On his show today, Mark Halperin wondered about Trump’s approval ratings at the American Society of International Law, which meets this week.
The question has a structural answer before it has an empirical one. The field selects for men whose careers, incomes, and status rest on the post-1945 legal architecture. Trump’s governing philosophy treats that architecture as negotiable. A man cannot run the architecture full-time and agree with a president who denies it binds him. The professional incentive runs one direction. So does the moral vocabulary. So does the social network. Approval sits in the single digits to low teens, and a formal poll would register the collision rather than discover it.
Oona Hathaway’s incoming presidential address on April 23, 2026 does the work a coalition-maintenance address is meant to do. She names the threat without naming the man. She reaffirms the moral vocabulary. She anchors present members in a lineage running from 1906 through the League of Nations, Nuremberg, the UN Charter. She converts rupture into origin material. The speech reads as ritual at a moment when the hero system is under pressure.
That pressure is Trump. Hathaway does not say so. She says “long-settled commitments are being discarded” and “norms that seemed beyond question a decade ago are being debated again.” Every man in the room can fill in the name without help. The address converts a partisan question into a civilizational one, which is what professional coalitions do when their architecture comes under threat.
Alliance Theory reads the moral vocabulary as coalition technology. Phrases like “the quiet architecture that makes modern life possible,” “might does not make right,” “sovereignty is not a license,” and “human dignity does not stop at a border” are not arguments. They are membership markers. Audience members recognize them because the phrases signal who belongs. A man cannot disagree with them without marking himself as outside the coalition. The vocabulary works as filter.
Becker’s hero system framework reads the lineage claims as immortality projects. International law offers the practitioner a chain of meaning that outlasts his career. Hathaway invites every man in the audience to see his work as part of an assignment running across generations. Your files are not files. Your treaty drafting is not treaty drafting. You are adding to a tradition that began before you and will continue after you. Becker treats this as the central psychological function of any professional coalition. Hathaway performs it with care.
Collins’s interaction ritual framework reads the annual meeting as a shared-attention event that produces emotional energy. The room is focused. The moral vocabulary hangs in the air. Membership is felt rather than argued. A man leaves the address charged with the sense of belonging to a group of consequence. This charge does not reason with Trump. It replaces reasoning with belonging.
Turner’s convenient beliefs framework sharpens the Trump question. A convenient belief is one a man holds partly because holding it supports his income, status, and access. For international lawyers, certain beliefs run structurally convenient. That treaties bind. That institutions deserve deference. That international law functions as law rather than as diplomatic suggestion. These beliefs may be true. They are also the beliefs without which the field has no reason to exist in its current form. A lawyer who concludes that international law is a polite convention for powerful states has talked himself out of a career.
Trump rejects these beliefs in practice. Tariffs issued unilaterally. Treaties exited. UN criticism delivered from the podium. Threats of force framed as sovereign prerogatives rather than Charter questions. Prosecutions of ICC personnel. Each action declares: this architecture is not binding on me. A lawyer whose career stands on the premise that it is binding reads these acts as attacks on his professional foundation.
The proxy data expresses the field’s composition rather than distortion of a neutral body. TRIP surveys of IR scholars show approval in the single digits. Law faculty donation patterns run overwhelmingly Democratic, around ninety-five percent. Hundreds of international law scholars have signed open letters opposing administration acts. ASIL itself hosted a long series on “International Law and the Trump Administration” that cataloged tensions with the legal architecture. These are not random samples. They are the field telling you what the field is.
Duranti’s book adds a complication the current field does not much discuss.
The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention by Marco Duranti argues that European human rights law emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s through conservative Catholic and Protestant networks rather than socialist ones. The framers wanted supranational judicial checks on left-wing parliamentary majorities, protection for property owners and ecclesiastical schools, and a transnational moral vocabulary rooted in Christian tradition. They built the architecture that today’s progressive human rights movement inherits without always acknowledging the inheritance.
If the architecture has conservative origins, why does the current field read so uniformly center-left? The subject matter does not require a particular coalition. The subject matter could support several. The explanation runs through professional formation. American international law since 1945 has drawn from elite law schools, center-left NGOs, State Department rotations, UN secondments, and foundation work. Each feeder filters for a particular political sensibility. Over seven decades the filter compounds. The coalition that now runs the field is the coalition the feeder institutions selected, not the coalition the subject matter demands.
A coalition that has captured an architecture tends to believe it is not a coalition. It believes it is neutral, universal, apolitical. Makau Mutua captured this pattern when he wrote of human rights organizations that “claim to practice law, not politics” while promoting paradigmatic liberal values. The self-deception is useful. It lets members treat opposition to their positions as opposition to law, rather than as opposition to one coalition’s grip on the law.
Hathaway’s address contains this self-deception in polished form. International law, she says, is “the quiet architecture that makes modern life possible.” The phrasing presents the architecture as civilization rather than as the preferred instrument of a particular professional-political coalition. A Trump supporter inside ASIL, and they exist in small numbers among realists, conservative national security lawyers, and practitioners who believe the field has overreached, might read this line as a category confusion. The architecture is not civilization. The architecture is one way of ordering relations between states, developed under particular conditions by particular men with particular interests. Defending it is not the same as defending modern life.
That minority reading inside ASIL sits at perhaps five to fifteen percent of members. The majority reading agrees with Hathaway. The structural answer to the approval question follows from which reading holds the majority.
Hathaway’s closing gesture shows what the coalition will do with Trump. She calls the present moment “generative.” She names Nuremberg, the UN, Geneva. She invites the audience to see itself as the next generation that will add to the law. Alexander’s cultural trauma pattern runs here. Coalitions under external threat consolidate rather than splinter. The threat becomes origin material for the next generation. “This is a moment for thinking big,” Hathaway says. “Every generation has added to the law, and ours will too.” The address is already writing the Trump era into the coalition’s founding myth. In twenty years the men who lead ASIL will have been the young lawyers in the room on April 23, 2026. They will date their commitment to this moment. The coalition will emerge stronger from the pressure that was supposed to break it.
The pattern is old. The European Convention emerged from conservatives who had watched their national parliaments fail. The UN Charter emerged from men who had watched the League collapse. Hard moments generate architecture. Hathaway knows this. She ends with it.
She does not say, because she cannot say from the podium, that the architecture her coalition will build out of the Trump years will carry the fingerprints of the coalition that built it, as every previous architecture has. The field will remember the men who stayed. It will forget the men who did not. The next generation will inherit both the architecture and the coalition. Whether they notice the coalition is another question.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, ASIL stands on fiction.
The field rests on a particular picture of the man: an individual bearer of rights, reasoning from premises, capable of stepping outside his history to judge questions of justice. The European Convention, the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration, the whole postwar vocabulary Hathaway invoked at the annual meeting, all assume this man exists. Mearsheimer says he does not. Men are born into groups that shape them before they can reason. Reason comes late, arrives weak, and runs downstream of socialization. The tribal man is the real man. The rights-bearing individual is a philosophical costume draped on him by a particular coalition at a particular time.
Grant the argument. What follows for ASIL?
Self-description goes first. ASIL presents its work as the protection of a universal good. Makau Mutua caught the pattern when he noted that human rights organizations claim to practice law, not politics, while promoting paradigmatic liberal values. The claim to stand outside politics is political work. The men at the annual meeting do not reason from principles that bind all humans. They reason from the principles of their coalition, which are the principles their law schools, foundations, NGO networks, State Department rotations, and UN secondments trained them to hold. Hathaway’s “quiet architecture that makes modern life possible” is architecture the coalition prefers. A different coalition, with a different childhood, produces a different architecture.
Origins go next. Hathaway cites Nuremberg, the UN, and Geneva as the lineage the Society carries forward. Mearsheimer reads these origins as coalition moments. Great powers met after a great war and wrote rules that suited their position. The rules then became the moral vocabulary of the professional class that administers them. Duranti adds the same point from another angle.
The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention by Marco Duranti. This book shows the European Convention on Human Rights emerged from conservative Catholic and Protestant networks in the late 1940s who wanted supranational judicial checks on left-wing parliamentary majorities, protection for property owners and ecclesiastical schools, and a transnational moral vocabulary rooted in Christian tradition. The architecture the current field treats as universal began as a coalition project of a European conservatism that has since been written out of the story.
If the founding coalition can shift, the current coalition can shift too. Universalism is the dialect the winning coalition speaks while it wins.
Membership compounds the pattern. ASIL draws members who have spent decades inside institutions whose ambient values match the field’s stated commitments. Elite law schools. Clerkships. State Department. UN agencies. Human rights NGOs. Foundation-funded fellowships. The filter compounds. By the time a man becomes a senior figure at ASIL, he has passed through a dozen selection gates, each with a political tilt. He holds the positions his formation produced. Mearsheimer’s point is that his formation produced them before his reasoning could examine them, and his reasoning thereafter defends them rather than tests them.
The Trump collision follows from the same logic. Trump’s foreign policy reads the international arena the way Mearsheimer describes it. States pursue interests. Treaties hold when convenient. Institutions defer to power. Sovereignty runs primary. The ASIL membership reads these moves as attacks on law. Mearsheimer lets us read them differently. A president operating from the descriptive account of human affairs that tribalists, realists, and much of the historical record share operates in the register where states have always operated and refuses to pretend otherwise. The ASIL men see the architecture under pressure. They may misread what the architecture is.
Training reproduces the blindness. Young international lawyers learn a vocabulary that presents itself as the universal grammar of justice. They learn to read opposition as ignorance, bad faith, or authoritarian drift. They do not learn to read opposition as another coalition speaking its own dialect. The failure to see other coalitions as coalitions, rather than as deficient versions of one’s own, recurs across hegemonic groups near their peaks and marks a vulnerability as they decline. Mearsheimer explains why the blindness runs reliably. Socialization is prior to reason. Men raised inside the coalition cannot easily see the coalition from outside. Their own internal experience is of reasoning, and their reasoning tells them they stand above coalition.
Much of international law continues to work even on Mearsheimer’s terms. Bills of lading, extradition treaties, diplomatic immunity, UNCLOS, the Chicago Convention on civil aviation, the postal union, trade law in zones where trade is not weaponized, all hold because states find them convenient. Mearsheimer predicts that international law holds where it tracks interest and buckles where it does not. ASIL members who work on shipping, aviation, commercial arbitration, and technical treaty regimes continue their work without contradiction. Members whose work assumes universal rights binding great powers against their interests occupy the harder spot.
Becker’s hero system framework reads the ASIL meeting as an immortality project. Men draw meaning from a chain connecting them to Nuremberg, Geneva, the UN. Mearsheimer does not deny the meaning. He insists on it. Men need such chains. The question is whether the chain delivers the cosmic significance members experience, or whether the chain is a coalition story that supplies its members with the emotional goods coalitions always supply: belonging, purpose, shared vocabulary, enemies to oppose, heroes to emulate, a future to build. On Mearsheimer’s account, the coalition story is the deepest level. The cosmic significance is what the coalition tells about the coalition.
If the field’s self-understanding is coalition self-understanding mistaken for universal reason, then the field faces a choice it cannot easily face. It can continue as a coalition that refuses to name itself a coalition and watch its architecture buckle under challenges it cannot read, because its tools for reading challenge assume the challenger is irrational or wicked. Or it can acknowledge its coalition status, which opens questions about membership, legitimacy, and relation to rival coalitions that the field’s current vocabulary cannot pose. The first path preserves the emotional goods at the cost of diminishing relevance. The second preserves relevance at the cost of the emotional goods.
Hathaway’s April 23, 2026 address points toward the first path. She invites the membership to receive a lineage and build the next architecture. The address does the work of coalition maintenance. It also confirms, from inside, what Mearsheimer says from outside. The coalition will not examine its coalition status. It will continue to describe its work as civilization and its opposition as threat.
Mearsheimer’s frame predicts the next thirty years of the field. The architecture gets patched. New treaties get drafted. The vocabulary expands. The membership renews through the same feeder institutions. Trump’s successors face the same collision, because the collision runs structural rather than personal. The field keeps producing men who cannot see the collision as the collision, because their socialization will not allow them to.
The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010) by Samuel Moyn argues that human rights did not descend from the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, or even from 1948. The movement took shape in the mid-to-late 1970s, after socialism lost its credibility as a global project and Third World liberation movements collapsed into authoritarianism. Human rights became the last utopia because the other utopias had failed. The vocabulary offered Western intellectuals a morally charged project that did not require them to defend any actual regime. It asked nothing of state power and demanded everything of it at once. It supplied the emotional goods of political commitment without the embarrassment of a concrete political program.
Moyn does not say the men who built the movement were insincere. He says they were mourners. Something had died and they needed something to carry. The timing maps cleanly. Amnesty International wins the Nobel in 1977. Carter’s rhetoric shifts in 1977. Helsinki watch groups multiply after 1975. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan discredits whatever remained of the Third World left. Reagan arrives in 1981. The Berlin Wall falls in 1989. Human rights crosses from a marginal discourse to the moral default of elite opinion across exactly the period in which Marxism exits the stage for serious Western intellectuals.
Mearsheimer and Moyn say different things that point the same direction. Mearsheimer says the individual rights-bearer is not the real man. Moyn says the movement that elevated the rights-bearer to moral center arrived because other projects collapsed, not because the philosophy finally came of age. Put them together and you get a professional field with a philosophical premise that fails on descriptive grounds and a historical premise that fails on chronological grounds. The field does not discover timeless truths about the human. It inherits a late-twentieth-century coping structure whose members no longer remember the coping.
The hole in the soul left by Marxism is the right frame for what Hathaway’s address actually delivers. The address is not a policy program. It names no law, proposes no reform, specifies no test. It offers a vocation. It hands the audience a role in a cosmic drama: quiet architects of peace, inheritors of Nuremberg, builders of the next charter. The men in the room leave with what a church service delivers. Meaning. Lineage. A people to belong to. A villain to oppose. A future to build. The content of the law recedes. What remains is the feeling of standing on the right side of history while doing work that hurts no one powerful enough to hurt back.
This is where the practical-difference problem bites hardest. ASIL members can point to technical wins. Treaty drafting. Arbitration awards. Amicus briefs. Human rights reports that embarrass regimes that were going to do what they were going to do anyway. The catalog looks impressive until you ask which of the catastrophes of the past thirty years the human rights apparatus prevented. Rwanda. Srebrenica. Syria. Xinjiang. Ukraine. Gaza. Sudan. Yemen. The field’s theorists will say the apparatus was never designed to prevent great-power-backed atrocity and that the partial wins in smaller cases deserve credit. Moyn’s framework lets you hear that defense for what it is. A coalition whose moral authority depends on universal reach explaining that its reach was always local.
The practical-difference question gets sharper when you add the hiring question. Where do human rights lawyers end up? State Department. DOJ. Top law schools. Foundations. UN agencies. The World Bank. Large firms with international practices. NGOs that draw from the same donor pool as the firms. The career pipeline runs through institutions that reward the rhetoric and do not punish the failures, because the rewards are paid in status and the failures register in places the rewarding institutions do not read. A man can spend a thirty-year career in the field, win prizes, chair committees, publish in the flagship journals, and never face the question of whether any of the atrocities his vocabulary was meant to address got smaller because he existed.
This is the part Moyn names that Mearsheimer does not. The field supplies righteousness on terms that do not require results. Marxists had to defend the Soviet Union or Cuba or China or at minimum point to a concrete political project that would replace the system they criticized. The embarrassment of the object forced the ideology to contend with evidence. Human rights has no object. It has a vocabulary of demand with no institutional form that carries the burden of outcome. When a regime ignores a human rights finding, the finding does not fail. The regime fails. The coalition’s authority increases. The members get to be right without having been effective.
Alliance Theory reads this as the terminal form of a coalition moral vocabulary. Moral claims that never have to cash out serve coalition cohesion better than claims that do. A coalition built around a creed whose failures can always be charged to its enemies has discovered the ideal moral form. The creed cannot disappoint its adherents, because its disappointments are attributed to forces outside the creed.
Hathaway’s line about the planes that land safely is the move in miniature. International law is most visible when broken, she says, so the public mistakes visibility for violation. The implication is that the system works continuously and silently. The unspoken corollary is that every failure is a visibility problem, not a system problem. The frame cannot be falsified from inside. Planes land. Ships sail. Most treaties hold. Therefore the architecture works. When the architecture manifestly does not work, the non-functioning gets classed as isolated and the public is gently reminded of how much works quietly.
Moyn would say the planes-land argument mistakes the trivial for the generative. Planes would land without a human rights movement. UNCLOS would function without an Oona Hathaway presidential address. Commercial arbitration existed before human rights emerged as a cause. The infrastructure of convenient cooperation between states does not need the moral crusade. The moral crusade needs the infrastructure because the infrastructure is the evidence the crusade cites when asked what it has accomplished.
The cruelest reading, which neither Mearsheimer nor Moyn quite states but which falls out of both, is that the field exists largely to give its members somewhere to put feelings that have no other outlet. The end of serious Western socialism left an enormous surplus of political emotion unattached to a project. Human rights absorbed the surplus. The field became a reservoir for the religious energies of a secular educated class whose other options were worse: cynicism, hedonism, nationalism, the religion their grandparents left, or silence. Against those alternatives, human rights offers a great deal. Community. Purpose. A moral grammar. A career. A sense of standing in history.
What it does not offer is effectiveness. Moyn’s argument implies that effectiveness was never the draw. The draw was always the feeling. Members who entered the field for effectiveness either leave, burn out, or learn to convert their unease into private jokes at conferences. Members who entered for the feeling stay and rise. Over decades, the selection effect produces a leadership class for whom the feeling is the product and the effectiveness question is an impolite thing to raise at dinner.
Hathaway is not cynical. She is sincere. That is the point. The coalition selects for sincerity because sincerity is what sustains the feeling, and the feeling is what the coalition provides. A cynic at the podium would break the spell. A sincere woman delivering practiced lines about quiet architecture and the hardest lessons of the last century does the ritual work the audience came for. The members leave the hall charged. They go back to their offices. The treaties get drafted. The amicus briefs get filed. The reports get published. The atrocities continue. The next annual meeting arrives. The ritual repeats.
Marx called religion the heart of a heartless world. Moyn’s argument implies that human rights became the heart of a post-Marxist world that discovered it still had the religious organ and nowhere to put it. ASIL is one of the churches. Hathaway is one of its priests. The liturgy works. The sacraments work. The congregation leaves comforted. Whether the world outside the sanctuary gets any better is a question the sanctuary has learned not to press too hard.
Traditional Adventism and the human rights movement both emerged from apocalyptic disappointment. William Miller’s 1844 date failed. The Great Disappointment followed. Hiram Edson walked through the cornfield and reported a vision in which Christ had moved from the Holy Place to the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary to begin the Investigative Judgment. The date was not wrong. The event was not what the Millerites thought. Christ was doing something else, invisibly, in heaven, and the delay was itself the sign that the work was ongoing. The disappointment became the doctrine.
Moyn’s account of human rights follows the same arc. Socialism disappointed. Third World liberation disappointed. The revolution did not come. The men who had organized their moral lives around the coming of the revolution found themselves with a religious organ and no object. Carter, Amnesty, Helsinki, the tribunals, the conventions. The work was not what we thought, but the work is still underway, in the invisible courts of international conscience, and the delay is itself the sign that the work matters. The collapse of the first utopia became the condition of the last utopia.
Both alliances tell their members that the apparent failure of the project confirms rather than refutes the project. That move is the structural signature. A creed that converts disconfirmation into confirmation has solved the selection problem of belief maintenance. It cannot be falsified from inside because every outcome counts as evidence for it. The 1844 date fails, and the doctrine grows richer. The atrocity continues, and the vocabulary of response expands. The shape of the response absorbs the failure and produces more of the response.
Both alliances organize time around an imminent arrival that keeps receding. Adventists have waited one hundred eighty years for the soon coming. Each generation adjusts the markers. Sunday laws. The time of trouble. The latter rain. The shaking. The reading of the signs continues. The human rights movement has waited fifty years for the moral order its charter promised. Each generation extends the horizon. The next treaty. The next tribunal. The next court. The arc is long and bends toward justice. The reading of the signs continues in both traditions. Arrival remains the horizon that orients the work without ever touching it.
Both alliances place the decisive action in a venue the adherent cannot inspect. The Investigative Judgment happens in the heavenly sanctuary. No Adventist visits. The work proceeds by faith in a process no member witnesses. Human rights work happens in international courts, UN committees, treaty bodies, and diplomatic channels that most members do not attend. The decisive actions occur in venues whose authority depends on members trusting that the work is real and consequential. The veil separates the member from the work his creed assures him is underway.
Both alliances produce a remnant self-understanding. Ellen White’s Adventists are the remnant church keeping the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus while the broader Christian world has fallen. The human rights movement reads itself as the conscience of mankind against states and populations that have lost their way or never found it. Remnant identity supplies the coalition’s emotional goods most efficiently. The members are not one group among many. They are the faithful few holding the line until the arrival.
Both alliances rely on a textual apparatus that only initiates can read. Adventists have the Bible read through Ellen White, the Daniel 8:14 math, the sanctuary typology, the health message, the Spirit of Prophecy. Lay members can follow the surface. The depth requires formation. Human rights has the charters, the conventions, the jurisprudence of the regional courts, the general comments of treaty bodies, the soft law, the customary international law arguments. Lay members can follow the surface. The depth requires law school, clerkships, and the apprenticeships Hathaway’s pipeline provides. In both cases the specialized text produces a clerisy whose interpretive authority the lay member cannot challenge without first becoming a specialist.
Both alliances draw the membership line through lifestyle markers that track the moral claim only indirectly. Adventists mark membership through Sabbath, diet, abstention, dress, and church attendance. None of these practices are the second coming. They are the coalition’s signals of fitness for the coming. Human rights lawyers mark membership through language choice, donation patterns, vocabulary, the conferences attended, the journals read, the positions taken on current cases, the firms avoided, the clients accepted. None of these practices reduce atrocity. They signal fitness for the coalition that works on atrocity. Lifestyle markers do the coalition maintenance the moral claim cannot do on its own.
Both alliances have an insider dissent problem they handle through the same pattern. My father Desmond Ford read the sanctuary doctrine against the biblical text and the evidence and concluded that the 1844 event could not bear the doctrinal weight Adventism had placed on it. Glacier View followed in 1980. Ford was defrocked. The church preserved the doctrine by expelling the most qualified insider who had examined it. Human rights has its Desmond Fords. Eric Posner has written that international human rights law has failed on its own terms. Makau Mutua has written that the movement operates as a savage-victim-savior script that Western coalitions require for their self-image. Stephen Hopgood has written that the endtimes of human rights are visible to anyone who will look. These men are not defrocked. They are simply not promoted, not cited in the flagship journals, not invited to deliver the keynote, not named to the presidency. The result is the same. The insider who reads the text against the doctrine finds that the coalition has ways of keeping the doctrine intact without ever engaging his argument.
Both alliances produce a particular psychological type. The traditional Adventist and the human rights lawyer both carry an orientation toward cosmic significance that worldly outcomes cannot touch. The Adventist knows the judgment is underway regardless of what the culture does. The human rights lawyer knows the moral arc bends toward justice regardless of what the regimes do. Both men can endure large quantities of worldly evidence against their projects without updating, because the project is not indexed to worldly evidence. The serenity this produces is real. It is also the tell. A belief structure that the world cannot perturb is a belief structure that the world cannot inform either.
Desmond Ford was not attacking the possibility of the second coming. He was testing whether the particular doctrinal architecture around 1844 could bear scholarly scrutiny. The answer was no, and the institution’s response demonstrated that the doctrine’s function was coalition maintenance rather than scriptural fidelity. Applied to human rights, the parallel question is not whether human dignity matters but whether the particular architecture the ASIL coalition has built around universal rights can bear scrutiny of the kind Mearsheimer and Moyn provide. The answer is looking like no. The response from the ASIL coalition matches the response from the Adventist coalition at Glacier View. Ignore the argument. Preserve the institution. Keep the members charged. Keep the ritual running.
The differences matter too. Adventism names its eschaton. Human rights keeps the eschaton unnamed and therefore undisprovable. Adventism has a textual center in Scripture that its most serious members can always return to, and Ford’s challenge came from within that return. Human rights has no comparable center. Its scripture is a shifting body of treaties and commentaries produced by the coalition that administers them. Adventism therefore can in principle be reformed from the text. Human rights cannot be reformed from the text because the text is what the coalition writes.
Adventism is in numerical decline in the West and growing in the Global South among populations who read the apocalyptic register with full seriousness. Human rights is in institutional expansion in the West and under pressure in the Global South from governments who read the universalism as a Western coalition dialect. The two curves are crossing in opposite directions, and the reason is the same in both cases. The coalition that built the creed in the metropole is losing its grip on the metropole, and the populations at the periphery are evaluating the creed on its merits rather than on the inherited prestige of its builders.
My father lost his ordination, kept his faith, continued his scholarship, and spent the rest of his life demonstrating that a man can be expelled from the institution and retain everything that mattered about the vocation. Human rights dissidents who take the Moyn-Mearsheimer reading seriously face the same structural situation. They will not sit on the ASIL executive. They will not deliver the presidential address. They will be read as cranks or as conservatives or as apologists for atrocity by colleagues whose coalition formation prevents them from engaging the argument. They will also, like Ford, be free. The coalition’s sanctions only work on men who want what the coalition withholds. A man who has seen the coalition from outside has usually stopped wanting what it offers.
