I’ve read a lot of stupid shit about Obama’s approach to human rights policy. But I haven’t seen anything half as stupid as this, and it comes from Washington’s most influential editorial page:

The Obama administration, [Secretary Clinton] said, would “see human rights in a broad context,” in which “oppression of want — want of food, want of health, want of education, and want of equality in law and in fact” — would be addressed alongside the oppression of tyranny and torture. “That is why,” Ms. Clinton said, “the cornerstones of our 21st-century human rights agenda” would be “supporting democracy” and “fostering development.”

This is indeed an important change in U.S. human rights policy — but the idea behind it is pure 20th century. Ms. Clinton’s lumping of economic and social “rights” with political and personal freedom was a standard doctrine of the Soviet Bloc, which used to argue at every East-West conference that human rights in Czechoslovakia were superior to those in the United States, because one provided government health care that the other lacked. In fact, as U.S. diplomats used to tirelessly respond, rights of liberty — for free expression and religion, for example — are unique in that they are both natural and universal; they will exist so long as governments do not suppress them. Health care, shelter and education are desirable social services, but they depend on resources that governments may or may not possess. These are fundamentally different goods, and one cannot substitute for another.

Apparently the third of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four freedoms — freedom from want — is the stuff of the Gulag Archipelago. What Fred Hiatt’s band of merry men finds unable to comprehend is that when we’re talking about addressing what Jefferson called the tyranny over the minds of men requires building a constituency for the meaningfulness of freedom. I can’t say it better than Samantha Power said it to me for a piece I wrote last year on the Obama Doctrine:

What’s typically neglected in these arguments is the simple insight that democracy does not fill stomachs, alleviate malaria, or protect neighborhoods from marauding bands of militiamen. Democracy, in other words, is valuable to people insofar as it allows them first to meet their basic needs. It is much harder to provide that sense of dignity than to hold an election in Baghdad or Gaza and declare oneself shocked when illiberal forces triumph. “Look at why the baddies win these elections,” Power says. “It’s because [populations are] living in climates of fear.” U.S. policy, she continues, should be “about meeting people where they’re at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That’s the swamp that needs draining. If we’re to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we’re not [providing].”

This is what Fred Hiatt equates to the Soviet Bloc. How often did we see during the second Bush term how empty democratic promises are when they don’t address the conditions that lead to demagogic hijacking? Hiatt’s team is actually making an argument that would get Khaled Meshaal smiling like a cheshire cat. Then there’s the ugly class implications of Hiatt’s blithe dismissal of vital social services as “desirable.” What a different tune he’d sing if he had to experience for one week the grinding poverty and abject fear that the hundreds of millions of people that Clinton is discussing presently endure.