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INTERVIEW WITH GREGORY FRIED
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Gregory Fried is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. He has taught at the University of 
Chicago, Boston University, California State University Los Angeles, and Suffolk University. He 
specializes in political philosophy and has a particular interest in responses to challenges to liberal 
democracy and the rise of ethno-nationalism. He also works in the philosophy of law, especially 
law and hermeneutics; philosophy and race; practical ethics, including just war theory; public 
philosophy; the history of ethics; Ancient philosophy; and 20th century Continental philosophy, 
especially Heidegger. This interview was conducted on November 17th, 2020.

Dianoia: Professor Fried, thank you for agreeing to interview with Dianoia: The Under-
graduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College. We are very excited to discuss your book,  
Because it is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror. Thank you 
for being with us.

Fried: My pleasure, thank you for inviting me.

Dianoia: Can you please give us a brief introduction to your book and highlight a few of its 
central claims?

Fried: The book began as a reaction to what came out of the news in the spring of 2004. 
I think it was April of 2004 when the first word of the torture that was being conducted 
in Iraq spilled out. I was very moved and concerned by that, and I, from that time on, had 
many conversations about it with my father. He and I were working on various aspects of 
philosophical and legal responses to it, and at a certain point we said, “Why don’t we just 
do this together rather than compete with one another; let’s combine forces.” And, so, what 
that brought together were my interests in figures like Locke and Aristotle on questions of 
prerogative and law at the limit and my father’s interests in what he had seen in the govern-
ment in terms of the abuse of presidential power and constitutional issues around privacy. 
We wanted to have an overarching discussion of these concerns that had jumped out at the 
political community of the United States following the outbreak of the war on terror. So, 
the subtitle of the book is “Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror.” 
Each of those are domains of pushing at the boundaries of either moral or constitutional 
legal norms that were put at issue by the war on terror. I think both my father and I came 
at those issues through a combination of philosophical lenses—I think most prominently a 
Kantian lens on the question of torture. We weren’t trying to force one specific philosoph-
ical lens on it, we wanted to try to analyze it with the help of philosophers who could help 
us articulate our points to make our own argument for an audience wider than simply a 
philosophy audience. So, that’s the background to the book. In the book itself we make the 
case that torture is wrong and that it should be avoided—in fact, made both morally and 
legally impermissible, as an absolute. But then we look at the questions of privacy and the 
extent and limits of presidential power within the same framework as well. What are things 
that break absolute restrictions on political or individual ethical behavior? Is the invasion 
of privacy like torture? Or, is it a different order of things? Is a president who bends or 
even breaks the law for the sake of national security the in same kind of absolute situation 
that we are facing with the question of torture? Our answer for those is that privacy is an 
important moral domain that any legitimate government should respect, but it’s not the 
absolute that the prohibition of torture is. The same, surprisingly, ends up being true of 
what we call executive law breaking, which means any person, not just a president, whose 
legitimate function within a constitutional republic is to execute the law and be respon-
sible for seeing that the law be faithfully upheld in situations where such a person might 



9Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Interview with Gregory Fried

bend or break the law in a legitimate way. The nature of that legitimacy is very compli-
cated, and that’s what we try to address. Those are the broad parameters of the book, 
and I’m happy to spend as much time as you’d like talking about some of the details.  
 
Dianoia: Moving forward to more of a future perspective on it, what changes do you 
anticipate in the global discourse around torture? Especially when figures like Donald 
Trump or Rodrigo Duterte say that torture “absolutely works.”

Fried: First of all, those figures are not particularly credible sources for the claim that tor-
ture works. But, they play an important rhetorical role in the public’s fear that has gained 
in influence over the last decade and has come to great prominence with the success of 
Donald Trump and figures like Bolsonaro and Duterte, and other quasi to genuinely 
authoritarian leaders throughout the world. I think it’s important to note that for author-
itarian, totalitarian or dictatorial leadership, torture plays a very important role. It is a 
tool in their toolbox that they want to lay claim to, but not for the stated purpose that it 
works to prevent terrible crime. What it works for is enhancing the power of an autocratic 
regime. One can give credit, even to a figure like Donald Trump, if one wants to, to say 
that they sincerely believe that there are certain circumstances where they think torture 
will work to prevent some great wrong. That may in individual cases be what’s motivating 
them to embrace torture, but functionally, if you look at the role of torture in regimes 
that have used it, especially in the 20th century, whatever the initial intent, what ends up 
happening once torture becomes institutionalized as one of the tools of the government 
is that it plays a distinctly oppressive role in the work of an authoritarian or dictatorial 
or totalitarian (if we are going to go from bad to worse) regime. The reason for that is 
that the torture itself becomes the point for those kinds of regime. It is not what they can 
accomplish in terms of intelligence or crime prevention; it is what they can accomplish 
in terms of terrorizing a population and corrupting the forces of law that are part of the 
institutions that the authoritarian or dictator want to bring into their fold. 

There are a variety of arguments one can make against torture, some of them can be deon-
tological, as my father and I tried to do, so in other words a claim about the sheer wrong-
ness of torture in of itself, as an act, that should be avoided, but there are other kinds of ar-
guments that are consequentialist arguments that I think are also very important that have 
to do with what happens to a society when torture is institutionalized. I don’t think it is 
particularly helpful to base policy  on some fantasy or imaginary thought experiment about 
whether or not in this or that emergency situation it would be right to torture somebody to 
prevent some terrible wrong from happening. I have a very strong philosophical problem 
with using thought experiments in order to establish policy, and I can come back to that. 
But, your question was about the world that we are engaging in the future, and I think it 
is very important to bear in mind that the rise of authoritarians and quasi-authoritarians 
will be accompanied by torture regimes. Therefore, the defeat of those kinds of leaders is 
very important. So, the next five years are going to be decisive. Will Donald Trump have 
a comeback after a Biden presidency? If he has a comeback, will he come roaring back 
and thereby be able to tear down even more of the institutional and cultural norms in our 
society? If he succeeds in that, or somebody like him succeeds in the United States, it will 
pull down the barriers for world leaders across the globe to incorporate torture in their 
governance. And they will do that not because it’s good for law enforcement or prevent-
ing horrible emergency scenarios. They will do it to entrench their rule. That’s the goal.  



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

I can’t predict the future, but what I can predict is that torture is like a canary in the 
coal mine. The more it’s happening, the more likely it is that you have a political com-
munity that’s shifting from some form of democratic republican form of government 
to an authoritarian one. It’s just not the tool of a democratic regime. It corrupts a dem-
ocratic regime to use torture. So one way to think about that is once you institution-
alize torture, what branch of the government is responsible for torture? Who are you 
going to be training to do the torture?  What’s going to happen when they come out 
of the military, for example, and join the police forces. It’s very hard once you start 
down that road to contain it, as if in some toxic waste facility. That’s not how insti-
tutions and governments and cultures of governance develop. Once you change a cul-
ture of governance by bringing in a torture regime you’ve changed much much more 
than just whether or not you’re torturing some people in some black site somewhere. 
 
Dianoia: In the final chapter “learning not to be good,” you make the distinction be-
tween something being wrong because it is illegal and something being illegal because it is 
wrong. How can executive officials know where to draw the line between those two types 
of wrongs when they are faced with a dirty hands situation?

Fried: There is no formula, and that’s what makes being involved in civic life a risky 
business, and it is one reason that we should be charitable to people who go into law en-
forcement, but we also have to be vigilant about what the boundaries are. This is really the 
problem if you have a democratic regime, such as ours, where the rule of law is really im-
portant and where officers of the law are just that: servants of the law entrusted to uphold 
it for the good of the people. We have a democracy, or a republican form of government 
that involves democratic elements. The idea is that it is the legislature and the people. In 
a regime like ours, the people are sovereign, so ultimately, it is they who get to decide. 
They decide on what the rules are through their representatives who make the laws, and 
then the officers of the law, from the parking meter enforcer to the president of the United 
States, are meant to be servants of the laws as they are passed by the people. That is what 
it means to be an officer of the law. Unlike other forms of regime, where the officer of 
the law can claim to be the law, especially in a monarchy. In a democracy, by contrast, 
the officer of the law is not meant to substitute their own judgement for the judgement 
of the people acting through their representatives in their law-making function. At the 
same time, part of the duty of an officer of the law is to attend to the common good of the 
community that they are serving, and it is impossible to lay out a formula in advance to 
be able to tell such an officer when their duty to the law will come into profound conflict 
with their duty to protect their community or an individual member of their community. 
You can try to build in all kinds of safeguards for emergency situations into the law, but 
it is ultimately impossible to build in enough safeguards so that you can cover every cir-
cumstance that might come up. The answer that my father and I have to this problem is 
that somebody who is an officer of the law, whether it is a police officer or the president 
of the United States, when they are faced with such a situation, must do what they think 
is best in terms of balancing the rule of law with the good of the community, or the good 
of a particular individual. They have to then come clean about that. You do not just sweep 
it under the rug. But the degree of responsibility really depends on the context, and there 
are petty situations, like parking meter violations, in which you could imagine somebody 
who is a parking meter attendant not giving a ticket to somebody who has parked their 
car to rush in to save the lives of people in a burning building, right? You might want to 
tell your supervisor that you did that and just make sure that there’s nothing you have to 



11Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Interview with Gregory Fried

do, to fill out some paperwork or what have you. 

But then there are much bigger issues like what President Lincoln faced, or President 
Jefferson faced, where they had to violate Constitutional norms in order to protect the 
nation. Let’s take President Jefferson, where he faced a moment where he thought that war 
with England was imminent and that the United States was unbelievably badly prepared. 
Under the Constitution, only the U.S. Congress can appropriate funds for any purpose, 
such as restocking the military. Jefferson appropriated those funds and used them to se-
cure naval defenses for the United States, because Congress was not in session to make 
this decision, even though he knew that his doing so was a violation of the Constitution. 
What he did was to go to Congress afterwards and say, “This is what I’ve done. I know 
it’s a violation of the Constitution. I think it was still the proper thing to do. If you don’t, 
punish me, impeach me, censor me, whatever it is you need to do, but if you do agree 
with me, let’s ratify this ex post facto by you making some kind of legal determination 
about it, so that we repair the rule of law after this breach.”  I think that you can imagine 
ways of institutionalizing the officer of the law’s responsibility to the rule of law even in 
the breach of law. What my father’s and my concern was, in the Bush administration, 
was there was no such acceptance of the recognition that laws were being broken and 
that the executive had a responsibility to uphold those laws.  Instead of being upfront 
about them and making the right kind of appeals to the public and to Congress, they did 
these things in secret and tried to paper them over. That was the problem, and those were 
things having to do with privacy violations. That was our concern there. Those are conse-
quentialist concerns, but even if you are a Kantian, it does not prevent you from having 
consequentialist concerns about how the government is organized and how to deal with 
these very, very difficult positions that people in executive authority may face sometimes. 
We want to give them a way of dealing with it that also provides them with an out—that 
they don’t have to feel like law breakers and then cover it up. That’s the danger that we saw. 
 
Dianoia: You frequently refer to the animalization of human beings as a negative effect of 
torture. You quote Jeremy Waldron’s claim that “torture reduces human beings to cattle,” 
and remark yourself that “torture causes us to look at the human body as a side of beef, 
ready to be flayed and butchered.” Do you think it is fair that in our culture we associate 
being an animal with being a creature that bears brutal deforming psychologically damag-
ing pain, and how would you philosophize about the value of an animal soul?”

Fried: This question posed itself to us when we were writing the book, and an analogy for 
how we could have pursued it would be what we did in the book with capital punishment. 
As we were working through the problem of torture, it became clear to my father that our 
arguments against torture were also arguments against the death penalty, which he had 
not been opposed to previously but became opposed to through working through this 
argument. What I would say is that it may well be that the argument we made has impli-
cations for the treatment of animals, and if that is the case, then our use of the language 
of animalization would have to be changed, but the whole point of it would be that what 
torture does is it renders us a kind of being that we are not supposed to be, and that is 
an intense violation of what we are and who we are. I do think that there are very serious 
critiques to be made of how we treat animals even if you do not want to go to the lengths 
of animal rights activism or veganism or even just the baseline vegetarianism. I think you 
can make such arguments. There is a very ancient set of ideas in Judaism and Islam, for 
example, the rules for keeping kosher or for keeping halal, that are in part designed to 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

protect the well-being of animals. There can be a recognition that animals are not the same 
as humans and do not have the same set of rights as humans, but that we ought to still 
behave with a minimum of cruelty towards them, and I think that’s true, although these 
religious traditions may not provide a precise argument for what the limits of humane 
treatment should be. I have made a lot of decisions in my own life that move in that di-
rection in terms of my diet. I think the question is a really good one, and it is just not the 
book we ended up writing, but I think it opens up the  question about our responsibilities 
to any form of life, in terms of the pain we cause. It should be one that we examine with 
an open mind, and my mind is certainly still open. I have not completely resolved all my 
thinking, so, there we are.

Dianoia: In the chapter “The Big Ear,” you mention that privacy, specifically the sensi-
tivity to it, is more of a modern sentiment. Relating to the scenario in which a woman 
is keeping a Swiss bank account that is separate, is today’s sensitivity to privacy more a 
matter of how citizens are perceiving their own government’s corruption, or has having 
control over one’s public image rather than a non-consensual display of one’s private life 
become more relevant?

Fried: That’s really complex. I want to say something about privacy as a more modern 
concern. By that, we do not mean to relativize it or say it should not always be a concern. 
It has just become something that is very much at the forefront of our conception in mod-
ern times about what legitimate government should respect. The way that my father and I 
present that in the book is that unless there is some zone of privacy within which one can 
retreat with one’s own thoughts and inquiries, or to which one can retreat in conversation 
with other people, the possibility of a freedom that is enabled to ask the hard questions 
about the legitimacy of one’s own government, how one might want to change it, how one 
might want to live even one’s own life apart from political questions—all that  becomes 
impossible. What we say is absolute is that, based on the technological and sociological 
state of your society, there should be an equally appropriate zone of privacy to which one 
can retreat with a sense of security to work through the questions that you might have 
about your own life or about your political life without fear of being squashed like a bug. 
That will depend on the kind of technology that’s available, and it will depend on the 
kind of society you’re living in. A mass society like we live in now is very different from 
a hunter-gatherer society, and the level of privacy that you might require in those very 
different kinds of societies to feel that you have the appropriate zone of privacy to have 
for human freedom will be very different. It’s not that there is nothing to privacy—that 
privacy is simply a modern invention. I do not think that it is. At least, the need for it is 
not simply a modern invention. 

I think what you are pointing to in part of your question is just how challenging the prob-
lem of privacy is in our modern world, given the rapidly changing technological situation 
that we are all living in. Right now, we are meeting each other through Zoom, and it is be-
ing recorded, and who knows where it is going to end up, and how much damage it will do 
to any one of us in our future lives. I cannot remember if we quoted this in the book, but 
the Cardinal Richelieu, the famous seventeenth century French statesman who worked 
for the king and had enormous power, said something like this: “Give me five paragraphs 
written by the most honest man, and I will find enough to hang him with.” Here you and I 
have been having an hour-long conversation. It is much more than five paragraphs. If this 
falls into the hands of some future government, it very well could be enough to hang me 



13Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Interview with Gregory Fried

with, especially given the things I have said about Donald Trump and authoritarian rulers. 
To live in a free society, though, I need to feel that I have a sufficiently protected zone of 
privacy to speak my mind with you right now—to engage in the human freedom of phil-
osophical reflection and philosophical discussion. What we need given the enormous per-
vasiveness of these technologies that capture our behavior, our location, almost our every 
thought at this point, is that it not become so pervasive that we are afraid of our own free-
dom. How we are going to do that, I am just not sufficiently adept with the technology 
to know. All I know is that the risks are becoming greater and greater with every improve-
ment in the technology. The zone of privacy has to exist, but again, there’s no formula for 
what defines it at a particular point in history because that zone is so dependent on the na-
ture of the technology—and not just the technology, but also the kind of society you have. 
 
There is a famous Supreme Court case from the 1930s about whether telephone calls are 
privileged zones of privacy based on the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution and 
whether or not the government can just tap your phone lines or whether or not there has 
to be a court order. This was a case where the government had tapped the phone line in 
a phone booth in a restaurant that they knew the people who were under investigation 
would be using. The constitutional question was, was that an unreasonable search and 
seizure when they tapped that phone booth? The answer was that there is not a reason-
able expectation of privacy when you are out in the public world using public forms of 
communication. If you are in the restaurant and speaking very loudly about your plans to 
rob a bank, there would be no legitimate expectation in that sociological, technological 
situation to think that a loud conversation wouldn’t be overheard. The court said the same 
is true of a public telephone. If the phone were in their own apartment, then it would be 
different. The zone of privacy and the reasonable expectations about how its boundaries 
should be protected  would be different, but it is very hard to predict these things until 
you actually know the technological and sociological circumstances themselves.

Dianoia: Along similar lines, you start the chapter “No Beginning or No End” with the 
discussion about George Bush’s decision to break the law in response to the credible intel-
ligence that was received about Al Qaeda’s plans to develop a weapon of mass destruction. 
Would you say that there’s a reasonable threshold that, for conversation standpoint, we 
could have for determining how credible this so-called credible intelligence needs to be 
to serve as an impetus to violate the law for this public good, as you have been discussing 
this evening?

Fried: Our argument in the book was that prima facie Bush would have been justified 
in breaking the law if he had such a credible threat of such a massive, destructive event. 
He would still have to do what Jefferson did and Lincoln did, though, which would be 
to explain it afterwards and to have it publicly affirmed that what he did was acceptable 
by Congress or what have you. Your question is a much more specific one about what 
constitutes credible evidence. and I think that is almost a question for a political scientist 
rather than a philosopher, because I think it is a question of the institutions that we have 
and whether those institutions are trustworthy and what data those institutions, such as 
in the intelligence community, can legitimately count as evidence of a credible threat. So 
long as you have a minimally legitimate government with minimally dependable routines 
of processing that information, the president or other executive authorities are legiti-
mately responsible for acting on the basis of that information. How I would specify what 
the tripwire is between legitimate and illegitimate, I am just not expert enough to say, 



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according to current technology and law. I just think that epistemologically, there must 
be such a point at which it is legitimate to say, “I think I know enough now to make this 
decision.” The reason that you then make it public afterwards is to determine whether 
you improperly crossed that boundary or not. That is why as we say being a real political 
leader at a high level involves very serious risk that one takes upon oneself. We quote the 
Declaration of Independence, where the signers say that they pledge their lives, property, 
and sacred honor to the cause. The higher and higher up you get in political responsibility, 
the more important it is to remember that you have made that pledge, too, and that like 
a soldier you are risking something by taking on that responsibility. You are trusting in 
the good faith of the system that if you ever have to cross that line, and then you present 
your case for why you did it, the system will exonerate you and make good the rupture 
of the rule of law. That requires that we have a very well-functioning political society, and 
I think we can have that. The examples of Lincoln and Jefferson show that it is possible. 
Unfortunately, in the atmosphere we have now, it is hard to imagine that being the case. 
Being as fair as possible to Bush’s administration, you could understand why they would 
hesitate to proclaim their lawbreaking. Still, I think it was Bush's duty to do so because it 
is important to prevent the presidency from becoming more and more autocratic, rather 
than bound by democratic norms and limits. John Locke, whom some of you have stud-
ied with me, said, “Y'know, we need to give our rulers the authority to make those tough 
decisions to break the law sometimes.” He calls it prerogative. We also have to remember 
that it is extremely dangerous for those leaders to use prerogative, and he says in fact the 
most dangerous thing is a very good ruler who uses prerogative because then the people 
will come to trust that when a ruler breaks the law, they are doing it for a good reason and 
can account for it. Then along comes a very bad ruler who uses that same expectation to 
do very terrible things and then insist that they do not have to account for what they have 
done. That is what we have to worry about in the rule of somebody like President Trump. 

There is a really good book for those of you interested in these questions. It is called After 
Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, and it is by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith. For 
those of you who are interested in law and politics as they intersect with philosophy, I 
really recommend this book. Jack Goldsmith is a remarkable man. He served in the Bush 
White House in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is a special office in the White House 
responsible for giving the President advice on the law so that the president doesn't break 
the law. Jack Goldsmith, at quite a young age, became the leader in the Office of Legal 
Counsel. He had taken that position after John Yoo. The name might mean something to 
you if you studied that period, but John Yoo had authored some memos saying that these 
various "enhanced interrogation techniques" did not constitute torture, and therefore if 
the president or his officers engaged in these activities they would not be guilty of torture. 
Goldsmith saw these memos and said we have to retract them. That was a very brave 
thing to do. He got all kinds of blowback, and so he is one of the people that my father 
and I talked with a lot when we wrote this book. Goldsmith co-authored this new book 
about the Trump presidency because—and he is interested in exactly the kinds of thing 
that we're interested in, which is presidential power—what kinds of problems are we now 
seeing as this fraying of the guardrails to excessive presidential power has proceeded under 
Trump well past what happened in the Bush administration. It might have been a trickle 
under Bush, but under Trump it is a torrent of lawlessness. This book is about what we do 
to bring the presidency back into the rule of law without damaging the presidency, with-
out making it so weak that it is no longer an effective part of our government. I strongly 
recommend After Trump for those of you interested in these questions.



15Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Interview with Gregory Fried

Dianoia: At the end of the book you revealed that you and your father are not completely 
of one mind when talking about prosecuting officials, and I wanted to ask what that pro-
cess was like? How do you write with someone that you might not always see eye to eye 
with, and how were you able to cross that gap?

Fried: My father had a lot of training in philosophy when he was in law school. He has 
written works in philosophy, so at that level we could really speak the same language. I do 
not have the training in law that he has. I will tell you a very brief story. After my father 
and I finished the book, my mother told me that she had been really mad at my father for 
suggesting that we do this book together because she was really worried that we would have 
some horrible falling out over the issues. That just never ever happened, I think, because 
we each have a philosophical disposition to enjoy vigorous dialogue and we were willing 
to talk things out. Where we could not come to an agreement in that last chapter of the 
book, we incorporated the disagreement into the book! It all worked, and that was a really 
lovely experience. I have done other work like that in my professional career where I have 
translated philosophical works out of German with a colleague, and we constantly were 
going back and forth but never getting into serious arguments. When you can do that, it is 
one of the great intellectual pleasures in life. I think our solution in that book was the best 
solution, which was just to incorporate our disagreement into the life of the book itself. 
That way, the reader would be presented with this stark problem that faced the nation 
after the Bush presidency, which was, "Here are these unpunished excesses committed by 
the executive branch; do we let that lie for the sake of the unity of the nation, or do we do 
something about it to make clear that these lines shouldn't be crossed?” Now we have had 
the Trump administration, which seems to bear out my side of the argument, which is if 
you do not do something about such transgressions, they will just get worse and worse. 
 
The fascinating thing about the After Trump book is that the two authors did the same 
thing. Bauer and Goldsmith end their book the same way: by one arguing that Trump 
should be prosecuted, and the other saying no. I teased Jack a little bit about that, saying 
that he had stolen our method, but I think it is a really useful thing to have in a book 
for conscientious citizens who want to understand just how tough these problems are. I 
would say we need to do something about Trump, although I think it is likely that the 
Biden administration will not seek his prosecution at the federal level, because Biden will 
not want to fray the nation’s divides even further. But there is a big difference between the 
Trump and the Bush administration. Trump's crimes are really the crimes of a dictator, 
not of somebody who's done things that are wrong for the sake of the common good, 
which if you want to be generous, you can say about the Bush administration. That is why 
it was so difficult for us in that context because I still have sympathy for what the Bush 
administration was facing, even if I think what they did was very wrong. With Trump, it is 
nothing like that. He is not doing these things for reasons of the common good. It is pure-
ly for his own benefit. If you are not going to come down hard on that, what are you going 
to come down hard on? The difference is that because Bush was doing these things for the 
sake of the common good, these were federal infractions, and therefore, in principle, he 
could be pardoned for them if it ever came to that. For Trump, he is committing crimes in 
so many contexts, so even if Biden pardons him for federal crimes, Trump will still have 
to deal with the state of New York, and they could still take him down. That might be 
good enough. It is still not as much as I would like to see, because I think Trump’s actions 
fell so far beyond the latitude that we should grant a president Although I am sensitive to 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

the problem that our country is really torn apart right now, and this could make it even 
worse, my fear is that the next president with authoritarian ambitions will be even worse 
than Trump if we do not set the bar somewhere.

Dianoia: Now that we are some years removed from the direct issues that you were dis-
cussing when you wrote this book around ten years ago, and now that we have the COV-
ID-19 pandemic still ravaging our country, would you say that there are any applicable 
takeaways from your discussion of the necessity to take bold action in the face of an 
overwhelming threat to the nation that would help inform our policy-making. You have 
clearly alluded to the inadequacy of the Trump administration during the last four years, 
and especially during the climax of the COVID-19 pandemic, so are there any applicable 
crossovers from what you have talked about in the book?

Fried: I think the gross negligence of the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 
was a conventional failure to face up to in an emergency. I do not think there was anything 
unconventional or illegal that was a useful option in that case. It was not like the threats 
coming from Al-Qaeda. This was a natural event. Maybe there would have been law 
breaking that a president could have engaged in order to facilitate the response. For exam-
ple, maybe seizing supplies of medical equipment in order to distribute them, assuming 
that would have been necessary. I do not know if it would have been, but let us assume 
that it was. That would be the sort of thing that we have in mind. In such a case, the pres-
ident would say, “Look, I did this. This was a crime. Congress of the United States, fix it 
by deciding either to impeach me or to confirm my actions.” The problem is that if it had 
been Obama making such choices with Mitch McConnell’s Republican Congress, they 
would have used it as an excuse to impeach him. That is what is driving this problem here. 
There is not sufficient trust between the branches of government so that a president could 
do what Jefferson and Lincoln did, which was to say, to put it in the vernacular, “Hey, I 
did this for the common good, cut me a break here.” That is what is so disturbing about 
our present moment because let us not forget Jefferson was president when he campaigned 
against John Adams. That presidential election was as vicious, if not more so, than the 
one that we just went through. The divisions between the Federalists and the Democratic 
Republicans were very serious. Again, it took courage on Jefferson’s part to expose himself, 
just as it did with Lincoln during the Civil War, when there were really serious political 
divisions that could have led to the end of their political careers. Lincoln’s re-election was 
not an obvious thing. He was facing challenges from people like McClellan, who would 
have made peace with the Confederacy. Exposing himself was a dangerous move, but I 
think it was the right one. At some point, you have to draw the line in the sand on these 
issues of presidential power because it looks to me like successive presidents are taking 
more and more and tearing out the guardrails against excessive power. Give one an inch, 
and the next one takes the mile, and the one after that is going to take a hundred miles. 
Soon, the country will be covered. That is the main lesson that I take. The fact is we do 
not yet know everything that we need to know about Trump’s law-breaking. The Mueller 
Report made very clear that Trump stonewalled them in gathering evidence at every turn. 
But I think we know enough to know Trump is deeply problematic. He has broken many 
serious laws, both constitutional and otherwise. We do not know everything, and more 
facts will emerge, I would hope, after his presidency is over —so long as he does not 
convince those Republican state legislatures to discard the popular votes in their states 
and substitute their own choice of the electors to go to the Electoral College, which is 
something that he has tried to get some of them to do. It is absolutely unbelievable. It has 



17Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Interview with Gregory Fried

a constitutional plausibility to it, but it would be the end of democracy if he does that. I do 
not think he will get away with it, though. I do not think the state legislatures will cooperate, 
but it just shows how far he is willing to push this in the direction of dictatorship, and the 
door has now been opened to the next attempt. 

You know, my father is a refugee from World War II Europe. I grew up in a household which 
had that era very much on its mind. He became a Republican because he believed that the 
best defense against the kind of tyranny that had destroyed his homeland—he was from 
Czechoslovakia, first a Nazi tyranny, and then a communist tyranny—was to have limited 
government and a sense among the people that their lives are their own and that the govern-
ment ultimately belongs to them. For my father, that meant you wanted to have as little gov-
ernment as possible while still maintaining the common good. He was a moderate libertarian 
Republican of the type that was very common in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. With the rise 
of the new Gingrich style of Republican, that more moderate Republicanism has gradually 
been eclipsed. That is no longer the Republican party that we have now—the kind of moder-
ate libertarian Republicanism that is suspicious of big government programs and regulation 
as potentially leading to governmental overreach. But what we have seen develop instead is 
that the overreach is coming from the supposedly conservative party. For somebody like me, 
and certainly for my father, there is certainly a kind of historical whiplash that we are seeing 
now where the old categories do not seem to mean very much anymore. If I were to leave you 
with one lesson from this, it would be to ignore the categories of liberal, conservative, left 
and right, because I do not think they are particularly helpful right now in terms of thinking 
about what is in the best interest of the nation regarding pivotal issues such as  reforms to 
make voting more accessible, fixing the Electoral College, and preventing voter suppression. 
These should not be liberal vs. conservative issues. They should be American issues. We have 
really gone off-track with that at this point. How to fix the divide, I am not sure. I am not 
enough of a prophet, but your generation will probably have to be the one to fix it, not mine, 
and not my father’s.


