The United States pioneered the way toward the worldwide recognition and development of human rights law since the late 1940s. Under the leadership of the US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was presented to the world on December 10, 1948. The declaration linked human rights firmly to the notion of dignity. Its preamble states: “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” (You can find an elaboration of the implications of this world-historical event in my recent book, Human Dignity and World Order, 2024.)

Since 1948, the discourse on human rights and human dignity has spread worldwide and has continued as a main line of development within the UN system. Many UN conventions have been developed since that time on racial discrimination (1965), civil and political rights (1966), social and cultural rights (1966), discrimination against women (1979), against torture or inhuman treatment (1984), rights of children (1989), rights of migrant workers and their families (1990), rights of persons with disabilities (2006), protection of all persons against enforced disappearance (2006), along with several other conventions pertaining to economic and social rights.

This process has led to the concept of human dignity being incorporated in many nation-state constitutions around the world and to becoming the issue in innumerable court cases within these nations, as many scholarly books, such as Dignity Rights by Erin Daly (2013) or Human Rights Law by Bernadette Rainey (2012), review. The US Constitution, brilliant as it was for its time, was written long before the worldwide recognition of human rights and dignity that has taken place since 1948. Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence, a key part of our national heritage (following British philosopher John Locke), speaks of the equality of all persons to whom God has given “inalienable human rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Democracy was then, as now, a political system that recognized and protected human rights and dignity.

Explicit philosophical recognition of human dignity goes back not only to Locke but to the monumental work of Immanuel Kant in Germany, who, nearly a century later, distinguished human beings (possessing dignity and inviolable worth) from “things” that can be manipulated and bought or sold for a price. Contemporary philosopher Jürgen Habermas in The Future of Human Nature (2003) links human dignity with our universal human communicative capacity, making human dignity central to every human being “who—in his anthropological universality—is everywhere the same.”

Philosopher George Kateb, in his book Human Dignity, comments on the notion of the “inviolability” of each person: “I construe that concept to say that anyone’s rights are incommensurably valuable: not to be sacrificed to others or to be thought interchangeable or replaceable, or part of a majority or minority that should be allowed to gain some advantage at the expense of the inviolability of others.” Rights are “incommensurably valuable” because each person must be respected for his or her individual dignity and not amalgamated into some general category. Finally, philosopher David C. Kirchhoffer in Human Dignity and Contemporary Ethics (2013), points out that there is an “eschatological” or future-oriented dimension to the concept of dignity. The concept points to an evolutionary imperative in human civilization to establish a planetary ethos that perpetually actualizes the several dimensions of human dignity and human rights at ever more profound and deeper levels.

However, a number of scholars have pointed out that the recognition and enforcement of human rights (that is, respect for human dignity) runs into a fundamental contradiction in the modern world. Since the system of sovereign nation-states was first formulated at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the world has been divided into a collection of territories, each ruled independently by its own sovereign authority (its government). The prerogatives of sovereignty mean that nations are not supposed to interfere with the internal affairs of other nations, including how they treat their citizens. Human rights are universal and apply to our common humanity. However, under the modern world system, there is no authority that can enforce human rights except sovereign nation-states. And their historical lack of success at doing so remains extremely problematic.

Jack Donnelly, in his classic book Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (2003), describes this internal contradiction that affects human rights development and protection in multiple ways. The world is divided into some 194 “sovereign territories,” each of which is supposed to protect the universal human rights of its own citizens and to respect the universal human rights of all other persons as well. Yet under this international system, imperial interventions in the affairs of others are commonplace, as well as perpetual wars that dehumanize perceived “enemies” and allow one or more nations to deploy weapons of great destructive power against other nations. And each nation deals with “immigrants” (who under this system have an ambiguous legal status) according to its own fears and prejudices.

In The Global Struggle for Human Rights (2006), Debra L. DeLaet reviews the history of US immigration policy and its treatment of illegal and legal immigrants and asylum seekers. The outrageous treatment that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are imposing on both legal and illegal immigrants is not entirely new under MAGA doctrine and the Trump Administration. It includes the entire post-WW II period. However, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service was disbanded, and enforcement of immigration law was handed over to the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration was reenvisioned from a domestic government administrative issue to a national security issue. And with this conceptual transition, the threat to immigrants and migrants (and all non-citizens within US territorial boundaries), substantially escalated.

This assault on democracy in the US (challenging democracy’s inherent respect for human dignity) took a major turning point after 9/11. It has accelerated since that time into a nationalist fetishism called “Make America Great Again, MAGA.” Sovereignty, and the arrogance that goes with being a powerful, militarized national entity with the capacity to threaten “enemies within and without,” has taken center stage at the expense of the democratic ethos predicated on the universal dignity of each person. The contradiction between universal human dignity and nation-state absolute autonomy has led to a MAGA ideology that entirely abandons the concept of dignity in favor of racism, white “Christian” nationalism, unchecked power replacing constitutionally limited power, and national in-your-face arrogance replacing the ethos of mutual cooperation among nations. All of these are false values and deny our universal human dignity.

George Kateb and several other thinkers cited above emphasize the indelible connection between democracy, human rights, and constitutionalism. Immanuel Kant raised exactly this same concern in the 18th century, declaring that true moral relations among persons were made possible by constitutional government. A constitution provides mechanisms for collective decision-making (as opposed to arbitrary domination by a king or dictator). This is a tradition that goes all the way back to the Magna Carta of 1215 in England (along with the idea that people have rights that need protection by the rule of law and that no one, not even the King, is above the law). A constitution specifies the rights and powers of government as well as the rights and powers of citizens (and persons within its territory) with which government is prohibited from interfering.

Introductory courses in the philosophy of law often ask students to reflect on the differences between a mafia organization that controls a monopoly on the use of force in a certain area and demands payment from citizens under its power in exchange for their protection and security, and a government that also holds a monopoly on force and demands payment of taxes from citizens. If the government is a legitimate government, then it is not a group of criminals using their power to extract political or monetary ends on behalf of some ruling elite. It is a government truly representing all the people, whose dignity is respected by operating within constitutional limits and equal due process of law. If its use of force is circumscribed and limited by law, then this must be implemented through legal rules ensuring police and governmental accountability, transparency, and responsibility to the public.

This is precisely the answer to what makes democratic “constitutional” government legitimate and the mafia situation illegitimate. Under a constitutional framework government is mandated to empower and enable the citizens. Its monopoly on the use of force is directed to enhance that empowerment and protect the dignity of its citizens from criminal activity. However, in a world of multiple militarized sovereign nation-states recognizing no constitutional framework above themselves, the heads of state are often endowed with “emergency powers” to mobilize against an enemy who may well attack very suddenly and unexpectedly.

These emergency powers place a worm inside the apple of constitutional democracy. For such powers can fairly easily be used to suspend the constitution and implement autocratic rule. MAGA ideology places in power a tyrant who claims false emergencies to amass arbitrary power for himself in the service of a reactionary impulse to deny the universal human rights regime that has been steadily transforming our world system away from nation-state fragmentation toward planetary constitutionalism. As such, MAGA is an enemy of human civilization and its future-oriented potential in general. A symbol of this attack on human dignity and the integrity of our civilizational potential is found in the MAGA-style practices of ICE.

  • Trump has declared a false “emergency” claiming that our country is being invaded by throngs of “murderers, rapists, and violent criminals” who make up its immigrant populations. And this “emergency” allows for “emergency” non-accountable policing (policing that is therefore no longer legitimate but now criminalized like the Mafia).

  • ICE agents wear masks and refuse to identify themselves to their victims or to onlookers. The cars into which they kidnap their victims are also unmarked (violating police accountability and transparency).

  • ICE agents arrest and kidnap (often violently) even those immigrants following the law and showing up for their hearings at immigration courts. (It is precisely following the law that is supposed to protect our dignity.)

  • ICE agents refuse to show warrants or may show general warrants that do not identify their specific victims. Hence, their dragnet is indiscriminate and in violation of Constitutionally protected rights. (We saw above that human rights are necessarily individual rights.)

  • ICE agents refuse to afford their victims due process rights under the US Constitution. They arrest indiscriminately, tell the victims nothing, do not allow for a hearing or phone call, rip the victims away from family and community without warning, and rush to deport them before due process mechanisms can be activated by their families or supporters.

These are not features of constitutional democracy, and every one of these practices violates the dignity of the victims (and the rest of us). There is a debate in the current literature concerning dignity between those who emphasize dignity as a moral imperative and those who argue that dignity is inherent in the very structure of law (and hence has a role that does not depend on its moral force). I do not think such a separation is very helpful. The private moral imperative explicated by Kant and others that we treat every person as an “end in themselves” (as possessing inviolable dignity) is absolutely valid at the same time that legitimate constitutional democratic law necessarily assumes and protects the dignity of persons. As philosopher Lon Fuller made clear in The Morality of Law (1969), all law necessarily includes a moral dimension.

MAGA violates both dimensions of human dignity (legal and moral) because MAGA has nothing to do with either human morality or with legitimate human governing. It is a form of fascism, which means the denial of both. If constitutionalism is transferred to the planetary domain (the only credible domain for genuine democracy and human rights protection), then the danger of “emergency powers” used by Trump to violate our dignity is minimized. For example, the Executive Power under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth1 is explicitly prohibited from declaring any state of emergency that can suspend the Constitution or violate its requirement to faithfully implement the laws under the Constitution (Article 6.6).

The concept of dignity lies at the very heart of human civilization as the general worldwide awakening to the centrality of human rights and dignity dawned on people across our planet. Especially since the mid-20th century, this idea of dignity has been elaborated in detail by the United Nations. Yet the contradiction between the regime of human dignity and the world system of militarized sovereign nation-states is embedded at the very heart of the UN Charter.

That is why we are holding the 16th session of the Provisional World Parliament2 this December 2025 in Pondicherry, India, under the authority of the Earth Constitution. We need to embrace the tremendous good work that the UN has done over the past 80 years within a constitutional framework that actualizes that work into democratic, enforceable world law. We need to ensure the protection of human dignity not only within the USA but worldwide.

Notes

1 The Earth Constitution at The The Earth Constitution Institute.
2 Provisional World Parliament at The The Earth Constitution Institute.