Eyoel is the founder of Keseb and a visiting fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Han is the inaugural director of the institute and a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins.
Democracy does not disappear by accident. Instead, all over the world, we are witnessing deliberate attempts by antidemocratic actors to weaken civil society, cripple the rule of law and activate social fragmentation. From weaponizing fear to re-writing history to exploiting religion, today’s autocrats and their supporters leverage the same playbook. At the heart of that playbook is a multipronged attack on civil society. In 2021, among the 33 autocratizing countries, repression of civil society worsened in 22.
If a diminished civil society is the foundation of autocracy, a robust and inclusive civil society is the bedrock of democracy. Civil society serves as an intermediary between the state and the individual, composed of organizations such as schools and universities, nonprofit and advocacy groups, professional associations, churches, and cultural institutions. Civil society is the connective tissue that holds any society together. It is no accident that anti-democratic actors start there.
Despite the centrality of civil society to the authoritarian playbook, efforts to strengthen democracy too often underinvest in civil society — even though it is our best line of defense.
Civil society organizations in both democracies and autocratic regimes are hamstrung by limited resources and lack of coordination. Even in the United States, with the world’s most sophisticated philanthropic culture, civil society organizations defending and strengthening democracy are grossly underfunded compared to organizations working on education, health or poverty alleviation. For instance in 2020, U.S. philanthropists spent $71 billion on education whereas decade-long philanthropic funding of democracy organizations totaled about $14 billion. This pattern of overinvesting in issue areas and underinvesting in governance is also reflected in how the U.S. government has allocated its funding globally. For example, in Africa, the U.S. government spends 70 percent of its funds ($5.4 billion) on health initiatives and only 4 percent ($312.4 million) on democracy, human rights and governance.
Because civil society is inherently decentralized, sometimes it can be hard to know how to strategically invest in it. Investments in civil society may not seem as significant as sweeping institutional and policy reforms, such as H.R. 1 in the United States. Or, because civil life involves the messy work of bringing people together, efforts to strengthen it may seem unpredictable relative to individually targeted psychological interventions, such as traditional or social media ads to incentivize action.
It doesn’t have to be so. We can and must develop a strategic approach to shoring up and inoculating civil society against attempts to weaken it. The first part of the solution to protect and strengthen democracy is to prioritize funding democracy issues and organizations. The second is to invest these resources strategically in civil society. We propose two immediate priorities:
- Build civic resilience: In the U.S. and internationally, there is an overinvestment in short-term outcomes, in pursuit of a silver bullet electoral or policy win (the 2020 U.S elections cost a whopping $14 billion). While leadership and structural reforms are important to strengthening democracy, we also need civil society organizations that cultivate a shared commitment to democratic values and build resilience among individuals and communities to advance those values. Funding for civil society organizations that are tirelessly building the culture of democracy and social cohesion through approaches such as civics education, community organizing, leadership development and facilitating deliberative dialogue for inclusive democracy should be prioritized alongside those working on structural reforms.
- Facilitate transnational pro-democracy coordination: As the Freedom House warns, “the global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.” Today, pro-democracy organizations are siloed, lacking the level of transnational coordination and playbook sharing that their autocratic counterparts artfully orchestrate. We need to create forums such as the upcoming virtual Global Democracy Champions Summit to weave global networks and elevate the aspirations, leadership, and innovations of pro-democracy organizations, activists, academics, and philanthropists.
From journalists to think thanks to Ukrainian freedom fighters, there is outcry for resources and innovation to defend liberal democracy. In the same way, philanthropic institutions, governments, and multilateral institutions galvanized in response to Covid-19, this is the moment to rise in global solidarity for democracy. Philanthropy, in particular, has a historic role to play by making bold investments in civil society organizations addressing both short-term crises as well as long-term civic infrastructure building efforts.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.