Utilitymonster269
Main Organizer @ Initiative for Safeguarding Democracy
I'm a German BA student of philosophy and political science specializing on ethics and political theory. Additionally to my engagement in the EA community, I have activist experience in various political movements.
I haven't. Sounds super interesting, thanks for the tip!
I agree to the extent that measures like these can be harmful to democracy, that some of them are, and that this topic needs to be discussed seriously. At the same time, I think it’s too simplistic to say that all such measures are per se anti-democratic.
In the article, I mentioned Germany’s law against incitement to hatred (Volksverhetzung) and noted that it is controversial for exactly this reason. The goal of the law is a “militant democracy” (wehrhafte Demokratie), a democratic system that can defend itself against extremist political movements. The reason for this approach lies in our historical experience with National Socialism. The same applies to Germany’s law that allows extremist parties to be banned under very specific conditions.
That said, the legitimacy of such laws is controversial for good reasons. They can be — and occasionally are — misused, including by center and center-left political actors. This might be a good topic for a follow-up article in the future.
From my perspective, as someone who cares a lot about both animal rights and safeguarding democracy, democracy is a necessary foundation for being able to advocate for animals as effectively as possible. Democracy guarantees us the right to freely campaign for our political preferences, including animal rights. If democracy erodes and rights like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly become restricted, that will also negatively affect the animal rights movement.
This is especially true because there are strong ties between agriculture and political power. That already creates problems for animal rights activism today, and it would become dramatically worse under an autocracy. I recently spoke with an animal rights activist from Uganda who told me that they have to be extremely careful with their demands there in order not to attract the attention of the state’s repressive apparatus. Openly criticizing factory farming the way we do in democratic countries is not possible there.
Ultimately, animals benefit from democracy too. Right now, the risk of democratic collapse seems so severe to me that I personally prioritize safeguarding democracy over other cause areas, even though it is less neglected than animal welfare. My hope is that, in the long run, democracies worldwide will stabilize again. Once that happens, I plan to shift my focus back more toward animals.
For international democracy promotion, I would stick to the recommendations from Power for Democracies. To my knowledge, they are currently the only ones that are sufficiently empirically grounded. Unfortunately, Power for Democracies doesn’t have recommendations for Germany and, as far as I know, they also won’t publish any, because compared to many other countries, the German democracy is still quite stable at the moment.
However, before Power for Democracies published their recommendations, there was a beta donation fund by Effektiv Spenden with recommendations that didn’t have quite as strong an evidence base, but were still selected based on expert judgment. They supported the following organizations, all of them in Germany:
I haven’t looked into all of them in detail, and there are a few I’m not a big fan of, but I think they’re worth considering if you want to support democracy work in Germany through donations. In general, when it comes to political causes, I’d always recommend looking into organizations yourself and not relying only on recommendations, because your own political orientation will inevitably shape your perspective on them.
If I had to make an intuitive call about what matters most in Germany, democracy support in Eastern Germany and engagement for social media regulation would be at the top of my list. Democracy work in the East because a right-wing extremist hegemony seems at risk of developing there. Social media regulation because, in my view, (1) the issue has a massive impact on how democracy will develop, and (2) it is still heavily neglected. As far as I know, none of the major German parties is currently pushing for it.
When it comes to volunteering, I find it very hard to give general recommendations, because it depends strongly on personal preferences. One thing I would always recommend considering when choosing an organization is what personal impact you can realistically have there. Especially in small political groups or organizations, one additional person can sometimes make a huge difference. If you volunteer for an organization that is already very well staffed, on the other hand, there may be only limited additional value you can add. This includes political parties.
The think tank Power For Democracies recently published its first donation recommendations for safeguarding democracy, including a U.S.-based one, Freedom2Vote. Their website also provides details on the evaluation.
I’ve been working on turning a talk on safeguarding democracy, which I prepared for my local EA group, into an article. I’m not sure whether it’s a good fit for Draft Amnesty Week, but seeing this post motivates me to actually finish my text and share it.