It is highly unlikely that Clinton and others like her, as successful practitioners within a corrupt system, are promoting the kind of democracy that they have helped subvert at home. If they were democratic patriots who had struggled against the subversive U.S. system of corruption they would not be working at a high level of the US government where such decisions are made. Sara Chayes describes the same phenomenon of systemic corruption in Afghanistan. "If that government was actually a crime syndicate in disguise, the dearth of good people was no surprise" and "did not mean Afghans as a people were intrinsically or culturally corrupt. This late in the game, constructive men and women had been stripped out -- any by now might prefer to stay clear."
Congress defines the purpose of its democracy programs abroad as "development of democratic states, and institutions that are responsive and accountable to citizens." Id. Wouldn't Americans like to have such a state, which currently they know that they lack? Instead they have a corrupt plutocracy that is unaccountable to its citizens on all important matters, except to those fewer than .02% of citizens who can come bearing gifts in each election cycle approximating the median annual income, or more. As the 2014 and 2015 editions of the Influence Peddlers Protection Acts fully demonstrate, those currently occupying the governmental role defined in the US Constitution are now "responsive and accountable to" money, not to voters. But democracy could probably be restored in the United States for the price Congress appropriates annually for counterproductive or unproductive "democracy programs" abroad, if backed by suitable legal authority.
Let us then rededicate these wasted billions first to the need of the United States to,
create and robustly enforce a supply-side automated conflicts-of-interest regime enforced through a transactional reporting system for political investors, their lobbyists and their rented politicians, that would support enhanced demand-side conflicts of interest recusal requirements foreclosing all politicians, and other officials, from doing favors for those who supply them money to pay for those favors;
convert the Patriot Act and Homeland Security budget to focus on defending against plutocracy the formerly democratic government described in the Constitution -- which a few political investors including foreign investors have already overthrown by means of corruption and utilize for their profits -- and pursue this neglected mission at least as robustly as they now focus on those pitifully few who would hopelessly attempt to overthrow this armed-to-the-teeth country by the highly unlikely means of violence that is not even aimed at the ruling power;
develop a fully auditable voting machine or apparatus, built on a platform of publicly-owned intellectual property rights, that while remaining efficient, cannot be re-programmed or otherwise rigged to steal elections by deliberately miscounting or reassigning votes;
host debates and other campaign communications on non-plutocratic, publicly controlled bandwidth (pdf), thereby reducing the major cause for the inordinate cost of political campaigns that now functions mainly as a subsidy to a plutocrat-owned mass media-propaganda system;
write, enact and enforce laws that would strip jurisdiction from the plutocratic U.S. Supreme Court to base unconstitutional rulings on the surreal proposition that "money is speech," while restoring all state and federal laws that the Court has wrongly and bizarrely overturned under that flight of illogic; and finally
create and fund the enforcement of new comprehensive prohibitions against, and the robust criminal prosecution of, political corruption in all its forms, within a permanent framework for continuous vigilance against the next plutocratic schemes that will inevitably seek to bore creative new loopholes to riddle with corruption and thereby undermine democracy.
After adopting such reforms the US could stand as a role model capable of again exporting lessons in democracy to the rest of the world. Now its "democracy" is a comedy routine, starring such performers as Donald Trump.
But then, the real irony of these two-billion-dollar CRomnibus II "democracy program" provisions is that the US government would not itself qualify for funding. The same rules supposed to apply to Afghanistan, for example, would prohibit federal funding of the US to recover its own democracy.
Incongruously, unlike for the rest of its appropriations, the Influence Peddlers Protection Act insists on high anti-corruption standards for use of its "democracy" money overseas. Division K, Title VII, "SEC. 7044 (a) AFGHANISTAN ... (2) (A) Provid[es], That such funds may not be obligated for any project or activity that-- (i) includes the participation of any ... individual or organization ... involved in corrupt practices." That would rule out any government and its corrupt hangers-on in the United States, which is crawling with a political class mired deeply and expertly in "corrupt practices" as their ordinary business means for operating within a systemically corrupt political order. One of the main functions and attributes of a corruption system is to exclude any who are not corrupt.
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