Confronting the ‘Cancelists’ with Alan Dershowitz
2023-03-13 · Guest: Alan Dershowitz (Civil liberties attorney and Harvard Law professor) · 52:20
Alan Dershowitz on Cancel Culture and Neutral Principles
Bob Zadek interviews renowned civil liberties attorney and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz about his recent books, The Price of Principle and Dershowitz on Killing. They discuss the rise of “cancel culture,” the erosion of neutral legal principles in favor of partisanship, and the personal social costs Dershowitz has faced for defending unpopular figures like Donald Trump. The conversation also touches on meritocracy in education, the January 6th Commission, and ethical questions surrounding the law’s role in life-and-death decisions.
Topics: Cancel Culture, Neutral Principles, Civil Liberties, Partisanship, January 6th Commission, Meritocracy, Identity Politics, Death Penalty, Assisted Suicide, Legal Ethics
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Alan Dershowitz: Civil liberties attorney and Harvard Law professor
Introduction to Alan Dershowitz [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello friends, I’m Bob Zadek, host of the country’s longest-running libertarian broadcast, nationally streamed at 8:00 AM Pacific Time Sundays on the 860 AM app. The archives of my Bob Zadek Show podcast hold 15 years of major discussion and is the ideal resource to revisit our prior mistakes, since so many seem to reappear. I promise you in-depth content on social, political, and economic issues that really matter, always with the ideal guest, accessible and entertaining. Our standard: ideas, not attitude; information, not talking points.
Today’s guest, the renowned civil liberties attorney and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, raises the bar and exceeds those standards. Professor Dershowitz has published numerous books and articles, including several national bestsellers, and is known nationally for his defense of high-profile clients and is most sought after by mainstream media commentary on our most important legal issues. Professor Dershowitz has written extensively on law, philosophy, history, religion, and sports. He’s published over a thousand articles and 50 books, including several national bestsellers. His autobiography, Taking the Stand, was a New York Times bestseller. Other notable books include The Trials of Zion, Rights from Wrong, The Case for Israel, and Chutzpah. His most recent book, Dershowitz on Killing: How the Law Decides Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die, was published just last month. I hope to have some time today to discuss this book in some detail.
Professor Dershowitz, welcome to the show. Alan, you recently published The Price of Principle: Why Integrity Is Worth the Consequences. Unlike many of your 30 other books, which methodically and persuasively argue a point of view, whether it be censorship, equality, vaccine mandates, and of course the law, The Price of Principle is rather personal. What was your goal in writing this book?
Attacking Cancel Culture and Defending Principle [02:57]
Alan Dershowitz: I want to attack cancel culture. I want to fight back against those who would censor views they disagree with. I wanted to show my disapproval for “free speech for me but not for thee,” “due process for me but not for thee.” If I can be canceled because I stood up for principle, then any American could be canceled. If I can be attacked, then any American can be attacked. And so I feel a special obligation because I do have a platform to fight back against what I regard as some of the greatest evils. And one of the great evils is the substitution of partisanship for principle. Today, people just pick sides and try to do justice not based on any evidence or on any principles, but based on which side you’re on.
You know, it’s so interesting because in the Bible, in the Torah, God tells judges there are only two rules. One: don’t take bribes. That’s obvious. But that’s the second rule. The first rule is lo takiru panim—do not recognize faces. Do not do justice based on who the people are. And that’s why the statue of Justice is blindfolded. But today, everybody’s peeking under that blindfold and doing justice based on race, on party, on gender, on ethnicity, on religion, on everything but the merits. And so this is a call for a return to principle. But it’s expensive because I have been obviously canceled, I have been attacked, I have been threatened with bar proceedings. Every possible—every possible type of attack has been leveled against me because I have insisted on putting principle before partisanship. But I’m going to keep doing it and keep fighting back.
Tactics vs. Neutral Principles [04:42]
Bob Zadek: Now, let’s unpack that a bit if we can. Put partisanship behind principle—principle first. Most partisanship—most those who practice partisanship—they do so, they believe, in furtherance of a principle. So are we talking about the weapons used to further a principle? Because one drives the other, doesn’t it?
Alan Dershowitz: Yeah, but remember, everybody claims a principle. The Nazis claimed the principle of trying to destroy the Jewish people. Stalin claimed the principle of communism over capitalism. So just because you claim to have a principle doesn’t mean that you’re a principled person, that you are actually basing your ideas and your actions on neutral principles. I call for neutral principles. You know, I have a philosopher who was a friend of mine when we were at Harvard together named John Rawls, who always said you decide moral issues behind a veil of ignorance. You don’t know whether you’re going to be a Democrat or a Republican, white or black, Jewish or Christian. You have to come up with moral rules, rules of principle, that would satisfy you and everybody else without regard to who you were and who you become.
And so it’s that kind of principle that I’m talking about. And as lawyers, Felix Frankfurter once said, “The history of liberty is largely a history of procedures.” And what I’m concerned about today is that the procedures are no longer neutral. You get different due process depending on ethnic backgrounds or on religious backgrounds. And so I’m looking for a return to neutral principles, which means sometimes you lose, sometimes you win. A democracy is a neutral principle. Due process is a neutral principle. I want to return to them.
Bob Zadek: It would seem to me that—and we will get into a great deal of the specifics of your book—but it seems to me that the problem that you sort of assume is—or don’t discuss a lot—is the principle itself, which drives the partisanship. Censorship, cancel culture is a tactic. It’s a tactic used by those who don’t favor your point of view to make sure your point of view never gets to see the sun. It pushes it into the shadows. So we can discuss—there are two topics packed into partisanship or cancel culture and principle. Number one is the principle. Number two is the tactic. Now, you spent a lot of time in your book, appropriately of course, on cancel culture. Now, let’s assume—and I’m asking a bit of a devil’s advocate—let us assume we don’t quarrel with the principle. It’s a principle—some principle which you and I could endorse. You still would write a book complaining about the cancel culture, focusing on the tactic. So help us understand why the tactic is worthy of so much attention itself.
Alan Dershowitz: Well, because for me, the tactic is the principle. The principle is the ends don’t justify the means. The principle is neutrality. The principle is fairness. The principle is due process. The principle is the adversary system. You know, there are two kinds of principles here. You’re right. There are principles like Nazism and communism and fascism and anti-Semitism. Those are all claimed to be based on principles. But all of those principles have one thing in common: they won’t tolerate counter-principles. They won’t accept the opportunity to challenge and debate and allow the other points of view to be expressed.
So I mean, you’re right in pointing out the fact—and I do in the last chapter of my book about principle—saying just because it’s a principle doesn’t mean that it’s right. There are wrong principles too. So for me, the focus has to be on process. You call it tactics; I call it process. I just think that in order for principled people to be able to dominate the discussion, there has to be a process. And in a democracy, the people decide, subject to checks and balances and judicial review. Those are the principles I’m most interested in—the principles that deal with procedure and process and fairness and the marketplace of ideas. And the hope of the marketplace of ideas, Jefferson said—and it doesn’t always work—is that as long as there’s opportunities to respond, you have nothing to worry about by allowing wrongheaded ideas. What we need to make sure is that the marketplace of ideas remains open to all views, and then hopefully a principled result will emerge. But not always. In the 1930s in Germany, in the beginning at least, the marketplace was open. Between 1930 and 1932, and it resulted in a plurality vote for Nazism. The marketplace has never been open in Russia or the Soviet Union, so we can’t judge that, or in China. But we have a few examples of the marketplace producing bad results. I guess early Spain and early Italy—I mean, early in the 20th century—the same thing is true. There was some degree of a marketplace and they chose fascism. So you never know who the marketplace will help or hurt. But for me, the marketplace is a principle in and of itself.
Personal Experiences with Cancellation [10:47]
Bob Zadek: In your book, you didn’t waste much time before you got into your personal experience with being canceled. And you share—you let the readers in in a very intimate way, it seemed to me, in your experience with cancellation in your book. Share with us a bit of that so the audience can understand what created such passion as you wrote this book.
Alan Dershowitz: Well, let me start with today. So today, the New York Times has a lead story, and the lead story is entitled “American Jewish Leaders Are Active in the Debate Over Israel Judicial Reform.” Well, that seems to describe me. I’m an American Jewish leader. I’ve been a leader of the American Jewish community for 50 years. I am the most knowledgeable American on the Israeli judiciary. I have written more articles than anyone else on that subject. But the Times chose not to interview me. They chose a whole bunch of people that some people have heard of, some have not. But the Times made a willful and deliberate decision to eliminate me, to cancel me from a debate in which I am deeply involved. I mean, having a discussion about American attitudes toward the Israeli judicial reform without me being included in it is like seeing the play Hamlet without the prince. And yeah, it may sound egotistical, but it’s just an accurate, truthful description. I am the most qualified person in America to discuss that issue, and yet the New York Times deliberately and willfully omitted me.
The same thing has happened on a number of other occasions. Temple Emanu-El in New York used to have me every single year putting a biblical character on trial—Abraham, Moses, David. They would get 1,600 people. It was the biggest event of the year. The rabbi used to say we have more people here than on Yom Kippur. And then when I was falsely accused by a woman I never met, the 92nd Street Y canceled me, as did Temple Emanu-El, as did the Ramaz School. Now, the woman eventually admitted after eight years that she may have mistaken me for somebody else and misidentified me, but the cancellation still continues.
When I defended President Trump on the floor of the Senate, even though I voted against him and disagree with him and plan to vote against him again, my wife and I and my whole family were canceled on Martha’s Vineyard. Nobody would speak to us. People were told, “If you’re seen speaking to Alan Dershowitz, you’ll never be part of our social group or invited to any events.” And so there was a massive attempt to cancel me. And as I’ve said, I can fight back. I have the resources, I have the ability, I have the energy to fight back. And therefore, I have an obligation to stand up for all the other people who have been canceled for no good reason or for very bad reasons, but don’t have the resources, the ability to fight back.
The Social Cost of Cancellation [13:52]
Bob Zadek: When you mentioned—and I suspected you would do that—your experience, because it was widely written about and discussed with you in public, so this is not breaking new news. But I said to myself, as I imagined myself in the same experience, did that make you at all wonder about whether, when you were accepted, whether or not you sort of made—did that question what you thought your relationship was with the cancelers, if that’s in fact a noun? Did the cancellation process make you rethink your relationship with people who you thought you were intimate with? Did you discover something about them you didn’t know before? Or is this merely a broader commentary on what’s going on in a segment of society?
Alan Dershowitz: A little of both. It made me realize that these were not real friends. People acting so obnoxiously. My wife was working out in a gym. A woman walked in and said, “Oh my God, that’s Alan Dershowitz’s wife. I can’t be in the same room with her.” Caroline Kennedy, who invited us to her house on numerous occasions, sat down next to me at a dinner party and said, “If I knew you’d been invited, I never would have accepted an invitation to come and sit next to you.” This is the woman who was the ambassador to Australia, supposed to talk to the Chinese leaders, but she can’t talk to somebody who defended President Trump on constitutional grounds.
Many of the people on Martha’s Vineyard, I represented their children pro bono, woke up late at night to help them when they were arrested for drunken driving or in one case cheating on a test, and then they wouldn’t talk to me. Larry David used to work out in our gym and used to come and have dinner at our house periodically. But he walked up to me in front of a store on Martha’s Vineyard and said I was disgusting because I had congratulated Mike Pompeo for the work he did on the Abraham Accords in Israel. And Larry said, “You know, you’re disgusting and all your people are disgusting. All these Republicans are disgusting.”
So it’s partly a function of what’s going on in society today, that people choose sides and if you’re not on their side, they don’t want to have anything to do with you. But it also showed the superficiality of friendships. A couple of the people have now reached out to me and I refuse to reach out back. I have no interest in being friendly with or having any association with people on Martha’s Vineyard who were part of the cancellation. In some respects, I’m thankful for the fact that these phony friendships have been exposed and that I no longer have to tolerate some of these bigoted and biased people. It was tough on my wife, it was tough on my children. They lost friends as well over my political views and the false accusation against me. Once since the false accusation has now essentially been rescinded—the woman saying that she may very well have mistaken me for somebody else, which I think is basically a withdrawal—she withdrew all the charges legally. Since that’s happened, a number of people have apologized. But a number of people haven’t.
When I got canceled by the 92nd Street Y, by Temple Emanu-El, in both cases and by the Ramaz School—in all three cases, the heads, the rabbis, the heads all said they didn’t believe any of the charges, but they just didn’t want trouble. Which is reminiscent of McCarthyism. When I was growing up, McCarthyism was rampant in the 1950s and people would say, “Look, we don’t believe you’re a communist, but people have said you are, so we don’t want trouble. And so we’re going to treat you as if you’re a communist.” And people were canceled. And it’s so interesting that Chilmark, which is the focal point of the cancel culture on Martha’s Vineyard—Chilmark was very much an object of McCarthyism because a lot of left-wing people lived there, and a lot of them were subject to McCarthyite tactics. And you’d think they’d be a little bit more understanding of the modern-day McCarthyism. But they are the worst offenders because for them, it’s fairness and due process for me, but not for thee. If you’re a hard-left person, then they want you to be treated fairly. But if you’re somebody who tries to be neutral and principled, they have no interest in you. And so it did teach me a lesson.
The January 6th Commission and One-Sided Justice [18:31]
Bob Zadek: It minimizes the cancel culture to dismiss it as simply boorish, perhaps insincere behavior. I don’t think that puts it in the proper perspective. What is it—what do the cancelers—I may have just invented a noun—what is it the cancelers have in common? Certainly, it’s not all of society cancels. Indeed, most do not. So what are—what do you think—you can’t know, I don’t think, but you certainly would have an opinion—what do you think all the cancelers have in common? How did they all catch it like COVID? Give us an insight into what makes them different in a negative way than those in society who are more welcoming of opposing views.
Alan Dershowitz: Yeah, it’s the one word, of course: intolerance. They just can’t tolerate opposing points of view. It’s a combination. Some of the people on Martha’s Vineyard that canceled us are just stupid. I mean, they just don’t have the intelligence to understand neutral principles. They think if you defend somebody, then it must be that you support them politically. They’re just too dumb to understand that. That’s a few people. And others understand it and pretend not to understand it. A third group feels that Trump, as one person put it to me, “Trump is worse than Hitler, and you, by supporting Trump’s legal case, you’re like Goebbels and Göring. You’re an accomplice and a facilitator, and therefore we’re going to treat you like a Nazi war criminal.”
It’s a kind of absurd radicalism, and it happens on the right and on the left, on the extreme right and on the extreme left. Look, I’m a strong enemy of woke culture and the extreme left. People ought to know that. I’m a centrist, libertarian, liberal. I am much closer to centrist, libertarian conservatives than I am to woke leftists or extreme people on the neo-Nazi right. For me, it’s all about tolerance. I used to debate William Buckley all the time. He was very conservative. And we used to fight like children, and then we would go out and have a drink together, and we would learn from each other. Those days are gone forever. Larry David doesn’t want to learn from me. You know, he wrote blurbs for some of my books calling me brilliant and saying my arguments were terrific. Now he doesn’t even want to listen to anything I say because I defended Trump. And that’s all that matters for him. For him, the ends justify the means. And that’s true of people like Caroline Kennedy as well. The whole Caroline Kennedy family—she has tolerated so much on behalf of people within her family or within her social circle, but the line is drawn on anybody who would defend the legal and constitutional rights of Donald Trump. So there’s an enormous amount of hypocrisy there as well. And people aren’t even embarrassed about being hypocrites. If you’re a hypocrite on the right side, that’s okay.
Bob Zadek: I have found—not that I have had that much opportunity, but I’ve had some opportunity—in explaining my opposition and the evils of cancel culture by making reference to something that most people can embrace, which is our judicial system, particularly the criminal law aspect. And I try to explain that imagine a judicial system where the defense was canceled, was not allowed to speak. Would we as a society be pleased with the result? Even though—even if you want to make the silly assumption—if they weren’t guilty, they wouldn’t have been arrested. If you want to even hide behind that, look no farther than our judicial system and understand why, in fact, the presumption is the opposite of innocence.
Alan Dershowitz: You don’t have to imagine it. It happened. It happened in the January 6th Commission, where everybody on that commission, every member of Congress on that commission, was virulently anti-Trump, and nobody was permitted to make any argument on behalf of Trump. For example, when they purported to put on Trump’s speech on January 6th, they deliberately, willfully doctored the tape and omitted the words of President Trump where he said, “I want you to go and demonstrate peacefully and patriotically.” They eliminated those words. If there were an adversary system where both sides could be presented, they never would have eliminated those words because they’d be terribly embarrassed on cross-examination when they were asked, “Didn’t you eliminate those words? Why did you eliminate those words? Doesn’t it show your bias?”
So we’ve already experienced in America the Iranian, Chinese, Russian system of justice. The January 6th Commission was an example of Iranian, Chinese, Russian injustice—one side, allowing only one side to be presented. I went to China in 1979 at the request of Ted Kennedy to look at emerging democratic groups, a democracy wall. And I went to my first trial there and I sat through the whole trial. And it was a minor trial. It was from somebody who had stolen building equipment from a governmental institute. And it would have been punishable by, I don’t know, 10 years in prison. And the prosecution presented its case, and it was a pretty compelling case. And then the judge said, “Before I decide,” nothing about a defense, “let’s hear what the people think.” And they opened the doors and 25 or 30 people rushed in screaming, “He’s guilty! He’s guilty! Maximum punishment!” And the judge said, “Well, now I’ve heard from all the sides,” and imposed a sentence. It was Alice in Wonderland—conviction, sentence, and execution first, and trial thereafter. The only difference is that there was no trial, either in the Chinese courthouse or in the congressional hearing room of January 6th. So we’re experiencing that in the United States today. We’re experiencing that with some of the attacks on Trump lawyers where only one side is being presented and judges are ruling against them. I’m not saying that Trump’s arguments are valid. I just want to hear all sides of all the arguments before rulings are made. And that just isn’t being done today, either in the court of public opinion or in the rooms of Congress or tragically even sometimes in the courts of law.
Bob Zadek: Just one comment to prove your point about how biased the process can be. You pick the January 6th Commission, which is purely political. There was no pretense—maybe a veiled pretense, but no sincere pretense—that this was going to be an inquiry to find out the truth. It was—all sides understood it was political theater. So that’s kind of—there was no pretense at all that this was going to be an inquiry into the facts, like for example the Warren Commission, Kennedy assassination, things like that, which was a more sincere attempt, I think.
Alan Dershowitz: Or the 9/11 Commission. Exactly right. Exactly right.
The Goal of Writing and Changing Minds [26:32]
Bob Zadek: Now, in your books and in others who write persuasively, they have a goal of changing a statute, changing an election—a goal that is, even if it’s a tough road to hoe, as they say, it’s reasonable to expect some benefit, some change if you write persuasively. In your book, I asked myself, what could you possibly hope to change in your book? And once your book—did you not have that hope? And if you did have that hope, what were you hoping to do? Or was it as personal as it seemed, which was your turn and you were going to explain to a large number of readers what had happened to you?
Alan Dershowitz: A little of both. I mean, every book I write—I’ve now, by the way, I’ve just today, today finished my 53rd book. So 30 books was a few years ago. I’ve now just finished my 53rd book entitled The Preventive State. And I plan, I hope—I’m 84 years old—I hope I have the ability and strength to get to at least 60. That’s my goal. But my goal in every book is to change minds, obviously. I wouldn’t write a book—it takes an enormous amount of energy to write a book. And I love writing. I write every single day. But I want to change people’s views. I want to open their minds.
You know, when I was a teacher for 50 years, I never expressed my personal views about political or legal issues in the classroom. I expressed them outside the classroom. But my goal in the classroom was to teach students how to think, not what to think. If they were conservatives, make them more critical and more analytic conservatives. If they were liberals or libertarians, make them better at what they’re doing. I didn’t really want to change people’s views. But when I write books, I do want to change people’s views. I want to open their minds. I want them to come out against cancel culture. I want them to try to see through the lack of principle.
By the way, you say that everybody knew that the January 6th committee was overtly political. A number of my friends and colleagues didn’t. They listened and they said, “Oh my God, listen to that evidence! Aren’t you convinced?” And I said, “No, I never am convinced until I hear both sides of the issue.” But there were a lot of people who fell for the pretense that since there were videos presented—they didn’t realize they were selectively edited—that there was evidence presented from testimony, that it must be true. But that’s why I think it was Wigmore who once said that cross-examination is the greatest engine of truth ever invented by human beings. And of course, it starts in the Bible, in the Apocrypha, in the book of Daniel, when Daniel confronts two witnesses who try to frame a woman and separates them and asks them separate questions and not allowing each to hear the other’s answer and gets them to contradict each other and admit their lies.
That’s, I think, a lot of people don’t understand that. When they hear one side of the case, they’re satisfied. And a lot of people make up their minds even before they hear the evidence. As you say, if you’re not guilty, why would anybody ever arrest you? The prisons are filled with people, unfortunately, who were ultimately proved innocent by DNA evidence and by other evidence. Also, the streets are filled with guilty people who never got convicted. Our system is far from perfect.
Bob Zadek: You should have invited those friends of yours you referred to to your house to watch 12 Angry Men and just sit and watch. It’s a very short movie, as you know, to me the greatest courtroom movie ever made.
Alan Dershowitz: And it’s not a courtroom; it’s a courtroom movie that takes place not in one room—in one room, in the jury room. That’s all. And it’s must-watching for every law student. You know, to this day, when I watch it, my eyes tear up. I just have to watch that movie more than once a year.
Alan Dershowitz: I watch it periodically too. And there have been attempts to try to redo it, never successfully.
Bob Zadek: Not going to happen. Not going to happen. Henry Fonda did it for $700,000. Lots of famous actors before they were famous, in their 20s and the like. It was magnificent. Sorry, I digress. I didn’t mean to take up our time with a movie review. Sorry about that.
Alan Dershowitz: I’m glad you did.
Identity Politics vs. Meritocracy [31:41]
Bob Zadek: In your book, you spent at least one full chapter and parts of other chapters talking about a subtopic of cancel culture, which is identity politics. Tell us what people in general mean by identity politics and tell us why that is, as I would describe it, a cancer in political life in our country.
Alan Dershowitz: Let’s distinguish between identity groups and identity politics. I strongly identify with my heritage. I strongly identify with being a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, the son of first-generation Americans, the grandson of immigrants from Poland. I have a strong identification with that. But I don’t want to be judged based on that. That’s personal. I want to be judged based on my own merits.
You know, I was at Martin Luther King’s talk in August of 1963, where—I could hardly hear him because I was way in the back—but where he uttered the famous words, “I dream of a day when my children will be judged by the quality of their character, the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin.” And I just think that it’s not so much the positives of identity politics—I understand that—it’s the negative of doing away with meritocracy. That today, medical students are being admitted based on their identity, not on their grades. We’re abolishing grades in many universities. And look, you want to do it for law students? Fine. You want to do it for talk show hosts? Fine. The country will survive. But don’t you ever dare eliminate meritocracy for airline pilots, for surgeons, for people who have life and death in their hands.
And that’s in my book as well, Dershowitz on Death. When it comes to issues of life and death, you must have the most highly qualified people. And if you have no discrimination, you’ll have real diversity. I’ll tell you a story. I needed a specially good doctor for a particular procedure that I was having after I had some medical issues. And so I called all over the city of New York for the best person to do this. And everybody came up with the same name. And I thought it was a very waspy name. I thought it would be some 6’2” wasp from Groton, New York, who had gone to Yale Medical School. And when I got into the operating room, there was this short African-American kid from Brooklyn with a thick Brooklyn accent, who was the very best. And everybody said he was the very best. And yes, there was diversity, but it was diversity based on merit, not diversity based on individual identity politics. And so I was thrilled to have the best doctor in the world, and the fact that he was black was—I liked that fact. But in the end, I want him to be the best surgeon.
Bob Zadek: The hard question I ask myself—I always knew there were legacy admissions, right? I always knew there were admissions based upon contributions. I always knew if your father went to an Ivy League school or mother, you were high—so I knew that was not a meritocracy. And yet at that time, years ago, it didn’t make me angry. I would sort of—so I’m asking almost a personal question. I got so angry at identity politics. Why was I—if I really was sincere within myself about looking for pure on the merits, and that’s been a lifelong standard of value of mine—what was I getting wrong then? I was the same person.
Alan Dershowitz: Yeah, no, you’re right. And I have to tell you, I’ve been consistent since the 1960s. I’ve opposed legacy admissions, I’ve opposed geographic distribution admissions, I’ve opposed admissions based on who your family is. In fact, I proposed something quite radical in the 1960s: that Harvard’s admission form does not contain—does not contain—the name of the applicant. So it doesn’t matter whether your name is Crawford or Smith or Dershowitz or Bernstein or Liu. No name. And it doesn’t contain the name of your college or your high school. What it contains is the quality of the college. You divide colleges into five groups: the very, very best college, number one; second-best college, number two. So if you went to Harvard or Yale, you get a number one. But you get the same number one if you went to WashU or some other—or Brooklyn College, which is every bit as good as Harvard. So every person would get pure meritocracy. Nothing is on the application that you’re not willing to say is the basis for admission. So I would not have race, religion, I would not have gender on the application. All you have on the application are things that are relevant: employment experience, you could have where you came from in the sense of whether you were a poor person and had to struggle to make it—whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t include things that are invidious, like names.
Remember, when I was growing up, if you wanted to get into Harvard or Yale, not only did you have to—or maybe some years before then—you had to provide a picture. You had to give your mother’s maiden name, so that if you changed your name from Goldberg to Gold, they would know that your mother’s name was Schwartz. And they would do everything possible to figure out whether you were Jewish, to figure out whether you fit other criteria or not. And I fought like heck in the ’60s to abolish that. And I have been consistently opposed to non-meritocratic admissions my whole life. Look, if you want to have random admissions, fine. That means the end of elite schools—that anybody can apply to any school and then you just, like the New York Lottery, you pick who goes to what school. But that would mean the end of elite colleges and universities. Maybe in a socialist society you’d want that. By the way, in a socialist society in communist Russia, they had quota systems. That is, the class consisted of ethnic divides. So there were 3% Jewish in the population, you get 3% Jews in the class. There were Crimeans 5%, you get 5% Crimeans. The class had to represent the ethnicities or the sub-ethnicities of everybody in the Soviet Union. That’s one way of doing it. And that’s why the Soviet universities that did that were not particularly good. But schools that pick on the merits are very, very good, which is why MIT is such a good school because it, at least until recently, focused much more on scientific ability than on identity politics.
Target Audience and the Danger of Political Correctness [39:13]
Bob Zadek: Your book, pointing out and telling a personal story about your experience with being the focus of the cancel culture—I have two questions, I’m going to ask them one at a time. What’s your primary audience, if you had one? And maybe you didn’t. Was the cancel culture sub-class of society—was it written to them? Or was it written to the rest of society to help you snuff out or minimize the power of the cancel culture? Or perhaps it was both. And then I’ll have a question after that.
Alan Dershowitz: The target was people who could make the cancelists—you like that word—the cancel culture people, the cancelers, feel guilty and hold them to account. The goal is to make it very difficult for people to justify cancel culture. Remember, when I wrote the book, there were those who were on television, in the media, writing for the newspapers, justifying cancel culture, saying it was a good thing. And I just wanted to make it clear that if you’re going to continue to do cancel culture, you do it in the face of very substantial criticism. So my audience was those who do the canceling for the most part. Obviously, I would understand that people who have been canceled would probably read the book more sympathetically. But I tried to write it in a way to make it acceptable to people who are cancelers as well.
Bob Zadek: Most of my audience, and probably by a head count, most of those who would read your book, are the non-cancelers, the people who go about their lives without spending time, energy, or power canceling. As to that audience, what is the message you hope they take from the book? And not necessarily in general, because the evils of the cancel culture are almost too obvious—maybe I’m a bit idealistic—they’re so obvious. But what—writing to the non-Martha’s Vineyard part-time resident, writing to that group, what do you hope the book says to them about how they can minimize the power, maybe eliminate this hopefully transient phenomenon of the cancel culture?
Alan Dershowitz: I don’t think it’s transient. I think it’s getting worse. And I think it’s being taught in universities today. And I think a lot of young people support it and a lot of people who teach them support it. My goal was to try to persuade young people that when you cancel, you shut your mind and you can’t learn and you become somebody who is static. And if you want to develop and if you want to have an ability to learn anew, then you can’t cancel people. You have to confront them, take them on, listen to them, argue with them. I’ve never had an argument with an intelligent person from which I didn’t learn something. I always learned something when I argued with a Bill Buckley or when I argued even with Rush Limbaugh. I always learned something. I learned about how different people think about issues. And my message was: don’t cut yourself off from different ideas. And having taught for 50 years at Harvard, as a teacher you have to be open to new ideas. I would come home from class every day and my wife would ask me, instead of “What did you teach the students today?” she would always ask me, “What did you learn from the students today?” And I would always be so happy to share an insight that I didn’t have that a kid that was totally different from me in my background explained to me. And I understood it better. I may still disagree with it, but at least I understood it.
Bob Zadek: I have had a similar experience. I express it—my version of that is when I have guests on the show or when I’m just having a conversation in Starbucks with somebody who sits next to me, in either instance, I find I love to be proven wrong. Because it’s only then that I learn something. To have to reaffirm what I already know, even if it’s wrong, doesn’t help me one tiny bit. So the sign of getting smarter is how often you’re proven wrong. Because each time, it’s like you graduate to the next level. I love getting proven wrong because it makes me—it makes me just feel better.
Alan Dershowitz: Well, the opposite is the people with closed minds, the cancelers, the Martha’s Vineyard types. They never learn anything because they shut themselves off from every possible alternate point of view. If you have a different point of view, they don’t want to listen to you. And that’s what McCarthyism was like. That’s what intolerance was like. That’s what fascism was like. And so these folks think of themselves as liberal, but they’re the most reactionary people on the face of the earth. They’re so bound by their so-called leftist principles that they’re unwilling to do anything that’s “politically incorrect.” People forget that political correctness is a phrase invented by Stalin. He would execute people who said things that didn’t fit into the political narrative of communism. That’s what the meaning of politically incorrect was. Today, people invoke that phrase as if it’s something positive.
Dershowitz on Killing [45:31]
Bob Zadek: Alan Dershowitz’s book, The Price of Principle: Why Integrity Is Worth the Consequences, is, as I’m sure you have just concluded in the first portion of our show, it’s a must-read. Alan invites you into his mind, into his point of view, and shares personal experiences with you in a way that you’re not often going to find in contemporary non-fiction. Alan, I made myself a promise I would spend as much time as we have left discussing your newest book, just published last month, Dershowitz on Killing: How the Law Decides Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die. And the reason I was hoping we’d have a bit of time is because it is a topic—of course, I flash to capital punishment, obviously, immediately—but it’s much more than that. It is a topic which is so hard—I grapple with it, I’m troubled by it, I’m troubled by the fact that a government takes away somebody’s life in my name. And I have a hard time coping with it. So tell us—we don’t have as much time as we needed—but give us the teaser. Give us an introduction to Dershowitz on Killing: How the Law Decides Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die.
Alan Dershowitz: Well, first, I came up with the idea as I was in the synagogue on Yom Kippur. And there is the central prayer of Yom Kippur says that on this day, essentially, it’s determined who shall live and who shall die. And then there’s the Leonard Cohen song which deals with the same prayer. And I had those things in mind when I wrote the book. And death is different. And I started my career as a lawyer opposing the death penalty when I was a law clerk on the Supreme Court. And I’ve been opposed to the death penalty now for 70 of my 84 years, probably even longer than that, because I remember the Rosenbergs being killed in the early 1950s when I was like 13. And my cousin, Rabbi Kozlow, was the rabbi who administered the last—the Jewish equivalent of the last rites—to them. So the death penalty has been a central part of my thinking about law.
But I also in the book deal with issues like: when you die, do you have a right to take your life-saving organs with you? Or should you be obliged to donate your kidney and your heart and any other parts of your body that can be used to save a human life? I deal with assisted suicide. I deal with the Holocaust. And actually, I have the libretto that I’ve been working on of an opera based on the Holocaust. I have in it a letter that I’ve written to be published the day after my death—a letter to the editor complaining about my obituary. And you know, there’s a little bit of humor there too, a little bit of gallows humor. But to me, the most important thing the law ever decides are issues of life and death. And so every chapter in the book deals with an issue of life and death and how the law sometimes badly, sometimes poorly, sometimes better, deals with issues of life and death.
Bob Zadek: In furtherance of my teaser, when you wrote the book, what were your—if you had such a thing—primary resource material, reference material? Because you made reference a lot to Judaism and a lot to religious culture. You made reference even in the few sentences you spoke to the law. You made reference to the growing law of assisted suicide, which is presently being debated somewhat in our country. We don’t know quite what to do with it. So what were the primary resource materials you looked to in writing the book?
Alan Dershowitz: A book like this is so personal that you have to look to your own life experiences. So I look to my life experiences as somebody who grew up as a Jew. I look to my life experience as somebody who’s fought against capital punishment. I am an organ donor, and I want everybody else in the world to be organ donors and not to take their organs with them so that the worms can eat them. I’d rather have my organ be used to save another human life or to give somebody sight who is blind. And so a lot of the book is based on personal experiences. But you know, my personal experiences include reading widely. I never write without reference to Dostoevsky and Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. These are people whose contributions to my own values have been great over the years. So I don’t sit and separate, particularly at my age now. I don’t go and look to the library when I write because I know what’s in my library. It’s now part of my life and my experiences. So I write from my experiences, which are based on having read and lived a very varied and controversial life. So those are the sources.
Bob Zadek: The way I cope with the subject of death is I say to myself, I have 81 years of uninterrupted immortality, not been interrupted even for a day. So I’m on a roll. I’m optimistic that it will continue. Alan, thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time. I know how valuable it is. I wouldn’t dare ask you—I couldn’t know what—how to ask an author what book would you write after you write about death? What follows? It has an air of finality to it. But I suspect you’ll find a 52nd or 53rd book after that. Thank you so much. I truly appreciated your time. I know how valuable it is and I know my audience will as well.
Alan Dershowitz: I enjoyed your questions. Thank you. Thank you.