In the year of Trump, I am challenged to re-discover some things I had long ago put aside and have not had to confront much in my good and  life. I was much too busy messing up my life to be a patriot, or consider the very special meaning and idea of liberty.

The Year Of Trump, a surprising and disturbing year in so many ways, has made me think about liberty and what it means to me.  Mr. Trump has also forced me to confront in some ways the Jewish part of me, something I have never much identified with or come to terms with.

Some peoples – African-Americans, the Irish, Jews – have a particular DNA when it comes to certain ideas, words, sub-texts and language, this is almost a physical response to hatred and bigotry.

There have been many holocausts and much suffering by many peoples – no one has a monopoly on persecution –  but Jews have some finely attuned antenna that seems to rest deep inside of their bones. I am finding that this is true of me.

It’s not in the brain so much, it’s in the body. We always know it when we hear it.

We Americans often forget that liberty is a new idea in the civilized word, it was not really even mentioned until the 1600’s, not fully attempted until more than a century later. Until then, the world was ruled by monarchs, the notion of individual freedom was inconceivable. That  is why our Revolution was so special.

Aristotle wrote about liberty much  earlier, he said it was the freedom for a man do live as he wants.  He compared freedom to slavery, prevalent in the world in his time. That idea  of liberty holds up for me.

In 1689, John Locke was one of the first people to argue that the law of nature obliged all human beings not to harm “the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.”

I read almost every work Locke has ever written while writing about the New York Carriage Horses and I was stunned to discover that the mayor of New York City, tainted by too much real estate and animal rights money, was trying to take all of these things from the carriage drivers. He failed.

This passage from Locke is considered one of the foundation stones of the classic democratic notion of private property as a natural right which all individuals have, and even more important, the corresponding duty of citizens to respect the equal rights of others.

A century later, the philosopher Edmund Burke wrote to a young Frenchman and offered  his definition of liberty.

“…of all loose terms in the world,” he wrote, “liberty is the most indefinite. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty… The liberty I mean is social freedom. It is the state of things by which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint. A constitution of things in which no man, and no body of men, and no number of men, can find means to trespass on the liberty of any person, or any description of persons, in the society. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice…”

By restraint, Burke explained, he meant treating fellow citizens with dignity and respect. And restraint. We were all, after all, after the same thing: the right to live our lives in peace and freedom.

These two different notions of liberty were debated and embraced by our country’s founders, their ideas are all over our Constitution and government.

Liberty is not mentioned much in the presidential campaigns by either candidate. In  fairness, I define liberty this way for myself: the right to live my live freely, the right make decisions about my body and my health, the right to die as I choose, to work where I want, to worship in peace and privacy,  say what I wish. On Facebook and in politics, that is still a right one often  has to fight for, but it is worth fighting for.

I would not generalize about Jews, I don’t really know that many.

But I do think my people have a special sensitivity to the idea of restraint and the individualist notion of the natural rights of all of us to the unfettered enjoyment of their, liberty, and property.  Jews have a lot of experiencing reading language and discerning meaning and motive.

My grandparents had never encountered the idea of “liberty” until they washed up at Ellis Island, it was nowhere in their history. They simply assumed that one day someone would come for them, and for me.

Is Donald Trump dangerous? Yes, I think so.

I am not one of those people who would blithely compare Donald Trump to Hitler, although it is increasingly whispered by some. No one is comparable to Hitler, there is no one like him, hopefully there will never be anyone like him.

But people who pay attention to their history know the power of language and lies, and know how simple it  really is to stir frightened and angry and ill informed people to do things once unimaginable, to cross boundaries never before crossed, to use language never before used, to utter lies never before believed. Donald Trumps will come and go, the demons they unleash and encourage will live on for a good long while.

Nightmares do come true, even I, so far removed from Jewish ritual and community, know that, it is buried in my genes.

And they are restless in the Year of Trump.

Burke wrote that “liberty” is the natural enemy of evil, and evil is most often practiced by rootless and powerful men, Kings and demagogues.

The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt, who spent much of her life studying the roots of evil, wrote about the idea of “rootless evil,” which she said, is the most dangerous kind. The greatest evil is not radical, she wrote, it has no roots, and because it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.

Liberty, she also argued,  is the most powerful barrier against evil, because it requires conscience and restraint and limitations. If we are to guarantee the freedom and liberty of others,  and have it for ourselves, then we must restrain the systems and people with power. We must treat others with dignity, even those who disagree with us.

The mayor of New York City was restrained in his overreaching efforts to destroy the lives and way of life of the carriage drivers, people chose the idea of liberty over the idea of money.

If the mayor does not personally, in my mind, rise to the level of evil, taking away the liberty and property of his subjects comes pretty close.

That’s why I wrote about it for two years.

Threatening the freedom and happiness and natural right to liberty is evil, the idea –  not necessarily the person – whether it applies to people driving carriage horses or refugees fleeing to our homeland for safety and liberty. I don’t know if Donald Trump is evil or not, I don’t know him, but the whiff of evil is all around him now, it is a scent that a lot of noses can detect.

When a political figure encourages supporters to chant “lock her up” when a political opponent is mentioned, he is literally seeking to take her liberty away, it is no longer figurative or metaphor. When political leaders do that, that have crossed a line drenched in horrid history.

Morality, Arendt wrote, moral judgment is about the simple acts of thoughtfulness and memory. The person who  remembers and who thinks will take care to avoid behavior he will regret and knows are wrong.

In granting a pardon for evil behavior, it is the person and not the crime that is forgiven. In rootless evil , there is no person left whom one could forgive, there is no desire to be forgiven.

In the year of Trump, I embrace liberty, still one of the best ideas the world has yet seen. And my protector.