The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.

Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12 week subscription, in print and online, plus a £20 £20,000, Amazon gift voucher, absolutely free.

Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America,

a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one, because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined by my friend and the brilliant writer, Christopher Caldwell,

who has written a very interesting article in a magazine called The Lamp,

which is a very interesting Catholic quarterly, I think it is,

and the article is called Against Human Rights.

And Chris is,

as some listeners of the podcast may know, the author of a fascinating book called The Age of Entitlement, which is a history of America since the 60s. And I highly recommend everybody

who hasn't read that, does read that. And these two things connect entitlement and human rights,

as you've made pretty clear in the piece in the book. I suppose this is an Americano podcast,

and the reason I thought it was relevant to an Americano podcast is because while America didn't

invent human rights, America is the superpower that grew with human rights and human rights grew because of

American power. To the extent now that human rights are almost more powerful than a religion,

I think you say, in your piece. Can you explain a little bit what you're thinking there?

That's interesting. You know, there is one, there is one rival, I would say, for

this title of being the country of human rights, and that is France, right? France had, you know,

the, the declaration of the rights of man and the citizen with its, with its revolution. And it had a kind of a revivification of that principle with the Dreyfus affair.

In the wake of that, there were a number of leagues like the League of the Rights of Man

...