Alan Dershowitz: Partisanship Is Destroying Principles in America

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor emeritus. John Lamparski/Getty Images for Hulu

“How dare they call themselves progressives,” Alan Dershowitz says. “They are regressives. They are reactionaries. They are repressors.”

In a recent episode of EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek and Harvard law professor emeritus Dershowitz discuss his latest book “The Price of Principle: Why Integrity is Worth the Consequences,” which argues that “unprincipled” partisanship has taken over the United States.

One of the top constitutional lawyers in the country, and a self-described liberal Democrat, Dershowitz has been excoriated by both the right and the left for defending highly unpopular public figures. Here, he shares his thoughts on systemic racism, due process, civil liberties, and the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States.

Jan Jekielek: “The Price of Principle” raises exactly the kinds of questions I’ve been struggling with. Has partisanship completely taken over?

Alan Dershowitz: Partisanship has taken over, but it’s an utterly unprincipled partisanship. If you dare to put principle before partisanship, you’re canceled. Your group won’t have anything to do with you. You have to be 100 percent partisan, no matter what the principles are. People claim principle, but they’re using it in a partisan way. It’s the opposite of principle. It’s doublespeak. Today, if you’re a principled person, you’ll be punished for it. Nobody wants principle or consistency.

Mr. Jekielek: You have a chapter in the book about systemic racism. Essentially, it’s partisanship masquerading as principle, isn’t it?

Mr. Dershowitz: It is. Meritocracy is a dirty word. You can’t use meritocracy. That’s white supremacy. There has to be racial advantage. But when there’s racial advantage, there’s racial disadvantage. Look at the Harvard case. Who’s suing Harvard? It’s Asian students, who are discriminated against because of quotas for black students. That case is going up to the Supreme Court, which I think will decide it the right way. But you know what will happen? All the major universities will cheat. They’ll still have racial quotas, but they’ll describe them as something else.

Mr. Jekielek: Do you see these Harvard student quotas as a form of racism?

Mr. Dershowitz: No, it’s an attempt to eliminate racism. But it’s a very awkward attempt, and it introduces new elements of racism. It’s not going to work in the end. We aren’t a systemically racist country. We’re a systemically anti-racist country.

The killing of George Floyd was inexcusable and horrible, but that event dramatically transformed us. The transformation was already occurring, but that one event changed it quickly, and the result isn’t equality. The result is to introduce a new kind of inequality and an anti-meritocratic approach.

Today’s woke generation looks for opportunities. They find events and use them to project their narrative. I tend to agree with a lot of their points of view, but they think the ends justify the means. Their utopia is going to be achieved, and so we don’t need the barriers of equal protection, due process, and free speech. Why do you need free speech if you already know the Truth with a capital T? Why do you need due process?

The left loves it when somebody they identify with is released, but they don’t want to apply the same due process standards to former President Donald Trump, or to a white person accused of oppressing blacks. I don’t like it when that happens, but I’ll defend anybody who the government is after. The more unpopular you are, the more likely I am to want to defend you.

And how dare they call themselves progressives? They are regressives. They are reactionaries. They are repressors. They want to stop due process and free speech and equal protection.

Mr. Jekielek: Three principles have dominated your life. I’m going to read them, because I found this very valuable. Number one: freedom of expression and conscience. Number two: due process, fundamental fairness, and the adversary system of seeking justice. Number three: basic equality and meritocracy.

Mr. Dershowitz: Yes. The one that’s the most unpopular today is the adversary system. If you want to appreciate defense lawyers like me, go to Iran, Russia, China, or Cuba, where people can’t get defense lawyers. People say I’m a horrible person because I defended O.J. Simpson or Leona Helmsley. Yes, and I’m going to continue to do that, just the way John Adams defended those who were accused of the Boston Massacre. It’s the essence of our system, yet it’s very unpopular. People love me when I defend people they like and hate me when I defend people they don’t like.

Mr. Jekielek: You cite Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, who says: “I’m on the side of law. I’m not on the side of justice.” It isn’t necessarily obvious why these things are different.

Mr. Dershowitz: I’ll give you an example. To convict somebody, you have to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. What if he’s guilty, but there’s no evidence of reasonable doubt? A guilty person goes free. That’s not justice. That’s the law. That’s a good law. It’s better that 10 guilty go free, than one innocent be wrongly convicted. That emanates from the Bible, from Abraham’s arguments with God over the sinners of Sodom. But it’s not justice, and I have produced injustice on some occasions.

Yes, I have occasionally gotten guilty people off. I don’t lose any sleep when I do that. I lose sleep when an innocent client gets convicted. That’s only happened a few times in my life, but it has destroyed me, because then I say it’s my fault. That’s why I fight so hard against that happening.

Mr. Jekielek: You said there were three things that made you a pariah in certain social circles.

Mr. Dershowitz: Representing Trump was number one. That put me on the “margins of academia.” Number two was representing Jeffrey Epstein. And the third, as the result of representing Epstein, I was accused by a woman named Virginia Giuffre, whom I never met and never heard of, of having sex with her on seven occasions, including in front of my house in a limousine. Her own lawyer admitted on tape that she was wrong. Her other lawyer admitted she was wrong. We discovered emails they tried to suppress, which revealed she never knew me, yet people believed it.

The people on the left don’t believe the sexual charges against me. They attack me because of the Trump business. Others attack me because if I’ve been accused, then I must be guilty. But I’ve clearly proved her [Giuffre] to be a serial liar. I’m suing her, and it will be resolved in court.

Note: American Thought Leaders contacted Virginia Giuffre about Dershowitz’s allegations against her, but didn’t immediately receive a response.

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s return to this element of systemic racism. There’s a lot of evidence that anti-Semitism is on the rise in this country, both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. What’s the relationship? Please talk about this, because you have some very good ideas about it.

Mr. Dershowitz: It’s clear that America in the 1920s and 1930s was a systemically anti-Semitic country. Jews weren’t allowed to work on Wall Street or in many law firms. They weren’t allowed into certain clubs. That was pure anti-Semitism, and that disappeared with the Second World War. What’s come after that, largely from the hard left, is a new disguise for anti-Semitism called anti-Zionism.

Here’s just one example: We hear arguments that Zionists have too much control over the American media, but The New York Times is an anti-Zionist newspaper. The Washington Post is certainly not pro-Zionist. At any rate, Zionism is becoming a euphemism for Jew. If you say you’re anti-Zionist, you can get away with it, because that’s political, not racial.

Of the social movements, for example, the Women’s March was headed by a virulent anti-Semite. Black Lives Matter was headed by anti-Semitic people. The Million Man March on Washington had Louis Farrakhan as a sponsor.

Mr. Jekielek: In “The Price of Principle,” you say, “My loyalty to the family comes first, even ahead of some of these other things.” But even in the family now, there’s this partisanship, with people not talking to each other. What’s the way out?

Mr. Dershowitz: There’s no clear way out. This trend toward the new McCarthyism on the hard left is going to be enduring because it’s being taught to our future leaders in universities.

I see it having a longer pendulum swing than many other things. McCarthyism in the 1950s was gone in 10 years. Left-wing McCarthyism will last many years longer. So, I’m not optimistic.

I’m going to end with a description of a pessimist and an optimist. In Israel, a pessimist is somebody who says, “Oy vey. Things are so bad, they can’t get worse.” The optimist says, “Yes, they can.”

And so I’m partly a pessimist, and partly an optimist. Things can get worse. But, I believe, along with Martin Luther King Jr., that the arc of justice moves in the right direction, but we need to help it. It doesn’t just move. We need to help it. I wrote “The Price of Principle” to stimulate that sort of debate and discussion.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.