Liberalism and Human Rights

Michael Barone condemns the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, and Democrats in general for failing to speak up on the issue of China's human rights violations. True, George W. Bush wasn't exactly a crusader for the rights of Chinese dissidents, but Barone charges that the Obamanistas aren't even trying:

It is one thing not to press a tyranny very hard on human rights; it is another thing to come out and say you're not going to raise the issue at all. It is a kind of unilateral moral disarmament. One arrow in the quiver of American foreign policy has been our pressing -- sometimes sotto voce (as in the Helsinki Accords), sometimes in opera buffa ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!") -- tyrannical regimes to honor human rights. Hillary Clinton has put that arrow over her knee, broken it in two and thrown it away.

He goes on to argue that Democrats have been criminally lax regarding human rights around the world. When Bush called for spreading democracy around the globe in the 2005 inaugural, Barone recalls how liberals "guffawed and groaned and jeered." Their reflexive Bush-bashing has led them astray from liberalism's long-time commitment to spreading democracy abroad.

Or so Barone says. I'm inclined to agree--mostly. Though even some of Bush's former supporters now say that the president's worldview might have been a bit too simplistic, he at least was willing to call for a change. And by freeing Iraq, he struck the greatest blow for democracy worldwide since the fall of the USSR more than a decade before.

The issue of human rights has become so much more complicated since then, because the world has grown much more complex. During the Cold War, our policy could be guided by asking a simple question. Would it help us defeat the Soviets? Now we ask, Will it help us defeat the terrorists? The first question is much, much easier to answer, not least because of the difficulty of defining "terrorist."

Does the United States have the responsibility to export democracy? One blog post isn't big enough to list all the pros and cons; one book isn't big enough. Several books, Oxford English Dictionary Style, probably wouldn't even be enough.

But I think Barone is right when he accuses liberals of dereliction of duty. Exporting democracy doesn't necessarily mean doing it by force, though those two ideas became tightly entangled during the Bush years. Instead, it means you're willing to speak up for those who can't speak for themselves. When Clinton glosses over China's human rights problems in one sentence, she's silencing the voices of those who deserve to be heard.