Rearview Mirror

The Age of Trade-Offs

The historian Sophia Rosenfeld has written an engaging and profound book entitled The Age of Choice. By following several key arenas of life, she tells a story of modernity as an era of expanding options for consumption, religion, personal partners, and political ideas have expanded in the modern and contemporary era, often challengingly so, such that opting for one good or another can be bewildering. She shows us how choices were constrained and shaped often (in the cases, for example, of women or minorities) by others than those making them. And she reminds us that while modernity expanded choice, it is not necessarily the summum bonum of a good society. The wonderfully appropriate cover brought back childhood memories of the lemon meringue and chocolate cream pie slices on display in the glass-fronted compartments of Horn and Hardardt’s Automats.

With great admiration for Rosenfeld’s original conceptualization and rich documentation, I am prompted to describe the political choices that the Trump era will have left us with as “The Age of Trade-Offs” rather than the “Age of Choice.” Let me try to explain the difference, which may be one prompted only by this reader’s temperament. Rosenfeld understands that all choices exclude other choices, but her overall context is one of the modern era’s expanding options in the modern era. The “production possibility frontier,” to use the economist’s terms moves outward from its origin. Even taking account of notable regressions, “the age of choice,” which she traces back to the Protestant Reformation, has created more wealth and more opportunities for personal and political freedom.

For the Age of Trade-Offs, the I am struck more by the fundamental conflict of values that our society seeks to maximize, in particular the difficulty of reconciling justice with political stability in the wake of dictatorship, war, and atrocities. The production possibility frontier for these two goods, justice and reconciliation, is relatively fixed. For many years before my retirement in 2019, I taught a course on political trials and political justice from Socrates to the fall of Communism, and indeed I am currently trying to construct a book around the material I taught. The literature is enormous, as one could expect given the material: slavery, genocide, imperialism, war crimes, apartheid, and the toll taken by authoritarian regimes. (I would signal most recently Gary J. Bass’s monumental Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia, Knopf, 2023 and Vintage paperback, 2024).

The histories built on these themes make clear the hard choices left in the wake of authoritarianism, racist policies, and war. On the one hand, can successor political systems really build democratic institutions without bringing to justice the participants and collaborators in the previous dictatorships? Must the former victims live alongside their former tormenters without any redress? On the other hand, since collaboration was so widespread and rooted in the military services, police, and paramilitary institutions of the dictatorship, can the new regime really afford to purge and punish without provoking counter-revolutionary resistance? Does civil peace preclude retribution, and does democratization not require punishment of prior atrocious behavior?

After World War II and the defeat of the Axis, retributive justice could be attempted and was carried out in part, whether by successor regimes or the victorious allies. It was highly imperfect: “little fish” were often tried while “big fish” often got away. The original Nuremberg trial excluded Nazi crimes within Germany. It identified “crimes against humanity,” but not genocide per se excluded trying the National Socialist regime for crimes within Germany. Subsequent trials by the occupying powers focused on selected civil servants, doctors, industrialists and concentration camp personnel. Only at the end of the 1950s did the Germans themselves initiate prosecutions. And an active civic consensus based on recognizing and rejecting the National Socialist legacy arguably had to wait until a new generation came of age in the late 1960s -- not without the turmoil of ‘sixty-eight.” (See Andrew Port’s Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, Harvard University Press, 2023). There was no equivalent process in Italy; nor did the post-Franco regime in Spain initiate comparable trials.

But by the 1980s and 1990s the regimes changed: in Eastern Europe, Russia, Latin America and South Africa. Transformation percolated from a host of reasons -- the economic disparity with the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the steady growth of dissent, the costs of the arms race, and in South Africa, the isolation of the regime. The forces for transformation were committed, however, to peaceful transition, and essentially accepted a bargain; foreswearing prosecution of former rulers in return for the establishment of “truth and reconciliation commissions,” which would grant amnesties in return for testimony from former officials, including police and military. The system became known as “transitional justice.” Martha Minow of the Harvard Law School wrote the classic text on the process: Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Beacon Press, 1998); see also the collection, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton University Press, 2000). In South Africa, the idea of reconciliation attained a religious aura in part through the example of Nelson Mandela and the activity of Bishop Tutu. Not every victim or victim’s dear ones -- mothers most notably of young, assassinated activists -- was willing to accept this bargain.

The overall pattern seems to be that only when a disgraced regime has been militarily defeated have atrocities been vigorously prosecuted by its successors. The establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1993 and the International Court of Justice established by the 1998 Rome Statute -- which the United States declined to sign-- have yielded more encouraging results. Former rulers and under indictment have yielded to its jurisdiction, and successor regimes in Sierra Leon and Serbia have surrendered defendants to its jurisdiction.

We do not know whether the Trump regime will endure past the 1926 elections. We do know that the corruption, rhetoric, and unilateral action supposedly against terrorists is unprecedented since the Civil War, the suppression of freed Blacks after 1866, or the Indian clearances. But let us face facts: no American leaders are likely to deliver indicted leaders to an international trial. Those fearful of being captured abroad under the notion of “universal jurisdiction” are unlikely to expose themselves to that possibility. Will Americans ever try political abuses at home? Presidential impeachment has never yielded conviction. Still, we may someday (if we emerge intact from the Trump infringements on due process) have to face the question: reconciliation or trials, or even “restorative justice” and truth commissions?

Will reconciliation trump justice? Should it? After the bloody tyranny of “The Thirty” collapsed at the close of the Peloponnesian War, the restored Athenian democracy passed an amnesty that included a stipulation never to speak of the episode -- literally to consign it to amnesia or oblivion. At the end of the long French Wars of Religion, a similar prohibition was instituted. I would wager on the coming amnesia. Nations are communities that usually fall back on believing in their own redeeming virtues. Amnesia is likely to trump justice assuming that we exit from the Trump era short of large-scale violence. I am old enough to probably settle for the bargain. Others may not.

December 1, 2025