Last month, Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic took David Bromwich to task for the latter’s front-page New York Review of Books article headlined “Stay Out of Syria!” Wieseltier, who has often written criticisms of the Obama administration’s response to Syria, hammered Bromwich for his “hysterical ratification of what is in fact the conventional wisdom” on the advisability of American intervention. As he sees it, that “conventional wisdom” of American liberalism is wholly determined by the country’s experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan:
All that matters to Bromwich about Syria is Iraq. I mean George W. Bush’s war there. Anybody who supported military action in Iraq must be wrong to support military action in Syria and anybody who opposed military action in Iraq must be right to oppose military action in Syria. History stopped in Baghdad. Atrocity after Bush gets an American pass. Pity the Syrians, who have the bad luck to be slaughtered post-Cheney. This analysis of the world, in other words, is not about the world. It is about us, and our a priori stain, and our quest for purity, which is grossly mistaken for conscience. We must not rescue, we must expiate. About the enormous strategic benefits of defeating Assad Bromwich has nothing to say; he is too exquisitely indignant, too ethically fastidious, for such considerations. So it is worth noting that this ethical fastidiousness, which is not his alone, is strikingly lacking in a particular moral vocabulary: The foreign policy discourse of American liberalism no longer includes an emphasis on freedom or democracy. It is saddened but not provoked by crimes against humanity. The satisfaction about quitting Iraq was undiversified by anxiety about the many reforms and reformers we were leaving behind, about the precariousness of the social and political progress that had been made. The relief at our withdrawal from Afghanistan is unaccompanied by regret for its consequences for the women of Afghanistan. What is the point of being a liberal if you are going to think like Rand Paul?
While it’d be ludicrous to claim that this last decade of war has no bearing on today’s foreign policy calculations, one would be hard pressed actually to argue that the most dominant concern for the leaders of the nation’s center-left has been an American cleansing. The parties responsible for spying on foreign citizens and diplomats alike have mostly thrown purity to the wind.
And yet, when one considers that the very concern for the well-being of citizens under Saddam Hussein that was used to justify preemptive war in Iraq in 2003 is what’s being deemed insufficient for Syrian intervention, Wieseltier’s take doesn’t lie too far off the arc scribed by the pendulum of American foreign policy sentiment. And what sent it swinging towards a concern for international human rights great enough to justify the last foreign occupations? In Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s, Barbara Keys shows that it was the Vietnam War. At its core, she argues, the human rights revolution of the 1970s was an emotional response to the trauma of the war.
The book’s publication is still many months away, but it should become a critical text for historicizing debates such as Wieseltier v. Bromwich (whom, it should be noted, we’ve published in the past).
To wit:
(Human rights) helped redefine America to Americans, for they were about American identity even more than they were about foreign policy. They emerged from a struggle for the soul of the country, for principles to define not only America’s international behavior but its character in a world shaped by new power relations—above all by its loss in the Vietnam War and all the soul-searching that entailed. As Americans entered the 1970s, many felt that they were standing on quicksand. Old certainties, beliefs, and standards—about America’s role in the world and the nature of the world at large—had crumbled. The promotion of international human rights was one of the ideas that helped Americans make sense of the new global terrain. Crucially, it served not as a means of coming to terms with the Vietnam War but as a means of moving past it. Human rights became a way to heal the country by taming the legacy of Vietnam.
Human rights promotion was an antidote to shame and guilt. The popularity of human rights in the 1970s was a function of their capacity to shift attention and blame away from the trauma of the Vietnam War and the embarrassments and self-criticism of the civil rights movement and Watergate. For a group of conservatives who felt that the war had been a just and necessary cause, human rights were a way to reassert the fundamental immorality of communism, to revive Cold War priorities, and to position the United States once again on the side of both right and might. For moderate liberals who had come to see the war as immoral and a stain on the country’s honor, promoting human rights in America’s right-wing allies spotlighted evil abroad and offered a way to distance the United States from it, alleviating their sense of responsibility. The two sides had divergent views of what had gone wrong in Vietnam, but both felt a deep need to reclaim the moral high ground in the war’s wake.
[…]
The liberal human rights ideas that slowly trickled into U.S. foreign policy in the mid-1970s were tightly circumscribed to fit a new era of limited resources and distaste for intervention. Their dollar cost was minimal, but they provided enough substance to allow the United States to reclaim the mantle of virtuous nation. At a time when American opinion had turned decisively against the idea of acting as a global policeman, the promotion of human rights offered a limited program that left solutions largely in the hands of foreigners. To a considerable degree, the message was that it was enough that Americans not be part of the problem. Human rights were also appealing because they had international origins and legitimacy, yet seemed consonant with American ideals. The country could push the world in Americanizing directions even while spreading ostensibly international norms with the support of international bodies.
[…]
Among the core group of congressional liberals and activists who would generate the momentum for integrating liberal human rights considerations into foreign policy, the war generated a deep sense of shame and embarrassment, feelings of guilt that cried for expiation, and a profound desire to return to normalcy—feelings that sometimes worked at cross-purposes and led to no single, obvious remedy except a strong antipathy to military intervention.
Okay, so that’s a very quick slalom through a nuanced analysis of moral principle and global violence, but connecting the dots gives us an America for which the fallout of the Vietnam War led to a gradual embrace of human rights, which Keys writes “succeeded because it appeared to heal the war’s psychic wounds by restoring American pride.” From there a platform of rhetoric that’d been intended to supplant intervention was seized by neoconservatives and reconfigured by 9/11, after which it fueled the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, until the realities of war and occupation left “disillusioned progressives” with a sense that human rights and humanitarian claims are “too readily manipulated to suit unjust causes,” in Keys’ words, until finally the “conventional wisdom” against which Wieseltier so forcefully writes seems again bent on taking a pass, perhaps with an eye to absolution.
Here’s Keys again:
Human rights (and its older relative the rights of man) is, then, a compelling, adaptable slogan. Facing another postwar, postoccupation era in which the ideals that justified the spilling of blood seem to many in retrospect to have been tarnished, Americans seem to be losing interest in the idea as a guide to U.S. foreign policy. The cautious optimism of the 1970s and the grandiose hopes of the 1990s have given way to a new ambivalence. The rhetoric of human rights is still the world’s moral lingua franca; nothing has yet arisen to replace it. But it may be that human rights has been stretched and pulled in so many directions that it will lose its force—until, someday, it rises again.
Reclaiming American Virtue, upon publication this winter, will join Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia in helping us to understand the near history of human rights, a notion whose development is more recent and more contingent than most of its adherents have understood.
