a kind of a permanently beleaguered minority who will never get a fair shake from white America. He believes that white racism is pretty much incurable. And these aren't just things you can find from when he was, you know, 18, 19 years old. These are things that you find when he's a full member of the Reagan administration. These are things that you actually find in his Supreme Court opinions. So, you know, just a side note,

you know, one of the things that used to drive me crazy, I mean, it's precisely what you say, he doesn't think and he doesn't want to. And meanwhile, he's got this body of jurisprudence, which is extremely large. Right. That nobody ever bothers to pay attention to. You know, you want to hear what the man thinks, like go read the goddamn opinion. He's constantly writing separate dissents, right? Exactly. Where he's like, well, I dissent along with everybody else, but I've got a different dissent,

so I'm going to write my own little essay. Exactly. And also for years, if anybody knew anything about that, they would say, well, he's just this crackpot. Well, lo and behold, those little dissents often become the majority opinion. Perfect example is he was the first modern Supreme Court justice who claimed that the right to bear arms was a personal, individual right. And he does it in a footnote long before Justice Scalia issues the Heller decision. Wow. And so, you know, this is the way he operates is to plant his flag. He's got an army of clerks who end up becoming very influential.

He had more clerks in the Trump administration than any other Supreme Court justice. We know a lot now about the Federalist Society and all of these kinds of things. And he, you know, helps create this intellectual infrastructure. But again, I think just to go back to where we began with all this, you know, the foundation of it is this really hardcore pessimism about the possibility of racial progress. And this is what I think is important for the left, because I think the left oftentimes has a version of that kind of racial pessimism. And then we think that's a progressive position. Well, in fact, that kind of pessimism about the possibility for political transformation,

that is the heart of right-wing thinking. Albert Hirschman was this great political transformation, that is the heart of right-wing thinking. Albert Hirschman was this great political scientist, economist, political scientist. He wrote this book called The Rhetoric of Reaction about 30 years ago. And he said there's three types of reactionary argument. But one of the which he talked about was the rhetoric of futility. And he said this is the most devastating conservative slash reactionary argument there is, that there is no point to trying to make change, whether it's economic change, racial change, gender change, because these kinds of inequalities, for one

reason or another, are sewn into the fabric of humanity as a whole. And that what you're really trying to do is change human nature. And that's just not possible. And this is, in a way, Clarence Thomas's argument about the possibility of black freedom. The consequence of that for him is that what you should do instead is cultivate a particularly kind of powerful black man, a black patriarchal figure, much like his grandfather who essentially raised him. And that if you empower these black patriarchs, these black powerful men, they will sort of preside over, they will take care of their own. And that is his vision, is this kind of powerful, you know, and it has a lot of, by the way, correspondence in some of the writings of Malcolm X, in some of the writings of the Black Power movement, which was, you know, at times fairly misogynistic, fairly patriarchal in its approach. misogynistic, fairly patriarchal in its approach. And so that's really the story of the book is how this guy begins as a black nationalist of the left, moves to the right, but holds on to certain kinds of ideas about black patriarchy, about racial pessimism, and about the impossibility

of political transformation. This is why, for instance, Clarence Thomas on the vote, right to vote. You know, he it's a hard thing to say, but he really does not believe that black people should concentrate upon is building up economic wealth in their communities, particularly black men. And that is the path not towards transformation. He doesn't believe in transformation, but towards black survival. And he said this more or less explicitly. Yeah. Yeah. And so this would be, for instance, I assume he voted for the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, where all of these states in the South are no longer under strict scrutiny, which has allowed a lot of. So he literally is just like, yeah, I mean, voting isn't really very helpful. So don't stress about it.

Exactly. And this goes back to one of his first. This was a concurring opinion because he was part of the majority. But this was in 1992, I believe, in the spring of 92, just after he had been brought onto the court. He wrote a 100-page concurrence in a case called Holder v. Hall, where he really, again, sets out in very careful detail his vision of the Voting Rights Act and that the idea of black people collectively having power through the vote is essentially a misbegotten enterprise and not really the path that black people should take. I mean, what I love about this analysis is how much it cuts through so many, you know, simple political stereotypes that we have about, I mean, first of all,

Clarence Thomas already violates one of those stereotypes, which is that black people always vote liberal, which is a very obviously false stereotype. But also that political project is somehow fundamentally progressive, et cetera, by actually understanding, A, what it means to be right-wing or to adopt that mindset. And then looking granularly at like what his politics actually is, you can, you really come to a much fuller understanding that like explains it. Yeah. And, you know, I have just nothing against

Hollywood people, but I do believe that. No, please, please. But there is, you know, it's interesting watching a kind of increasing politicization in the last 10 years, you know, in the Hollywood liberals and Hollywood left. And, you know, it's a real missed opportunity because, you know, you guys are influential and you have, you know, power and all the rest of it. But I do feel like there's a lot that is missed about the right. There's a lot of comforting kind of fairy tales in a way that are told about the right and someone like Clarence Thomas that just just miss the blueprint. And that's the thing. Like, these guys have really thought this through. And it's sort of interesting, actually, when you think about it, because someone like Clarence Thomas moving to the right when he did that that was you know it was not a popular move yeah um this was a very you know this was a minority position um you know of a very besieged kind of small group of people

um to make it you know to make it in that world like they really had to think this stuff through for themselves like it does it wasn't just handed to them. So the notion that somehow or another that these people are stupid and, you know, just not thinking all the rest of it, it just doesn't speak to the facts. It's, you know, they didn't come to power, you know, in some kind of subterfuge way. What's most amazing to me is this was all there, clear as day. And, you know, a lot of people on the left ignored it yeah i mean even movies uh that cover politics that i liked i think about um the uh the adam mccain movie about dick cheney which is a movie i quite liked but there's a line in it where you

know the characters it's like rumsfeld and cheney or whatever are talking and they're saying like you know what do we believe and one of them is like we don't believe anything and i you know the characters it's like rumsfeld and cheney or whatever are talking and they're saying like you know what do we believe and one of them is like we don't believe anything and i you know i watched that going yes they did they they did they did have beliefs this is i mean you know that's a comedy and it's you know it's a it was a bit of a fictionalization um but you know there's there's almost no depiction of what politics actually is on you know film and television or just the idea that people especially in comics if you watch a movie watch things like veep or like house of cards or etc no one believes anything it's all cynicism i'm like no but people really do they are motivated by their beliefs yeah and i think the problem that a lot of liberals have is that they associate

having beliefs and principles with being virtuous. And so anybody who they believe isn't behaving virtuous can't have principles whatsoever. They're just a cynic. Exactly. And that is, you know, just as my English teacher in ninth grade, Mrs. Damon used to say to me, you know, you are so wrong. You couldn't be further from the truth. And, you know, that really is just a very wrongheaded assumption that I, you know, if I could do one thing, it would be to disabuse people of that idea. Yeah.

That somehow or another, the good guys are the ones who have principles. And, you know, you see this a lot whenever anybody on occasion from the right votes the way the left wants. on occasion from the right votes the way the left wants so you know gorsuch uh you know in his opinions about indigenous people or lgbtq rights suddenly they say oh he got principled yeah you know and what are the odds that you know on that one thing he got principled but then he's not principled it just doesn't make any sense yeah um or when john mccain voted the right way on um obamacare right oh you know it's it was the last heroic act, you know, for, you know, come on. That's just, that's not the way people are.

Well, John McCain is enough of a storyteller about himself that perhaps he didn't. It was literally for that reason. But in that case, it would have been out of principle. It would have been cynical because he was trying to tell a good story with his big thumb down and everything. Which, you know, yes, exactly.

It was a very dramatic Hollywood kind of story and he he did like theater well what i like about what you do here is that you for someone who you know overtly associates themselves with the left you pay much more respect to those on the right because you are paying them the respect but also paying yourself the respect of assuming that they are intelligent people who actually believe things and have some thought behind themselves um and so uh you know you're you're i say you're paying yourself respect because it's i think less lazy and it's more you know from the top of your intelligence to assume that anyone you're talking to has has a thought in their heads. But like it is it's almost a little bit radical of a way to of a way to treat those folks. I mean, how do you what kind of reaction do you do you get to these arguments?

You know, initially there was a lot of resistance. You know, when my the reactionary in mind first came out, it really got attacked by liberals. They really hated the argument. I think with time and with Trump and certain things now, I think they resonate more. The Clarence Thomas book was better received, but I know there's an awful lot of people, you know, who really, I mean, I thought it was interesting because it came out right on the cusp of Black Lives Matter, or even the sort of second wave of Black Lives Matter, and kind of the racial reckoning where we were supposed to listen to black voices.

And, you know, I would say like, okay, you know, you want to listen to black voices, this is the most powerful black person in the United States. This is the most powerful black person in the United States. And you might think he only speaks for himself, but the truth of the matter is he doesn't. I mean, I used to get, it was amazing to me when I'd give book talks, I would have a lot of people who were black would come up to me who were younger and they'd say, you know, you, you sound like you're describing my father.

And I never really understood this, but like, that's exactly how he sounds. You know, so clearly there is a constituency among African-Americans who are not a united, politically unified group of people any more than any other group of people. But I do think there's been quite a bit of resistance on this because, you know, I think Clarence Thomas is like a particular villain for the left. It goes back to the Anita Hill thing. And, you know, people don't want to think that, you know, their cartoon villain can think. it's very hard for reasons I have to say I think I'm pretty good at understanding people whom I disagree with but I think this one I've never really been able to get like why is it that you think

you know and especially people who are in like the theater like you know the greatest villain in all theater Iago you know was quite a brilliant Shakespeare's Othello you know quite a brilliant kind of a guy but for some reason you know we just we don't like to think our villains are smart and I don't. Well, our real life villains, we like a, we like a fictional villain who's smart.

That's true. But in real life. Hans Gruber or somebody like that. Yeah. Well, yeah. Or, you know, I don't know. Darth Vader, right. He's like a great, he's great at everything. And he's in fact, almost a hero, but in real life, maybe it's too frightening to believe that the person who opposes you is, is a real person with, who is perhaps smarter than you, more committed than you are. Often people don't want to believe the frightening thing. Somehow it reminds me of the opposite conclusion, which I remember, you know,

in the years after September 11th, I knew a lot of people who were like, ah, Bush knew, and he let it happen because it was all part of his master plan. And I was like, I think it's more frightening to believe that. Now, he had no fucking clue that the people who are running the country are just ignorant, conditional humans the way the rest of us are. That's a more frightening thing to contemplate. That's true too, yes.

Did you feel at all writing about Clarence Thomas as a white author? Did you ever have any difficulty or worry that maybe I'm missing something about the black culture that he grew up in? Absolutely. I mean, I think you'd have to be kind of, you know, foolish not to go into a project like this with a certain amount of

humility and, and carefulness. Um, and so, you know, I work really hard. I mean, I work hard on all my books, but I really worked extra hard, um, you know, to make sure that I got this, you know, that I got this story right. And, you know, what's interesting about, you know, Thomas is, you know, he's partially a reflection of sort of Southern black culture where he grew up. He's partially a reflection of his sort of northern academic training. And he's also, you know, a Supreme Court justice. So there's lots of different communities of, you know, that you have to kind of get a handle on. And I mean, I was fortunate because I've got a lot of help from, you know, various people who really are experts in this stuff much more than much more than I am. really do feel like um uh more than anything else you know uh black readers um and people you know in audience really you know um connected i mean they hate thomas it's not like they came away from

this you know saying like i'm a i'm a thomas guy but they connected to it they were like like there there is truth in here yeah and there's there's intelligibility where before it was just sort of opacity yeah that's really powerful and valuable to be able to give people. What do you feel that the story of Clarence Thomas tells us about overall American life? And actually, I got to bring us in for a landing here. What do you think about the moment that we're in and where you think things might go over the next couple of years? What do you hope people do over the next couple years well i i i won't make any predictions because you know often my predictions turn out to be wrong but you know sometimes it's fun to make a prediction

just be like i'm putting a marker down i don't know i'm putting it on black let's see what happens so you can do that if you like but i'm just i'm just curious how you analyze the moment that we're in yeah i mean i i i feel like we're sort of in a stuck moment because it's very clear to me, as we've talked about, that the right, the modern right, is probably at its weakest stage that it's ever been. And I know that seems very counterintuitive and kind of, you know, just for the, you know, what's the word, contrarian for the sake of it. But, you know, I think there's an awful lot of evidence for this. What has been my great frustration is, is that you can't beat something with nothing. And I feel like the left has had a very tough time. And I don't just mean the Democratic Party. I mean, you know, I'm very supportive of the Democratic DSA, Democratic Socialists, you know, that's kind of my politics. We've had a very tough time coming up with a kind of an overall political story that would win a majority and not just

these kind of very bare majorities, but the kind of majority you need in order to really make the sort of transformational changes. And I'm not sure why that is. There's been no Roosevelt New Deal moment. No, we haven't had it there. And I don't point any fingers. I just think we haven't figured this out yet. And the real problem is that we're, and I don't like to talk this way because it sort of goes against the grain for me. But because of climate change, I think we're in a bit of a, you know, race against the clock.

Yeah. You know, we don't have the luxury of what and it sounds strange to say this, but, you know, the American left leading up to the Roosevelt moment, you know, they went through there was a lot of trial and error there. There was a lot of failure. failure failure is the story of every popular movement um the question is not whether you fail it's what you do with the failure what you learn from it what how how you build on that um and i i believe that i think that's true the problem we're in right now is we there's not a lot of margin uh for failure um and so i i work so that's that's my you know profound prognosis for where we are in terms of that political, you know, that message or it's even bigger than a message, the political project that is going to be able to create a majority. I mean, Bernie Sanders tried to do that quite hard. That is like what you're describing.

I can look back at his two campaigns and say he was trying to do that. He had the headlines. He had the program. He had the rallies. He had a movement, a genuine movement that, you know, I mean, you mentioned the DSA came out of like it was it turned into a semi durable political movement. But, you know, sometimes when I look at it at that movement, I say, well, he was squelched by the powers that be. And sometimes look at it and say it didn't quite have the juice. Yeah, it didn't.

You know, and which do you think it is and why? Yeah, I mean, it was certainly, you know, there was an effort to shut it down. There's no doubt about it. But it didn't quite have the juice. And I think the real problem is, is that that kind of, you know, democratic socialism is still too reliant upon, you know, kind of younger voters in cities overwhelmingly. And, you know, you're just going to have to be able to break out of that if you want to take on this as a as a mass project. And I think there's something else about it, which a friend of mine, the labor historian Steve Frazier, has been talking about a lot. I mean, you think about Bernie Sanders, you know, there is something very backward-looking about the left. Think about, you know, a Green New Deal, a New New Deal, even socialism itself. You know, these are ideas that are more than 100 years old. Our frame of—and I don't know what

that means for now, but the thing about the New Deal itself was it was this radical experiment. The New Deal. Exactly. It was new. But when you say Green New Deal, it's not new anymore. It's 100 years old. Yeah. And I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that.

If it had worked, I would have said that was great. But it does tell you something. does tell you something. I think there's a certain kind of timidity, there's a certain uncertainty, and a looking back that's, you know, which all movements do this. There's nothing strange about looking. I mean, Edward Bellamy, one of the great utopian thinkers of the 19th century labor movement had a book called Looking Backward. So, they all do that, but they do that as a way of kind of catapulting forward. And I feel like there's a looking back today that's a crutch. And what that means in practice, I don't know,

but it tells me we're not there yet. And the only question is, you know, how much time do we have to get there? Is there something that you could see arising to break the log jam? I mean, is it a, you know, a visionary, you know, once in a generation political mean, is it a visionary, once in a generation political figure?

Is it a new intellectual movement? Well, I don't know about the intellectual figure or the political figure. I mean, for me, the greatest moment, there have been two great moments of promise in the last, where are we, 2023, in the last seven years. One was that the wave of teacher strikes in 2018, 2019,

that we're all in red States in West Virginia and Oklahoma. And that was to me, the first sign of breaking out of this red, blue dichotomy. And they won. Yes. And they won. And they were wildcat strikes.

They were wildcat strikes. And it was, you know, the teachers are, you know, both beloved and hated. Right. They're public sector strikes. And it was, you know, the teachers are, you know, both beloved and hated. Right. They're public sector workers.

And I, you know, I saw there the beginning of something. So that was one moment. And the other moment was when Bernie won in Nevada, which was, you know, this huge moment for Latino left kind of immigrant younger workers. There's a labor victory too. It was a labor victory. The union's there. And people forget about the New Deal. But one aspect of it was it was a lot of new, younger immigrant workers.

1924, we cut off immigration in this country. But there were people who had come in 1920, 1918. Their children came of age in the 1930s. And those were the people, Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans. They were the people who built the New Deal, the modern Democratic Party. And they were outsiders. I mean, we think of them today as white ethnics. But they were once, they were the children of immigrants.

They were the refuse of Europe. They were the refuse of Europe. They were Catholics. Exactly. They were Catholics. Exactly. And so when I saw in Nevada, all those young housekeepers, casino workers, who were talking about T.O. Bernie, Uncle Bernie,

and I just thought, this is the future. What it does, I don't know, but that is the future. And I, you know, I feel like those two moments to me are kind of what sparks of something. That is a really powerful vision. And it's a great, I'm not going to ask you anymore because I don't want to fall back into pessimism. I really like ending on that note.

It's been fascinating talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed it. ask you anymore because I don't want to fall back into pessimism. I really like ending on that note. It's been fascinating talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. Well, thank you once again to Corey Robin for coming on the show. If you want to check out his books, head to factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. When you do, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well.

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