COVID-19 reports flood the airwaves, etherspace and newsprint these days. And understandably so. The virus represents an existential crisis on many levels, first and foremost to the bare physical survival of infected individuals. It also threatens our ways of living, the ability to earn a wage or salary, and the daily interactions in the workplace, at school, in bars, restaurants and cafes — ultimately, the sociability that defines human beings.
The virus has pushed into the corners the other existential threat we face, namely, climate change. But the climate crisis does not wait for us to resolve one pandemic before we feel its full effects. Glacier melting at the South and North Poles, rising sea levels, extreme storm patterns and excessive heat waves already make it impossible to farm in some places around the globe even as factories and coal-fired power plants shut down or drastically reduce their output.
In the last few weeks, scientists, economists and public officials have begun to lay the path out of the pandemic-induced urban and economic comas in which we now live. All necessary. But we forget the other existential crisis we face to our peril. Is there a way to think about public policy that addresses both existential crises?
Human rights provide the answer. Human rights are not merely a set of nice, vague principles. They provide a unique and powerful framework that allow us to address the global crises we face. They demand the well being of all the people and the forms of governance that ensure their implementation. The drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the late 1940s understood all that. To be effective, human rights, in their view, meant political rights like freedom of speech and assembly, and also the right to a decent standard of living and a good education (to mention just a few of the articles of the UDHR).
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Human rights also required strong states and well-functioning international institutions. That is the lesson the drafters, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, derived from the Great Depression and the massive destructiveness and violations of human dignity wrought by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The UDHR, brought before the UN General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948, pronounced the ultimate rebuke to the suffering and inequality of the Great Depression and the racism and extreme nationalism of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
The strong state the drafters envisioned does not mean dictatorial and certainly not totalitarian ways of ruling society. It means a government based on law and democratic practices that functions for the well-being of all its people. It also means a state that participates constructively in a variety of international institutions.
COVID-19 and climate change rage along without regard for county, state and national borders.
In the process, they have demonstrated the weak capacity and downright incompetence of the United States government, the result of 40 years of ideological attacks on the very idea of good governance and a current president who makes decisions based on self-obsession rather than science. The enshrinement of the market as the arbiter of literally everything has reduced important public goods like education and healthcare to mere products traded in the marketplace like stocks, toys, and computers.
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The consequent disinvestment in government at all levels has had appalling effects. Public health departments around the country have seen their budgets continually slashed. Even the highly regarded Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have stumbled badly in the current situation. Just when international collaboration is more necessary than ever, the Trump administration has retreated to a policy of isolation and attacks on political rivals, real and imagined, as the source of the pandemic.
COVID-19 has also demonstrated the chasm of inequality that has emerged in the last 40 years both within the United States and between the Global North and Global South. Every statistic emerging out of the COVID-19 crisis shows that in the United States, the poor and minorities — often one and the same — suffer from a much higher incidence of the disease, and once contracted, have a much higher death rate than the well off. Meanwhile, coffee farmers in Central America and pastoralists in Sudan have seen their life resources ravaged by climate change, harbingers of the more general crisis to come.
The drafters of the UDHR could not envisage the pandemic and the climate crisis. But they did expect the UDHR to be quickly followed by a binding international treaty whose principles would then also be secured in the national laws of the UN member states and in an international criminal court to prosecute human rights violations. The Cold War intervened and it took nearly 20 years until the United Nations General Assembly passed two human rights treaties, one on political and civic rights and the other on economic, social and cultural rights. It took another 32 years until the founding of the International Criminal Court in 1998. (The United States is only party to the first of these human rights advances, the treaty on political and civic rights.)
No one knows how long the acute phase of COVID-19 will last. We do know that we have only a few years left to rein in climate change. The tasks before us are enormous. Every human rights resolution and treaty since 1948 and the passage of the UDHR rests on these fundamental principles: the right to live, to possess the security of life and to live that life in a dignified manner.
Upon that basis, governmental policies become easy to define. In the United States, rebuild a robust public health system and work to deepen, not undermine, the Paris Climate Accord. Expand and reform, rather than attack and destroy, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international agencies. Accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources. Reduce inequality at home through a return to a progressive income tax. Tax capital gains at the level of wage income, and vigorously enforce antitrust laws. Support trade unions as a necessary counterbalance to corporate wealth and power. Provide decent-paying jobs for the entire population. Invest in public, not private education, both K-12 and colleges and universities, so all people have the opportunity to progress in their lives through education. Ensure that everyone has access to adequate healthcare.
Forty years of neoliberal policies have brought great advances in wealth and technology. They have also devastated the public realm and the governance capacity of the United States. It’s time to reset the course if we are to survive, and survive well, COVID-19 and the climate crisis. And that means making human rights and the well being of all the people the guiding principles of public policy.
Eric D. Weitz is the author of A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States (Princeton University Press, 2019) and is Distinguished Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
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