This week, the State Department distributed roughly $177 million in Democracy Funds through 43 awards hours before a deadline and despite congressional concerns and requests not to. The money is typically used to fund authoritarian or limited democracies. Instead, according to The Guardian and CNN, it will support causes opposing immigration, Brexit, and “gender ideology,” including projects in wealthy European democracies. I argue that by choosing European recipients, the U.S. is using democracy funds to favor one side in other democracies’ internal politics, which undermines the neutral role that Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt assign to what they call gatekeepers.

In How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that democracies survive when political elites, especially parties, act as “gatekeepers” (p. 20). They do this through what they call “distancing”, which includes refusing alliances with extremists, expelling them, and avoiding acts that normalize authoritarian figures (p. 24-25). They give the example of Belgium in the 1930s when the Catholic Party declared cooperation with the far-right Rexists incompatible with party membership, and the Rexists were sidelined (p. 26-28). Austria shows it in the present. In 2016, leading conservatives backed their ideological rival to keep the far-right Freedom Party out of the presidency (p. 30-31).

Those gatekeepers are in the U.S., but the logic travels internationally. Levitsky and Ziblatt stress that alliances give outsiders confidence to become legitimate contenders for power (p. 15). Money from a powerful foreign government does something similar as it provides resources and approval to one side of another country’s politics. The awards include a project documenting “democratic backsliding” in Europe that it ties to migration, and a floated grant to counter migration in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. A $7 million award to a British thinktank whose stated aims include ending mass migration was dropped in July after congressional pushback. The selection is openly ideological: a $2 million program called “Promoting Western Civilization Allies” is limited to implementers who reject “ideologically weaponized accounts of human rights, such as gender ideology,” and names possible recipients in Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Balkans. A State Department official described the aim as supporting Europeans’ “civilizational self-confidence.”

The administration would object because it presents these grants as defending free speech, religious freedom, and Western values. Funding conservative groups is not undemocratic in itself but gatekeeping is about who is treated as a legitimate participant, and when a foreign government picks which groups to fund through ideology, it shifts that judgment away from voters and parties in those countries, whatever its intentions.

This argument could be wrong, and the evidence to test it is public. It fails if the funding turns out to be open to groups across the political spectrum or chosen by neutral criteria. That is the limit of the argument. Levitsky and Ziblatt did not write about foreign aid necessarily, so applying them to this situation is an extension of their thinking. Democracy aid is meant to strengthen governments abroad, and that purpose is undermined when the administration decides which side of a country’s politics deserves support.

Image: “Afrikaner refugees from South Africa hold American flags as they arrive at Dulles airport in Washington last May. Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP”. Sourced from The Guardian.