I feel sick. Is it just me, or does this creature come across as a psychopath?
[WS:] I think you are missing the point entirely by trying to "psychologize" Mr. Dershowitz's opinions. Such approach rests on a questionable assumption that individuals like him are free agents freely expressing their values and opinions. I think a more realistic assumption is that these individuals are paid professionals, hired guns or mouthpieces, mercenaries, if you will, saying what their paying clients demand.
One does not expect an attorney to actually believe in his/her client innocence to perform competent defense. Au contraire, he/she is expected to deliver such defense even if he/she privately knows that the defendant is guilty as charged. The same holds for most other symbol-manipulating professions - from journalists, to social workers and social scientists, to lawyers and jurists, and to politicians - they say what the system that hired them demands, rather what they personally believe. I think that inflexible personal beliefs can actually hamper their ability to act in their professional capacity.
This may sound cold-blooded and cynical, but I agree with George Lakoff that applying the logic of personal morals to social phenomena, especially politics, is a metaphor - a simplified way of making sense out of complex and murky phenomena. I also think that this personal-ethics-metaphor approach to politics - while persuasive at the individual level (as Lakoff argues) - is also very misleading as it obscures more than it can possibly elucidate. Claiming that Dershowitz, Coulter, Limbaugh - or for that matter Michael Moore and scores of other political commentators peak out the contents of their psyche may evoke feelings of hatred or admiration, but otherwise limits our policy tools mainly to those used by Stalin or Pol Pot - rewarding sycophants and silencing or exterminating all real or perceived enemies.
The fact that so many otherwise intelligent and educated individuals (as well as scores of dim-witted and uneducated ones) in this country publicly speak out right-wing rubbish has more to do with the functioning of the knowledge production and distribution system than with personal beliefs and attitudes. A big part of it is, as Lakoff argues, how the right and left use their resources. The left and liberals (especially foundations and NGOs) spend their resources mainly on providing direct social services that elsewhere (e.g. in EU) would be provided by government. The right, otoh, unburdened by "bleeding heart feelings toward less fortunate," concentrates its resources on recruiting and training high caliber intellectuals who can tilt the public opinion - and government policies - toward right wing causes.
So instead of berating people like Dershowitz, Coulter or Limbaugh for expressing reprehensible opinions - a better approach is to recruit high caliber intellectuals who can effectively counterbalance such opinions. This goes far beyond giving more media outlets to people like Chomsky or Moore. It requires implementing a whole institutional complex - from schools, to churches, to unions, to mainstream media, to think tanks and to political parties that explicitly promote and defend a liberal/left point of view, and recruit and maintain professional cadres (as opposed to a few celebrity intellectuals) to that end.
Unlike Lakoff, I do not think that such partisan knowledge production and distribution systems can be built at will. There is a high degree of path dependency here (which is not the same as determinism - it is a probabilistic approach, see Brian Arthur, _Increasing returns and path dependence in economics_.) The window of opportunity for implementing such systems existed in the last half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. Europe took an advantage of this opportunity, while the US blew it. This created two divergent paths - European, with a visible and influential presence of liberal/left institutions, and American, with the overwhelming preponderance of right wing and religious institutions. Altering these paths is against the odds at the present time, but this may change if the status quo is sufficiently upset (which may or may not require a catastrophic event.)
Wojtek