NGOs: The Plague of the Post Cold War World

Walter Russell Mead writes: for The Wall Street Journal: “Authors Sarah Bush and Jennifer Hadden put their fingers on one of the most important international developments of our time. After the Cold War, human-rights, development and democracy promotion-groups, nominally private but often funded by Western governments, gained prominence and clout around the world.

These NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—and their supporters see themselves as representing “civil society,” a phrase often conflated with society as a whole that in practice means the consensus of upper-middleclass liberal opinion. Amnesty International is a pillar of civil society. The National Rifle Association isn’t.

Groups like Human Rights Watch, the Global Fund for Women, Greenpeace and Oxfam raise money primarily in rich countries to fund, among other things, efforts to change policies, provide legal services and build political movements in poor countries to support their goals. Many NGOs are funded by government grants and often provide services ranging from disaster relief and medical assistance to support for democracy campaigners against the host government.

In the 1990s, when the U.S. was a unipolar superpower and many thought history had ended, NGOs seemed to be sweeping the world. Autocrats everywhere trembled at the prospect of “color revolutions,” civil-society-led upheavals that challenged dictators from Myanmar to Ukraine. The example of Poland, where the Solidarity movement, with help from the West, broke communist power and helped bring down the Warsaw Pact, resonated globally. Chinese Communists saw how democracy movements ended dictatorships in Taiwan and South Korea and worried that the contagion could spread. The arc of history was bending toward justice, and NGOs were making it happen.

That isn’t how things look today. Instead of Russia and China worrying about liberal infiltration from the West, Western governments worry about subversion and propaganda inspired by Moscow and Beijing. Freedom House notes that 2024 was the 19th consecutive year in which the world became less free. Meanwhile, a combination of budgetary constraints and political backlash is reducing Western support for NGO-backed priorities around the world.

What went wrong? Ms. Bush and Ms. Hadden identify a mix of causes. As NGOs gained power and prominence, they proliferated and competed for resources. They became identified with controversial political positions. There were charges of sexual exploitation in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, damaging the reputations of organizations like Oxfam Great Britain and raising doubts

about the whole sector. Polling across 28 countries by the Edelman Trust Barometer found that respondents viewed business as almost as ethical as NGOs and much more competent.

Simultaneously, the authors note, changes in international politics were creating a more hostile climate for wannabe arc benders. As antidemocratic great powers like China and Russia worked to counter the influence of pro-Western NGOs, governments in countries like Turkey, India, Indonesia and Mexico acted to limit the ability of outsiders to fund political activity on their territory. Citing political scientist Suparna Chaudhry, Ms. Bush and Ms. Hadden write that more than 130 countries worldwide have adopted various restrictions on the activities of international and foreign-funded NGOs.

Countries aren’t always foolish or evil to do so. Many so-called NGOs are largely state-funded. The National Endowment for Democracy is primarily funded by the American government. The International Planned Parenthood Federation is funded for the most part by donor governments. Even when NGOs are funded by Western foundations and billionaires, it’s unclear why governments should allow random foreign actors, however wise and well-intentioned the donors may think they are, to intervene in their societies without oversight or control.

Looking back on it all, the belief that NGOs were shaping a new, post-Treaty of Westphalia world (which formally ended the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War, established the modern international system, and the concept of state sovereignty) reflected the illusions of America’s elite liberal establishment after the fall of the Soviet Union. America was supreme in the world, and upper-middle-class liberal elites largely controlled American media and government institutions.

Both trends have reversed. American power is contested globally, and upper-middle class-liberal elites, challenged both by Trumpian populism on the right and radical socialist and identity politics on the left, are less politically powerful and more intellectually incoherent than they were. The result is that the NGOs reflecting the priorities and aspirations of the liberal-elite establishment are in disorderly retreat across a darkening world.”

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He’s also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. He worries that we are losing our very civilization.

“If you live in a community in which retailers don’t fear roving bands of thieves swarming stores and pillaging the place, count yourself lucky. Not everyone in this country can say that. More and more, street-level retailers face daily threats of having their products stolen right off the shelves, either all at once or just a bit at a time.

Dick’s Sporting Goods has explained a miss in second-quarter profitability by a reference to “elevated inventory shrink.” This means that customers, employees, or both are stealing stuff. And this is hardly the only company that faces this problem. Stores in large cities around the country are closing because of theft. The problem is so bad that police have largely given up trying to prosecute the crimes.

The whole phenomenon is a reminder that there’s no substitute for a baseline population-wide ethic of respect for property rights. All of the security cameras, locks, police, and guns can’t stop a rampage of immorality once it takes hold. Civilization itself requires a common trust that the rights of others will be respected. There’s nothing that can substitute for that.

Those living in urban centers in the Northeast and the West Coast should take a visit to any small town in rural Texas. They all have hardware stores, farmers markets, and various other retail shops that leave their goods on the sidewalk overnight. Feed stores will stack bags of stuff everywhere, completely open and unguarded. There’s zero risk of theft. That’s because everyone in the community has a well-formed conscience, that inner moral compass that dictates the right and wrong of our actions.

This is true in large parts of the country. Contrary to what New York City dwellers might think, most of the country is devoid of wandering vagabonds, stoners, and armies of thieves, to say nothing of muggers and murderers. Most of the country can still brag about having a civilization.

Which raises an interesting question: What precisely is civilization? Let’s visit a wonderful late work by Sigmund Freud called “Civilization and Its Discontents.” His thesis is that civilization is built from maturity, which itself is the product of the sublimation of primal instincts to take whatever isn’t nailed down, pillage, rape, and otherwise rampage against human rights. This requires a social code of ethics and presents itself as a common ritual of norms and manners. The discontents in society, he theorized, haven’t obtained that maturity because of some psychological shattering. If that’s true, something is fundamentally broken in our culture.

In the course of his argument, Freud laid out for us what are the marks of civilization.

FIRST, the natural world is tamed for the benefit of human beings. Rivers are regulated and protected for travel and trade. The soil is “cultivated and planted with the vegetation suited to it.” Mineral wealth is “brought up assiduously from the depths and wrought into the implements and utensils that are required.” Communications between people “are frequent, rapid, and reliable.” “Wild and dangerous animals have been exterminated, the breeding of tamed and domesticated ones prospers,” Freud said.

COMMENT: Our governments today are urging the opposite: no more taming, drilling, and communicating and meanwhile pretending to control nature by controlling us!

SECOND, in a civilization, “the industry of the inhabitants is applied as well to things which are not in the least useful and, on the contrary seem to be useless, e.g., when the parks and gardens in a town, which are necessary as playgrounds and air-reservoirs, also bear flowering plants, or when the windows of dwellings are adorned with flowers.” We can add to that museums and churches, which aren’t essential to survival but are glorious for the cultivation of the highest ambitions of human life.

COMMENT: Governments shut down parks and playgrounds only three years ago, while museums are closing and parks are falling into disrepair in many spots of the country.

THIRD, a civilization is marked by the exaltation of beauty.

“We expect a cultured people to revere beauty where it is found in nature and to create it in their handiwork so far as they are able,” Freud said. “Beauty is an instance which plainly shows that culture is not simply utilitarian in its aims, for the lack of beauty

is a thing we cannot tolerate in civilization.”

COMMENT: Seen any civic sculptures lately? Do we even know what beauty is anymore?

FOURTH, in a civilization, “we expect to see the signs of cleanliness and order,” according to Freud.

We do not think highly of the cultural level of an English country town in the time of Shakespeare when we read that there was a tall dung-heap in front of his father’s house in Stratford; we are indignant and call it ‘barbarous,’ which is the opposite of civilized, when we find the paths in the Wiener Wald littered with paper,” he said. “Dirt of any kind seems to us incompatible with civilization; we extend our demands for cleanliness to the human body a lso, and are amazed to hear what an objectionable odor emanated from the person of the Roi Soleil; we shake our heads when we are shown the tiny washbasin on the Isola Bella which Napoleon used for his daily ablutions. Indeed, we are not surprised if anyone employs the use of soap as a direct measure of civilization. It is the same with order, which, like cleanliness, relates entirely to man’s handiwork.”

COMMENT: Government regulations have degraded so many home appliances now that not even washing machines and toilets work properly. Not even detergents work as they once did.

FIFTH, civilization presumes order.

“The benefits of order are incontestable: it enables us to use space and time to the best advantage, while saving expenditure of mental energy,” Freud said. “One would be justified in expecting that it would have ingrained itself from the start and without opposition into all human activities; and one may well wonder that this has not happened, and that, on the contrary, human beings manifest an inborn tendency to negligence, irregularity, and untrustworthiness in their work, and have to be laboriously trained to imitate the example of their celestial models.

“[Therefore,] beauty, cleanliness, and order clearly occupy a peculiar position among the requirements of civilization.

No one will maintain that they are as essential to life as the activities aimed at controlling the forces of nature and as other factors which we have yet to mention; and yet no one would willingly relegate them to the background as trivial matters.”

COMMENT: None necessary.

SIXTH, civilization is marked by a high place for ideas in human life. Religion is part of that given their complicated evolution alongside social development. Next to religion comes “philosophical

peculations.” Along with that comes man’s “conceptions of the perfection possible in an individual, in a people, in humanity as a whole, and the demands he makes on the basis of these conceptions.”

Freud noted that “these creations of his mind are not independent of each other; on the contrary, they are closely interwoven, and this complicates the attempt to describe them, as well as that to trace their psychological derivation.”

“If we assume as a general hypothesis that the force behind all human activities is a striving towards the two convergent aims of profit and pleasure, we must then acknowledge this as valid also for these other manifestations of culture, although it can be plainly recognized as true only in respect of science and art,” he said.

COMMENT: The intellectual world has been largely captured by woke charlatans these days.

SEVENTH, Freud said that in civilization “social relations, the relations of one man to another, are regulated, all that has to do with him as a neighbor, a source of help, a sexual object to others, a member of a family or of a state.” In this context, He discussed the idea of freedom itself, which he argued isn’t a product of civilization but rather its precondition.

Indeed, the unmitigated freedom of individuals to do whatever they want without restraint—to pillage, abuse, lie, wreck, menace, and kill—can be a grave threat. It’s only freedom tamed by a cultivated moral sense that gives rise to creative and civilized culture.

COMMENT: Social breakdown is a huge feature of life today.

Freud ended his striking discussion with this: “A great part of the struggles of mankind centers around the single task of finding some expedient (i.e., satisfying) solution between these individual claims and those of the civilized community; it is one of the problems of man’s fate whether this solution can be arrived at in some particular form of culture or whether the conflict will prove irreconcilable.”

Yikes, but there it is. Other important thinkers have dissected this issue of what constitutes civilization, but Freud’s views are less well-known and nonetheless trenchant.

In the same book, Freud wrote that the more government fears revolt, the more it seeks to control the behavior, speech, and thoughts of the people. It actively seeks to decivilize, thus unleashing the same in the population.

So it’s no coincidence that the widespread unleashing of uncivilized behavior, especially in the form of “elevated inventory shrink,” came following the mass violation of property rights by government. After all, the federal government declared most of the stores currently dealing with criminality to be “nonessential.”

What message does that send to the population? We would do well to revisit the foundations of what we call civilization lest we risk losing it entirely [because what our elites are doing to the Country is infantile and insanely destructive to any civilization].”

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The Good News From the Colbert Cancellation

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.  He writes:

“One of my earliest memories was sneaking into the living room after bedtime and seeing my father watch Johnny Carson on late night television. I never understood a word of the narrative but loved the band. It was an old-fashioned big band led by trumpeter Doc Severinsen. The music was thrilling, and vastly better than any of the music that replaced it as “ The Tonight Show” rolled from host to host.

Never a TV guy in adulthood, I seldom cared much who hosted these things, but it is generally agreed that no one ever replaced Carson’s capacity to capture a national culture, keep spirits bright, be serious when necessary, and generally speak with a voice that seemed solidly American in every way that mattered. Literary critic Walter Kirn is correct that Carson contributed even more than Walter Cronkite to making the idea of America real.

Late night host Stephen Colbert struck me as periodically funny back before everything became hyperpolitical. But at some point in 2015 and following, he became absolutely unwatchable. This is because he curated his audience mainly according to a single standard: Trump-loathing and celebration of the left resistance. At some points, the show started feeling like a psychological operation to fool people into believing that everyone thought a certain way and only a tiny minority of people could possibly ever think otherwise.

It was around this time that most major news organizations faced a real choice. They could go on as they had in the past, attempting to capture the whole of American opinion on matters and finding that core of truth while chronicling the passing scene. This is more or less what The New York Times ( NYT) and the networks attempted in the past. When The NYT wholly miscalled the 2016 election, it even sent out an apology of sorts and a pledge to do better.

That mea culpa did not last long. It seems that the newsroom had become filled with activists educated at elite universities that had taught an entire generation that a life and career of activism was more important than objectivity. Indeed, according to woke theory, there is no such thing as objective facts or truth; everything is a lens, a text, a perception, a “ lived experience.”

Under such conditions, no media figure or venue can possibly purport to be a record of national events or opinion. Instead, they must become aggressive propagandists for a cause, else be part of the problem. The NYT fired its newly hired op- ed editor and plunged full- on into hardcore partisan propaganda. I used to read it, figuring that its biases were at least authentic ticks, but after 2016 it became something else. It became a preacher of a doctrine that alienated the dominant swath of the U. S. middle class.

The late night show with Colbert became that too, wholly unfunny and predictable, expecting its audience to laugh as they ridiculed the new president and anyone and everyone who might think there was a good reason to give him the benefit of doubt. As a result, the loss of the show’s market share was inevitable.

But Colbert fans say otherwise. The NYT actually published a piece claiming that this is “authoritarian coercion” via the Trump administration.

Evidence? None. The victim posture just doesn’t work here. It strikes me as very unwise for the entire gaggle of legacy comedians and late night hosts to rise up in solidarity with Colbert. That alone suggests that they know: They are all going to bite the dust, thanks mostly to market forces.

Ben Sasse explains: “ Mr. Colbert has 2.4 million viewers most nights—less than 1 percent of the country. It’s a tiny fraction of Carson’s viewership at a time when the nation was smaller. The Late Show’s audience has fallen more than 30 percent in the past five years, and even more among the critical 18- to 49-year- old demographic. Mr. Colbert’s operation reportedly costs north of $100 million annually, and hemorrhaged $ 40 million last year, nearly half being the host’s salary.”

At the same time, the wokeification of late night and network TV, alongside the same among major news sources, caused an explosion of interest in alternative programming. Podcasts with their legendary authenticity, plus Substacks, plus The Epoch Times, and so many more non-mainstream sources began to gain traction. This is not just because of technological changes. It’s also because what was once the mainstream became the extreme— so much so that the editors and writers did not even know it.

Anyone could watch “ The Late Show” and know for sure that it was not long for this world. It’s the same with National Public Radio, so biased that there was no chance that taxpayers would forever put up with paying for this nonsense. I have found most of the content utterly unreadable and unlistenable for years. This is not because I’m a partisan Trump supporter. It’s because I’m looking for interesting and useful information and entertainment.

So much media after 2016 became like going to church, where you expect preaching. You don’t expect that from mainstream media.

What’s striking is just how not self-aware all these venues became after Trump took office. It’s like they went into denial, not just about who won the election but also about the people who elected him and the values that were fueling a kind of public revolt against the establishment.

There is a genuine mystery as to why and how all these institutions could have pursued such a losing strategy for so long without an awareness that they were dooming their place in American life. It has something to do with how the media elites became a subculture of their own, fully convinced of their own doctrines while demonizing people with whom they disagreed.

It traces to the academy. Gone are the days when journalism was driven by merit, scrapping derring- do, and a desire to tell what’s true. Once the academy became a feeder to the industry, the new employees came with all the pomps we associate with high-level training. Denied any real access to American history and increasingly detached from middle- class moorings, the staff ethos became careerism and group think, in which belongingness took priority over disruptive reporting.

The same fate befell comedy among the elites. Where everything is too offensive to say, the only option becomes to say and do what is permitted and approved. There used to be a publication called The Onion that was hilarious and fun until it became insufferable and boring alongside most of the U. S. left. It was easily knocked off its position of dominance by The Babylon Bee, which faced repeated attempts to ban the site. Now it is profitable alongside all the new media.

The cancellation of Stephen Colbert came with the shutting down of the entire show too. The other hosts of late shows joined to protest in solidarity, like middle- school brats. They imagine that their influencer status can somehow prevent or at least delay their inevitable defenestration.

So unwilling is the network to do an about-face on its whole ethos that it has actually chosen the path of subsistence over profitability. This feature of this media transition is one of the more bizarre: how legacy venues could clearly see examples of viral and profitable media rising up all around them and yet still refuse to follow the model with more diverse programming.

This is a tribute to the power of ideology. Its adherents will stick to it even at their own expense and even to the point when the end times arrive, as they have for the networks and many other institutions. Once they all made the decision to deploy their hardearned credibility for partisan purposes— again 2016 seems to be some kind of turning point—there was no going back.

Now we only wait and watch for the rest of them to fall and the generations to flip, while historians are left to write of the fall of all of these voices, venues, and institutions. Colbert is only the most conspicuous and recent example. The good news is that there are plenty of replacements.

Next time: Going to the Barricades