By Xhabir Deralla
It has long been more than obvious that corporate culture and elitism now define many self-proclaimed progressive civil society organizations (CSOs or NGOs, as you wish).These entities often operate in isolation, producing low-impact outputs with limited public value. Far from acting as multipliers of democratic energy, they neither seek to engage broader civic networks, nor empower others to amplify their work. Their growth is rooted not in grassroots legitimacy or societal relevance, but in their ability to appease donors, many of whom they are effectively spin-offs of. Born from donor-driven projects, they’ve evolved into robust bureaucratic machines designed primarily to meet administrative demands and digest large funding streams, often with little or no discernible effect on the real world.
This critique does not stop at CSOs. These patterns are visible across a broader spectrum of actors who claim to advance democracy – progressives, democrats, and moderates alike. Political parties that wear democratic values as branding often operate as elitist clubs, where messaging replaces mobilization and leadership speaks past its base rather than with it. Many think-tanks produce polished papers brimming with jargon and metrics, yet fail to connect with the lived experiences of real people or offer grounded solutions. Even fact-checkers often reduce truth to a technical procedure, stripping it of social and political context, moral clarity, or systemic critique.
One of the core reasons these structures struggle to earn public trust is their failure to act as genuine public resources for democratic resilience. They show little interest in building relationships with the citizens they claim to represent. Communication with the public is one-directional, sterile, and transactional – void of dialogue, humility, or solidarity. Most of them lack any meaningful constituency, no community base, no engaged membership, and no active collaborative ties with formal or informal civic initiatives.
Instead, they mirror the behavior of the very institutions they should be holding accountable – hierarchical and opaque. Their activities follow bureaucratic templates devoid of soul, context, or community relevance. Even their public outreach is cold and formulaic, often limited to rigid formats that reflect corporate branding more than civic engagement. Feedback mechanisms, when they exist at all, merely simulate participation through limited and sanitized tools designed to protect reputations, not to provoke growth or transformation.
They also suffer from a form of hollow academism – methodologically sound on paper, yet devoid of moral courage, real-world relevance, or transformative vision. Their language is steeped in technicalities and sterile formalism, often crafted more to impress funders, peers – or themselves – than to engage communities or confront systems of injustice. In the end, they reproduce a sterile intellectual culture that prioritizes institutional self-preservation over public service, and metrics over meaning.
Their response to burning challenges – wars, war crimes, and gross human rights violations – is often cautious, muted, or entirely absent. They pick and choose whose rights to defend, frequently prioritizing those within their inner circles or political comfort zones, rather than those most vulnerable or in need. Their advocacy is selective and risk-averse, overly careful not to offend powerful institutions, governments, or media conglomerates, even when silence means complicity.
When they become targets of hate campaigns or public criticism, their reaction is rarely one of principled defiance. Instead, they revert to corporate-style damage control: appeasement, retreat, or vague statements meant to soften the blow and avoid further attacks and public scrutiny.
In most cases, they effectively reconcile with power centers rather than confront them, thereby reinforcing the very narratives that discredit the civic and progressive spheres. They fear backlash more than they value truth, and brand preservation often trumps moral clarity.
In terms of building, defending, and embodying democratic values, these organizations are surprisingly weak, especially when it comes to diversity, inclusion, and the universal application of human rights. They speak in floscules – buzzwords and platitudes – while avoiding uncomfortable truths and failing to respond with courage or integrity to the pressing moral questions of our time.
In doing so, they leave a vacuum – one easily filled by authoritarian power centers that thrive on populist rhetoric and offer seductive, simplistic answers to complex social problems. While democratic actors tiptoe and self-censor, authoritarians roar.
Meanwhile, the world is being ravaged by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the horror of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, gross human rights violations across South America, and bloody conflicts throughout Africa. And above it all, the world is shaken by the thunder of rising authoritarianism.
Yet these self-declared defenders of democracy merely whisper, retreating into vanity, proceduralism, and elitism, while the world cries out for courage.
The absence of substance, solidarity, and courage among these elitist structures doesn’t just render them ineffective, it makes them part of the problem. It enables the erosion of trust, weakens the democratic fabric, and ultimately leaves societies more vulnerable to manipulation, fear, and authoritarian control.
I wish I weren’t right.
