Wrong About Rights
SALAM, REIHAN
Wrong About Rights The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and the Politics of Global Order By Nicolas Guilhot Columbia. 274 pp. $45.00. Reviewed by Reihan Salam Contributor, "Washington...
...Guilhot is right, though, in noting that a 1947 New Leader article by Louis Fischer called for converting "the negative, defensive Truman Doctrine into an assertive crusade for the brotherhood of free men who do not suffer want and will not therefore be lured by the false promises of dictators...
...Though only rarely explicit, they harbor a hostility toward the reformist Center-Left, which they view as complicit in imperial crimes...
...Because the author relies heavily on secondary sources, he gets a number of facts wrong...
...Though far from flawless, the much-maligned Great Society slashed child poverty and dramatically improved material conditions for tens of millions of Americans...
...In his final chapter, Guilhot describes how the rhetoric of democracy and human rights steered the World Bank from indifference, even hostility, toward political reform to strong advocacy of it...
...He realized that despite its drawbacks, professionalization was necessary for getting a job done...
...arsenal of power"-an "arsenal" that includes the "soft power" of persuasion-the democracy industry has improved living conditions around the world...
...This animus neatly parallels a penchant for hero worship of the latest masked brigands of the Third World...
...Pretty soon, they were comparing the Great Society unfavorably with the Poor Laws...
...It did not tum out that way, of course...
...The election of idealistic President Ronald Reagan completed the transition...
...To his credit, he is careful to provide caveats and provisos before and after making sweeping, slippery claims...
...Events ranging from the Vietnam debacle to political radicalizationconspiredtostymiethe global democratic campaign of the early Cold War until the 1980s...
...The reformist Center-Left was abandoned for the libertarian Center-Right, and many once devout Socialists fell in love with Alexis de Tocqueville...
...Through the the CIA, anti-Communist literary and political circles were cultivated in Western Europe...
...Guilhot spends considerable time describing how the politics of social science research moved in a more moderate direction, both in the U.S...
...Anti-Communism became "the sole intellectual compass" of the Old Left...
...Moynihan himself jumped ship long before this antigovernment drive reached full flower...
...It attracted the active support of "the most progressive" human rights wing, according to the author, by contending-as did many authoritarians-that attacking only the symptoms without tackling global inequality itself was the route to failure...
...The Democracy Makers, in fact, leaves one thinking that he and his cohort may pose a more serious intellectual threat than has generally been appreciated...
...It was launched as a broadsheet in 1924 and Levitas became its executive editor in 1936...
...His thesis is that democracy and human rights have gone from being "weapons for the critique of power" to becoming "part of the arsenal of power itself...
...In short order, the "promotion of democracy" became the central mission of the liberal human rights movement...
...The "moral exhilaration" of an oppositional stance has an unmistakable allure, and it makes for a moral purity that those wrestling with messy political realities cannot match...
...Not so French scholar Nicolas Guilhot's new work...
...But the progressives, Guilhot says, were outmaneuvered by the neoconservatives...
...Like it or not, no vision of a better world can be realized without it...
...If the altermondialist Left is to grow up, it will have to make peace with the progressive exercise of American power...
...Eventually, Moynihan and several of his intellectual peers revised their view...
...Through its alignment with the U.S...
...Although still hopeful that government activism could alleviate poverty, he was disillusioned over the promise of professionalization...
...Reviewed by Reihan Salam Contributor, "Washington Monthly," Los Angeles "Times" The ANTIGLOBALIZATION movement, recently restyled under a more Gallic moniker as the "altermondialist Left," has its guns trained on bigger targets than mere capitalist exploitation...
...They came to see the cult of expertise as in some respects antithetical to the interests of the vulnerable poor, who need self-respect as much as they need social services...
...nonprofits thus was accelerated under President Reagan...
...rather, it sought a superiormeansofputtingneoliberal policies to work...
...The establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983, spearheaded by neoconservatives and backed by many in the human rights community, gave the crusade for democracy an institutional form...
...For example, The New Leader, which he cites prominently, was not "founded in 1920 by Menshevik ?©migr?© Sol Levitas...
...The result is a passiveaggressive attack on what he dubs the democracy "industry"-an interlocking network of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and private firms that have turned democracy into "a commodity that can be exported...
...He oscillates, however, between sober, even plodding, sociological analysis and a searing polemic...
...The "moral exhilaration" Moynihan considered ultimately trivial was also recognized as more important than had been anticipated-essential, even...
...and overseas...
...In a similar vein, the democracy industry Guilhot denigrates represents an undeniable step forward...
...By applying the latest social scientific technologies, an elite cadre of technocrats would revolutionize the helping professions, displacing the hapless amateurs of yesteryear...
...Armed with long experience of turf battles against Communists in and around the labor movement, they shifted to an ideologized and even militant defense of liberal democracy...
...interests would be better served...
...By decade's end Moynihan was chastened...
...This helped build a "transnational network of academics sharing similar professional standards and apolitical concern with democracy...
...In yet another arena, U.S...
...Throughout Latin America, "the former critics of imperialism became the producers of new imperial policies...
...It was at this point, in Guilhot's view, that the democracy crusade shifted from revolution to counterrevolution...
...Rights-oriented liberal democracy-very much including property rights-would appeal to the mass public and enhance the legitimacy of structural adjustment...
...interests...
...Grant money was spread generously to newly minted "democracy experts," social scientists ideologically aligned with the NED project...
...But the excess of messianic hot air that pervades their manifestoes, Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), has made it easy for critics to dismiss them...
...A process begun with U.S...
...Apparently unbeknown to Guilhot, he is attacking what the late Democratic Senator and Harvard political scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "the professionalization of reform...
...Far-sighted elements in the State Department and elsewhere in government came to recognize the importance of promoting democratic socialism as an alternative to Communism...
...They would experience less in the way of "moral exhilaration" than the visionaries who came before them, but these technocrats would get the job done...
...The "democracy experts" constructed a political and economic orthodoxy in line with U.S...
...The result, ironically, is that the author's flawed critique of the neoconservatives repeats their mistakes...
...The academic darlings of the movement, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, supplied protesters of the World Trade Organization with a theoretically informed critique of globalization and a Utopian call to arms...
...The polemical talents of leading antiStalinist intellectuals, Guilhot maintains, facilitated their rise to positions of prominence during the Cold War...
...Try as he might to seem detached, it is clear that his sympathies lie with the partisans of the New International Economic Order (NIEO...
...who argued that only democracies could secure human rights and seized the mantle of idealism...
...Participants see themselves as the enemies of all bureaucracies and hierarchies...
...Defending American institutions at home and abroad was invariably right, violent revolutionary struggle in the Third World invariably wrong...
...Operating with a clear-eyed rigor hitherto found only in the private sector, they would apply massive quantities of Federal money and Ivy League intellect to the problem of poverty...
...THE OTHER central protagonists in Guilhot's narrative are the foot soldiers of the human rights movement...
...Poverty would soon be a thing of the past...
...Romanced by the notion of "American exceptionalism"-that the U.S...
...Then came the neoconservative turn, when the criticism of professionalization evolved into a celebration of civil society and charitable works...
...In 1965, in the first issue of Public Interest, Moynihan described the professionalization of reform in positively glowing terms...
...That did not represent a repudiation of the neoliberal Washington consensus...
...As Guilhot tells it, the democracy industry was begun by a clique of intellectuals on the anti-Stalinist Left...
...Civic activism went from "seeking to limit the powers of the state" to becoming "a new instrument of global domination" that "refashions societies from within...
...Unfortunately, the price of this ethical vanityin the form of lives unimproved by American aid and know-how-can be very high indeed...
...Initiated by the Non-Aligned Movement in 1973, the NIEO has advocated reordering global economics along Socialist lines...
...middle class was a bulwark against fascism-key figures of the anti-Stalinist Left embraced a very moderate politics, more or less at peace with the central features of American society...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
