Alan Dershowitz: On Becoming a Republican in His Ninth Decade

As he recounts in the introduction to Why I Quit the Dems: And So Should You! (confessions of a reluctant Republican*), the well-known attorney and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School worked on his first Democratic Party campaign at the age of fourteen. Although Dershowitz decided to become a law professor rather than a politician, as his parents had at times hoped, he remained intermittently involved with the party throughout his long career, including stumping with former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg when Goldberg challenged Nelson Rockefeller in the 1970 New York gubernatorial race. He was also a frequent donor to Democratic candidates. At one time, Dershowitz was considered one of the most recognizable Democrats in the legal profession.

But then in September of 2024, shortly after the Democratic National Convention, Dershowitz left the party to become an independent, citing the number of speakers at the convention with views he considered hostile to the State of Israel, particularly Al Sharpton. Although Dershowitz already was at odds with Democrats over affirmative action and DEI, he maintains that he might have "remained a lonely Fetterman Democrat" were it not for the party's shifting views on Israel. Then, in April of 2026, Dershowitz announced via a Wall Street Journal op-ed that despite differences with the GOP "on abortion, the separation of church and state, immigration, healthcare and taxes," he still "decided to bite the bullet and register as a Republican." Israel was the deciding point.

This discussion marks Dershowitz's second interview with Merion West, following his conversation with Erich J. Prince last year on Dershowitz's magnum opus The Preventive State. In this conversation on Why I Quit the Dems, Dershowitz and Prince revisit a topic from their prior interview: Iran. They then discuss whether the United States remains a centrist nation; the future of free speech; Dershowitz's views on the contemporary state of both the Republican and Democratic parties; and whether any political party ought to describe itself as "big tent."

---

We last spoke in May of last year, about your book The Preventive State. As I look back on that conversation, one of the themes was potential military action against Iran, something you also discuss in Why I Quit the Dems. I just wanted to begin by getting your thoughts on the Iran conflict as it continues to unfold.

I think history will recognize the attack on Iran's nuclear facilities as one of the most important military actions of the twenty-first century.

I wrote an article a couple of months ago saying that 1935 was the worst year in modern American history—modern world history. Why? Because nothing happened. It was the last year in which France and England could have stopped Nazi Germany from doing what they did, killing a hundred million people. But they didn't do anything.

And I think that President Trump was presented with the same dilemma. Should it be 1935? Should he do nothing? And he decided to do something, to bury the nuclear material under rubble, making it inaccessible to the Iranians, at least for the moment.

Is it a permanent setback? Was it a devastation? Was it all the words he used? People can disagree about that. But he certainly set back Iranian nuclear ambitions considerably, and I think that has been a really important development toward world peace.

And now if he could take the next step and topple the regime, we would have real peace in the world. We would really see peace in the Middle East if this regime were toppled. Unlikely it's going to happen, but I give him a lot of credit for trying.

One of the key points you brought up in your previous book and in that conversation we had last year is that we often don't see what could have happened were preventive actions not undertaken.

We saw today at the UN the president of Iran saying that Iran will develop civilian nuclear power. We know that's a lie. We know Iran has no interest in nuclear power. They have all the oil in the world. They are only interested in developing nuclear facilities in order to build a bomb.

We know that for one hundred percent certainty, and yet the president of Iran continues to lie about that in front of the General Assembly of the UN as recently as now.

Turning to your latest book, obviously, it's always notable when someone so long associated with a particular political party makes the shift that you did.

I know you mentioned how some of your family members, even if they don't agree with you, are more civil about it. I understand you may have recently reconciled, but Larry David, for instance, very strongly objected to your relationship with Mike Pompeo.

Can you talk a little more about how people you've known from your decades of life as a Democrat have been dealing with this?

I was very pleased that Larry reached out to me a few weeks ago and said that he was sorry the Brooklyn in him came out, and he was very upset.

I like Mike Pompeo a lot. I consider him a friend. He's a former student of mine. I think he's a great man, and I think he'd be a great public official again. So I'm not going to apologize for my support of Mike Pompeo or my support for President Trump's actions.

I would hope that real friends stick with you even if you don't agree politically. Some have; some haven't.

All my family members have remained Democrats, except my wife. She's an independent. She's not a Republican. But everybody else in my family has remained Democrats, and yet they still continue to obviously love me, and we discuss it and we talk about it.

We try not to talk about it over Passover Seder or during Rosh Hashanah dinners or Thanksgiving dinners, but we do talk about our differences. And we have intelligent conversations about it, and I appreciate those conversations.

Those conversations aren't occurring in places like Harvard. You cannot have a serious conversation about politics at Harvard University.

An example: I was at Harvard for fifty years, and I've been gone now almost fifteen. I've never been invited once back to the Harvard Law School to have a debate about politics. They don't want a debate. They don't want to have their minds changed.

The universities have become places of real mediocrity. When I was at Harvard, we used to have great debates. I debated William Buckley. I debated Norman Podhoretz. I debated so many conservatives, and the students loved it. Today, the students are being deprived of that.

I recall last time you even told me about a study group you were part of as a young faculty member with John Rawls.

A couple of Nobel Prize winners were in the group. Those were great times where you could really debate and discuss. That isn't happening at universities today.

To that point, you include in the book a question-and-answer exchange from this past February, and you actually suggest that “the left promoted free speech when it was good for them, and the right did it when it was good for them.” If that is the natural tendency of both political sides, is there a lot of hope for consistent, classically liberal free speech?

No, there isn't. And you saw recent polls just in the last couple of days where, I don't know, thirty-two percent of Democrats are willing to assassinate President Trump and support having a coup to get him out of office by unlawful means.

We're seeing a lot of ends-justify-the-means attitudes now today on college campuses. Tolerance for differing points of view is not being taught, and debate is not being encouraged.

And it's too bad because if you want to know what a country will look like in twenty years, look at what the colleges and universities look like today. They look like intolerant places where meritocracy is dead, where ideas are judged not on their merits but on who makes them (and the race or gender of the person who makes them), and where admissions are based on gender, unconstitutionally.

I think we're seeing the demise of meritocracy at the universities.

Editor’s note: A September 2026 survey asked 683 Democratic voters how they would feel about hypothetical news headlines. Thirty-one percent said they would feel positive about a headline reporting President Trump’s assassination at a rally; forty-three percent said they would feel negative. Fifty-nine percent said they would feel positive about a separate headline describing a military takeover. The questions measured reactions to imagined events, not willingness to commit violence.

One of the interesting things in your book was the chronological progression of your views. And one of the articles that struck me was one you wrote in 2021 about the Squad.

You suggest that either those who are actually part of the Squad or people with their viewpoints “probably could not be elected in statewide races” due to a lack of broad support.

I wonder if you still think that's true today with someone like Abdul El-Sayed leading in many polls in Michigan or betting markets increasingly favoring Troy Jackson in Maine over Senator Susan Collins. Do you still stand by that 2021 position about very progressive candidates struggling statewide?

No, I don't. I certainly think they can win primaries. There's no question in my mind that in order to win a Democratic primary today, you have to be a hard left, anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-meritocracy. You have to be a DEI advocate.

The question is, can you win a statewide general election? And that's changing, and we'll see what happens with El-Sayed, and we'll see what happens in Maine.

If Collins loses in Maine, do you know what's happening in the Senate? Not a single member of the Senate in all of New England will be a Republican.

It's probably the first time in history that the entirety of New England, which is forty-five percent Republican, will not have a single member of the Senate that is a Republican.

By the way, that would include New York. That would include New Jersey as well. There are a few House members, but, in the Senate, that would be the case.

You talk at length about how the United States has historically been a fundamentally centrist country, resisting the pull of both the far left and the far right, of communism and fascism.

Do you still think this describes the electorate in 2026, or has the center weakened? I'm thinking of Mamdani's election in New York, for example.

There's no question that the center has weakened. There's no question that, going forward, we're going to see much more of what happened in the 1930s all over the world, except the United States.

The United States and Great Britain were the only two countries that resisted the pull toward fascism and communism because of two people: Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both of our countries resisted that.

Today, they're moving in that direction, and it's not only the United States. England is moving toward extremes. Canada is moving toward extremes. Australia is moving toward extremes.

I think we're seeing a very direct movement toward extremes in what used to be liberal democracies.

What do you think best explains that? Is it high levels of immigration? Is it a fragmented media landscape? What do you think best explains that, at least in the United States?

I think the social media explains it more than anything. And universities.

One of the main features of your book, the guiding principle, has been the degree to which the Democratic Party has changed its view on Israel.

You even suggested that President Biden might be the last sort of strongly pro-Israel president, and even that is a debatable claim.

But I think one of the points that I found the most persuasive is the resistance of some members of the Squad to funding Iron Dome, which you point out is a purely defensive mechanism.

Can you talk a little bit about why you included that discussion of Iron Dome in particular in that essay?

It's more than just the Iron Dome. A lot of Democrats voted against any kind of defensive weapons for Israel, and we're seeing a movement within the Democratic Party against allowing Israel to defend itself.

We're seeing a real change in that direction, and that's one of the reasons that I left the Democrats. I want to see Israel able to defend itself.

I think today anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, anti-Israelism has become one of the great evils of the twenty-first century—much more serious than racism or sexism or homophobia.

Those are all moving in the right direction, whereas hatred of Jews is moving in the wrong direction.

If I remember correctly, you mentioned that your grandmother used to look through things often through the prism of what is good for Jews. Arguably for a number of decades, a lot of American Jews had the luxury of not having to do that. But it seems as though that is no longer potentially the case.

I think that's right. When I'd come back from a Brooklyn Dodger game and I would tell her the Dodgers won, my grandmother would say, "Yeah, but was it good or bad for the Jews?"

She would look at it through that prism of having come from a country of pogroms and anti-Semitism. And I thought my generation didn't have that.

But now I go back and I now think often: "Is it good or bad for Israel? Is it good or bad for the Jews? Is it good or bad for America?"

Because I think things that are good for America are good for Israel and vice versa. Israel is America's strongest ally.

So I know that you have indicated some other areas where you disagree with the new Democratic mainstream, so to speak, with DEI and maybe affirmative action. But do you think you would still be Democratic if the party had basically stayed constant on Israel?

I don't think so. I think I might be an independent. I might not be as strongly supportive of the Republicans winning, but I don't think I could be a Democrat.

I don't think I could be a Democrat today in light of its opposition to meritocracy, its support for racial quotas, and everything being determined by identity politics.

I don't think I could remain a Democrat, even if the Democrats were supportive of Israel. But certainly their attitude toward Israel pushed me more quickly away from support for the Democrats.

I asked how you have been received by Democratic friends. So now maybe the question is: How are you being received among Republicans? Clearly, you still have differences with a lot of people in the Republican Party on social issues.

They're much too friendly to me. They're inviting me all over the place to speak, and I think of myself a little bit as an oddity, an old Democrat who now has become a Republican.

So the Republicans love me, probably a little bit too much, because I'm going to turn on them too if they don't support my liberal values on issues, like a woman's right to choose or the separation of church and state. I'm a liberal. I'm a libertarian. Right now, my views are more consistent with the Republican Party. I don't know how long that will maintain.

If Tucker Carlson became more dominant among Republicans, I would have to change and reconsider my views as well.

So far, the Republicans have done a much better job in marginalizing their extremists than the Democrats have done. Chuck Schumer has embraced El-Sayed, whereas President Trump has not embraced Tucker Carlson.

Or Thomas Massie.

Right.

I remember in 2019 when then-Democratic Congressman Jeff Van Drew was in the Oval Office switching to the Republican Party, and the press asked, basically, “What do you make of this congressman joining your party, who's voted against the first Trump administration some high number of times?”

And Kevin McCarthy says, “The Republican Party is the big tent party.”

But I heard Chuck Schumer say something similar a few weeks ago about the Democratic Party. Do you think either party is capable of being a big tent party?

The big tent is a terrible metaphor. Big tent could incorporate Nazis and communists and fascists and Islamists and all of that.

No, that's not what parties are about. Parties are supposed to represent something, stand for something in principle. So that's what I'm hoping will happen.