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I thought he won that appeal and made big bucks on the book and movie deals.
Exactly when I think the change began (I should have said, "Reversal of Ideology", but I was making reference to the book/movie, not what happened to his case).
It might be unfair of me to say so, since I haven't followed Dershowitz's career all that closely, but there seemed to be an inflection point there, where his conviction that even the rich and powerful deserved a fair defense subtly morphed into something else. That superficial impression has been reinforced by the public utterances of his that have caught my eye. I admit to selection bias, and the need for further elaboration. But his anti-tenure crusade against Finkelstein seems consistent.
Today we can look back on that period with a different, perhaps better, understanding of that period of history, and fascism in particular, but we are much farther removed from it than they were. Something about that movement made them speak of it in those terms.
It shouldn't provoke such controversy to do so, either, regardless of where that examination took us. But then, we are here in the land (blogistan I mean) of instant moral judgment as personal entertainment, where the subtle thinking required for such a thing is actively discouraged.
It may not have been any easier, in any previous point in history, to put oneself in the boots of other people living in difficult times and places, facing difficult choices with all their (honestly gotten) human imperfections, blindnesses and lack of access to information, and to try honestly and sympathetically to understand what it was like for them, and what led to the outcomes that are laid out for our easy consumption. It probably wasn't.
But we seem to have lost the interest or the will to do it, and that loss seems to have accelerated in just the past ten years.
