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Khakpour jumped in, asking Dagres to share some words about video compilations she put together of content Iranians had posted online. One featured 16-year-old vlogger Sarina Esmailzadeh living her life as a teenager—cooking and singing along to pop songs—and calling for more freedom. “We’ve also seen those in Los Angeles enjoying life to the fullest,” she says in Farsi in one clip, alluding to the way social media has connected her generation. “Freedom is loading.” Esmailzadeh was beaten to death by police forces while protesting in September.

“Social media is the only way for Iranians to be heard by the world,” Dagres said. Drawing on her research, she discussed how social media is used not only to document human rights abuses, but also as an accountability tool, to mock officials through satire, and draw attention to issues through hashtags. And because Iranians must make deliberate use of tech tools such as VPNs to circumvent the state’s control over the internet, Dagres explained that “what you see coming online, it’s because they want their voices to be heard.”

The current movement is a “social media uprising,” Dagres said, sparked by hashtags and viral images of a comatose Jîna Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who died in state custody after eyewitnesses reported seeing her beaten by the Guidance Patrol also known as the “morality police.” That this movement is populated by the younger, born-digital Generation Z is of import, Dagres said. “They’re not going to settle and accept the living standards. They don’t want this for their future.”

The current movement is a multigenerational one, too, Mahdavi pointed out. While before there were the “children of the revolution,” who came of age after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and protested during 2009’s Green Movement, now there are the “children of the resistance.” Mahdavi noted that she sees schoolkids her daughter’s age bravely singing anthems, tearing pages out of textbooks, and saying “enough is enough”; they are supported by older generations. “They’ve inherited our intergenerational trauma and our intergenerational strength.”

By Soobin Kim.

In addition to the multigenerational element of the current uprising, it is important to center minorities “at the forefront” in the struggle, Ghorishi said. Citing Iran’s great diversity, she uses her art as revolution, and to bring attention to minoritized voices—of Kurds, LGBTQI+ people, and people with disabilities. “It is these people who are fighting,” she said. Khakpour agreed, “There’s a really inspiring language of inclusivity now that I feel personally has been missing a lot in different eras.”

All four panelists were in consensus that throughout the eras and various movements in Iran’s history, women led the charge. Mahdavi, partly responding to Dagres’ point about new media, noted that during the Islamic Revolution women smuggled in cassette tape recordings from an exiled Khomeini to spread the gospel of the revolution. Women, too, were at the forefront of the constitutional revolution in the first decade of the 20th century.

As the conversation came to a close, questions from both the online chat and in-person audience prompted the panelists to draw parallels to activism here in the U.S. Mahdavi urged people to think about the transnational context and how the seeds of social movements inform one another like “roots and branches strengthening each other.” She has heard from Iranians that BLM and the #MeToo movements, for example, were formative in helping find their voice and courage. Viral images of police brutality are another parallel. Mahdavi, too, brought up the notion of justice feminism—a topic she discussed as part of a 2021 Zócalo event on transnational women’s movements—which brings forward the idea of feminism’s intersectional roots and offers a means to share strategies across movements that can reverberate across the globe.

A final question from an in-person audience member prodded the panel to imagine what would happen if there were regime change in Iran from these protests: Then what? Who will our leaders be? Dagres took this one, noting Iran’s highly educated population and their experience with democratic processes like voting. “Don’t underestimate the people of Iran,” she said, “Just because [the movement] is leaderless doesn’t mean it’s meaningless.”

Just before the panelists left the stage, Ghorishi shared a somber and sobering slideshow that she and some collaborators had made to highlight the faces of those who had been killed during the uprising thus far. The faces and names of these mostly young protesters moved across the screen in memoriam. And throughout the evening, shows of solidarity—from the panelists, from the online chat, during the reception, and on a small altar that Ghorishi assembled outside the room dedicated to political prisoners, “freedom fighters,” and the rallying cry of the movement: “Women, Life, Freedom.”

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That such a question must be asked points out a democratic paradox. Universal suffrage—the term meaning that everyone has the right to vote—is described as a fundamental feature of modern democracy. But there is no democracy where universal suffrage is actually universal.

That may surprise you, because more than 100 countries on Earth claim to have universal suffrage. But by that, they mean only that there are no distinctions between voters based on gender, race, ethnicity, wealth, or literacy.

In reality, all democracies prevent many of their residents from voting, and do so without apology. Children and teenagers are denied voting rights because of their age. Many countries limit the voting rights of people in prison. Most democracies deny equal suffrage to members of their population who lack citizenship, residency, or other legal status.

So, if suffrage is ever going to be truly universal, the world must find a way to make the right to vote as much a part of every human being as the heart. It’s with you for your whole life, and it goes with you wherever you go.

I’ve been thinking about the need for portable voting rights while watching countries celebrate anniversaries of so-called “universal suffrage.” Of course, these commemorations are really about remembering the long-ago campaigns to extend the voting rights to women.

Such history deserves celebration, but it also should remind us that democracy, like other human enterprises, moves both backward and forward often at the same time.

This month’s 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage in Switzerland—which was granted very late, in 1971, by a majority of male voters who had secured their voting rights 123 years earlier—has been an occasion to consider all the ways that this very democratic country falls short. Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are about to commemorate both the 1921 adoption of women’s suffrage, and the loss of those rights in 1922 when their shared federal republic fell. In the U.S., last year’s celebrations of the centennial of women’s suffrage also noted how that advance came with new restrictions on voting by non-whites and immigrants.

These pasts point to a hard fact: suffrage is problematic for democracy, because it tears at a fundamental contradiction within it. That contradiction is embedded in the roots of the English word suffrage, including the Old French sofrage, meaning “intercessory prayers or pleas on behalf of another.”

“On behalf of another” signals the democratic contradiction: Democracy appeals because it allows us to govern ourselves, and vote in our own self-interest. But democracy, unlike American waistlines or solids under heat, does not expand naturally. Extending suffrage requires us to share our own democratic rights with others, even though it reduces the power of our own votes.

This internal and eternal democratic conflict of interest—democracy requires selfishness and selflessness—is why no human society has given voting rights to everyone. To make suffrage truly universal, we citizens, and our nations, must surrender the power to decide who else will get the vote. Suffrage, the right to vote, must be a universal human right, granted automatically at birth.

Achieving this sort of universality won’t be easy. The good news is that the right to vote is already enshrined within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements. But international human rights are notoriously hard to enforce. Universal suffrage will thus require an international treaty, or other agreement, with not just nations but with governments at all political levels—provinces, regions, cities—as signatories.

The details would be debated, but I would propose two fundamental provisions. First, every single human being has a right to vote in the country of which they are citizen. Second, every single person has a right to vote at the municipal level in the community where they reside, regardless of legal status.

The practical impacts would be profound. Truly universal suffrage would be a major advance of freedom for prisoners and ex-convicts, whose voting rights are often limited. More profoundly, universal suffrage would be the greatest expansion of children’s rights in human history.

There could be a backlash against giving toddlers a democratic voice. Today the most common voting age in the world is 18, with Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Scotland, Wales, and possibly soon Switzerland allowing voting at 16. If there must be a compromise, I would suggest either 15—the age at which the Dalai Lama assumed his temporal powers and Greta Thunberg launched her boycott—or 13—when Anne Frank began keeping her diary.
And giving non-citizens the right to vote where they live would offer timely protection for the rights of migrants, now under growing threat worldwide.

According to one survey, at least 45 countries now allow noncitizen residents to vote in their local, regional, or even national elections. This includes Australia, parts of Latin America, some U.S. municipalities, several Swiss cantons, and the European Union, which since 1992’s Maastricht Treaty has guaranteed local voting rights to residents who are citizens of other member states.

The enduring success of this E.U. rule suggests that when our voting rights cross national lines, we grow closer. In the same spirit, truly universal suffrage—and the principles that we all may vote where we live and where we have citizenship—might make a fractured world more unified, and more democratic.

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Certainly, it’s not required to protect your rights. We live in a world of human rights, where slavery is outlawed, gay people can marry, and thinking for yourself (rather than obedience to authority) is valued. So why, in societies based on the ideal of equal human worth, does citizenship still exist?

Citizenship is typically justified with romantic notions—self-determination, democracy, preservation of values. But at its core, citizenship is little more than a certain legal status within a certain legal system. By defining its rights and privileges as bound to a particular state, citizenship itself violates our cherished idea of equal human worth. Instead, citizenship is most effective at upholding caste systems both within and among nations.

In most cases, citizenship is granted more or less at random, based on where your family was from, or where you were raised. Public authorities grant citizenship; the actual citizen typically has no participation in the decision. Once granted, citizenship cannot be refused—or changed before obtaining some other citizenship, without the risk of becoming a “stateless” person, deprived of the rights of citizenship anywhere in the world.

Citizenship was created to legally proclaim equality among the haves and have-nots. It did not eliminate socioeconomic inequality; it merely explained it away through the incomplete promise of “one person one vote.” This made extracting obedience from the population easier and drove nationalism. Today, even the most awful political systems boast glorified citizenships.

For most of its history, citizenship has been useful for a very ugly reason. Citizenship allows us to ignore the basic tenets of the enlightenment—the presumption that humans are equal—without real argument. It is enough to say “She is not a citizen” to justify excluding someone from rights, entitlements, and respect.

Citizenship, thus, can divide as much as it unites. We see that in the U.S. with DACA kids, the Dreamers, who are threatened with being thrown out of their home country because they lack citizenship. And America is not alone. Citizenship divides not only people within a nation, but confers unequal status based on the privileged status of some nations over others. Think of those who possess the all-entitling super-citizenships of nations of the global north, versus the limitations against people who come from former colonies—it’s clear that the status quo of citizenship is racist.

Racism is just one of the core building blocks of citizenship; sexism is another, as citizenship was routinely denied to women as well as minorities until well into the 20th century.

This map is the world rescaled so that the relative sizes of the countries express the relative sizes of their populations. The map is colored to show the “Quality of Nationality”—that is the power conferred by citizenship—in each place, with darker colors indicating higher quality citizenship. Courtesy of B.Hennig and D. Ballas.

This map is the world rescaled so that the relative sizes of the country express the relative sizes of the GDP of the countries. This map, like Map 1, is colored to show the “Quality of Nationality”—that is the power conferred by citizenship—in each place, with darker colors indicating higher quality citizenship. When you compare maps, note how closely higher GDP correlates with high quality citizenship. Courtesy of B.Hennig and D. Ballas.

Citizenship is at a crossroads now: the dominant narrative that the global equality of human beings can be assured within states is in reality eroding. Different citizenships are not equal, and the allocation of citizenship rights worldwide is neither logical nor clear.
At the macro level, citizenship enables the perpetuation of rigid pre-modern caste structures. The son of an American is an American, and the son of a brahman is a brahman. We do not ask ourselves whether this is just.

To argue for citizenship at a micro level is utterly confounding and contradictory. Being a tenured professor is irrelevant to citizenship in Germany, but was crucial to securing immediate citizenship in Austria until 2008. “Being active in the diaspora” is irrelevant to Austrians, but can make you a Pole. Having a Lebanese mother is irrelevant to Lebanese citizenship, but having a Jewish mother, even without Israeli citizenship, can make you Israeli.

Examples of this disparity in the rules of citizenship are countless: what is taken for granted as best practice in one country can seem almost outrageous in another. But the contradictions should point us to the bigger problem with citizenship: there cannot be a “worse” or a “better” method of assignment to a caste. Any caste system depends on repugnant assumptions and should be intolerable, at least in modern democracies.

All citizenships are described often as equally valuable—even though this assumption is flawed. Equality of different citizenships would only work in a world where authorities could enforce standards of self-fulfillment and personal empowerment in every country. In such a world, citizenship would provide rights, not liabilities.

And in such a glorious world, citizenship would then be irrelevant.

But we live in a world where there are Pakistanis, whose citizenship is a global liability; they must hold a visa to travel to any other country, and hold no settlement rights abroad—and also Norwegians, who enjoy countless rights at home and can settle in more than 40 of the richest democracies without any formalities. In our world, citizenships do not have equal dignity. We are treated differently according to the color of our passport, and citizenship upholds random privilege. Look from Europe across the Mediterranean, or peer from the U.S. across the wall President Trump is building, and you see a world order where punishing randomness and hypocrisy reign.

The quality of our citizenship correlates very neatly with the global distribution of wealth. Most of the world’s people are losers of what prominent scholar Ayelet Shachar called ‘the birthright lottery.’ That is because they are denied the mobility and security that comes with a passport from an economically advanced nation and got their status at random. By controlling the borders between states, citizenship is the most important tool in the world to keep it that way.

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The world looks to China and sees an economic giant. But the China we ought to see is a political giant. Xi inherited a regime of pragmatic authoritarianism under collective leadership. Now that pragmatism has been superseded by ideological fervor, Xi’s project is to make his totalitarian “China Dream” of national rejuvenation and greatness a reality. For that he needs a strong and growing economy, but in his project the economic is in the service of the political. What always comes first is the perpetuation of the regime itself.

China is an economic giant, and governments and corporations obviously want to do business. But when you do, you should know that you are dealing with a dictatorship, inspired by nationalistic ideology, with a confident one-man supremo at the helm. By acting as if this kind of state is a cuddly teddy bear of benevolence, Europeans and other democratic governments have not learned much from history. Dictatorships can be soft or hard. China’s dictatorship is getting ever harder. When democratic governments want to engage with China, they should do so in ways that halt the hardening of its dictatorship.

To understand how China’s mission has changed in the last decade, look no further than Xi’s career. Elevated to party boss in 2012, he has since tightened all the reins of dictatorship. Any semblance of opposition has been crushed—even small feminist groups that were organizing protest against sexual harassment on public transport. Their sin was not in their cause, but in the act of organizing outside of the party system. Human rights lawyers have been detained or put out of business en masse. Censorship and internet control are more penetrating than ever. Internally in the Party, discipline is the mantra. All potential opposition has been silenced with the help of the anti-corruption campaign.

Xinjiang, the predominantly Muslim province in the west, has been turned into a surveillance state laboratory, with the deployment of the most advanced electronic tools of the trade. The political activist Yang Maodong was right when, in his trial in 2014, he defied the court with an eloquent defense statement in which he compared today’s China “blow by blow” to the nightmare state of George Orwell’s 1984. But there’s no real need to reach for fiction to describe what’s occurring: With both pragmatism and collective leadership gone, Xi stands on a pedestal of power previously occupied only by Mao.

In keeping with this transformation, China is no longer engaging in balanced collaboration, but rather pursuing domination. It is undermining the rule of law in Hong Kong. It is threatening Taiwan with annexation, and thus taking the position that the will of the people of a democratic country is to count for nothing. It has de facto turned 3 million of the South China Sea’s 3.5 million square kilometers into its own territorial waters, in contravention of international law and a ruling by the Tribunal of the Law of the Sea. Australia and New Zealand are on the forefront of China’s purchase of influence abroad, through persistent interference in politics, media, and universities, described in a recent Australian book as a “silent invasion.”

Beijing may not be imposing its model on others, but it is imposing something else: silence. If you want to collaborate, be you a business, an organization, or a government, you are not allowed to say or do what the men in Beijing regard as unfriendly.

Recently, Mercedes-Benz happened to mention the Dalai Lama in promotional material outside of China, met criticism in China, and quick as a flash removed all reference to His Holiness and apologized for “hurting the feelings” of the people of China.

If you cross the regime, you will be in danger of retribution, such as exclusion from operations in China. Environmental NGOs like Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature, and Conservation International are silent on China’s environmental destruction in the South China Sea.

To see how much norms have changed recently, consider what happened when China and Norway “normalized” relations last year. (Relations had been on ice for six years after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the human rights activist Liu Xiaobo.) What Norway had to pay for “normalization” was a promise to undertake no action that could disturb the new harmony between the two governments. Since then, a Norwegian government whose global identity rests on its championship of democracy and human rights, has had not a word to say about human rights abuses in China.

The problem this new China poses for democracies is not the standard one of a shift in world power. Instead, the problem is the character of the rising power—repressive towards its own population and hostile to others’ liberty. A state that has annexed vast territorial waters and is threatening to annex a neighboring democracy is able to use its economic clout to buy silence on the part of countries that claim to live by democratic values and international law.

What to do? First, we must acknowledge that in China we are dealing with a totalitarian state with immense powers behind it. We must free ourselves from Western wishful thinking that, with economic growth and opening up, China will become more like us and more benevolent at home and collaboration abroad. That has not happened. Xi’s regime is exercising totalitarianism with more strategic discretion than any before it—smart totalitarianism, I have called it—but totalitarian it is.

Secondly, the democratic governments of the world need a coherent strategy for meeting the challenge of China. The liberal democracies, says the German sinologist Kai Strittmatter, must find their voice against assertive autocracy. China deals as much as it can with each country on its own, in which case most countries are small fry next to the giant. We need a collective strategy. Currently, the hope, if distant, is for the European Union to mount such a strategy, since President Trump has placed America on the sideline.

This collective strategy should have three components: engagement, affirmation of human rights, and pushback against aggression.

First, democratic institutions should engage with China on all levels, politically, economically, in science, and culturally. Non-engagement is impossible, and engagement gives some strategic leverage. There is not much other countries and outsiders can do to influence Chinese policies, but it does count that when Chinese institutions are pulled into an exchange, they are exposed to the influence of international law and standards of collaboration.

Second, we should speak up in clear language, to Chinese authorities and in public, against repression and breaches of human rights in China. This we should always do with reference to the Chinese State Constitution and to Chinese law, which are in these respects sound (although ineffective).

Third, we should speak up in clear language against Chinese aggression internationally, notably in its neighborhood, and against interference in politics and civil society in other countries. When we do this, we should refer to the many relevant international treaties and conventions that China has signed.

The sad truth is that China is and will remain a dictatorial state and that the democratic world can do nothing to prevent that. Democratization is, for the foreseeable future, not on the agenda. But we do have the capacity to hold the Chinese regime to account. The leaders are sensitive to how others criticize their regime. It is effective to stand up to the Chinese leadership with words. By holding the regime to account, we can halt or slow Xi’s transition of the regime towards irreversible hardness. We can encourage the preservation of an element of pragmatism in the PRC dictatorship.

That may not seem like much but it matters to the many in China who live in fear of repression and to activists who engage in the struggle for some more openness in Chinese society.

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Q: As an historian, what do you think about the dueling arguments that, on the one hand, there is an empathy deficit going on, and on the other, social media is constantly bombarding us with things to be empathetic with?

A: I would say that the duel is not just about empathy deficits. There are also dueling positions about whether empathy is a bad basis for human rights or international politics, generally, because it acts as if [these things are] an affective question when [they’re] really a political question. But there is considerable interest in the question of empathy. So, on the one hand people say that it’s not a good thing to be thinking about, and on the other hand lots more people are thinking about it.

Part of it is a general shift in the humanities and social sciences, especially in the humanities, toward being more interested in the affective, emotional side of everything. There was a turn within neuroscience to be more interested in how emotions are crucial to reasoning and that kind of set [off] a lot of different kinds of arguments: philosophical, literary, you name it.

Q: One of the things that really struck me in reading your book—about how epistolary novels connected to human rights and revulsion around torture—was this real, incredible, excitement that people had reading these novels like Clarissa, Pamela, and Julie. The heroines of these novels, the people that men and women were empathizing with, were women. I wondered if empathy is still seen as female, and does that give it its weird moral authority? Because it definitely continues to have a very strong moral authority.

A: I think, for me what was really interesting about the 18th century was precisely that it was actually not assumed that it was just women who were going to empathize with these female characters. I think it was assumed that men were going to empathize with these female characters, and they did empathize with these female characters.

But a female character was the best representation of these agonies over personal autonomy. Women felt constrained, so they could be the subject of tragedy in a way that men couldn’t, because men were assumed to be autonomous and could just leave. We have many more novels about men leaving [for] picaresque adventures in search of autonomy.

This is inconceivable for women. So women become ideal for the representation of conflicts over autonomy. They can’t leave. They have to fight it out—either in their current situation or in a very constrained orbit. In Clarissa there is actually quite a bit of movement but it’s within England, if not within London. Whereas men can join the army, they can go overseas, they can join the navy.

Finds Pamela Writing. Painting by Joseph Highmore. Image courtesy of Tate.

Q: There is a sense among some people that human rights are naturally expanding, because if they’re based in empathy or a feeling of distress the line will naturally continue to move. How do you see the future of human rights based in empathy?

A: It’s an interesting question, when it’s not an incredibly tragic one. This is exactly what everyone is dealing with on immigration. Some part of the population is urging that we empathize with people fleeing who want to come to our country, that we see their common humanity. And some part of the population is saying this has gone too far, there need to be borders, we can only protect the community by keeping other people from getting into it. So, the issue of who you are supposed to have feelings for, and what the consequences of those feelings should be, is right now very much front and center. It would be a mistake to say it’s an easy question.

The chances for mobility are now so great in the world, even if they’re dangerous and horrible chances for mobility, that it’s a real issue. Is it really imaginable that a nation would say, “We’ll take anyone who wants to come”? Probably not. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s realistic to say, “Let’s have closed borders.” Which is why it’s such a complicated question.

Q: People are moving more. There’s also the growth of faster and faster communication. I wonder if you see the potential for even great empathetic leaps as the communication changes, along with other sorts of artistic experiences creating empathy.

A: I don’t think this works in lockstep: You get a new media technology and you get a new boundary of empathy. I don’t think it works quite that way. It’s so hard to predict how this line is going to move. Gay rights is obviously a stunning example of this. I saw a program on TV recently about AIDS back in the 1970s and 1980s. I lived through that, these were my friends, and I can’t even believe it … The kinds of things that people said about gay people in the 1980s—I almost can’t even believe it because we live in such a different world now. That’s the kind of thing I’m interested in.

At some point slavery became so intolerable to some portion of the population, not everybody, but to some portion. And it goes really quickly from being tolerable to being absolutely intolerable. That’s what I’m interested in. Slavery for centuries and no one did anything about it to speak of, and then at the end of the 18th century all of a sudden there is this revulsion.

Obviously it’s an emotional feeling—but it’s not like people automatically start to feel it when X happens. Gay Rights, for example. You go from some huge portion of the population being disgusted by the idea to some rather large portion of the population saying “Well, okay.” I mean it’s the same people. We’re not talking about some new generation. How that interior feeling of right and wrong gets activated—that’s the thing that interests me. Now we’re seeing that with trans people.

Pamela in the Bedroom with Mrs. Jewkes and Mr. B. Painting by Joseph Highmore. Image courtesy of Tate.

Q: Beyond trans rights, do you see another frontier that’s coming up?

A: Animals. I’m a meat eater but I say to all my friends: X number of years from now, I don’t know how many it’s going to be, we’re going to stop eating meat. I just think it’s going to happen. Again, it’ll probably happen for some people rather suddenly. People just can’t do it anymore.

Q: Obviously terrible backlashes have been part of the process of the establishment of human rights. Going forward do you think empathy is up to the task for what we have to do or are we asking too much of empathy?

A: I think it actually has to be up to the task. It has proved to be a very powerful force and it is much more powerful than rationally arguing cases. (Though the courts in this country have an absolutely fundamental role in all of this, don’t get me wrong.) The backlash part isn’t really so much that people don’t believe in human rights. It’s more a question of who they apply to.

Very few people have argued that they don’t think people have rights. It’s that they think they have to be limited: They have to be limited to the citizens of your country; they have to be limited to straight people; they have to be limited to whatever. It’s more the question of where the boundaries are.

The reason that’s the case is because it’s not obvious what the alternative would be. If you want to say that human rights are nonsense, which is a position that people have taken, you can make a strong philosophical argument. The issue that you have to resolve then is: “What is it that you think is the appropriate replacement?” And the only thing that people have been able to come up with is the rights of citizens within a nation or the rights of the nation as a superior community. But that led to such problematic things in the 1930s that I think that people aren’t super into that argument anymore. The backlash opinion now is that rights should be limited to the citizens of the nation as it is currently constituted. Of course, in the United States there are staggering numbers of people from other places. Who are, however, all too willing to shut the door now that they’re here.

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Coincidentally, this February 19 marks the 75th anniversary of FDR’s Executive Order 9066 setting up the camps. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in upstate New York is devoting an entire exhibit to FDR’s internment decision and its impact on the lives of internees for the first time in the library’s illustrious history.

The exhibit, “Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans In World War II,” will be ready for public viewing February 19, and will run through Dec. 31, 2017. In the meantime, it is worth reflecting on President Roosevelt’s role in and his reasons for setting up the internment camps. Trump, after all, described Roosevelt as a revered leader who was nonetheless responsible for setting up the internment camps. The then-presidential candidate suggested that if one of America’s greatest presidents could take such a step to defend lives, then Trump reasonably could crack down on Muslim Americans for the sake of security if he were to win the White House.

The internment decision represents one of the great paradoxes of FDR’s three-plus terms as president. Roosevelt was not just an architect of the New Deal but also a champion of human rights and individual liberties here at home and around the world as the crisis of World War II encroached on the United States.

Faced with the growing power of fascist militarism, Roosevelt declared in his 1941 Four Freedoms address that “the mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all the things worth fighting for.” Indeed, he then cited “the preservation of civil liberties for all” as one of these fundamental democratic values that was worthy of national sacrifice.

The puzzle of his presidency is how a man so responsible for defending freedom against the totalitarian menace—whose wartime addresses stirred millions of people to defend the cause of liberty—could simultaneously authorize and implement one of the greatest civil liberties abuses in American history.

In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the political pressures on Roosevelt to take drastic action against Japanese Americans on the West Coast metastasized. Popular fears of imminent air raids, widespread espionage and land invasion combined with entrenched anti-Japanese racism, especially in California, Oregon, and Washington state, into a combustible mix in the uncertainty that defined the days following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Railing against any American officials who had the temerity to defend Japanese Americans as loyal citizens, the Los Angeles Times denounced all people of Japanese origin as “snakes” who posed imminent dangers to communities on the Pacific coast. Anti-Japanese voices grew louder as concerns soared that cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle—would come under enemy attack. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron warned residents that, “Right here in our own city are those who may spring to action at an appointed time in accordance with a prearranged plan wherein each of our little Japanese friends will know his part in the event of any possible attempted invasion or air raid … We cannot run the risk of another Pearl Harbor episode in Southern California.”

A group of Army officers, fearing that invasion was imminent and under pressure from nativists in the Western United States, pressed the White House to remove and incarcerate Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Roosevelt was kept abreast of the fast-moving debate about the fate of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and the voices in support of internment proved far louder and politically and militarily more potent than the arguments made by interment’s opponents.

A member of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Harley Kilgore (D-WV), sent Roosevelt letters from Americans protesting the ongoing presence of Japanese people within the United States as a grave threat. “I am enclosing herewith a few samples of the types of protests which I am receiving from persons very distant from the Pacific Coast with reference to the dangers of Japanese and other inhabitants of that vicinity,” Kilgore wrote the president. “It is my sincere belief that the Pacific coast should be declared a military area which will give authority to put [residents] … under military law, permitting their removal, regardless of their citizenship rights, to internal and less dangerous areas.”

The most vigorous dissent to incarcerating Japanese Americans came from Attorney General Francis Biddle and Assistant to the Attorney General, James H. Rowe, Jr. But even as they argued admirably against evacuation and incarceration, the Justice Department’s leaders conveyed to the president some sense of the popular racism, war hysteria, and economic motivations that would ultimately overwhelm the debate and set in motion FDR’s executive order. Biddle wrote Roosevelt:

“A great many of the West Coast people distrust the Japanese, various special interests would welcome their removal from good farm land and the elimination of their competition, some of the local California radio and press have demanded evacuation, the West Coast congressional delegation are asking the same thing and finally Walter Lippman and Westbrook Pegler recently have taken up the evacuation cry on the ground that attack on the West Coast and widespread sabotage is imminent.”

When Biddle and other Justice Department officials were assured by the Army that the military and not Justice would be responsible for implementing and running the camps, they withdrew their opposition to Roosevelt’s executive order. That order, numbered 9066 and signed on February 19, 1942, did not explicitly mention the Japanese, but there was no question that it targeted people of Japanese ancestry for removal rather than people of German and Italian origins.

The decision was hardly motivated by legitimate threats to the national security of the United States. Almost all historians have concluded that there was no evidence in the early 1940s—and that no evidence has emerged in the seven-plus decades since—showing that Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans were acting as spies or that they were part of a larger plot aiding the Emperor’s war effort. The notion that national security considerations justified the camps is simply contradicted by the voluminous historical evidence to the contrary..

“There is no evidence that [the Japanese government] had any success” recruiting spies in the United States to advance its war aims, historian Greg Robinson, author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, has pointed out. “The American occupation authorities in Japan after the war who studied captured Japanese documents found no evidence of any giant spy rings among American citizens of Japanese ancestry.”

Roosevelt, a product of his times, regarded the Japanese with the racist suspicion shared by countless of his fellow Americans. A close student of public opinion, and attuned to the military, political, and popular pressures to incarcerate Japanese Americans and suspend their rights as citizens, he issued the executive order without much apparent forethought or agonizing about the fraught moral questions and human costs of his action. Roosevelt subscribed to decades of anti-Japanese racism that pervaded early 20th century American culture. Just as the nation’s 19th century political leaders could speak eloquently for democracy and sing the praises of individual freedom while also defending the institution of slavery, Roosevelt gave hope to the world’s victims of fascist militarism and rallied millions of Americans to defend democracy while simultaneously authorizing the complete suspension of rights of an entire group of people based on their race. One historian has rightly called the internment camps “the most tragic act of his administration.”

During the 1980s, a committee established by the U.S. Congress to investigate the history of the internment camps concluded that they amounted to “a grave injustice” born out of “racial prejudice, war hysteria, and the failure of political leadership.” The most glaring abdication was the failure of Franklin Roosevelt to defend the rights and liberties of tens of thousands of his fellow citizens as he was pulled along by the tides of hysteria and racism 75 years ago this February.

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