When human rights could determine an election 

After four years of scaling down its international engagement and putting “America first”, the US once again finds itself at a crossroads in the 2020 election. 

Joe Biden has promised to return to the ways of the old when it comes to US foreign policy: Engaging with allies with shared values, recommitting to international treaties and multilateral institutions and generally seeking to restore the US moral standing in the world. 

A triumphant Trump would most likely continue a policy of breaking with the norms, rules and institutions of the liberal order through pragmatic dealings with strongmen and dictators and a pronounced disdain for the idealistic principles of universalism, as they´re captured in diverse treaties and multilateral institutions – even to the degree of actively dismantling them.

But the discussion isn´t a novelty in US politics. From the debates on a post-war order in the 1940s to the neocons of the noughties, the disagreement over whether to commit US foreign policy and strategic decisions to the principles of human rights or whether to follow a more pragmatic approach has been a recurring theme.

 In this regard, one election stands out beyond the current one.

Although foreign policy is rarely a dominant theme in U.S. presidential elections, in 1980 dramatic developments in international affairs and the starkly diverging foreign policy visions of the two candidates made foreign policy a salient campaign issue. A central component of the foreign policy debate was the appropriate role for human rights concerns in American foreign relations. The incumbent, President Jimmy Carter, had made human rights the banner for his foreign policy. 

He had adopted human rights as a language to restore America’s moral standing in the world after the Vietnam War and viewed it as a way to break with the Cold War dichotomy of East-West contestation. Conversely, the challenger, Ronald Reagan, made criticism of Carter’s human rights policy an integral part of his platform. To Reagan, this policy had proven both misguided and dangerous and he blamed it for weakening America’s allies and strengthening its enemies.

America’s Embrace of Human Rights

The prominence of the concept of human rights in the 1980 presidential election was a remarkable development. Although the Carter presidency established human rights as the key moral language in debates on U.S. foreign policy, the concept was marginal to his campaign and did not feature prominently in the 1976 election. In previous presidential elections the issue of human rights had been further relegated to the margins of foreign policy debates if it had been mentioned at all. Thus, the 1980 election marked the first time human rights concerns played a key role in a U.S. presidential election.

Although it was Carter’s presidency that elevated human rights to the center stage of the national debate, the breakthrough of human rights happened in the preceding years in Congress. During the second Nixon administration, human rights became part of a congressional assertiveness on foreign policy that generated substantial conflict between the executive and legislative branches of government.

Rising in opposition to what they perceived as the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon, members of Congress passed a number of measures to restrict the presidency’s prerogatives on foreign policy. These measures included the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which limited the president’s power to deploy military forces without congressional consent as well as legislation that tied elements of U.S. foreign relations with other countries’ their records on human rights.

Illustration © Lisa Reschefski

Over the course of a five-year period starting in 1973, the liberal Democratic Representative Donald M. Fraser (D-MN) used his House subcommittee to hold a series of hearings on human rights issues that resulted in legislation that conditioned foreign aid and trade relations to the respect for human rights. Congress also passed several country-specific measures that cut off or reduced assistance to specific countries, including Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, the Philippines, South Korea, and Uruguay.

The conservative Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) introduced the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which prohibited the granting of most-favored-nation status and trade credit to communist countries that denied or restricted the right to emigration. Fraser’s subcommittee also published a report calling for the United States to take the lead on international human rights and detailing twenty-nine recommendations for integrating human rights concerns in U.S. foreign policymaking.

Under growing congressional pressure, the executive branch accommodated several of these recommendations, including the establishment of a Human Rights Bureau at the State Department in 1975, the assignment of human rights officers to all its regional bureaus and compliance with a request for annual reports on the human rights situation in countries receiving U.S. aid.

To Carter, human rights represented a moral language to reclaim America’s sense of virtue and a new guideline for the country’s role in the world in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Moreover, Carter’s human rights based-foreign policy was aimed at resetting America’s relations with the world by transcending Cold War contestation and improving relations with specific regions such as Latin America. In relations with the Soviet Union, Carter pursued human rights issues in an unsteady combination with support for improvements in superpower relations known as détente.

In relations with the Global South, Carter’s human rights-based foreign policy dictated criticism of authoritarian regimes but restraint from intervention. It also shaped the response to the demands of developing countries for a reordering of international economic relations through the so-called New International Economic Order. 

In his inaugural address on January 20, 1977, Carter spoke of a new global demand for human rights:

“The world itself is now dominated by a new spirit. People more numerous and more politically aware are craving, and now demanding, their place in the sun – not just for the benefit of their own physical condition, but for basic human rights.”

Consequently, he proclaimed that the United States’ commitment to human rights had to be absolute and explained that, “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.” The human rights record of other countries would affect the relationship between these and the United States.

Christian approach

Despite this forceful rhetoric, Carter was actually a relative latecomer to the cause of human rights. Unlike early human rights proponents, Carter opposed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, arguing that it was an ill-advised interference in Soviet domestic affairs and his 1975 memoir did not mention human rights at all. As historian Barbara J. Keys has pointed out, Carter’s religious beliefs and his interpretation of the civil rights movement made him predisposed to a moralistic foreign policy, but he was slow to adopt human rights language and only did so because he found that it resonated with the American public.

Influenced by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, Carter believed the world could not be cleared of injustice but that particular wrongs could be corrected – a worldview that fit well with the limited agenda of human rights. As a Southerner supportive of desegregation, Carter also believed that external coercion from the federal government had helped white Southerners to confront their past without losing face – a belief that would inform his approach to promoting human rights abroad.

The first president to seriously grabble with how to make human rights concerns part of U.S. foreign policy, Carter experienced significant difficulties implementing rhetoric into actual policy. Despite the talk of an absolute commitment to human rights, the administration quickly determined that human rights would have to be pursued on a case-by-case basis and in combination with other national interests. 

In February 1978, Carter issued Presidential Directive 30 (PD30), which formally defined U.S. policy on human rights, emphasizing a preference for positive inducements through the allocation of foreign aid rather than economic sanctions. Regarding the question of which human rights to promote, the administration initially declared its intention to advance a broad spectrum of human rights divided into three categories: the integrity of the person, civil and political rights, and basic human needs. However, significant differences existed in the administration over the relative importance of these rights and ultimately Carter prioritized speaking out against torture, political imprisonment and other repressive practices while largely ignoring socio-economic needs. 

The administration’s attempt to pressure authoritarian allies and the Soviet Union to improve their human rights records, while also improving U.S. relations with the Global South and continuing détente, meant that the human rights policy was never absolute. 

Human rights were pursued as a low-cost moral infusion to U.S. foreign policy but when it meant trouble, the administration was reluctant to pay the costs. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and domestic criticism of his foreign policy, Carter took a tougher approach to the Cold War. The invasion of Afghanistan effectively destroyed détente and the overthrow of U.S.-friendly regimes in Teheran and Managua by forces hostile to the United States demonstrated the risks of criticizing authoritarian allies. Carter responded by hardening his rhetoric toward the Soviet Union, declaring that the United States would use military force if necessary, to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf against further Soviet advances. The United States also withdrew from the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty II (SALT II) negotiations and boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In July 1980, Carter signed Presidential Directive 59, which called for a build-up in nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, public perceptions that the United States was experiencing a decline in military power and that Carter was weak on foreign policy persisted.

Republicans choose conservative internationalism

The collapse of détente also destroyed the centrist consensus on national security among Democrats and moderate Republicans that had stretched from Nixon to Carter. This breakdown deepened divisions over foreign policy among Democrats and fostered a new unity in the Republican Party around a foreign policy of conservative internationalism.

This new Republican foreign policy consensus was also a result of internal struggles in the party. During the 1976 Republican primary, conservatives had criticised President Gerald Ford’s foreign policy of détente for ignoring human rights abuses in the Soviet Union.

Although Ford won the nomination, by the end of the convention a conservative approach to human rights emerged triumphant. This approach defined human rights narrowly as civil and political rights and applied these to a strategic and ideological framework of anticommunism. In the following years, the rightward move was further fuelled by the rise of the New Right and the migration of neoconservatives from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Several of these neoconservatives would occupy important positions in the Reagan administration, while others provided ideological support from through advocacy groups like the Committee on the Present Danger and the Committee for the Free World.

The collapse of détente, the shift in party alignments as well as Carter’s emphasis on human rights abuses in Latin America created a situation where the administration’s human rights policy was criticized from both left and right. Leading liberal Democrats criticized Carter for failing to take an equally tough approach to right-wing dictators in countries elsewhere with a higher geostrategic importance to the United States such as South Korea and the Philippines. Conversely, conservatives and Cold War hawks blamed Carter’s human rights policy for undermining American allies in Latin America and demonstrating a weakness that emboldened Soviet expansionism. Carter thus went into the 1980 campaign with his human rights-based foreign policy beleaguered by both flanks.

Human Rights in the 1980 Presidential Election

Although domestic economic problems such as high inflation and unemployment rates dominated the 1980 presidential election, foreign policy, including human rights issues, also received considerable attention. The ongoing Iran hostage crisis after Iranian students took 52 Americans hostage at the American embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, in particular, drew attention to foreign affairs. The hostage crisis emerged in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, in which the U.S.-backed Shah was overthrown in favor of an Islamic republic under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. Other key developments that drew attention to foreign policy included the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, advances by Soviet-supported guerrillas in Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique, and the overthrow of the U.S.-friendly Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua by the leftwing Sandinistas in July 1979. The combination of these foreign policy woes and the economic crisis fed a growing sense among many Americans that the United States was in decline.

Carter’s weakness emboldened Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) challenge the incumbent for the Democratic Party’s nomination. Representing the leftist wing of the party, Kennedy was one of the leading liberal critics of Carter’s human rights policy. Years before Carter’s embrace of human rights, Kennedy had been one of the leading figures in the congressional human rights activism in the mid-1970s. He was at the forefront of banning military aid to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in 1976 and two years later he successfully introduced an amendment to cut off military aid and commercial sales to Argentina over the military junta’s human rights abuses. The Democratic primary thus stood between two candidates who both claimed the mantle of human rights.

Kennedy announced his campaign shortly after the onset of the Iran hostage crisis and in December 1979, he implicitly criticized Carter for his support for the Shah. In a television interview, Kennedy said that the Shah “ran one of the most violent regimes in the history of mankind – in the form of terrorism and the basic and fundamental violations of human rights, in the most cruel circumstances, to his own people.” 

The comments drew immediate backlash from both Democrats and Republicans, who rebuked Kennedy for sowing division at a time of national crisis and accused him of hurting ongoing efforts to secure American hostages. In this case, Kennedy’s idealistic approach of consistently criticizing human rights abuses regardless of U.S. national interests backfired.

Despite this misstep, Kennedy proved a strong challenge to Carter’s reelection, highlighting Carter’s weakness. As evident by Kennedy’s challenge, this move made him vulnerable to criticism from the left. On a more general level, Carter was hampered by a poor economy and the perception that he was a weak and ineffectual leader. Kennedy’s challenge inflicted divisions in the Democratic Party and underlined Carter’s weakness ahead of the general election.

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Whereas Carter experienced an unusually tough nomination challenge for an incumbent president, Reagan won the Republican primary in a much more convincing fashion. Having narrowly lost the 1976 Republican nomination to Ford, Reagan had a lock on the 1980 nomination early on. 

The two-term California governor and former Hollywood actor had become a conservative icon and despite contemporary arguments that he was too radical to win the presidency, Republican voters favored him over more moderate alternatives. He subsequently secured party unity by making his main opponent, the more moderate George H. W. Bush, his running mate. 

Illustration © Lisa Reschefski

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Reagan emphasized his commitment to peace, but he also criticized Carter’s record on the economy and foreign affairs, complaining that the Iran hostage crisis ridiculed the United States before the world.

The 1980 Republican Party platform adopted at the convention also launched a full-scale attack on Carter’s human rights policy, arguing that Carter had been too tough on America’s allies while failing to crack down on communist human rights offenders such as the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba. 

“The nations of South and Central America,” the platform declared, “have been battered by the Carter administration’s economic and diplomatic sanctions linked to its undifferentiated charges of human rights violations.” 

The platform promised that a Republican president would rectify Carter’s policy on Nicaragua by countering Soviet influence in the country and supporting “a free and independent government.” The Democratic Party platform, on the contrary, proclaimed the party’s continued commitment to Carter’s human rights policy, stressing the need to be vigilant on human rights violations among allies as well as among enemies.” Reagan and Carter thus emerged from the primaries with strongly opposed views on the appropriate role of human rights concerns in U.S. foreign policy.

Both Carter and Reagan believed that foreign policy represented a weakness for the other, leading them to focus on international affairs during the campaign. Beset by economic problems at home, Carter viewed foreign policy as a more promising case for reelection. Central to this strategy was the Carter campaign’s belief that Reagan’s lacking foreign policy experience and his reputation as a Cold War hardliner made him vulnerable in the area of foreign policy. 

The Reagan campaign, conversely, believed that it could exploit the growing perception that Carter was weak on foreign policy and that the international standing of the United States was on the decline. 

Attacking Carter’s approach to human rights figured prominently in this strategy. In 1978, Reagan had described Carter’s human rights-based foreign policy as “well-meaning intentions” mixed with a “false sense of guilt” after Vietnam, but by 1980 he struck an even harder line. Despite Carter’s alterations to his human rights policy, the Reagan campaign maintained that the Carter administration was too soft on the Soviet Union and too tough on American allies. In October 1980, an aide to the Reagan campaign claimed that a Reagan administration would transform the human rights theme into an instrument to counter Soviet propaganda.

During the only presidential debate between the two major candidates on October 28, 1980, only a week before the election, Reagan attacked Carter for criticizing the human rights abuses of allies while at the same time seeking détente with the Soviet Union. 

Reagan lamented that Carter’s policy toward allied authoritarian regimes had “in a number of instances, aided a revolutionary overthrow which results in complete totalitarianism.”

Arguing that Carter’s human rights policy had “undercut our friends,” Reagan blamed Carter for the fall of American allies such as Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah of Iran. 

Reagan’s arguments closely resembled those presented by Jeane Kirkpatrick in an influential article in the neoconservative journal Commentary the previous year. According to Kirkpatrick, Carter’s human rights policy had neglected the centrality of the Cold War by failing to make a distinction between totalitarian communist regimes and authoritarian regimes. The former, she argued, were the ultimate human rights offenders for which there was no hope of reform, while the latter had the potential to democratize. Consequently, the United States should resist communism at all costs and support friendly authoritarians – a policy that became known as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine. 

By attacking Carter’s human rights policy amidst perceptions of American decline, Reagan sought to paint a picture of Carter as a weak leader who failed to support America’s allies and was unable to withstand communist aggression and Islamic fundamentalism.

Reagan also sought to link America’s foreign policy troubles with its domestic economic problems. In his final statement during the presidential debate, he addressed the sense of decline by urging the American people to ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?” With Carter’s so-called misery index (the combination of inflation and unemployment numbers) peaking at 20.76 in 1980 and the foreign policy embarrassments of Afghanistan and Iran fresh in mind, many Americans decided they could not answer Reagan’s questions affirmatively.

How Human Rights Impacted the Election and the Election Impacted Human Rights

Foreign policy, including human rights, was crucial to the 1980 election, which had a higher percentage of newspaper editorials devoted to foreign affairs than had the previous four elections. Foreign policy even received more newspaper coverage than domestic and economic issues combined. Moreover, the study found that four foreign policy issues dominated the coverage: the Iran hostage crisis, the development of stealth aircraft, the SALT II negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the question of war and peace. The Iran hostage crisis, in particular, dominated the news cycle. The coverage was further amplified just before the election, as Election Day fell on the one-year anniversary of the taking of the hostages.

Furthermore, contemporary polls and studies indicated that while the economy was the most important issue for voters, foreign policy mattered a great deal to a large part of the electorate. In one study, 56 percent of voters sad the economy was the most important issue, but 32 percent answered foreign policy – a marked increase from a mere four percent in the previous election. Foreign policy was decisive for the election because of the large differences between the candidates’ foreign policies, including their views on human rights, as well as the high salience of certain foreign policy issues. 

First and foremost, it was the Iran hostage crisis that haunted Carter. Although the crisis initially benefitted Carter’s popularity as the American people rallied behind their leader, the continued failure to secure the release of the hostages turned the issue against Carter. Reagan hit the issue hard as a prime example of his characterization of Carter as a weak president that undermined respect for the United States abroad. 

Illustration © Lisa Reschefski

Carter’s embrace of human rights likewise ended up hurting his bid for reelection. Initially, his promise to restore morality to U.S. foreign policy by making human rights a guiding principle for America’s foreign relations had been popular. Opinion polls during Carter’s tenure consistency showed public support for human rights as part of U.S. foreign policy. 

. In the context of Soviet expansionism and the fall of American allies his commitment to non-intervention and criticism of authoritarian regimes made him vulnerable to attacks that he was responsible for a decline in American power on the international stage. 

Ultimately, Reagan won the election in an unexpected landslide, taking 489 electoral votes against Carter’s 49. The popular vote amounted to 51 percent for Reagan, 41 percent for Carter and 6.6 percent for the independent candidate John B. Anderson. 

The Republican Party also took control over the Senate for the first time since 1955 and decreased the Democratic majority in the House by 34 seats. However, a Reagan victory appeared far from a foregone conclusion in the months leading up to the election. Polls generally indicated a close race, and only one week before the election a Gallup poll among registered voters even gave Carter 47 percent of the votes to Reagan’s 39 percent. Post-election polls indicated that an unusually high proportion of voters were undecided right until the end with as many as 37 percent making their decision during the last week.

Historians as well as contemporary observers have characterized the 1980 election as a massive shift to the right in American politics and society. However, the landslide was less categorical than it appeared and Reagan’s victory was not an indication of the American electorate enthusiastically embracing conservative ideology. 

In the year of conservatism’s biggest triumph only 32 percent of Americans self-identified as conservative. Americans were clearly disgruntled with the malaise of the Carter years and desperate to try something new and the election result was as much a rejection of Carter as it was an embrace of Reagan. 

On foreign policy, however, the 1980s election did signify a rightward move with important implications for U.S. human rights policy. In 1976, yearning for a restoration of honesty and morality in American government and foreign policy in the slipstream of Watergate and the Vietnam War, American voters had chosen Jimmy Carter’s message of a revitalized moralism. During the 1976 campaign, Carter famously told the American people that he would never lie to them and took a moralist approach to foreign affairs that would eventually be articulated in human rights language. 

Four years later in 1980, beset by economic crisis and perceptions of American decline under a weak president, American voters opted for another promise of restoration.

This time, however, the restoration was Reagan’s message of economic growth and renewed American strength in world affairs. The role of human rights in American foreign relations had also changed. Whereas Carter had embraced human rights as tool to distance the United States from repressive allies and an attempt to move beyond the Cold War through a policy of restraint, Reagan incorporated human rights into a more interventionist and assertive foreign policy aimed at defeating communism once and for all. 

Conclusion 

Foreign policy played an unusually large role in the 1980 U.S. presidential election, which took place in the shadow of the ongoing Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Human rights, which had never previously been given any serious attention in presidential elections, also suddenly stood at the center of the debate about U.S. foreign policy. Carter’s human rights-based foreign policy, adopted in the aftermath of congressional activism on the matter, made human rights a core concept in Carter’s bid for reelection as well as in Reagan’s attack on the incumbent. Informed by different worldviews, Carter and Reagan envisioned markedly dissimilar roles for human rights in U.S. foreign policy. 

Whereas Carter’s embraced human rights to rehabilitate the international image of the United States and move beyond Cold War contestation, Reagan selectively employed human rights as an ideological weapon to defeat the Soviet Union. 

Foreign policy, including human rights, thus shaped the 1980 election, but the election also impacted the role of human rights in American foreign policy in the years to come. Reagan entered the White House highly skeptical of human rights as a foreign policy concern. A human rights-based foreign policy, as practiced by Carter, was both practically and ideologically incompatible with Reagan’s conservative internationalism, and the administration’s initial reaction, once in office, was to dismiss human rights concerns altogether. 

Despite this initial skepticism, within Reagan’s first year in office pressure from members of Congress and the wider human rights community led the administration to revise its position on human rights. The result became a conservative human rights policy that integrated human rights concerns into the administration’s broader foreign policy vision for combatting communism and selectively promoting democracy. As the event that facilitated this conservative human rights policy, the 1980 election stands as a watershed moment in the history of American attention to human rights. 

As noted in the opening, Trump has broken with the norms, rules and institutions of the liberal order, including on the issue of human rights. Through the Commission on Unalienable Rights, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has sought to recast human rights as essentially religious liberty and property rights. To its critics, the Commission’s redefinition threatens to weaken the protections of marginalized groups and exposes how the U.S. has moved away from global norms.

Biden has called the Trump administration “a disaster for human rights” and vowed to reverse many of Trump’s foreign policies to restore U.S. global leadership. Some commentators have speculated that Biden might make human rights a pivotal component of his break with Trump’s foreign policy. Whether Biden will in fact adopt a proactive human rights policy, should he be successful on November 3, is of course an open question.

Human rights – and foreign policy in general – does not enjoy the central role in the 2020 election that it did in 1980. Nevertheless, the battle over the appropriate role for human rights in U.S. foreign policy clearly continues today. The outcome of the 2020 election will almost certainly have considerable consequences for how this battle unfolds in the coming years.

This is an edited and expanded version of an academic article originally published in the journal of American Studies in Scandinavia