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Foreign Aid After Trump: Our Democracy Won’t Survive Without It [1]

['View Profile', 'Angmar Barrow', 'Chitown Kev', 'Alonso Del Arte']

Date: 2026-04-23  

The article by former USAID official Luke Zahner (cited in today’s DK post by the Alliance 4 American Leadership) is a necessary corrective to the ignorant isolationism that has dominated US national politics since Ronald Reagan first took office as POTUS in 1981. This article’s greatest feature is how it comprehensively highlights how interconnected our world has become. This interconnectivity is well understood by the global forces of authoritarianism and institutional corruption that threaten the US and other democracies around the world. President Franklin D. Roosevelt also understood this as the US joined with its wartime allies to defeat the Germany-Italy-Japan Axis of dictatorships during WW2. President Roosevelt led the international movement to create the United Nations in 1945 as a deterrent to future global military conflicts. President Truman built on the foundation set by his predecessor by championing and implementing the Marshall Plan that financed the rebuilding of war-ravaged Western Europe. Without that plan—and the United Nations, war-ravaged and displaced populations in these countries might have succumbed to resurgent fascist movements.

Restoring US support for foreign aid—and the preservation of democracy here at home—will require reeducating US voters about (1) how our federalized system of national and state governments operate and the constitutional basis for their operation; and (2) the interconnected and networked reality of globalized human societies in the 21st century. This understanding will require a reintroduction of civics into our public schools.

Civics was a subject that I took in high school decades ago. It was mostly removed from US public schools by RW opponents of public school desegregation during and after the 1970s. That being said, a restored civics education can’t be the old-school civics that glossed over our nation’s institutionalized inequities in race relations, gender interactions, environmental injustice, and economic privilege. It must incorporate the socioeconomic and environmental realities facing our country and the rest of the world in the 21st century. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s often-overlooked 1967 speech on the evil triplets of racism, militarism, and economic greed (see the quote in this article’s title image) provides us with the framing that we need to rebuild US foreign aid as a tool to help preserve democracy at home and abroad.

As the dramatic photos of Earth taken from the Artemis spacecraft indicate, our home planet is indeed a small and fragile place. In order to preserve it, our public schools and the communities they serve must collaborate to produce informed and engaged citizens that are immune to populist-cloaked authoritarian demagoguery—and click-bait social media technologies that reward hysteria over critical thought. The majority of us US citizens that are not public school-aged will need remedial civics education (as part of our life-long continuing education) to steel ourselves against current and future authoritarian threats to democracy here and abroad. This will not happen, however, until we who believe in democracy pressure-wash the forces of theofascism out of our government this coming November and in 2028.

Aluta Continua!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/23/800026425/community/foreign-aid-after-trump-our-democracy-wont-survive-without-it/

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