The Playbook
Autocrats around the world have a tried and tested approach to undermine democratic institutions and fuel polarisation through divisive, populist propaganda. Their financiers work across borders to invest in grassroots movements (e.g. Brexit, Tea Party, etc.), create powerful narratives (such as the “great replacement” theory), take control of the media so that it can serve their interests (e.g. Elon Musk with Twitter/X and Vincent Bolloré with Europe1, JDD, Paris Match) and set up think tanks to do long term strategic forecasting and sow distrust in democratic institutions, including elections (e.g. Heritage Foundation). This is happening throughout Europe, and it is about to get worse in the US.
What is the pro-democracy philanthropic playbook and how can US and Europe-based donors collaborate to restore trust in and popular support for democratic institutions? This is what I asked my interlocutors and here is what I heard:
We face similar yet different challenges across the Atlantic
The US and Europe have much in common: stable democracies (until recently), educated populations, high GDPs, and similarities in the populist discourse stoking fears about immigration and the demise of the traditional family strtucture. More and more people on both sides of the Atlantic have lost faith in the ability of their democratically elected government to understand their problems and address their needs. Many are now voting for parties that promise to deliver results in radically different ways.
Yet, political systems differ from country to country (multiparty or two-party systems, federal or centralised states, parliamentarian or presidential, etc.) and the challenges to democracy are different from place to place.
We need to focus more on these differences, about what will work in a particular place, without assuming that a strategy to foster democracy that worked in one country will work in another context. For instance, in the US, polarisation is pernicious – the country is deeply and closely (50/50) divided on fundamental lines of race, religion and worldview. The situation in most European countries (with maybe the exception of Poland) is different: polarisation exists but is less extreme and profound. Addressing polarisation in the US will require different strategies than – say – in France, Slovakia or the Netherlands.
There is much we can learn from each other
Even if every country faces a unique situation, there is much we can learn from each other to increase our effectiveness in countering authoritarianism populism.
Currently, the lines of trans-Atlantic collaboration and partnership, while they exist, tend to be ad hoc and disparate. This is a vacuum that needs to be filled.
Several US funders are concerned about and seeking to combat populism and illiberal democracy. They see parallels between the rise of these developments in Europe and the US -and in corresponding efforts to close civic space and restrain media freedom on both continents.
Moreover, many NGOs and funders focused on strengthening democracy in the US are increasingly drawn to solutions for doing this in which EU countries are far ahead of the US. These include gender parity in representation, the regulation of Big Tech and efforts to combat disinformation, multiparty democracy, proportional representation, and citizens’ assemblies.
Inversely, there is much European foundations can learn from counterparts in the US, including their extensive experience in pooling funds at scale and with a sense of urgency, for instance in support of a common cause (such as the Press Forward Fund – the $500 million movement to reimagine local news in the US) or to seize a strategic moment (such as the All By April campaign in which more than 170 philanthropic funders marshalled $155 million to support election integrity and voter engagement ahead of this year’s election.
Steps we will take together to be more interconnected
At its most recent Steering Committee meeting, Civitates foundation partners committed to engaging in a more concerted way with US-based allies.
One of the immediate opportunities in front of us is to engage in joint foresight and scenario planning on democratic futures to develop our capacity to think long term (20-50 years) about democracy. The Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE) and the Democracy Funders Network (DFN) in the US have extended an invitation to Civitates to partner in the “democracy futures” initiative that they are spearheading, and we look forward to participating in the workshops next year.
We also want to collaborate on a learning journey, through regular learning calls involving US and European players active in the democracy field, to allow for information sharing, collective sense making (for instance of recent elections), experimentation, learning, and adaptation. To this end, we co-hosted the Philea Democracy Network’s recent Lunch & Learn webinar with Keseb, a US-based, non-partisan, pro-democracy civil society group that has conducted research on democratic backsliding and closing civic space in the US, Brazil and South Africa. They spoke about their recommendations to funders on how to prepare to counter elected authoritarianism.
We also want to be more intentional in building connections among grantees on both sides of the Atlantic through joint convenings and co-funding, to create vast networks of transnational solidarity allowing liberal civil society groups to work in more connected and mutually reinforcing ways to resist authoritarianism.
Other steps, which can be considered by Civitates and others, now or in the future, include:
- Invite US donors to visit Europe and European donors to visit the US on learning trips to show opportunities and deepen EU-US funder-to-funder relationships and to get more of an on-the-ground feel for what is happening in each place.
- Involve other funders and partners from other parts of the world, including from large, embattled democracies (Brasil, India, South Africa) to increase learning opportunities.
Key take away
Pro-democracy funders on both sides of the Atlantic need, more than ever before, to support context-specific experimentation, fund groups they may not have funded before, take risky bets on bold ideas, support people who work on a range of approaches from imagining what democratic renewal could look like to organising at the grassroots level across constituencies, to fostering narrative change that resonates with large(r) segments of the population.
The more connected and coordinated we are, and the more we learn from each other’s work on both sides of the Atlantic, the greater our chance to succeed on all these fronts will be.
