It's STILL not about Alan Dershowitz (Part Two)

Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz

So, in my last post I outlined the problems that Alan Dershowitz, Professor Emeritus of Harvard Law School and source of pride to many American Jews...well, until recently, anyway.  Dershowitz has been a prominent liberal Democrat for over half a century, a champion of civil liberties and in particular Free Speech, a member and board member of the ACLU.  And, he has been all these things whilst being a proud, sometimes-practicing but always identity-affirming, Zionist Jew.

He was also, by the way, a strong supporter - including financially - of Hillary Clinton's bid to become the 45th US President.

So, what changed?  In Dershowitz's life and work, nothing; ever the champion of legal due process, he spoke out against the way that the Mueller investigation was running roughshod over President Trump and members of his inner circle.  He defended their rights as he has defended the rights of many others over the decades.  He has spoken on the subject a number of times recently on Fox News, the only major news organization that seems interested in this story.  Dershowitz has not changed one whit.  What has changed, is that his former colleagues and associates - in the academic world and the civil liberties advocacy community - have pushed Dershowitz aside and shunned him as if they were a medieval reilgious cult and he had committed heresy.

Let me be clear; I'm not especially troubled that Alan Dershowitz has stopped getting invitations to hoity-toity Martha's Vineyard dinner parties.  But I am interested - and troubled - by their shunning one of their own for having the audacity of defending the rights of the president whom they consider to be The Embodiment of All Evil.  No, I'm not troubled that they don't especially like President Trump.  There have been occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, of whom I was not especially a fan - in particular the immediate past one.  I cringed, in particular, when he was re-elected with such zeal after his first four years' performance in office.  I told all my friends who voted for President Obama the first time, that I absolutely forgave them, given the hype that accompanied his first election campaign.  But I could not for the life of me understand why they would vote for him again, especially when he was running against such a nice, smart, moderate guy like Mitt Romney.  So, support, or lack thereof, for President Trump is not the point.  Rather it is the way that someone - even someone with amount of liberal, democrat cred that Dershowitz enjoys - becomes toxic to the Left the moment he says, Whoa, like the guy or not, he's still entitled to the protections of the Constitution!  That's what Dershowitz has done, and that's why he is persona non grata in circles that used to honor him.

The political Left, and I say this with nothing but regret, has become so anti free speech and civil liberties in recent years, that it is just breathtaking.

It didn't happen overnight, with the election of Trump.  It has been happening at least since the year 2000 - to my observations - but probably a lot longer.

I used to think that this was a particular sin of the political Right, of the Republicans.  When Bill Clinton beat George HW Bush's bid for a second term, a number of Republican voices began, almost immediately, to say negative things about him.  At the time, I thought, oh, that's just sour grapes.  It's one thing when a president gets beaten out of a re-election, but it must especially sting when that president hasn't been the subject of any kind of scandal that broke his credibility.  George Bush 41 weathered no particular scandal, and he had just led the nation in a military campaign that, to so many astute observers, was brilliantly executed and restored the military's honor which had been in a tailspin since Vietnam.  So, why did Bush 41 lose his re-election bid?  I think it was essentially two things.  Firstly, he broke his promise ("Read my lips...no new taxes"), and secondly, he didn't have the charisma and ability to articulate a vision for the country that Bill Clinton had.

With the passage of time, during Bill Clinton's tenure in the White House, it became clear that there was something to the charges of bad behavior that had followed him from the Arkansas Governor's mansion to the White House.  And it became clear that all along the way, his wife Hillary was covering for him and even applying her own considerable political and legal muscle to quash anybody who would dare accuse her husband of any untoward behavior.  The defense of one's spouse is honorable...iff the defender has reason to believe in her spouse's innocence.  Over the years, it has become clear that Hillary was fighting for her husband, specifically to defend her own political ambitions and future.  And in doing so, she hurt a number of women - an offense, in particular, because she has posited herself as the champion of women.  But also, she simultaneously fought her own scandals.  By the time Bill Clinton lefft office in 2001, it was clear that many of the charges against him were not just innuendo or Right-wing Smears.  And the Clintons' behavior in the years after the end of his presidency, during wife Hillary's political rise in her own right culminating in her unsuccessful bid for the White House in 2016, give further credibility to the charges of corruption that have only grown with time.

During all these years, it has become acceptable to throw spurrious accusations at Republicans (eg, "Bush Lied, People Died") whilst throwing labels such as "racist" at anybody who had even a legitimate gripe about Obama's performance in the White House.  But the curbs on free speech are not limited to important public figures.  If you were not a supporter of same-sex marriage, for example, for whatever reason, you were a "homophobe."  If you offered any argument, not matter how moderate, for control of the chaos at the border, you were a "xenophobe" (or simply "racist," since the complaints about lawless immigrants almost always apply to non-whites).  If you thought that abortion is tantamount to murder, or even just manslaughter, and even just in some circumstances, then you were a "misogynist," since denial of a woman's absolute right to do what she will with her body, even freely dispose of a child who happens to be dwelling therein during gestation, must be reflective of a hatred of women.  You get it.  For every possible ideological position on any issue, where you come out opposite the ever-left-shifting positions of the Democrat Party, there's a label, a perjorative term whose purpose is nothing other than to deligitimize the person taking that position, and therefore that position.

In the  case of Alan Dershowitz, he has dared to remain steadfast in the ideologies that he has held dear all his professional life.  Because he is not willing to stop defending the rights of the President, whom the Left likens to the Sum of All Evils, he is now beyond the pale.  The Left is cutting him out of the conversation.  They've tried to cut so many others out of the conversation, but where Dershowitz is concerned, it is very telling because he is so firmly and completely one of them.  Well, not exactly:  he is so firmly and completely one of what they were, before they went off the Deep End.

I know what I sort-of-promised to wrap this up tonight, but I think this post is long enough and I still haven't begun to make my point about why Alan Dershowitz and other liberal Jews who are starting to feel as if the Democrat Party and liberal circles are not their natural home after all, are absolutely correct.  I will continue tomorrow.  A good week, everybody!