Retired Harvard criminal law prof, Alan Dershowitz, has become a pariah in polite academic society, which wouldn’t be a bad thing but for the reason.

It’s rather striking that Dersh and Dennis Prager, a conservative radio talk show host, are sitting in the same room, talking calmly to each other, agreeing. A mere decade ago, this would have been more likely to be a naked mud-wrestling match. 

One explanation for this phenomenon is that Dersh has gone cold, the one-time wooly-haired liberal has become a Trump apologist and conservative shill, an ex-prawf willing to say whatever will get him a TV gig to keep his name in the papers and puss on the screen. Given his history of being provocative for its own sake and his self-aggrandizement, this wouldn’t be much of a stretch.

But even blind squirrels find an occasional nut.

Dersh’s dismissal of the alt-right, whom he calls “a few dozen people with swastikas,” suggests he’s deliberately trivializing the “hard right.” While the naxos threat was more goofy fear-mongering, they represent merely a small contingent of cosplaying fools. There remains a far larger group of people in America who aren’t play-acting Nazis, but are very much racist, plus a variety of other -ists.

But even assuming they represent 10% of the nation,* over 30 million people which is not an insignificant number, it means 90% of the nation does not share their racist views. While 30 million people shouldn’t be taken for granted and dismissed with a wave of the hand, they do not carry the moral suasion to bring a majority of people to their racist point of view. To the credit of a nation, there is no argument, no appeal to emotion, the hard right can make that will carry a nation back to the days when the majority hated people for their skin color or other immutable characteristics.

But you wouldn’t know this on social media, where anyone not bowing to the progressive extreme is called a racist. While the alt-right can’t drive people to its side, the hard left is well-positioned to drive away, and farther away with every twit, the very people who are in general agreement with its goals, if not its methods and ideology.

The other day, I was challenged for my lack of acquiescence to identity politics as being either a person who doesn’t care about Equal Protection or, worse, someone with a secret racist agenda. Unlike most people, my career as well as my writing overcame any compulsion I might otherwise have to argue my Equal Protection bona fides, but it was enlightening to be lectured by someone who reads books about the sorts of things I’ve done.

Dersh’s flip side, however, is the one that matters more. These elite students are the future leaders, the people who will hold office, run law firms, sit on benches and boards. And they believe.

It’s been decades since I’ve sat as a student in a classroom. I assume they’re still taught Hadley v. Baxendale, but I don’t really know what else they’re taught. Dersh dismisses law profs as cowards, which may be the case with some of the older academics.

It’s been an issue faced here, and I’ve responded rather testily to prawfs who would send me emails asking me to write about some issue they’re confronting in the classroom, because they didn’t want to take the risk of writing about it themselves. It’s not that I disagree, but that their refusal to stand up and speak their mind because of academic intolerance speaks louder than anything I can say.

When I was in the classroom teaching, I saw it in the students. No longer did they come to learn, but to have their beliefs validated. When that didn’t happen, some turned hostile. It wasn’t just that they couldn’t take gentle criticism, but that they refused to accept the premise that their views weren’t deserving of equal respect to that of their teachers. In other words, they refused to be taught.

But Dersh ignores the other part of the problem in the Academy, that the younger generation of academics isn’t afraid, but believes as well. They aren’t pushing social justice into their classrooms to get high marks on student evaluations, but because they believe in the cause and believe it to be their duty to turn out graduates whose ideology is pure and correct.

There is a nagging pain behind my eyeballs when I agree, even in part, with Alan Dershowitz. Even more of a pain when Dennis Prager doesn’t strike me as completely off the wall. But there is a realization here that even those people who espouse views that fall short of agreement are more reasonable, more susceptible to rational discussion, than those who are so ideologically bound to their beliefs that no discussion, no disagreement, no variance from the orthodoxy, can be tolerated.

And as Dersh correctly points out, the reason this matters isn’t that the alt-right frog-boys have any possibility of their message of hate resonating on college campuses, but that these true believers will be the ones with the education and credentials to direct the future of America down the road to well-intended perdition.