The abstract principle that human beings are born with dignity is too difficult for a person to formulate on her own. It had to be formulated by many minds in concert over generations and then enshrined in philosophical texts which shape worldviews and governments. Though the idea of human dignity is at least as old as the Bible, it was not set down in a political philosophy until millennia later. Liberalism is the word we use to refer to the systems of belief and the politics which are buttressed by this principle. It instructs that human dignity endures even when it is abused. And as a political philosophy, liberalism constrains the power of government in service to this inalienable human dignity. Liberalism hectors, and long may it do so, that might does not make right. Might can ignore the truth, but it cannot annul it. In a liberal country — and America is the only country founded explicitly on that philosophy — our leaders serve at our behest. Power does not confer dignity: humanity does. We are blessed to be born late, after this tradition had been developed, and after the government formed upon it has grown fat and sophisticated. Fat and sophisticated, but alas not always wise. In our country every four years the electorate grants power to a single executive, on the condition that that power be checked and bent to the citizens’ will and rights and good. But it is possible for a liberal system to democratically grant power to an illiberal leader, a leader who has contempt for individual rights and who does not have faith in the liberal system. Insofar as they are only a poll, elections are value-neutral and can reward illiberal leaders and parties without being undemocratic. Such a leader, once elected, can corrupt the power of the presidency by governing as if power itself is constrained by nothing but other power, and that rights are a myth which the citizenry cannot insist upon. Such a leader, like a medieval king, mistakes rights for privileges, which he believes are his to give and his to take away. There have been power-hungry American presidents before, but the power that they were hungry for derived from the mechanisms laid down in the Constitution. American identity has been perverted, misinterpreted, swollen, shrunk, and turned in on itself — but before Trump the many varieties of abuse dealt to the country by its elected leaders were all products of a particular president’s perverted interpretation of what America was supposed to mean. Trump is different. For Trump, American power is in service to nothing but the personal interests of the man at its helm. Even more than he detests those who “poison the blood of our country,” as he once put it, he adores himself. He is a misogynist but misogyny is not his worldview, and a racist but racism is not his worldview. Self -preservation and self-aggrandizement are his operating principles. Power for power’s sake — fascism, in a word. Trump’s prejudices are all handmaidens of his avarice. Donald Trump’s stranglehold on our power is premised on wringing out the liberalism which is the lifeblood of this country. He is a bloodhound, and he follows the scent of his own interests with a sub-intellectual zeal. The liberal system was designed to constrain precisely his variety of brute greed, and so he is hellbent on destroying the liberal system — our system, the system of government upon which American identity depends. The system that has made this country the most powerful source and defense of freedom in human history, and the philosophy which informs that system, is the price of his perpetual ascent. On January 6, 2021, our current president goaded thousands of violent supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol because, he insisted, the election held that year had been stolen from him. He instructed the mobs to fetch for him what was rightfully his. This was a lie which he told in order to protect himself. That day was traumatic for the country because on it a former president sowed distrust in the democratic process throughout the population of a great democracy. But for Trump something else happened that day: for the first time, and irrevocably, he associated his interests with the obliteration of our democracy. When he returned to power — through the very system he now permanently associates with his own defenestration — he returned to destroy it. It is often pointed out that, while Trump allies himself with various far-right groups (the Christian right, for example) he is not strictly speaking an adherent of any far-right ideology — of any belief system at all. This line of argument is sometimes trotted out to make the point that Trump is not as bad as the company he keeps. This is true: he is worse. His many allies have various discrete concerns, various uses for Trumpian contempt for the liberal system, but Trump’s concern, his aggressive obsession, is with the system itself. And so every beneficiary of American liberalism — and American beneficiaries in particular — is duty-bound to consider Trump and his allies the gravest threat to our wellbeing and our future. 
Powerful leaders of one minority group in particular, the American Jewish community, are already shirking that duty. I write as a member of that group, in the first-person plural, because I believe we have a duty to denounce the cowardice committed in our name. On January 20, 2025 — the first day of Donald Trump’s second and final term as president of the United States, the president issued about one thousand five hundred pardons and commuted the sentences of fourteen of the supporters of his who had, at his instruction, mounted that violent insurrection against the Capitol four years prior. Among those pardoned were members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two violent white-supremacist groups. On that same day Rabbi Ari Berman, the current president of Yeshiva University, gave the
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