In this new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld examines how over the past two decades, dozens of governments have used regulations, laws, and vilifying narratives to restrict the ability of civil society organizations to act and speak. Now, a similar set of tactics is being rolled out in the United States. What should philanthropists and organizations expect, and what can be done?

From the report:

CLOSING SPACE INTERNATIONALLY

“The absence of civic space was a hallmark of Cold War totalitarianism. There was the individual, and there was the government; any attempt to organize regular people to act or speak publicly in even innocuous ways—such as a birdwatching league, a home church, or a small arts magazine—had to be monitored and approved by the ruling party or crushed.

The blossoming of civil society across the former Soviet Union and many other once-closed societies was among the strongest signals that the 1990s wave of democracy was not only toppling authoritarian regimes but also growing roots. Organizations, interest groups, religious congregations, open media, and the free exchange of ideas helped people find their voices, locate their communities, and push their governments and societies to do things that they cared about.

Then, in the mid-2000s, democracy started to recede globally. And the walls started to close in on civil society.”

Read the full report here>>

In this brief update of the January 2023 report, we summarize how the trends we observed have become even more worrying. With implications for every funder's work, authoritarian populists have strengthened their hold on government power and are using it to restrict freedoms across a wide swathe of American life. Regardless of the programs or issue areas you fund, whether you're socially conservative or progressive, we hope the report and update will act as a guide to the challenges ahead and encourage greater collaboration across programmatic and institutional lines in defense of liberal democracy.Rising authoritarianism in the U.S. has the potential to profoundly damage civil society and the philanthropy that supports it, damage that itself has the potential to further accelerate autocratic rule.

What Happens if It Happens Here? U.S. Philanthropy, Civil Society, and the Authoritarian Threat

The size, strength, and diversity of American philanthropy and civil society are unique in the world. These institutions have a key role to play in first stopping and then reversing the trend of democratic backsliding.

Authoritarians know this, which is why they have set their sights on civil society organizations and their funders. Groups working to ensure free and fair elections, reform police practices, or defend the rights of Muslim, Jewish, or LGBTQ Americans are among those contending with official harassment and threats of violence encouraged by politicians and rightwing media. Prominent funders have been targeted as enemies of “real Americans” and threatened with asset seizure. These examples, as well as the experiences of people in U.S. states and foreign countries undergoing democratic decline, tell us what might be coming. The warnings are all around us.

Changing the nation’s trajectory for the long term will involve work for which philanthropy and civil society are uniquely suited: helping Americans bridge divides and come together to build a fully functioning system of self-government. Doing so will demand taking on illiberalism on both left and right. In the near-term, however, philanthropy will have to contend with growing authoritarian factions on the right that are using government power, and even political violence, to gain and maintain control – and that threaten philanthropy and civil society itself. The danger comes from those who are no longer interested in the give and take of policy making, of negotiation and compromise, and who reject one of the key principles that make democracy work: the willingness to lose to the other side.

READ THE UPDATE>

READ THE ORIGINAL REPORT>

Since June 16, 2015, the day that Donald Trump descended an escalator in Trump Tower and announced his run for the presidency, the American body politic has struggled to figure out how to treat him, his rhetoric, and the threat he poses to our system of government. A similar pattern plays out repeatedly: Trump makes a seemingly outlandish promise that upends conventional understandings of politics. Then, those who help Americans make sense of current events — the media, other politicians, pundits, and influencers — dismiss, distort, or deny the very promise Trump has made. And few then know quite what to make of it all or how to respond — a state of confusion that has enabled Trump to shatter democratic norms in previously inconceivable ways.

We now have more than eight years of experience with this phenomenon and a full presidential term as a track record proving that Trump’s pledges should be taken both seriously and literally. He has, for the most part, sought to do the extreme things that were dismissed as mere rhetoric when first promised, from enacting a “Muslim ban” to refusing to accept the results of an election. And yet, here we are again, with Trump making even more extreme promises to “terminate” the Constitution, seek “retribution” against political opponents, and be a “dictator” (just on day one), only to see people unsure what to make of or how to respond to these threats.

This report aims to alter these dynamics by clearly showing how Trump would follow through on his most extreme anti-democratic pledges for a second term and then offering expert recommendations for how to mitigate that danger. 

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America’s authoritarian faction is both more extreme and more successful than similar movements in other advanced democracies. Yet despite its ascendency, this faction does not enjoy broad-based support. So what explains its outsized success?

In Advantaging Authoritarianism: The U.S. Electoral System & Antidemocratic Extremism, Protect Democracy examines the links between escalating antidemocratic extremism and the U.S. electoral system: “one uniquely translating limited factional support into outsized political influence.” In particular, it interrogates how specific features of the U.S. electoral system may be structurally favoring political extremism, such as by exaggerating one party’s electoral wins over the other, diluting minority voting power, weakening competition between the major parties, preventing an electorally viable new center-right party, and rewarding extreme factions at the ballot box, among other effects.

As political scientist Robert Dahl once observed, the U.S. system, “natural as it may seem to us, is of a species rare to the vanishing point among the advanced democracies.” Advantaging Authoritarianism examines its anomalous features; the ways in which those features are aggravating extremism; and how various reforms could help to turn the tide. While the authoritarian threat confronting the U.S. is a near-term crisis, successfully confronting it will also require long-term, structural solutions.

Earlier this year, Citizen began comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the modern American Right, examining attitudes towards Authoritarianism, QAnon, Voting & Elections, COVID-19, and Climate Change. 

This report summarizes our findings and affirms our initial hypothesis that while political polarization puts our democracy at increasing risk, opportunities exist for Citizen partners to reach pragmatic voters on the Right and engage them in efforts to strengthen democracy and address other pressing national issues. READ MORE>

When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. READ MORE>

Bright Line Watch shares key findings from expert and public surveys on the state of American democracy. READ MORE>

For two hundred years, the grand project of liberal internationalism has been to build a world order that is open, loosely rules-based, and oriented toward progressive ideas. Today this project is in crisis, threatened from the outside by illiberal challengers and from the inside by nationalist-populist movements. This timely book offers the first full account of liberal internationalism's long journey from its nineteenth-century roots to today's fractured political moment. Creating an international "space" for liberal democracy, preserving rights and protections within and between countries, and balancing conflicting values such as liberty and equality, openness and social solidarity, and sovereignty and interdependence--these are the guiding aims that have propelled liberal internationalism through the upheavals of the past two centuries. G. John Ikenberry argues that in a twenty-first century marked by rising economic and security interdependence, liberal internationalism--reformed and reimagined--remains the most viable project to protect liberal democracy. READ MORE>

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin--enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future. READ MORE>

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism.

From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. READ MORE>

Joe Goldman on how philanthropy can support the fight for a more open and just democracy. READ MORE>

Philip Rojc interviews democracy funders on what funders should have done better in the lead-up to January 6, and what they can do now. READ MORE>

In mid-2020, the Alliance for Securing Democracy convened a task force of 30 leading American national security and foreign policy experts to devise a national strategy for the United States to offset autocratic advances in non-military domains of competition. This report reflects the collective insights and recommendations of this bipartisan group. READ MORE>

In its 2020 assessment, Freedom House asserts that global freedom has been declining for 14 straight years, as democracy and pluralism come under further assault from dictators and authoritarian states.

In the face of the decline of democracy in the United States, it is beneficial to look toward other democracies which declined and recovered. This analysis reveals that often recovery takes decades, can remain incomplete, and that it requires the dedication of individuals committed to renewal.

Our global community is experiencing similar trends. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk offer a global perspective, demonstrating that declining trust in democracy is a problem around the world. See their findings in The Danger of Deconsolidation.

In his book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Edward Luce argues that we are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance towards society's economic losers, and complacency about our system's durability. Unless the West can rekindle an economy that produces gains for the majority of its people, its political liberties may be doomed.

Ben Wittes and Susan Hennessey describe how to interpret Donald Trump’s behavior as a president in the context of how we understand the presidency as an institution, detailing which aspects of Trump are radically different from past presidents and what aspects have historical antecedents.

Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt show how democracies fall to authoritarianism—and how U.S. democracy can be saved.

Larry Diamond argues we are in a critical moment: the defense and advancement of democratic ideals relies on U.S. global leadership. If we do not reclaim our traditional place as the keystone of democracy, today's authoritarian swell could become a tsunami, providing an opening for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and their admirers to turn the twenty-first century into a dark time of despotism.