Centrists Are Blaming Lefty Philanthropists for Democrats' Woes. Here's What They're Missing
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Black lives Matter protest in Miami, Florida. YES Market Media/shutterstock
Over the past several months, we’ve seen a veritable barrage of centrist critiques pinning the Democrats’ current woes on overzealous progressives who have, according to these accounts, pulled the party into politically toxic terrain.
At least a few of those critiques assign blame for this supposed state of affairs to a curious group: philanthropic foundations and major donors.
Jonathan Chait’s November 2021 account of President Joe Biden’s woes in New York magazine painstakingly details the supposed missteps of the “progressive-foundation complex.” A January essay by Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times paints a picture of foundations insisting on a kind of ivory-tower leftism and washing their hands of the political consequences.
Substack writer Matthew Yglesias summed it all up in a perfect, if perfectly nonsensical tweet: “One of the most underrated aspects of contemporary politics is the extent to which ‘activists on the left’ and ‘major funders’ are the same people. It’s very different from the dynamic of 20 years ago.”
It’s a well-worn trope. Wealthy interests, insulated and disconnected from the body politic, attempt to steer things in a certain direction, do so ham-handedly, and undermine sensible efforts toward positive change.
What’s frustrating about this whole narrative is that while it does reflect some real trends in progressive funding, and some real concerns over the influence of philanthropy, the picture it paints is simply not a credible one. Any actual progressive activist could tell you that far from being leftist instigators, major liberal funders often act as ballast upon the movements they nominally support.
The implication that slogans like “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” emerged from foundation boardrooms (or well-heeled nonprofits, for that matter) will sound ridiculous to anyone who has much experience with the sector. For the most part, foundations are famously cautious in both the language and funding they deploy, their decisions meticulously crafted by besuited staff and consultants, and usually reined in by their relatively conservative trustees.
No—the energy for progressive movements over the past several years comes from where it always has: movement activists typically working on shoestring budgets (or no budgets at all), motivated by the real-life concerns of a significant fraction of the American populace. Funders sometimes play along or pay lip service to these movements, but with rare exception, they have not been the motivating force. It makes sense. These are, for the most part, capitalism’s winners, literally invested in the status quo. Why would they start a revolution?
Changing discourse
Most of us close to the funding world know full well that philanthropy tends to move slowly, has an intense allergy to all things radical, and staves off anything resembling “politics” with a 10-foot pole. So why this sudden narrative that foundations—and, even more absurd, major living donors—are Bolsheviks in disguise?
Well, the racial justice reckoning touched off by George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests is one part of the picture. Prior to 2020, calls for racial parity and “diversity, equity and inclusion” were already a familiar part of philanthropic discourse, although big funders rarely backed up that talk with money. The events of 2020 obliged funders to ratchet up the rhetoric, and most of them defaulted to emulating the language of progressive movements in that respect. Big corporations were doing the same, after all. For that matter, a few funders did recognize the need for serious change, and turned to those on the ground for direction.
The catch, as we explored last year and continue to find, is that talk doesn’t equal action, or funding. Sure, a higher proportion of philanthropic dollars is now earmarked as racial equity funding, but actual on-the-ground movement groups remain under-resourced relative to their more moderate counterparts. As one example, while climate justice groups are indeed seeing increased funding, the budgets of centrist Big Greens like EDF ($216 million in 2020) and The Nature Conservancy ($1.2 billion in revenue in 2020) are tens or even hundreds of times larger than more progressive organizations like the Sunrise Movement ($15 million in 2021). But guess which funding stream most offends pundits like Yglesias?
There is also, of course, the fact that a vast amount of politically oriented nonprofit money has accumulated over the past several years, much of it through c4 channels. While the right long dominated that arena, in recent years, large quantities of this often non-transparent funding now lie in the hands of groups aligned with the left. Conservatives have made much political hay of this fact, which is almost entirely attributable to the trauma that Trump inflicted on the worldviews of polite, white, liberal donors.
But being repulsed by Trump doesn’t make a donor an “activist on the left.” These wealthy donors from tech and other booming industries are no radicals. Moreover, most of this admittedly large and opaque tranche of money, again, isn’t making it into the hands of progressive activists. If it were, we’d see the budgets of on-the-ground movement groups overtake those of mainstream liberal outfits. Of course, that’s not happening.
Instead, most of this “dark money” is waiting in the wings to be deployed later this year, and in 2024, to try to maintain Democratic control of Congress and keep Trump out of the White House. That might make its donors committed Democrats, but it hardly means they’re anything close to committed leftists.
Marx goes missing
Another thing these blame-hunting critiques fail to register about philanthropy, especially as they invoke terms like “leftist” willy-nilly, is funders’ almost universal lack of attention to anything remotely resembling hard-hitting economic justice. You know, all that stuff Marx actually wrote about.
Funders have been all too happy to pay lip service to the need for “equity,” and maybe fund an entrepreneurship project or two. But where’s the funding to rebuild the nation’s gutted labor rights movement, to empower women workers and workers of color? Where’s the funding to hold the excesses of Wall Street in check—even to comprehend the arcane mechanisms big finance uses to extract value from Main Street? Where’s the funding challenging big tech’s unregulated sway over our lives?
Why are think tanks that favor higher taxes on wealth still playing budgetary catch-up with their free-market rivals? Where is big philanthropy on reparations, on dealing with the brutally obvious toll of de facto urban segregation? Where’s the advocacy money for the ever-stalled Equal Rights Amendment? Why is so little money making it to groups facing down rural poverty?
I could go on, but the answer’s pretty obvious. The private funders of nonprofits tend to be society’s economic winners, and cautious ones at that. They want to be the ones setting the terms by which money leaves their pockets—the proletariat has no role. If that’s “leftist,” anything is.
While centrist critics construct a fantasy in which big philanthropy is pushing “progressivism” and “leftism” down people’s throats, real intersectional justice movements—especially those pushing for economic justice—remain starved of support.
The reactionary backlash to reasonable restorative steps in American society is thus given fuel. Terms like “progressive” and “left” lose their reference points, coming to mean anything even marginally left of the status quo. And funders are partially to blame, not because they’ve been too progressive, but perhaps because they haven’t been progressive enough.
