Human Rights are the Foundation of Democracy

The United States claims to be a beacon of democracy and human rights. But for the last three years, it has funded and participated in military operations in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria that many international legal experts argue violate basic human rights — including the right to life, protection from collective punishment, and the laws of war. This isn’t a partisan issue. Democrats and Republicans have both voted to fund and run cover for the genocide.

Here’s why that hypocrisy matters for democracy at home.

First, democracy requires treating every person as having basic rights that government cannot override. If a government decides it can systematically ignore the rights of people outside its borders — justifying mass civilian death as “collateral damage” — it builds a political culture where rights are conditional.

And once rights become conditional (“You have rights only if you’re on our side, in our country, or not deemed a threat”), the same logic can be turned inward. If Palestinian civilians can be dehumanized, why can’t a political opponent? If entire families can be wiped out in Gaza because they live near a target, why can’t voting rights be stripped from a region because it leans Democratic?

Second, look at what just happened with SCOTUS and the Voting Rights Act. The Court didn’t wake up one day hostile to democracy for no reason. It’s part of a long erosion of the idea that rights are universal and enforceable. When a nation spends trillions on war but lets voting protections be gutted with a single ruling, it reveals a consistent pattern: power is what matters, not rights. That pattern starts abroad. The same arguments used to dismiss civilian deaths in Gaza — “military necessity,” “we have to act decisively,” “enemy combatants are everywhere” — are the arguments used to justify voter ID laws that disproportionately affect minority communities. The details differ, but the core assumption is the same: some people’s rights are less important than the government’s goals.

Third, this is why people are asking why the Democratic Party can’t defend this assault on democracy. If a party claims to be the defender of democratic institutions but cannot draw a clear line against genocide — cannot say “no, we will not fund mass civilian death” — then what does that party actually believe in?

Ta-Nehisi Coates sums it up perfectly: if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.

Because a political system that permits the deliberate destruction of a population’s basic right to exist has already decided that rights are negotiable. Once that’s true, nothing — not free elections, not voting rights, not due process — is safe. The same machine that dehumanizes people abroad will eventually dehumanize people at home.

Human rights are not a separate issue from democracy — they are the foundation under it. Democracies don’t collapse all at once. They collapse when governments learn they can violate rights in one place and get away with it. Then they do it again. And again. First abroad, then at the margins at home, then in the center. If you cannot understand that human rights underpin every issue you claim to care about — voting rights, free speech, fair courts, accountable government — then you don’t have a political strategy. You have a ticking clock.