Since 1946, the U.S. government has intervened in more than a hundred foreign elections to assist its preferred candidate or party. Democracy is so important that the U.S. government refuses to stand idly by when foreign voters go astray. Rather than delivering political salvation, U.S. interventions abroad more often produce "no-fault carnage" (no one in Washington is ever held liable).

In 1983, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In 1984, Congressman Hank Brown (R-CO) provided a single sentence that should have nullified NED's right to exist: "It is a contradiction to try to promote free elections by interfering in them." In a 1985 piece for the Oakland Tribune, I hailed NED as "one of the newest, most prestigious boondoggles on the Potomac." But there were plenty of scoffers early on: "NED has been called many things — an International Political Action Committee, the Taxpayer Funding of Foreign Elections Program, and a slush fund for political hacks who like to travel to warm climates in cold weather. In less than two years, NED has lived up to all these epithets." My op-ed concluded, "The sooner NED is abolished, the cleaner our foreign policy will be."

But that is a paltry argument compared to "jobs for the boys" —or perpetual government subsidies for Washington hustlers.

Guatemala 

U.S. democracy promotion efforts in Latin America have resembled a fairy tale or a bad LSD trip. In the 1980s, the Agency for International Development bankrolled a program "to motivate the people of Guatemala to participate in the electoral process." The written materials for the program assured everyone that "All Guatemalans are Equal and Free." The program distributed a pamphlet entitled, "How the State and Government Is Organized to Protect Our Lives and Work for the Development and the Good of All." The Carnegie Institute's Thomas Carothers noted that the titles the program used were "seemingly drawn from a Chinese reeducation campaign of the 1960s." Uplifting fare on democracy was a hard sell because the Guatemalan government had just completed a genocidal crackdown that killed hundreds of thousands of Mayan Indians and suspected leftists.