The American Political Science Association, which will be meeting next week in San Francisco, will be featuring John Yoo on two panels. Many political scientists are protesting this decision, and will be protesting Yoo at his panels. I am not attending the conference this year, but I wrote the following letter to the two program chairs of the conference. Dear Professors Jamal and Hyde: In his celebrated diary of daily life in the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer writes: If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not […]

Lesser evilism is always a trope in an election campaign. In part because it reflects a very real reality: there are candidates who are worse against whom we must mobilize, even to the point of casting a ballot in favor of an only slightly less odious candidate. But here’s the problem with that argument: human nature being what it is, that argument can also be used on behalf of the truly odious. As our friend Victor Klemperer discovered in Nazi Germany. Writing in his diary in April 1935: Frau Wilbrandt told us: in Munich people complain out loud when Hitler or Goebbels appear on film. But even she—economist! close to the Social Democrats!—says: “Will there not be something even worse, […]

Increasingly, one hears the view that not only is Donald Trump a fascist but that he will be elected president. I don’t know what I think about these claims, but it seems to me that if we truly believe them, we’re obligated to ask the question: What will we do once Donald Trump is elected president? Woody Allen offered one answer in Manhattan. Whatever one thinks, I’m struck by the mismatch between the easy avowal, which you see around various precincts of the internet left, that the future looks bleak and the failure to consider the logical next question: What is to be done? It may be that I’m over-reading the discussion because I’m going through one of my periodic late-night reading binges […]