The Rights Revolution
by Michael Ignatieff
Anansi, 184 pp., $ 16.95
When Norm Macdonald hosted the news segment on Saturday Night Live, he delighted in reporting that "Germans still love David Hasselhoff." In a similar vein, I am compelled to report that Canadians still love Michael Ignatieff. His new book, The Rights Revolution, has become a bestseller in Canada, the subject of several well-publicized national radio broadcasts, and the recipient of glowing praise from media and academic elites. The main reason Canadians love Ignatieff's book is the same reason many Americans will hate it: It is a blistering attack on the American tradition of protecting individual rights.
Currently a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Michael Ignatieff takes as his subject the "rights-claims" that have been made by minority groups around the world during the last forty years. An ardent defender of minority interests, Ignatieff argues for the need to grant new rights and privileges to women, aboriginal peoples, ethnic groups, and gay men and women. This makes the book a timely read, for the new democracies of Eastern Europe and the mature democracies of Western Europe and North America are all facing the challenge of reconciling the demand for group rights with the guarantee of individual rights.
The (small "l") liberal solution to this problem is simple enough: unalienable rights, such as freedom of speech and equality before the law, must prevail in any conflict with group rights. Ignatieff, however, argues for the acceptance of otherwise forbidden group rights based on the need to correct historical injustices and the inherent need of groups to be publicly recognized by means of special entitlements and constitutional guarantees. To this end, he recommends, among other things, affirmative action programs on a vast scale, pay equity laws, the devolution of sovereignty to aboriginal groups, multicultural education, more trade unions in the workplace, and welfare entitlements such as universal day care and expanded accident and unemployment insurance. He can also live with high taxation. Many of these measures have already been implemented in Canada, and so Ignatieff chooses Canada over America as a model for the just society. (Did I mention that Canadians love Michael Ignatieff?)
The book's attack on American justice is rooted in the desire for recognition. The analysis begins with a critique of the liberal view of civil society as a collection of identically free individuals, all equally enjoying the same fundamental rights and privileges. This vision -- expounded by the American Framers -- is inadequate because it provides a partial and limited view of what it means to be a human being. Ultimately, it leads to assimilation to the norms of the "white, heterosexual, family-oriented, native-born" majority, and so it fails to deal with the other essential source of our humanity: the commitments that define us as members of groups. These commitments are essential because they are the primary source of individual identity.
According to Ignatieff, no one really feels that he is an equal until the state publicly values his "culture, heritage and distinctive point of view" by extending rights or entitlements to his group. Only when the state honors everyone in this way does each person enjoy what Ignatieff refers to as the right to "equal moral consideration."
So, Ignatieff believes that any conflict between group rights and individual rights can be resolved when the purpose of granting group rights is to recognize the identity of minority citizens. In this respect, Canada emerges as a great success and America a failure. Yet Canada looks successful only because Ignatieff ignores the implications of Canadian policies, and America seems to be a failure only because he almost willfully misunderstands American liberalism.
In the case of Canada, for example, when examining government affirmative action programs, Ignatieff fails to deal with the objection that they lead to reverse discrimination; when dealing with the question of whether self-governing aboriginal groups can deny women the right to vote or hold office, he urges the parties to engage in intercultural negotiation, the equivalent of asking, Can't we all just get along? Throughout, Ignatieff can argue for Canada as a model because he ignores the conflict between groups and individuals. Similarly, America's ability to reconcile individuals and groups is underrated because he does not fully articulate what the Framers had to say about the ends of government.
Ignatieff is right in asserting that a liberal society does tend to mitigate differences between groups. In pre-liberal societies, people engaged in endless disputes over whose religion or culture deserved preeminence. Those disputes produced nothing but war and poverty. By focusing society on the pursuit of gain, and assigning religion and culture to the private domain, where they would become matters of individual choice, the Framers hoped to diminish religious and cultural ties in some measure and keep them out of the public domain. The Framers would never have accepted Ignatieff's politics of recognition, fearing they would reinvigorate group differences at the expense of peace and individual rights. And that, of course, is what those politics have done in Canada and elsewhere.
But the liberal solution also cuts in a completely different direction. For Ignatieff, America forgets the importance of recognizing minority groups because his American model is an incomplete articulation of the liberal view of government. Citizens lack identity in this model because it views them from only one perspective, that of the state. From the government's standpoint, group identity is a non-issue because everyone deserves to have his rights protected regardless of his aims, beliefs, or affiliations. But the point of protecting these rights, when seen from the standpoint of the citizen, is to provide an expansive private domain where the real richness of human life can be experienced, where everyone has the freedom to pursue happiness -- regardless of how it is understood.
Ignatieff stacks the deck against a liberal regime of individual rights by assuming that it necessarily leads to assimilation, when in fact it is the essential precondition to the protection of individual and group differences, and thus genuine diversity.
Perhaps the greatest problem with The Rights Revolution is that it fails to address how the demand for equal approval can block individual development. This demand prevents us from questioning different commitments and beliefs. We cannot ask, for example, whether a life devoted to cross-dressing deserves the same approval as one devoted to eradicating injustice. But can we really believe that RuPaul is the moral equal of Martin Luther King?
In a world where equal approval is required, we cannot ask that question for fear of offending RuPaul, his fans, or any citizen who believes in the right to equal approval. What this means is that we no longer have the freedom to discuss what it means to lead a good life, an inquiry that requires us to ask whether some ways of life are better than others.
Properly understood, the author's identity politics lead to wholesale political correctness and the end of liberal democracy's greatest claim to fame, freedom of thought. This should give modern liberals like Ignatieff cause to wonder, for, as one notable gay political thinker said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
Michael Alexander, a public policy lawyer and professional speaker based in Toronto, is the author of How to Inherit Money.