To prevent national security failures and mitigate them when they occur, the U.S. has built a national security state unlike anything humanity has ever seen. The U.S. government has a network of security intelligence and operations agencies that spans the world, working through a web of domestic and foreign governmental, nonprofit, and corporate institutions.
We outsiders think this network runs through the CIA. Yet as we are learning, thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), that is only partly true. In 2023, while the Intelligence Community, including the CIA, was appropriated $71.7 billion dollars, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an “independent” but supposedly State Department-guided agency, received about $40 billion. While USAID has the word “International” in its name, it has spent a lot of money not only spreading atheism in Nepal but also on woke dogma and censorship at home.
As true Communist believers can now barely be found outside of U.S. educational institutions, USAID and their web of partners have moved on to new missions. The most important of these is “countering threats to democracy,” especially “countering domestic extremism.” To those ends, every U.S. agency has been weaponized, and law has served as a shield for official excess as much as it has been used as a weapon against genuine bad actors outside of government.
For what, after all, do these officials mean by terms such as “democracy” and “ally”? With regard to “democracy,” we political scientists have a lot to answer for.
Joseph Bessette coined the term “deliberative democracy” to mean the actual working of democratic institutions of deliberation such as legislatures and their committees, adversary jury trials, and election campaigns with their mixture of reasoned argument, spin, door knocking, and celebrity glitz. Yet in spite of Bessette’s still-fruitful concept, we academics have repurposed “deliberative democracy.” To us, it means the construction of supposedly “ideal deliberative situations” in which the academic imagines agents detached from all the messy realities of politics reasoning together and coming to conclusions about fundamental questions regarding rights, justice, and equality.
In practice, such “democratic theory” is a tool for the defense and extension of the current politically correct fashions regarding immigration, affirmative action, abortion, and secularism. In classrooms and conferences, “deliberative democracy” amounts to very little deliberation or debate, just lectures and posturing; disagreement or criticism is highly disfavored. Students are to be indoctrinated with the conclusions of “democratic theory,” and how to defend them with ever-new refinements of theoretical argument. And when our students go out into the world as fledgling bureaucrats, NGO staff, or political activists, these are the views they carry with them, which is how they have largely penetrated U.S. national security agencies and their web of supposedly “nongovernmental” and “private” affiliates.
USAID claims in its mission statement to “promote and demonstrate democratic values abroad.” But abroad and at home, thanks to my “democratic theorist” colleagues and USAID funding, elite students are taught that the prejudices of administrators are “democratic values,” and that any criticism of those prejudices is “antidemocratic,” “sexist,” “racist,” or “Islamophobic.” Our students are taught that political movements that attempt to check administrative actions in the name of the national interest or the actual opinion of the governed are “threats to democracy.”
German politicians who wish to ban the immigration-skeptic Alternative for Germany to avoid losing power to them are labeled “defenders of democracy” by USAID-funded journalists, politicians, and pundits. Hungary’s Viktor Orban, whose freely elected regime holds no political prisoners, is called “authoritarian” and a “threat to democracy.” “Allies,” in the parlance of our “democratic” betters, are the foreign officials and NGO activists who work with their American peers in USAID and other agencies against “threats to democracy” in America and abroad.
What we have been living under since 9/11 is to a substantial degree an intelligence operation directed against the American people, and against freedom-loving peoples everywhere. The principal targets are not people and groups plotting evil but “extremism,” “transphobia,” and “Islamophobia”—that is to say, reasoned criticisms of our bureaucratic rulers, unease and skepticism that “men can be mommies,” and all-too-often justified fear of the effects of Islamic preaching and supposedly charitable organizations funded by Islamist governments.
The goal of the globalized and intergovernmental “democracy advocates”? To quote George Soros’s late house academic Ernest Gellner, “colonize simply everybody.” All peoples and places should be ruled by a globalized, homogenized, and deracinated official and activist class that champions supposed “democratic values” and the “open society”—but in reality uses censorship and prison to silence disagreement and prevent effective political organization.
These “democracy networks” are large, and their resources are global in scope. They transcend any distinction between public and private, or between government and civil society. At the most literal level, supposed nongovernmental organizations and ostensibly private foundations are often channels for state funding from agencies such as USAID and agents of state operations. George Bernard Shaw called the British Empire “a system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes”—the foreign aid bureaucracy is in large part a system of outdoor relief for the elite-credentialed, a network of places to train and fund a new generation of operatives for global campaigns for “democratic values.”
While the ostensible targets of such operations are allegedly foreigners, the actual goal is in part—and often in principal part—to transform domestic opinion by astroturfing a supposed global consensus on what would otherwise be controversial issues.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is supposedly financing demonstrations against settler-colonialist Israel at settler-colonial Columbia University. The Ford Foundation is paying not only for LGBTQ literature in Bolivia, but also for disseminating the work of the 1619 Project to tarnish and distort Americans’ own sense of their past. Until the DOGE revelations about USAID, the web of nonprofits, contractors, and agencies concealed how much of their funding comes from supposedly private donors and endowments, and how much of it is Americans’ own tax money being used to alienate their children from America’s traditional ways of life.
Yet just because so much of our government is directed against our safety, prosperity, and well-being, this does not mean we do not face real threats. What is needed is not just defunding and dismantling but real reform as far-reaching as the reforms of the 1940s that created the NSA, the CIA, and other pillars of the American national security state.
American domestic security needs its own comprehensive agency—not a police agency but, as the jurist Richard Posner proposed in a series of writings after 9/11, a “security intelligence service” like Britain’s MI-5, Canada’s Security Intelligence Service, or Australia’s Security Intelligence Organization. Such an agency would provide a single address for congressional, press, and public oversight. Through such an agency, intelligence operations on Americans would be conducted only by Americans, and not by funding foreign astroturf campaigns or soliciting assistance from British Government Communications Headquarters technicians and Australian diplomats to spy on Americans and monitor—and even disrupt—their political activities.
Such operations on American targets should be conducted only insofar as they can be justified politically after the fact, as Angelo Codevilla pointed out long ago. The so-called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has been used too often to surveil Americans in ways that cannot be justified. Under FISA, judges provide warrants that indemnify government malfeasance, whereas, as Posner also argued, the 4th Amendment is intended to permit only reasonable searches and seizures, and disfavors warrants by demanding that they be justified in all relevant particulars.
Whereas the lawyer who lied on the FISA warrant application to spy on Carter Page got a slap on the wrist from a D.C. judge and jury, military personnel who act beyond the limits of the law and the American national interest are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and to court martial. Juries are drawn from the whole pool of servicemen and servicewomen of appropriate rank, which are ultimately subordinate to the elected president and his Senate-confirmed deputies. Perhaps more of the American national security apparatus needs to be formally militarized so that its participants can be disciplined in a politically accountable manner instead of being able to rely on get-out-of-jail passes from their fellow compromised swamp creatures.
Finally, while we all cheer the dismantling of USAID, we should not forget that MAGA needs its own public diplomacy. Democratic institutions and fundamental rights are under attack everywhere by the champions of “democratic values.” One thing we can learn by imitating our current enemies and the better men and women, the cultural Cold War warriors, whose methods they have misapplied, is that we are not going to preserve our rights at home unless we carry the war for their defense to foreign battlefields. We must help our allies stand against the enemies of freedom of thought, of worship, and of political action—that is, against their would-be neocolonial and hopefully former USAID-grantee opponents from Ottawa to Buenos Aires and from Dublin to Cape Town, Sydney, and Seoul.