Left Jabs

  B ig Law is on the hot seat. Major firms have unexpectedly been thrust into the front lines of the war against Trump, and all their options are bad. I wrote about this two weeks ago, and since then a slew of big firms have either made a deal with the devil or joined the side of the angels. On the minus side, all but one of the top twenty firms have either taken the “deal” or stayed silent. I personally think they’re playing a bad hand badly. On the plus side — beyond those top twenty behemoths — there are hundreds of very large firms who have taken a stand, of sorts, against the junta. If you’re interested in keeping score , you can do so, but the whole thing keeps getting weirder. As we watch these “deals” being made, the one common denominator — and the most publicized aspect — is the “pro bono” work these firms are committing to. About a billion dollars’ worth of lawyering is available to be used in “conservative” causes. What does this mean? What ...

  History records that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was much the work of one man, Mikhail Gorbachev, and there is some truth to that. But one could also argue that the fall actually began in 1962, with the publication of a single book, and the astonishing bravery of the man who wrote it, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The book was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and the simple fact of its publication was, at the time, seismic. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, was walking a tightrope. He needed to find a way to pull Russia out of the abyss of Stalinism, and restore some sort of normal life after three decades of hellish oppression and mass death. But he had to do this without allowing any meaningful change to the sclerotic system that had created Stalin, and given absolute power to the Communist Party. So, for a short time, there was what became known as the “Khrushchev Thaw,” a loosening of the totalitarian shackles — both physical and psych...