,
13 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
1/ Now let’s talk about the members of the new State Department commission on “unalienable” rights. That word is a signal of the larger politics of the American Founders’ human rights.
2/ The contending sides of US nationalism, liberal and conservative, have never been above claiming that Americans are the best to represent human rights to the world because they discovered them.
3/ As Jimmy Carter put it in his farewell address, “Americans did not invent human rights; human rights invented America” — which has authorized what even liberals have often thought, that human rights are redundant for Americans, whose role is to help the world.
4/ As liberal Louis Henkin once put it, Americans are to international human rights as a flying buttress is to a cathedral: America supports global human rights from outside the system it helps support.
5/ In its right-wing forms, of course, Americans not only regard human rights as redundant but dangerously expansionary, especially when they do not emphasize the only real God-given rights of liberty, property, and religion.
6/ But we must look past the founder-mania in Pompeo’s launch yesterday. It’s a red herring. For the membership list suggests this project is something distinctive to our time: an exploration of common ground of the alt- and religious right.
7/ Along with chair Mary Ann Glendon, members Paolo Carrozza and Christopher Tollefson exemplify the Christian right line, along friendly Jews who support it like Peter Berkowitz and Meir Soloveichik.
8/ Carozza is easily the most significant scholar on the commission. Tollefson, a protege of @McCormickProf and coauthor with him of an attack on abortion rights, offers a familiar human-dignity-and-natural-law-prohibit-things-I-don’t-like perspective. We know where this goes.
9/ Soloveichik is the son of one of the most brilliant and significant Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Like Berkowitz, who was once a good scholar, Soloveichik fils has supported the politics of the Christian Right for years now.
10/ Far more revealing is the presence of Russell Berman, formerly a New Leftist and for years an animating spirit of the far-right-curious journal “Telos.” There’s much more to say about its history, but it has long flirted with the European new right. journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/kont…
11/ I haven’t had the pleasure of reading the scholarship of commission member and Berman’s fellow Germanist David Pan, but note his associations with “Telos” as well. faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?fa…
12/ What does this commission lead? For my money, it’s most interesting not as a boring attempt to push back on abortion and LGBTQ rights, significant as that undoubted emphasis of the commission is. Rather, it is one domain in which alt- and religious right politics are merging.
Sorry, I actually knew this (I think), but Meir Soloveichik is the great-nephew of Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik. Mea culpa (slicha?) for the error.
