Luke Ford

Prior to reading this book, I was unaware of any major players in human rights who were right-wing.

Here are some highlights from this 2016 book by Marco Duranti:

Conservative Europeanists invoked international human rights norms for different purposes. Nevertheless, they were united in their belief that a democracy in which tyranny of the majority held sway was little better than a dictatorship. The rights of the minority, like the autonomy of the individual and civil society, were not to be sacrificed at the altar of the unitary nation – state.

Pluralism, not popular sovereignty, was their watchword. While their socialist opponents called them anti – democratic, conservatives saw their aim as protecting democracy from itself. Totalitarianism, they believed, was a contagion whose carriers were not limited to communists and fascists, for it could metastasize within democratic movements and persist even after the fall of authoritarian regimes. Socialism was alleged to be its breeding ground, especially that of the Marxist variety, but so, too, were certain aspects of liberalism and republicanism to blame. With domestic courts having proven themselves unable or unwilling to uphold the rule of law against overweening executives, in their eyes, a new international solution was needed. For conservatives, this was not to be found in what they regarded as the soulless internationalism of liberal technocrats, with their naive faith in scientific and technological progress. A return to tradition and older forms of community would form the bedrock of a free and united Europe, not technocracy.

None of this is to deny the centrality of left – wing activism to the history of human rights writ large. In the domestic sphere, the Left had for much of the past century been at the forefront of championing civil liberties, ending discriminatory measures against women and minorities, expanding suffrage, and securing economic and social rights.

* What remains to be explained is why in the aftermath of the Second World War proposals for the creation of a European human rights court attracted the disproportionate support of conservatives and disproportionate opposition of socialists. Socialists also tended to be less enthusiastic about European integration than their conservative counterparts. It is true that those who participated in European assemblies were eventually prepared to accept a European human rights text of some kind once conservatives had taken the initiative of placing it on the agenda. What polarized Western Europeans was the question of which rights such a charter would guarantee and whether it would be implemented by a supranational version of the US Supreme Court — that is, a European high court empowered to overrule the decisions of national executives, judiciaries, and legislatures, as well as deal with claims of rights abuses submitted by private parties.

The European Court of Human Rights was an object of great controversy even before its creation. Judiciaries had long been viewed with hostility on the Left. This was particularly true of Britain and France. In Britain, memories were still fresh of the role that courts had played as bastions of conservative assaults on trade unions and economic planning, as well as their complicity in repressive measures against various left – wing organizations. The ruling Labour Party had not failed to take notice of the US Supreme Court’s efforts in the 1930s to overturn Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It advocated a strict adherence to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, whereby acts of parliament were not subject to judicial review or other constitutional constraints. In France, judicial power was associated with the aristocratic privileges of the ancien régime . Ever since the French Revolution, the French Left had inveighed against the creation of a reactionary “government of judges” capable of overriding the will of the people as expressed in the National Assembly.

* In domestic affairs, a European supreme court was widely regarded as a mechanism for realizing what socialists described as a discredited conservative agenda too unpopular to be enacted through democratic means. The most avid advocates of a European supreme court were those conservatives who before the Second World War had championed the independence and constitutional prerogatives of domestic courts. They reasoned that the ever – expanding state bureaucracies in their countries, once placed at the disposal of socialist governments backed by left – wing parliamentary majorities, posed a threat to their human rights. Of particular concern to conservatives were the fundamental freedoms of property owners, ecclesiastical schools, and political oppositions.

* It is said that human rights are akin to a secular religion. Some of the framers of European human rights law took this analogy quite literally. A new court whose legal authority and moral suasion mirrored that of the medieval Church was to be constructed from the wreckage of a lost Christian civilization. For some Catholic conservatives, the spiritual reunification of Europe required the subordination of parliamentary democracy to what they called “supranational justice,” a term that rearticulated an older belief that transnational Christian norms should constrain the exercise of sovereign power. Envisioned as a successor to the medieval charters of old, a European human rights treaty held the promise of strengthening the autonomy of Catholic churches, towns, and regions, as well as associations of Catholic peasants and workers.

* In the name of promoting reconciliation, these conservatives called for greater leniency or outright amnesty. They were unhappy that, to varying degrees across Europe, the Left had taken advantage of postwar purges to disenfranchise and silence political rivals, seize the assets of landholders and industrialists, and rid armies, bureaucracies, and judiciaries of conservatives.

* Involvement in the creation of the European human rights system offered conservatives the opportunity to disavow right – wing authoritarianism, which many had once argued was preferable to left – wing revolution and democratic dysfunction, without requiring them to repudiate their prewar worldviews. It placed a renewed emphasis on the anti – statist, libertarian dimensions of conservatism.

* Conservatives correctly identified the propensity of postwar socialists to reject checks on majority rule in their attempts to centralize bureaucratic authority over economic and social affairs. In response, they sought to forge a European human rights system that would replace majority rule with the rule of law, the unitary state with a more pluralistic system, the absolute sovereignty of nations and parliaments with greater autonomy for individuals, families, localities, minorities, and civil society. Such views were by no means exclusive to conservatism, nor did all conservatives share them. Certainly, they are foreign to much of the European Right today. In the immediate postwar period, however, their realization fell primarily to conservatives over a chorus of objections from socialists.

* The decision of postwar conservatives to momentarily place themselves at the vanguard of the human rights revolution in Western Europe did not mark a repudiation of their longstanding political beliefs. Rather, it signaled a recognition born through the lessons of the recent past that conservative objectives would be better realized on the transnational plane than the national one. Participation in the construction of international human rights safeguards occurred in tandem with a shift in emphasis, not a wholesale transformation, in the component parts of conservative ideology. For the most part, it was the application of conservative principles rather than the principles themselves that changed — and even here, the language of human rights was employed to advance economic and social policies that conservatives had advocated since at least the nineteenth century.

* Romanticism remained an important an element of conservatism throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Conservatives by and large remained skeptical of the liberal faith in reason and progress. The modern world was not necessarily a more just, free, and peaceful one than the old. On the contrary, the destruction of social hierarchies in the name of egalitarianism had led to widespread material and spiritual impoverishment, setting peoples against one another in a cycle of perpetual conflict. It was a delusion to believe that rights and obligations could and should be the same for all, for in reality they could only endure if tailored to specific groups. Liberties were not to be deduced from first principles on the basis of cold logic alone. Rather, they emerged organically from the development of human habits and personalities within a particular civilizational or communal framework. Humans were naturally selfish, sinful creatures who could only learn to respect one another’s liberties through the recovery of the traditions that once united them, not the issuing of abstract declarations of principle.

* Conservatives differed to the extent to which they rejected the modern world. They disagreed violently, for example, on the virtues of capitalism, industrialization, and parliamentary democracy.

* Protestant conservatives in Britain, for example, were generally averse to fixing their mast to a set of timeless, universal prescriptions for the organization of human societies, preferring instead to defer to the practices and values particular to a given historical community, though their view of human nature remained a consistently pessimistic one. For them, conservatism meant the defense of institutions that were historically tested — in other words, that had proven their worth over a long span of time — and liberties that were for the most part historically contingent — in other words, that were not necessarily suitable to all peoples in all places at all times. They believed that human rights originated in medieval charters such as the Magna Carta and later the Reformation. While rejecting popular sovereignty as a foundational constitutional principle, they agreed with the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, which for them meant that parliamentarians were entitled to their traditional prerogatives. Their chief concern was limiting the power of the executive, which they argued needed to be constrained through both an independent judiciary and parliamentary oversight, particularly as regarded the rights of property owners. Though, historically, conservatives in Britain were more comfortable exalting the virtues of “constitutional government” than those of “democracy,” this proclivity faded across the first decades of the twentieth century, in part as a consequence of the expansion of suffrage and the democratic rhetoric that characterized Allied propaganda in the two world wars.

Catholic conservatives in France tended to be more hostile to parliamentary government than their Protestant counterparts across the Channel, but this was in part because the conception of parliamentary government they associated with the Jacobin republican tradition diverged from that of constitutional monarchies such as the United Kingdom. In accordance with the doctrine of social Catholicism, they were more given to denouncing capitalism and liberalism, promoting in their place a neomedieval form of corporatism that would restore the collective rights of workers while fostering harmony between social groups. Even the most right – wing among them, rather than seek to do away with representative bodies altogether, believed that they should function according to older conceptions of the constitutional order… Catholics following the Vatican’s lead looked to natural law doctrine, particularly that of the medieval scholastic Thomas Aquinas, as a basis for the organization of society.
Others had a more historicist sensibility.

* Ever since the American and French Revolutions, British and French conservatives had generally been uncomfortable invoking the “rights of man.” Yet, none hesitated to proclaim themselves champions of “liberty,” which could mean anything from the inviolability of private property and the autonomy of the Church from the state to the emancipation of the human spirit from a false moral outlook.

* The result was a hybrid human rights doctrine, a strange amalgam of the Enlightenment and the counter – Enlightenment, modern individual liberties and medieval communal liberties, natural rights and historical rights.

* The conservative politicians who championed a European human rights court believed that colonized peoples were not entitled to the same rights protections as Europeans.

* A common thread in Euroskeptic critiques was a perceived contradiction between democracy and human rights, on the one hand, and the supranational prerogatives of EU institutions, on the other.

* The faltering popular legitimacy of European institutions today is due to the fissiparousness of European identity as much as the vicissitudes of domestic politics and economic growth. Attempts to articulate a set of qualities shared by all Europeans often only sow the seeds of fragmentation. To characterize Euroskeptic forces as “anti – Europe” ignores how many of them have their own conception of the history and values that unite Europeans, one that often betrays a longing for the days when the expressions “Europe”, “Western Europe” and “Christian Europe” were interchangeable. In postwar Europe, democracy and human rights were invoked for contrary purposes, with the terms themselves assuming radically different meanings depending on the context in which they were deployed. Appeals to democracy and human rights continue to divide as much as to unite Europeans. Whether found in calls for a greater pooling of national sovereignty or for greater national self – determination, such rhetoric has been mobilized both in defense and in defiance of supranational authorities.

In response, there has been little agreement among “pro – Europe” forces on which markers of European identity should be the focal points of a new vision of the multicultural, multiethnic Europe of the twenty – first century, one spanning east to west, north to south, the continent and Britain.

* Europeanists sometimes speak of the need for a charismatic leader to counter the growing tide of “anti – Europe” sentiment. Charisma, however, is a quality that emerges only if there exists an empathic bond between leaders and the people they aim to inspire and mobilize. This in turns depends on identification between the two on the basis of not only common material interests but also a shared cultural and ethical sensibility.
Charismatic figures are, above all, powerful storytellers. Yet, the grand narratives found in official and scholarly accounts of European integration rarely capture the popular imagination. There is none comparable, for example, to that which Barack Obama used to great effect in the 2008 US presidential election, when he campaigned on the theme of American unity in diversity by invoking the motto e pluribus unum, “United We Are One.” By tethering his own personal story to that of the American nation, Obama was able to momentarily inspire hope for a reunited United States, a new America refounded on old American ideals, a vision that carried with it both great historical resonance and tremendous affective power. At the same time, the unabated political polarization of the United States during Obama’s tenure as president offers a cautionary tale. Charisma and visionary rhetoric alone are not sufficient to effect either national or transnational integration. More critically, the qualities that are said to unite Europeans must resonate with the social solidarities they experience in their everyday lives.

First Things editor R. R. Reno wrote in the May 2016 issue:

In my years as a theology professor, as a rare conservative in higher education, I became accustomed to calls for dialogue on this or that issue. In almost every instance, it was a set-up for mandatory public capitulation. If someone regards abortion as a moral evil and same-sex marriage as an oxymoron, as I do, he cannot say so in a public forum, for it amounts to a sin against dialogue. It “shuts down conversation,” I was told on many occasions. As I learned over the years, there’s dialogue—until there isn’t. Once homosexuality is affirmed on a Catholic university campus, there’s no more “dialogue.” Can you imagine “dialogue” on global climate change? The movement from dialogue to censure and then denunciation is often a smooth one.

…After World War II, human rights came to prominence in Europe as a way to protect the individual from the state.

…in the twenty-first century, human rights has changed its role, at least in the West. Today, it has become a powerful ideology that promises to relieve us of the burdens of political responsibility for the common good.

Case in point: Europeans today must face the very difficult task of determining whether and how to limit migration. Who shall be counted as part of the national community? This is a political question, perhaps the most fundamental one, and it remains our responsibility to answer it. Human rights, however, can become an ideology that rejects this political responsibility, saying that migrants who qualify as refugees must be accepted, regardless of circumstances. By this way of thinking, immigration is a matter of basic human rights and thus transcends the political.

… I’m increasingly against human rights. As an ideology, it has become a patron of negative freedom, pushing against demands and ­obligations arising from our shared culture. In the West, human rights now functions as an enemy of the ­responsible ­exercise of freedom. Exalting human rights as the epitome of social responsibility short-circuits collective judgment and stymies action for the sake of the common good.

…Both right and left in America imagine that today’s social distemper stems from too little freedom, when, in fact, what currently agitates society is the loss of stability, unity, and solidarity.

Consider the increasingly bizarre liberal fixation on transgender rights. As more and more commentators now recognize, our political crisis concerns the disintegration of the once expansive and solid middle class. People feel economically vulnerable, true, but they feel culturally vulnerable as well, something that politically volatile concerns about immigration indicate. In this context, “problematizing” male and female identity—a fundamental point of orientation for every young person trying to figure out where he stands in the world—exacerbates the disintegrating trends that make so much in their lives so liquid.

Author Seth D. Kaplan wrote in the May 2018 edition of American Affairs:

Over the last few decades, the human rights project has become increasingly progressive, advocating a singular way of living the good life, with a concomitant demotion of values that don’t fit in, such as those associated with religious belief or with social institutions such as families, churches, schools, local communities, and clubs…

Although those on the right do not accept the liberal universality that currently drives much of the discourse and action around human rights today, they continue to believe in the inherent dignity of every human being, which includes the right to the security of life and property, due process, and the protection of fundamental liberties. The forms that these rights take can vary across societies depending on historical context, but they are essential.

…The number of rights that concern conservatives is smaller, but what is required to protect them and build a successful society is more expansive. Whereas liberals put rights at the center of their worldview, conservatives see them as dependent on social institutions, a complementary set of duties, and a healthy appreciation of virtue. Rather than being “Against Human Rights,” conservatives could more accurately be said to believe in a different vision of human rights—a vision with values shared by many societies worldwide. Unfortunately, the progressive takeover of human rights promotion alongside an individualist turn in Western culture has blurred this vision…

Anglo-American conservatives have historically had a much more modest and context-specific understanding of rights than the vision prevalent today.2 Recognizing a higher authority, a natural law established by God, that could be learned from the accumulated experience of many generations and which the Bible (and, for Selden, also the Talmud) provided reliable guidance, they rejected the “unrestricted use of pure and simple reason” as a way to govern on the grounds that it would produce judgments that are “intrinsically inconsistent and dissimilar among men.” A purely rationalistic approach would lead to confusion and a breakdown in social and political order. As such, except for a core group of laws that apply everywhere (e.g., the seven Noahide Laws), they prescribed no universal rules for how to organize states. As Selden wrote, “Diverse nations, as diverse men, have their diverse collections and inferences, and so make their diverse laws grow to what they are, out of the same root.”

…There are, broadly speaking, two different approaches to organizing society: one focused on maximizing personal freedoms and the other on maximizing the robustness of relationships and institutions. The first centers on the autonomous individual and emphasizes the liberty of each person as long as they do nothing to harm anyone else; the second centers on the wellbeing of society as a whole, emphasizing the interdependence of each person within the groups and networks they belong to.

These approaches assume and promote different definitions of the good life. Individualistic societies highly value choice and fairness, and they emphasize moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice. On the other hand, sociocentric societies highly value order, hierarchy, and tradition; they emphasize moral concepts such as duty, respect, reputation, patriotism, sanctity, and purity.

Not surprisingly, these two social orders have different conceptions of human rights and the role of the state in enhancing human welfare. Autonomy-centered societies prefer a human rights framework that offers broad protections for individual choice and which gives the state a large role in enforcing rules. Cultural differences, traditions, and social institutions can be set aside if they conflict with human rights goals. Sociocentric societies, in contrast, prefer a human rights framework that includes a few core rules that ensure certain minimum standards are met while providing flexibility for local adaptation. The state is still important but plays a different role in enforcing rules. Traditions and social institutions, considered crucial to identity and feelings of dignity, are given a relatively large role. Human rights are seen as but one of many ways to better lives and improve how societies work.

…a diminution of the important role originally played by duties, responsibilities, social institutions, norms, and morality; a debasement of political discourse; and an unnecessarily expansive role for the judiciary in setting public policy, which produces “coerced, and often unsatisfying, social arrangements.” The progressive domination of much of the discourse as well as their overwhelming influence on key institutions (including the media) in the human rights field means that today too often rights promotion is based on a particular, singular worldview about what it means to be a person, and what is just, good, and worth pursuing. As Makau Mutua writes, “They [human rights organizations] claim to practice law, not politics. Although their mandates seek to promote paradigmatic liberal values and norms, they present themselves as neutral, universal, non-ideological, non-partisan, and unbiased.” Values that don’t fit into this worldview are ignored or devalued.

…Western individualists of all political persuasions must recognize that promoting human dignity does not always mean securing individual autonomy. Not only do different societies—and different parts of our society—have different definitions of rights, but they also have a different vision concerning the place or exercise of individual autonomy. Many of the rights currently promoted by progressive human rights activists are highly dependent on a particular culture or worldview—one that has evolved significantly over the past half century. A different vision of society would promote and implement rights differently. For instance, whereas approval of any right to kill or harm oneself was once unthinkable, now ever-widening forms of physician-assisted suicide are becoming acceptable. While the amputation or reshaping of the body was formerly seen as unethical and dangerous, now sex reassignment surgery is accepted and encouraged (while, for some, circumcision is considered a human rights violation). Marriage used to emphasize the needs of children; now it is centered on the rights of adults. Instead of developing a concept of children’s rights that constrains the freedom of parents, a concept of adult rights that often deprives children of much needed social support predominates.3 In all these cases, what is at issue is not the importance of mores and rights, but which rights and harms to emphasize, and who is permitted to make choices.

The evolution of human rights discourse has prompted many of the growing disagreements over human rights between countries (and between different parts of American society). By assuming that, as Sally Engle Merry notes, “human rights are part of a distinctive modernist vision of the good and just society that emphasizes autonomy, choice, equality, secularism, and protection of the body,” progressive rights proponents have converted their own cultural norms into universal rights. This approach produces an ever-growing number of rights while it assumes a uniform value system across countries. It generally views culture as an obstacle that needs to be changed through education and the intervention of national and international authorities—not a very appealing proposition to people who understandably cherish their values, history, and sovereignty.

Indeed, when progressives urge non-Western countries to discard tradition or heterodox ways of living, or adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to various challenges that they face, they engender ill will and undermine whatever consensus on human rights existed in the aftermath of World War II (when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted; see below)—consensus that could bridge differences across cultures and improve human wellbeing—and that was rooted in an older vision of human rights that conservatives were much more comfortable with. Today, autonomy-centric progressives too often incite resistance from sociocentric societies to even those reforms that ought to be acceptable to them.

…When conservatives have discussed rights historically, it is usually with the understanding that they are based on a divine source and represent a sacred moral order.

Feb. 1, 2012, the Hoover Institution published:

When the American section of Amnesty International was first founded in the 1970s, William F. Buckley was one of its earliest supporters. The prime mover behind the American section, Ginetta Sagan, was a mentor to those of all political stripes, including, for example, Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, whom no one has ever accused of being a “leftist.” When George W. Bush called in his second inaugural address for the United States to affirm “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” he was issuing a call with which no human rights advocate could possibly disagree. The board of Freedom House, a prominent human rights organization, is rife with ex-Bush administration officials like William H. Taft IV and Paula J. Dobriansky, and with scholars like Ruth Wedgwood and Joshua Muravchik who are generally identified with the conservative end of the political spectrum.
And yet, despite the political diversity these instances represent, human rights are generally identified as a left-wing cause. There are many reasons for that, perhaps foremost among them the fact that human rights standards are established largely by international instruments, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr), and enforced, to the extent to which they are “enforced” at all, by international institutions, such as the un Human Rights Council. Conservatives tend to resist subsuming American sovereignty to international regimens and to be suspicious of international institutions, in part because they include some member states lacking consent of the governed and basic liberties. As a consequence, the United States has ratified fewer key human rights treaties than the other g20 nations and, when it has ratified them, has tended to attach reservations asserting the preeminent authority of the U.S. Constitution.2

Human rights are generally identified as a left-wing cause, largely because human rights standards are established globally.

Moreover, human rights have come to be associated with a number of causes — notably opposition to the death penalty; the closure of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay; and the assertion of a right to health care — that, justifiably or not, are considered liberal causes in American political terms. The fact that conservatives have played a prominent role in other landmark human rights struggles — such as the promotion of religious freedom; an end to the second Sudanese Civil War in 2005; and the campaign to end human trafficking — has failed to redress the perception that human rights advocates, with the exception perhaps of a handful of neoconservatives, are ineluctably drawn from the left.

…Perhaps no issue has more robustly divided left and right, at least since 9/11, than the challenge of finding the right balance between security and liberty. Without re-litigating, so to speak, highly contentious decisions of the Bush administration, it is fair to say that it erred on the side of security…

There is no international definition of terrorism, and the Geneva Conventions were not designed for nonstate actors.

…Ever since Jeane Kirkpatrick tried to distinguish between authoritarian and totalitarian governments in her 1979 Commentary essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” left and right have been arguing about when national interests trump accountability for human rights abuses.

For many years Amnesty International claimed that it favored no particular form of government — only governments of whatever stripe that support human rights. And human rights leaders have repeatedly and correctly pointed out that democracy was no guarantee of respect for human rights…

Conservatives have traditionally blanched at social and economic rights.