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Corey Robin is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump and a contributing editor at Jacobin.
For Democrats, the main issue in the shutdown wasn’t electoral backlash — it was the filibuster. Leadership feared its removal, viewing it as a safeguard to keep the party’s rising left wing in check.
In 2020, Bernie Sanders decisively won the Nevada primary, in part because many younger immigrant voters persuaded parents and grandparents to vote for him. Zohran Mamdani’s victory, powered by similar dynamics, marks the second phase of this moment.
There is no simple opposition to be drawn between the liberal market order of the early 1800s and the supposedly more violent neoliberal state of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Coercive projects and authoritarian visions run throughout both.
The vision of W. E. B. Du Bois was one of congressional democracy, critical of presidential regimes that concentrate power in the hands of one individual — an individual who can, say, impose his vision of a White House ballroom in the sky upon all of us.
The issue of Palestine speaks to a range of constituencies that Zohran Mamdani is trying to stitch together into a new coalition — and creates a cleavage with the establishment leaders of the Democratic Party like Andrew Cuomo and Chuck Schumer.
With Eric Adams out of the New York mayoral race and the corrupt Andrew Cuomo his main opponent, Zohran Mamdani has a chance to cast his democratic socialism, his alleged “extremism,” as tied to the creation of a lawful society.
In response to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, Republicans are arguing that an employer has every right to fire employees for speech it doesn’t like. This is a deeply impoverished idea of basic democratic rights like freedom of speech.
Abraham Lincoln is often invoked in calls for civility and reconciliation across the partisan divide. But Lincoln himself understood that such reconciliation was impossible in his own time until justice had been served and slavery abolished.
For decades, advocates of humanitarian intervention argued that the international community should take military action against states engaged in extreme human rights abuses. Israel is one such state.
The University of California’s turning over of dossiers on 160 people under investigation for antisemitism, including Judith Butler, to the Trump administration has strong echoes of McCarthyism.
Repression of Palestine activists on New York campuses like Brooklyn College is being done in the name of protecting Jewish students from antisemitism — even as polls show New Yorkers, including Jews, reject the idea that criticizing Israel is antisemitic.
The parallels between Zionists and a northern Arkansas group seeking to forbid Jews and people of color from buying adjacent tracts of land are more significant than you might think.
For decades, liberal humanitarianism argued that the international community should take military action against states engaged in extreme human rights abuses. Well, there’s no way to argue that Israel isn’t exactly such a state.
One problem with ultrarich people like Bill Ackman is that their riches often spill over beyond the economic realm into other realms — like, in his case, the kind of delusional self-confidence that led him to buy his way into a professional tennis match.
In both of the absurd controversies over Zohran Mamdani’s college application to Columbia and the furor over the phrase “globalize the intifada,” we see the experiences of one subjugated people being used to preclude any understanding of another subjugated people.
Pundits have emphasized Zohran Mamdani’s videos and charisma and Andrew Cuomo’s weaknesses in Mamdani’s victory. But easily the most important factor in that victory is the movement that the Democratic Socialists of America have built in New York City.
Billionaire Bill Ackman and his rich friends want someone, anyone, to bring down Zohran Mamdani. Their pitch: take our money, it won’t be much time and energy, and maybe you’ll get famous enough to use the campaign as a stepping stone to higher office.
James Madison argued that politicians’ ambition would lead them to uphold the separation of powers. Today congressmembers’ ambition seems to lead them to do the exact opposite: submitting to Trump and completely bargaining away their own power.
The Left’s predicament today is not that there is no opposition or resistance and not that the Right has all the power. It’s the sense that we lack the levers of power we once wielded.
One of the Right’s biggest funders and most important strategists, longtime Federalist Society head Leonard Leo, seems to be breaking with Donald Trump over tariffs.