For decades, Democrats and progressives have sought to claim human rights as their own. They depicted conservatives as Cold War-obsessed, uninterested in either freedom or democracy. For many liberals, the Cuban Revolution was about human rights. So too were the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Every Latin American dictator was a Republican friend; every revolutionary was an inspiration for change.
Too often, conservatives refused to engage. That ended when President Ronald Reagan appointed Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, respectively, to the Latin America and East Asia bureaus at the State Department. Both took on leftist groups that used the language of progressivism but sought autocracy. Both tied liberty to economic freedom. And, under the tenures of both, tens of millions of people won freedom.
While groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch increasingly place subjective partisanship above objective principle, and while the Southern Poverty Law Center allegedly crossed the line into illegality with dirty tricks against mainstream conservative groups, many conservatives proudly advocated for individual liberty, freedom, and human flourishing.
Increasingly, however, Republicans are pivoting away from any interest in such core human rights principles. The problem is not just the Trump administration. Donald Trump was at one time a Democrat, and he switched parties because he saw an opportunity to hijack the party’s mechanism. In reality, he does not adhere to either party’s traditional ideology. Short-term strategic and economic gaming dominates Trump’s transactional approach. But in Congress, too, there is broad silence aside from isolated outposts such as the bipartisan Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. The value of think tanks is in their insulation from short-term politics. Increasingly, however, right-of-center think tanks have largely abandoned human rights advocacy.
Some think tanks — not necessarily conservative ones — are increasingly pay-to-play. A few, like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, are admirably open about it, noting foreign sponsorship of certain programs. Other think tanks are not.
The problem is not just ignoring human rights but, in some cases, having disdain for them. Some might gleefully cheer the ethnic cleansing of Armenians and Kurds, never mind that the precedent Azerbaijan now applies in Nagorno-Karabakh — sandblasting ancient inscriptions and last month destroying the region’s main cathedral — could just as easily apply to excuse Palestinian Arab destruction of millennia-old Jewish heritage in the West Bank. The Heritage Foundation’s apologia for antisemitism, meanwhile, has done decadeslong damage to the conservative movement.
Too many other conservative institutions have largely abandoned human rights and religious freedom work to instead focus on the minutiae of military analysis, theoretical discussions of grand strategy, or sanctions policy. The libertarian Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index is valuable but tends to treat many international human rights issues as footnotes.
What is missing, then, is any institution that does serious work or broader advocacy for human rights and religious freedom across the broader conservative movement. Niche organizations exist: The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the Center for a Free Cuba both do excellent work, for example, but focus only on those countries. Other organizations dedicate themselves to religious freedom.
POPE LEO APOLOGIZES FOR CATHOLIC CHURCH’S LEGITIMIZING OF SLAVERY: ‘WOUND IN CHRISTIAN MEMORY’
But with a global crisis of autocracies on the march — with the Uyghurs of northwestern China experiencing the most industrialized genocide since the Holocaust, Turks celebrating the ethnic cleansing of Kurds, the Rohingya crisis worsening, and progressives and even the New York Times seemingly engaging in blood libel — dissidents have too few backers in the intellectual petri dish of the conservative movement.
To again cede the human rights mantle to progressives will only erode freedom as it did prior to Reagan. For think tanks to allow human rights advocacy to disappear bodes poorly for the movement’s claim to advance freedom and human flourishing.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and director of analysis at the Middle East Forum.