History is Happening Now

The Washington Post has recently published what can only be described as a Red Baiting editorial accusing the Obama administration — and Hillary Clinton in particular — of Communist thought crimes. Apparently the Obama administration is “Redefining Human Rights.” How, you ask?

The Obama administration, she said, would “see human rights in a broad context,” in which “oppression of want — want of food, want of health, want of education, and want of equality in law and in fact” — would be addressed alongside the oppression of tyranny and torture. “That is why,” Ms. Clinton said, “the cornerstones of our 21st-century human rights agenda” would be “supporting democracy” and “fostering development.”

This is indeed an important change in U.S. human rights policy — but the idea behind it is pure 20th century. Ms. Clinton’s lumping of economic and social “rights” with political and personal freedom was a standard doctrine of the Soviet Bloc, which used to argue at every East-West conference that human rights in Czechoslovakia were superior to those in the United States, because one provided government health care that the other lacked. In fact, as U.S. diplomats used to tirelessly respond, rights of liberty — for free expression and religion, for example — are unique in that they are both natural and universal; they will exist so long as governments do not suppress them. Health care, shelter and education are desirable social services, but they depend on resources that governments may or may not possess. These are fundamentally different goods, and one cannot substitute for another.

Got that? After the impressive democracy promoting agenda of the Bush administration — which courageously spoke up for democracy in places like Saudi Arabia, suspended aid to dictatorships like Pakistan and Egypt, and supported democratic elections unless it didn’t like the outcome — we are in the age of Crypto-Communist-Muslim Obama now embracing a completely alien concept of human rights, a “Soviet” idea of human rights which considers economic welfare to be vital for human freedom and efflorescence.

Except of course the editorial board of the Washington Post apparently hasn’t heard of something called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Eleanor Roosevelt helped write, and which the United States adopted after the Second World War. Let’s quote at semi-random from this (by the Post’s standards Communist) document:

Article 22.

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23.

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24.

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children

I guess maybe economic rights are also a kind of human rights, universal rights, after all. Perhaps human rights are just the rights that humans get together and decide are most important to a dignified life. Or did the Soviet Union or China or some other UnAmerican nation perhaps slip these alien concepts into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights against the will of the United States? Nope.

As Elizabeth Borgwardt documents in her history, A New Deal for the World, the impetus for enumerating economic rights partly originated with Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which always had an international orientation. Indeed, Roosevelt originally proposed what he called a “Second Bill of Rights,” concerned specifically with economic rights, to address what the postwar world might look like for the United States. As Borgwardt writes:

Early 1940s pronouncements about rights, including economic rights, drew upon the immediate experiences of Depression and war; they did not prefigure a Cold War orientation. The Economic Bill of Rights created a bridge between the economic aspirations of the Four Freedoms and wartime attempts to institutionalize a developing culture of human rights by means of New Deal-style institutional planning.

Let’s list these proposed rights — radical, Communist rights! — in toto.

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

If this is Communism, we should perhaps open our minds to its message. In our finance-mad age of boom and bust; persistent economic insecurity; a weak, deunionized labor movement; increasing levels of economic inequality; and debt-dependent standard of living, we have a long way to go before the reality of life in America lives up to the rights ambitiously enumerated in the Universal Declaration, almost seventy years ago.