Although his politics is a bit different from mine, I’ve always admired the liberal thinker and legal expert Alan Dershowitz. He is what I would call a proper liberal, one who looks at both sides of an argument and tries to discern what is and what is not truth. Mr Dershowitz is a powerful and effective debater and is one of the few intellectuals who managed to effectively challenge people with both hard right and hard left opinions. For example his debate with the late right wing Rabbi Meir Kahane is a masterpiece of the art of debate and was one of the few times when I saw the aggressive and very well educated Rabbi Kahane on the intellectual ropes.

Alan Dershowitz has recently spoken at the Restoration Weekend an event run by the conservative David Horowitz Freedom Foundation and a transcript of Mr Dershowitz’s speech to the gathering has been put on on the Front Page Magazine website. Here’s a short excerpt from Mr Dershowitz’s speech, the full transcript can be found HERE.

Mr Dershowitz said:

Here in the United States we have been blessed with a constitutional system of checks and balances that constrain the excesses of either extreme, but the most important and the most powerful check has always remained within the hearts and minds of individuals.  As the great Judge Learned Hand once wisely reminded us, liberty lies in the hearts of men and women and when it dies there no constitution, no law, no court can ever save it.  Our democratic system of checks and balances transcends what we learned in high school civics.  In addition to the legislative branch, the executive branch and the judicial branch, we have non‑government checks.  We have the media.  We have the academy.  We have churches.  We have business.  We have so many other elements, and a perfect example was this.  When the president of the United States decided to separate families at the border, the checks and balances came into operation.  Not necessarily in the courts or in the legislature, but business leaders objected to it, academic leaders, church leaders objected to it, and ultimately it became clear this was not the American way, and the president withdrew that ill-advised suggestion.  Some of the media as well have prioritized ideology over truth.  Opinion over reporting.  The New York Times now, it’s subtle, sometimes you can’t notice it, has on the front page something called News Analysis.  It’s simply a disguised editorial.  Their headlines are disguised editorials.  And it’s very hard today, oh for the good old days of Walter Cronkite.  Walter Cronkite never voted in elections because he didn’t want to appear to be biased or be biased.  At the end of his life, I knew Walter Cronkite.  He came to Martha’s Vineyard.  I sailed with him on his boat.  He actually had some strong political views.  You would never had known that from his reporting.  He was trusted to report not to opine, and he represented the best of the media; something we don’t have today. 

The great concerning question is where the current trends toward extremism and intolerance are wounding liberty to the extent that they will not be able to recover.  Do we have the capacity to treat these wounds before they fester and become fatal?  History has generally blessed this country with an absence of powerful and influential extremes.  We never had the kind of large fascist or communist parties that plagued Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s.  To be sure, we had regional extremists such as the Ku Klux Klan and the communist party, but they never had a major impact on American politics.  When Europe responded to the depression after World War II with Nazism and communism, America responded in its way.  We had the New Deal, we had President Roosevelt who saved us from extremism and saved capitalism.  You might disagree with him, but he prevented the United States from moving toward either communism or fascism.  President Trump was justly criticized for not condemning more forcefully the white supremacists who falsely claimed to be speaking in his name, so too must Democrats be criticized for not condemning more forcefully those who distort liberalism and turn it into intolerant radicalism.  So too should educational leaders condemn those who misuse the academic license to propagandize rather than to teach and who tell their students what to think rather than how to think for themselves. 

When I taught at Harvard, for 50 years, I never expressed a personal view in the classroom.  Students did not know whether I supported or opposed the death penalty.  I had devoted much of my professional life to opposing it.  Students didn’t know because I took the devil’s advocate position in the classroom and defended every possible position.  Students didn’t know my views on Israel unless they read my material outside the classroom.  I think it’s an abuse of the lectern for teachers to try to propagandize their students and yet it’s going on all over the academy.  Too many mainstream Democrats have remained silent even some complicit with the anti-Semitic and anti-gay incitements of Louis Farrakhan along with his bigoted followers on campus.  I want you all to imagine the following scenario.  Imagine that President Bill Clinton, who I liked and voted for twice and I regard as a personal friend, imagine if he had been invited to the memorial service for a white country and western singer who he liked, and he came to the memorial service and he saw sitting in a place of honor two places away from him David Duke.  He wouldn’t have stayed on that platform for 10 seconds.  He would have been furious for having been duped into standing on the same platform as David Duke.  But that happened.  He went to the memorial for Aretha Franklin and who was sitting two seats away from him?  Louis Farrakhan.  Did President Clinton get up and leave?  No.  He stayed there, and he shook hands with that horrible bigot.  Shame on President Clinton for not applying the same standard he would have applied to David Duke. 

This is a superb speech from Mr Dershowitz and one that I would wholly recommend people to read. He is absolutely correct in his assessment of what has gone on both in the political Left and in America’s universities