How Mike Pompeo’s Professors Hijacked a Scholarly Debate

The State Department’s new Commission on Unalienable Rights, announced with fanfare a few weeks back, has attracted skepticism from many quarters. Human rights organizations have registered alarm over Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s dark talk about the “evil” hijacking of human rights rhetoric for “dubious or malignant purposes” by “interest groups.” Many critics find it hard to look past the hypocrisy of an administration that revels in flouting human rights norms sponsoring such a panel. And isn’t there a Trumpian smirk in the replacement of the phrase “human rights” with the archaic “Unalienable Rights,” lifted from the Declaration of Independence?

Yet despite its Tea Party tone, the human rights panel consists almost entirely of academics, representing an unusual convergence of humanist inquiry with hard-right power. It is led by iconoclastic Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon, who played an influential role in the rise of human rights as a field of scholarship over the past two decades. What might we expect from the first such government commission to appear since the academic boom in human rights studies?

The commission’s stated aim is to reclaim human rights from their global misuse and misappropriation by convening thinkers to explore the “natural law” roots of the authentically American philosophical tradition of human rights. To many, that suggests a deeply conservative social and religious ideological agenda. Indeed, it is not hard to see how the promotion of religious freedom might privilege white Christians and exclude Muslims and LGBTQ people, among others, from its umbrella of protection. Those fears are heightened by the number of Christian religious conservatives involved, many of whom have staked out controversial positions on sexual equality and reproductive rights.

Those figures include Glendon, former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See under President George W. Bush. Long known for her vocal opposition to legalizing gay marriage and abortion, she attacked the excessive proliferation of rights-language and law’s pernicious effect on American morals in her 1991 book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. She then went on to write a best-seller, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2001), which helped canonize a narrative of the exemplary role of American leadership in the post-World War II rise of human rights. Delicately side-stepping the former first lady’s sexuality and progressive labor politics, Glendon emphasized how Roosevelt corralled an unlikely team of squabbling diplomats from around the world to overcome their differences in quest of drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the years from the end of World War II to its triumphal appearance in 1948.

In her reconstruction of the road to 1948, Glendon outlined what came to be the orthodox narrative of human rights history. Enlightened American moral leadership rejected the dangerous forms of utopianism that had led to the horrors of global war, fascism, and the Holocaust. Under Roosevelt’s watch, the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shared the hope that they could set a universal standard of human rights — and heal the wounds of humanity. Glendon and Pompeo clearly want to reclaim that stirring moment of unity, in which human dignity was consecrated as the basis for global consensus.

Achieving that goal under the auspices of the Trump administration presents obvious challenges. Glendon may have envisioned herself as a latter-day Roosevelt, deftly guiding a broad swath of public intellectuals back to the “basic human rights” of 1948. But the lack of political and cultural diversity on the commission will likely hamper that effort.

Beyond that obstacle, though, lies a larger one. The vaunted consensus Glendon seeks to reclaim never existed. Her hagiographic account of 1948 helped launch an academic field that now encompasses history, anthropology, political science, sociology, and many other disciplines. But as that field has grown, scholars have replaced Glendon’s pristine image of 1948 with a much more realistic view of the moral compromises, political failures, and legal setbacks that defined human rights from their inception.

Far from operating outside of the constraints of politics, Roosevelt reluctantly found herself a tool of an administration determined to use her as a symbol of its legitimacy in foreign affairs while denuding her of all real power. Roosevelt’s handlers exploited her image to promote a norms-based, American-led liberal internationalism in place of a binding legal multilateralism. She was chosen to champion a cause — human rights — that few in Washington saw as a lynchpin of American foreign policy, in part because of bipartisan mistrust about international law. A similar spirit of cynicism lies at the heart of Trump’s project on “unalienable rights.”

Academia’s role in this exercise seems to be to supply an outlet for harmless solipsism rather than critical inquiry. That is also reflected in the narrow slice of scholars chosen to pursue this effort. At its core are a number of Christianist religious philosophers, along with one rabbi, Meir Soloveichik, a frequent companion of the GOP and Christian evangelicals, and one Muslim cleric, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, closely aligned with the United Arab Emirates government. They are joined by various contrarian secular scholars such as political philosopher Peter Berkowitz and German literature professor Russell Berman, who seem picked principally for their critiques of left-wing ideological excesses.

This is unfortunate, because the field of human rights studies has spawned its own vibrant intellectual debates that include a distinctive engagement between scholarly critics from the progressive left and the conservative right. Indeed, recent years have produced a fascinating convergence between right- and left-wing critics on the crisis of international human rights law and debates about how to remedy it. Rather than return to philosophical questions of first principles, these scholars have asked what the internationalization of legal rights and the launch of transnational legal institutions since World War II have actually achieved in terms of atrocity prevention, global inequality, and political freedom.

To judge from the recent statements issued by two of its members, Berman and fellow Germanist David Pan, the Commission on Unalienable Rights seems unlikely to engage significantly with these productive scholarly debates. Challenged by members of the German studies community to reconsider their participation in an entity linked to the Trump administration, each responded with polite, concise statements focused narrowly on freedom of thought and expression, with a brief nod by Berman to the emerging area of human rights and artificial intelligence. The more provocative and interesting questions about the future of international law, and the relationships between nationalism and internationalism, capitalism and human rights, to name but a few, seem absent from their frames of reference.

It may very well be the case that the commission will mark a further stage in the American retreat from the international human rights system. It is entirely possible that the Trumpian human rights vision will follow a global pattern of conservative internationalism that invokes the language of moral idealism to promote social and religious conservatism. Deeper engagement with human rights scholarship might not arrest that trend in the American case, but it would provide better prospects for a more substantial intellectual inquiry beyond high-minded philosophical discourse. It might also spare Glendon and the Commission on Unalienable Rights the fate of the original committee on which it is modeled: freighted with symbolism yet largely powerless by design, less a bold political experiment than a symptom of American ambivalence.

James Loeffler is a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia.