The United States’ founding story portrays it as a “city on a hill” and a model for the rest of the world.1 U.S. presidents, from Ronald Reagan to John F. Kennedy, have proclaimed how exceptional the United States is as a country where freedoms are upheld at home and defended abroad.2 On international Human Rights Day, it is important to consider these popular notions, realizing that they distort a more complicated reality. While the United States has made important contributions to human rights around the world, it has also undermined and denied them overseas and at home.
Indeed, conceptions of human rights in the United States tend to separate what happens abroad and what goes on at home. Consider the Founding Fathers, who enshrined fundamental freedoms in the Bill of Rights but also participated and profited from slavery; or the fact that the U.S. government has installed and long kept in place laws and policies that disproportionately target its own vulnerable communities, while at the same time helping to spread rights and democracy in other parts of the world.3
The United States cannot credibly speak against abuses in other nations if its own policies are perpetuating human rights abuses abroad or if it is failing to uphold and protect rights at home. China and Russia, for example, repeatedly try to use U.S. abuses of rights domestically—such as police brutality and voter suppression—to undermine American efforts to condemn and dissuade other governments from committing human rights abuses.4These authoritarian states also point to U.S. hypocrisy on human rights to advance their own alternative view of human rights—one that often allows states to violate fundamental freedoms.5