In October 1941, about six weeks before Pearl Harbor, the House of Representatives came within one vote of dismantling the United States Army. A similar kind of shortsightedness seemed apparent in the June 22 House vote to kill funding for the National Endowment for Democracy.
NED costs each American about $.13 per year. For the world's premier democracy and lone superpower to announce that its citizens could not bear a thirteen-cent annual impost to support democrats around the world would be an act of national self-degradation.
NED has saved the taxpayers billions of dollars by its work in helping to dismantle the Warsaw Pact; in that respect, it is perhaps the most cost-effective foreign-policy initiative in American history. But there is more than money at stake here: there are values, and there is honor. Polish parliamentary leader Bronislaw Geremek, a leader in the formation of Solidarity, put it this way recently:
Democracy merits collective solidarity, and... it should be a matter of common concern transcending the frontiers of states, civilizations or continents. Democracy matters for all of us, because it is much more than an efficient method of government, a political regime or a set of institutions.... Politics only matters when it means a commitment to values.... One must create the best possible conditions so that minority rights are respected, mechanisms of checks and balances are applied to power, and the state is ruled by law. There must be a constant dialogue between those who govern and those who are governed and an unceasing democratic education process.
The National Endowment for Democracy is America's best investment in the future of freedom. It has won the United States millions of friends throughout the world. Its flourishing should be supported by every American who cares about the cause of ordered liberty under the rule of law: which is to say, by every American who takes his political birthright seriously.
Read EPPC Senior Fellow Stanley Kurtz's remarkable new political biography of President Obama,