Democracy's Trojan horse

National Interest, The, Summer, 2004 by John Fonte

Fortunately, for practical policymakers the conceptual tools needed to grasp the serious nature of the post-democratic threat to American principles and American interests are available. The intellectual spade-work identifying and conceptualizing this challenge has already been accomplished by specialists in international law, including John Bolton, Jeremy Rabkin, David B. Rivkin, Lee A. Casey, Robert Bork, Jack Goldsmith, John Yoo, Stephen Krasner, Curtis Bradley, Jed Rubenfeld and Kenneth Anderson. Policymakers need to read, absorb and build upon their work, some of which has appeared in the pages of this magazine. (6)

The United States should be prepared to champion not simply generalized notions of building democratic institutions and promoting "human rights" and "democratic values" that are susceptible to post-democratic manipulation, but the principle of democratic sovereignty within the institution of the liberal democratic nation-state. Hence, the concept of democratic sovereignty as a core American value should be officially incorporated into the National Security Strategy of the United States and promoted by the State Department, the National Security Council and the other institutions of the President's foreign policy apparatus.

Post-democratic challenges to American democratic sovereignty should be clearly identified and resisted. NGOs that consistently act as if they are strategic opponents of the democratic sovereignty of the American nation should be treated as such. They should not be recognized or supported at international conferences, not permitted to roam battlefields, and not given special briefings or access to U.S. government officials.

In particular, these NGOs should not be given the legitimacy and credibility that comes from a certain status as quasi-allies of American democracy in human rights arguments in non-democratic and developing countries. Most importantly, the post-democratic NGOs and their allies in the self-designated "international human rights movement" actually harm the cause of genuine human rights. They claim to speak for "humanity", as other utopian elites once claimed to speak for the "workers" or the "people." Yet like previous utopian elites they speak for a particular ideological movement. They purport to support the "rule of law." Yet they denigrate the "rule of law" as it is actually practiced in functioning liberal democracies, while constantly reinventing new utopian versions of "law." At the same time, this so-called "law" (really ideological politics or agitprop by other means) is--at the particular moment that it is evoked--touted as absolute bedrock human rights law. The astute Kenneth Anderson has labeled this phenomenon "serial absolutism." Thus, what is absolute human rights law today, was not human rights law in 1994 and will be different again in 2014. Apparently, "absolute" human rights law is, from decade to decade, or day to day, whatever "human rights" activists tell us it is.

As the United States expands its initiatives to foster democracy abroad these post-democratic NGOs and "human rights activism" should not be given federal funds and grants to promote what they will surely claim is "democracy building", but is, in realty, their own narrow ideological agenda. This issue has direct practical consequences since President Bush has called for a major effort and increased funds to promote democracy and democratic institutions. It is crucial that this initiative and these funds are not co-opted and captured by post-democrats.