Trump must end the National Endowment for Democracy once and for all

Readers of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter entertainments will recall that the number-one bad hat, Tom Marvolo Riddle, AKA Voldemort, had a clever way of preserving himself. Rightly worried that the forces of good might try to destroy him, the Dark Lord devised a way of infusing living bits of himself into various objects and people. The resulting magical charm was called a “Horcrux.”  

“If the body of a Horcrux owner is killed,” we read in a Potter gloss, “that portion of the soul that had remained in the body does not pass on to the next world, but will rather exist in a non-corporeal form capable of being resurrected by another wizard.” Nice work if you can get it. 

I have often wondered whether the architects of the deep state have been inspired by Rowling’s tale. For like Voldemort, they have taken care to distribute their essence in external objects and institutions. Wizards like Donald Trump and Elon Musk pronounce anathema upon their activities. They cast death spells that evaporate the elixir that imparts life – dollars in all their glory – but somehow the deep staters manage to evade death.  

Consider, to take one  prominent example, the National Endowment for Democracy. This private entity depends entirely on a federal subsidy of some $315 million in order to carry on. And what do they do? Essentially, they are a front for the neoconservative, globalist wizardry that has made the world safe for bureaucracy. As James Piereson explained in the New Criterion this winter, the NED is a holdover from the Cold War.  

“With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Piereson wrote, 

the NED adjusted its mission to support democratic reforms in countries in non-communist countries with authoritarian governments, many of which were never adversaries of the United States in the first place. Over the years, the NED adopted a view of democracy that held that nationalist and populist leaders campaigning for office around the world were in fact authoritarians, and a threat to democracy. Many foreign leaders were tossed into that bucket – not only Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but also Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, and others. Many of these leaders were popularly elected but were nevertheless branded by the ned as authoritarians. It surprised no one when ned officials deemed Donald Trump, too, an authoritarian, lumping him together with these leaders.

Indeed, although it was originally a bi-partisan organization, the NED has in recent years veered sharply to the left. In 2016 and after, it emerged as a virulent opponent of Donald Trump and the entire America First agenda.  

In 2016, Carl Gershman, a former president of NED, contributed to the Trump-is-Vlaidmir-Putin’s-puppet hoax in the Washington Post and elsewhere. Trump was elected in a free and open democratic election, but somehow, according to Gershman, his victory showed that “our democracy” was “broken.” Commentators like Anne Applebaum, Bill Kristol and deep-state apparatchiks like Victoria Nuland joined Gershman as cheerleaders in the anti-Trump campaign for the NED. 

Since the NED was an ostentatious enemy of Trump and his agenda – and since it was pursuing a foreign policy that was not just separate from, but actively opposed to, Trump’s foreign policy – it was no surprise that Trump and his cost-cutters at the Department of Government Efficiency took aim at its budget. Just a couple of weeks ago, NED’s subsidy had been zeroed out in Congress’s proposed budget. 

Abracadabra! A look at the most recent recision shows that what had been zero was suddenly transmuted back into $315 million, with provisions for additional contracts. Voldemort chose some unlikely objects – including, if I remember correctly, Harry Potter himself – as the Horcruxes into which he deposited his spirit. Just so, the deep state has chosen some apparently unlikely objects – various GOP members of Congress, for example – into which it has infused its soul. How else to explain the sudden resurrection of the NED? 

A Horcrux cannot be destroyed by conventional means: by being smashed or ripped or burnt, for example. What is needed, we are told, is Basilisk venom, the Sword of Gryffindor or a magical, inextinguishable flame. 

That’s the bad news. The good news is that deep-state outposts like the NED, though remarkably hardy, are not necessarily immortal. Like cockroaches, they can survive a lot, especially when they can depend on the support of lily-livered RINOs who are so numerous in the GOP.  But they are not immortal. What is needed to extinguish the NED is not Basilisk venom but the concerted attention of Donald Trump. Perhaps the President had thought he had gotten rid of the NED already. I am here to remind him that that essential piece of work is but half done. It is time to finish the job.