Sandy Vogelgesang,
The New York Times, June 28, 1978.
Who can oppose human rights? Most Americans rank them with God, Mother and Country. What we will do about them is another matter. The gap between preaching and practice may leave both human rights and Jimmy Carter the losers.
Why are Americans solid in the general support for human rights, but so soft on specifics? And what does that mean?
First, few Americans know the scope of the President’s program. The Administration has not made sufficiently clear that its policy embraces all rights proclaimed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That means not just condemning torture or protecting free speech but trying to meet such “basic human needs” as food, shelter and health care at home, as well as abroad.
Second, few think promoting human rights requires more than statements. The Administration is loath to stress the link between words, which can be cheap, and deeds, which are not. The economic pressure needed to impress a dictator can mean lost business and jobs for Americans. Serious United States focus on basic human needs might mean big tax hikes to finance more foreign aid and/or domestic welfare. Such programs suggest a substantial redistribution of income within and away from the United States.
Third, even fewer Americans —hard‐pressed by inflation, opposed to higher taxes, and prone to a new political conservatism — welcome such price tags on their principles.
United States reaction to Cambodia may be the most telling index to this trend. Although the United States could not prevent the genocide of an estimated one million Cambodians, it has done little for those it could help: the thousands who risked death to escape. Many Americans are all for human rights — until Indochinese refugees compete for scarce United States jobs. One rabbi, recalling comparable disregard for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, senses a new American “epidemic of callousness.” It mocks the human rights policy intended, in part, as the moral antidote to the Vietnam period.
The malaise occurs elsewhere. Americans say they worry about the plight of the poor in developing nations. Yet, United States foreign aid ranks, as a percent of gross national product, in the bottom 25 percent of all non-Communist-country programs. ‘And, since Americans spend more on pet food at home than on food aid abroad, more may be at issue than economics.
There is a schizoid split in the American public, sometimes aroused by others’ needs, but more often absorbed by private matters. Ten years after the Kerner Commission report on urban riots in the 1960’s, the United States is moving toward two societies — not one black and one white as then predicted — but one of haves and havenots, separate and unequal. The one rarely sees and and, as the vote on California’s Proposition 13 suggests, sympathizes with the other.
The invisible poor of this “other America” are the domestic counterpart of a global phenomenon: one billion people below the United States “absolute poverty line.” Still others suffer indignity because of their sex or race. Yet, neither haves nor have‐nots make that connection. The American’s line of sight seldom extends from Peoria to Pretoria.
This ambivalence in the American commitment to full furtherance of human rights creates a crisis of capability, as well as credibility, for the President’s policy. The new “politics of scarcity” puts the highest priority on lower expectations and limits to what government can do — especially for the poor and powerless. Thus, despite some impressive gains on political rights, the Administration’s policy lacks economic margin for magnanimity and risks losing longer‐term support.
Critics from the third world and American minorities, who are most concerned about their constituents’ economic and social needs, believe that the United States failure to address their rights reflects the inherent hypocrisy of the policy. Others, watching politicians stress military spending and fiscal responsibility rather than focus on the needy, lament the narrow scope of human rights action and the lapse from traditional American liberalism.
Mr. Carter seized “human rights” as one way to make United States foreign policy reflect American values. Its ultimate irony may be that, in revealing current apparent priorities, it does just that. The policy, premised on compassion, my be hoist on its own petard— and the pocketbook. If Mr. Carter does not hear the increasingly hollow ring of rhetoric on human rights, he may see one more initially popular policy boomerang by 1980.
That need not and should not he. Americans are, by instinct, generous and responsive to firm Presidential leadership. Mr. Carter has made an Important beginning. But Just that. Any lasting significance for United States policy on human rights lies in the response to the larger question that launched the Republic: What price principle?
Sandy Vogelgesang, an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a Foreign Service Officer on leave from the State Department. She is author of “The Long Dark Night of the Soul: The American Intellectual Left and the Vietnam War.” This article is adapted from one in the July issue of Foreign Affairs.