An Interview with Professor Margaret Levi

A: I have always been deeply interested in the relationship between governments and those they are meant to serve. Moreover, as long as I can remember, I have been motivated to correct the injustices caused when government fails its populace or allows/enables their rights to be abused. My parents bought our first TV in the early 1950s so that we could watch the Army-McCarthy hearings; my mother, who lived a long life and died early in Trump’s first term, always said the scariest time she experienced in the US was during McCarthyism. I do wonder what she would think now…

I was raised with multiple anxieties about when governments I trusted could become governments I feared. I grew up in the shadow of the holocaust; if it could happen to Jews in highly respected and civilized Germany, it could happen here. I attended elementary school when we had drills requiring us to get under our desks in the event of nuclear bombs — an ineffective act against the bombs but effective in terms of frightening us about hostile governments. I stood in line awaiting my sugar cube and then later in line for a vaccine against the polio threat. I was in elementary school when Brown v. Board of Education was implemented. In all these instances, I felt government was my protector, but I also had a sense of how easily that could shift.