Fair-Weather Friends? Progressive Nonprofits' Dangerous Dependence on the Liberal Rich

Funding for American nonprofits has been trending toward the top-heavy for a while now. Big gifts are getting even bigger, and for many organizations, small donors are becoming an endangered species. What gets less play, though, is just how much that top-heaviness has benefited progressive and center-left causes — though not necessarily to their long-term advantage.

Just take a look at, say, our recent compilation of D.C.’s most influential philanthropists, and it’s clear that mega-donors are quite receptive to funding liberal and even downright progressive ideas these days. The same goes for many of the nation’s largest foundations.

This liberal tendency among many of the American donor elite well predates 2016, but the rise of Trump and Trumpism kicked it into overdrive. For several years, as the Donald and his supporters ransacked their way through the halls of government, outraged donors registered their resistance by bankrolling a left-of-center electoral and movement infrastructure that grew by leaps and bounds from 2017 on. We even had an entire “Trump Effect” section on Inside Philanthropy’s website for a while.

Then the pandemic hit, and not long after, George Floyd’s murder prompted a great national awakening around racial justice (at least for a while). Coupled with the COVID-era stock market boom, those events brought even more heavy-hitters into the progressive camp, from uber-wealthy donors like MacKenzie Scott and Jack Dorsey on down to the merely rich.

Now, though, amid intense right-wing backlash to social justice movement goals, there’s a case to be made that we’ve reached peak progressive mega-donor. And more than that, progressive nonprofits’ heavy reliance on the rich, though understandable from a fundraising perspective, means that the policy and movement infrastructure those donors bankroll is more financially brittle and ideologically out of touch than it could be, and should be.

Most grantees (and former grantees) know all too well that the major donor and the big foundation can be fair-weather friends. Withdrawing grant support after a strategy shift is par for the course for many foundations, and pulling back when the stock market wavers is normal behavior for many big donors, especially those with “pay-as-you-go” giving strategies.

But even more concerning for progressives is the possibility that the ongoing backlash against supposed leftist overreach is chipping away at the longtime norm that most new mega-donors, if not “progressive” as such, will be at least reliably liberal.

That especially applies to the tech barons of Silicon Valley, whose shark-like business practices have long been masked by a thinning veneer of counterculture and a workday uniform of tee-shirts and hoodies — not to mention a casual West Coast liberalism that has long colored their philanthropy. Mark Zuckerberg is the go-to example here, with the positioning of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative reflecting a kind of Obama-era, establishment-friendly liberalism. (Remember when David Plouffe — of Obama 2008 campaign fame — was CZI’s policy guy?)

Recently, however, it’s becoming obvious that for many of our new crop of digital-age Rockefellers and Carnegies, liberal and progressive views are more a matter of performance or political convenience rather than heartfelt belief, and liable to be easily discarded. The most notorious recent example is Sam Bankman Fried, the disgraced former crypto king who seemed headed in a generally left-of-center direction with his effective altruist philanthropy and support for numerous Democratic politicians — before being outed as a cynical fraudster who was meddling on both sides of the political spectrum.

One could also point to Elon Musk for another disturbing example of political volatility among the super-rich. His meme-happy approach to giving and corporate governance has taken on an increasingly obvious right-wing tone, including a Twitter assault on George Soros that channeled antisemitic tropes. And then there are people like Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison, who’ve outright rejected tech’s liberal norms, as it were, and gotten behind the Trumpist GOP.

These examples of a “rightward lurch” among Silicon Valley bigwigs tend to involve much more political support than they do charitable giving, and despite this trend, if that’s what it is, plenty of liberal donors remain steady in their support. But we’ve also seen cases of faltering commitment to liberal causes from tech billionaires with more actual philanthropy under their belts. That includes Pierre Omidyar, who recently signaled he may dial back some of his expansive left-leaning philanthropic commitments. There’s also Jack Dorsey, another once-promising progressive mega-donor whose flagging social justice giving through Start Small, not to mention his endorsement of an anti-vax conspiracy theorist in the 2024 presidential race, seems like another sign that relying on these guys is a dangerous gambit.

The problem is that big-donor pullback has real repercussions for the social justice nonprofits that rely on these funding streams to sustain their daily operations. Just look at Peter and Jennifer Buffett's retreat from women and girls’ funding, or the possible ramifications of the Open Society Foundations’ ongoing downsizing, which will likely result in bigger grants to a much-diminished array of institutions.

And it’s not just about the biggest donors. From foundations to corporations to the merely rich, we’ve already seen a bunch of funders pull back from some of the more ardent progressive positions espoused circa 2020, and that’ll likely continue, especially if a Republican doesn’t win the White House in 2024. When it comes to progressive giving, the wealthy as a class may only be willing to go so far.

Nevertheless, the historic dwindling of strong, progressive member-supported organizations, unions in particular, pushed American nonprofits on the left to rely on what were once its ideological opponents (still are, some would say).

What do progressive nonprofits stand to lose when they’re so dependent on the wealthy and the very wealthy? I’m tempted to be melodramatic and say “their souls,” but it’s really a matter of sustainability, and also of democracy. Standing up for people who otherwise wouldn’t be heard is the name of the game for many of these groups. With that in mind, does so much top-heavy support erode their case for saying they serve, channel and represent actual communities in need? And if so, with small donors continuing to leave the scene, where else can they turn?

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