{"id":51271,"date":"2025-02-04T07:54:06","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T15:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=51271"},"modified":"2025-02-04T07:54:06","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T15:54:06","slug":"forty-years-bashing-the-national-endowment-for-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/04\/forty-years-bashing-the-national-endowment-for-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Forty Years Bashing the National Endowment for Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Sunday, Elon Musk posted on X<\/span><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"After that merciless arm-twisting, I have no choice but to recap my National Endowment for Democracy bashes going back to shortly after it was launched in 1983.<\/p>\n

In a November 29, 1985 piece in the Oakland Tribune<\/em>, I hailed NED as \u201cone of the newest, most prestigious boondoggles on the Potomac.\u201d But there were plenty of scoffers early on: \u201cNED has been called many things \u2013 an International Political Action Committee, the Taxpayer Funding of Foreign Elections Program, and a slush fund for political hacks who like to travel to warm climates in cold weather. In less than two years, NED has lived up to all these epithets.\u201d My op-ed concluded, \u201cThe sooner NED is abolished, the cleaner our foreign policy will be.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The following year, after fresh NED scandals, Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC) howled, \u201cThis thing is not the National Endowment for Democracy but the National Endowment for Embarrassment.\u201d Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) complained, \u201cFrom its very inception, the National Endowment for Democracy has been riddled with scandal and impropriety.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was a \u201cjobs for the boys\u201d program that enabled politicians to launder money to plenty of their aides and donors, so it survived one pratfall after another.<\/p>\n

In 2006, in \u201cDefining Democracy Down<\/span><\/a>\u201d in The American Conservative<\/em>, I wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2001, NED quadrupled its aid to Venezuelan opponents of elected president Hugo Chavez, and NED heavily funded some organizations involved in a bloody military coup that temporarily removed Chavez from power in April 2002. After Chavez retook control, NED and the State Department responded by pouring even more money into groups seeking his ouster.<\/em><\/p>\n

The International Republican Institute, one of the largest NED grant recipients, played a key role both in the Chavez coup and also in the overthrow of Haiti\u2019s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In February 2004, an array of NED-aided groups and individuals helped spur an uprising that left 100 people dead and toppled Aristide. Brian Dean Curran, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, warned Washington that the International Republican Institute\u2019s actions \u2018risked us being accused of attempting to destabilize the government.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

The U.S. pulled out all the stops to help our favored candidate win a \u2018free and fair\u2019 election in 2004 in the Ukraine. In the two years prior to the election, the United States spent over $65 million \u2018to aid political organizations in Ukraine, paying to bring opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to meet U.S. leaders and helping to underwrite exit polls indicating he won a disputed runoff election,\u2019 according to the Associated Press. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) complained that \u201cmuch of that money was targeted to assist one particular candidate, and\u2026 millions of dollars ended up in support of the presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko.\u2019 Yet with boundless hypocrisy, Bush had proclaimed that \u201cany [Ukrainian] election\u2026 ought to be free from any foreign influence.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In a 2009 piece for the Future of Freedom Foundation<\/span><\/a>, I wrote, \u201cNED is based on the notion that its meddling in foreign elections is automatically pro-democracy because the U.S. government is the incarnation of democracy. NED has always operated on the principle that \u2018what\u2019s good for the U.S. government is good for democracy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2017, Donald Trump\u2019s first administration dropped \u201cdemocracy promotion\u201d from the list of official goals of U.S. foreign policy. In a USA Today<\/em> op-ed with the headline, \u201cEnd Democracy Promotion Balderdash,<\/span><\/a>\u201d I wrote that the reform \u201ccould sharply reduce America\u2019s piety exports\u2026 It is time to recognize the carnage the U.S. has sown abroad in the name of democracy.\u201d I warned:<\/p>\n

\u201cDemocracy promotion gives U.S. policymakers a license to meddle almost anywhere on Earth. The National Endowment for Democracy<\/span><\/a>, created in 1983, has been caught interfering in elections in France, Panama<\/span><\/a>, Costa Rica<\/span><\/a>, Ukraine<\/span><\/a>, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Russia, Czechoslovakia<\/span><\/a>, Poland<\/span><\/a>, Haiti<\/span><\/a> and many other nations\u2026Rather than delivering political salvation, U.S. interventions abroad more often produce \u2018no-fault carnage\u2019 (no one in Washington is ever held liable).\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In a 2018 op-ed headlined \u201cTime for the US to end democracy promotion flim-flams<\/span><\/a>\u201d in The Hill, I wrote:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDemocracy promotion has long been one of the U.S. government\u2019s favorite foreign charades. The Trump administration\u2019s proposal to slash funding for democratic evangelism is being denounced<\/span><\/a> as if it were the dawn of a new Dark Age. But this is a welcome step to draining a noxious swath of the Washington swamp\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, many Washingtonians are blinded by self-serving sanctimony. National Democratic Institute president Kenneth Wollack claims that equating U.S. and Russian interventions in foreign elections is like \u2018comparing someone who delivers lifesaving medicine to someone who brings deadly poison<\/span><\/a>.\u2019 But the opiate crisis illustrates how easily therapeutic concoctions can produce vast carnage\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Democracy often provides a vast improvement in governance in foreign lands but bribery, finagling, and bombing are poor ways to export freedom. Can Washington politicians and policy wonks explain why the U.S. government deserves veto power over elections everywhere else on Earth?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Since that 2018 op-ed, NED became a top funder of the worldwide Censorship Industrial Complex. It has also continued trying to rig foreign elections. NED tacitly justifies itself because \u201cGod wants democracy to win.\u201d The U.S. government is simply doing God\u2019s work \u2013 or doing what God would do if he knew as much as U.S. government agencies.<\/p>\n

In 1984, Congressman Hank Brown (R-CO) provided a single sentence that should have nullified NED\u2019s right to exist: \u201cIt is a contradiction to try to promote free elections by interfering in them.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>But contradictions never stopped the growth of Leviathan. NED\u2019s continued existence is a testament to the perpetual perfidy of U.S. foreign policy. With pressure from Musk and from the Trump administration, Americans may soon learn of far more NED scandals.<\/p>\n

Reprinted with permission from The Libertarian Institute<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jim Bovard is a Senior Fellow for the Libertarian Institute and author of the newly published,<\/em> Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty (2023). His other books include<\/em> Public Policy Hooligan (2012),<\/em> Attention Deficit Democracy (2006),<\/em> Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and seven others. He is a member of the<\/em> USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for<\/em> The New York Times,<\/em> The Wall Street Journal,<\/em> Playboy,<\/em> The Washington Post, among others. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Sunday, Elon Musk posted on X: After that merciless arm-twisting, I have no choice but to recap my National Endowment for Democracy bashes going back to shortly after it was launched in 1983. In a November 29, 1985 piece in the Oakland Tribune, I hailed NED as \u201cone of the newest, most prestigious boondoggles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1006],"class_list":["post-51271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51271"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51283,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51271\/revisions\/51283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51271"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=51271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}