Actually to do democracy would demand, as she proposes, that philanthropy “better understand the American public’s full range of perspectives and what is fueling their dissatisfaction with how the system is working.”
As Katherine Don noted in a recent Inside Philanthropy article, “With an estimated $53 billion in collective assets, the sprawling Pritzker family is one of the wealthiest and most influential in the nation.” She also points out, in something of an understatement, that their “many philanthropies paint a portrait of a family that leans liberal.”
Which makes a recent contribution to The Chronicle of Philanthropy by Rachel Pritzer, one of the fourth generation of this family of givers, all the more remarkable. Although she shares the family’s sterling progressive credentials—she is, after all, a co-founder of the distinctly left-leaning Democracy Funders Network—she nonetheless raises some deeply insightful and provocative questions about the left’s funding for pro-democracy causes.
In spite of massive growth in funding for the “democracy field” during the past decade—“reaching $6.7 billion last year, according to U.S. Democracy Hub,” as she notes— the indicators of public faith in American political processes and institutions have continued to plummet, she points out. “Toxic polarization” is worse; we “trust one another less and less;” we are “less optimistic about the future;” public confidence in “most institutions is at or below its lowest levels;” and “satisfaction with American democracy is near a 20-year-low.”
This familiar litany of democratic deficiencies is easily explained, according to most of the philanthropic professionals on the democracy beat. After all, we’re in the midst of an authoritarian upsurge. Powerful forces are dragging us relentlessly toward Trumpian fascism. Of course the country is losing faith in democracy—that’s why we’re mobilizing to defend it!
This is where Rachel Pritzker’s insight comes into play. She realizes that such an apocalyptic framing of the issue is counterproductive. It guarantees that democracy work will continue to be defensive, divisive, and unable to appeal to the broader public.
As for defensiveness, Pritzker argues that democracy funders are too quick to stand by public institutions that in fact “have failed to live up to their public purposes and have lost credibility as a result.” She offers the example of universities, “whose well-documented problems include ever-escalating tuitions, ideological bias, and the perpetuation of elite privilege.” Instead of addressing these widely acknowledged failures, democracy funders have “simply rushed to defend them from government pressure.” They thereby “only reinforce the perception that they are unable or unwilling to reform themselves.”
Democracy backers fuel divisiveness by funding too much adversarial advocacy. The movement “treats opponents as obstacles to overcome rather than parties to persuade or bargain with, forcefully pressures allies into extreme and often counterproductive positions, and defines success by the mobilization of those already bought-in rather than the building of broad and enduring consensus.” She cites funding for climate policy as an example of divisiveness, because it “often embraces polarizing tactics, including by making hyperbolic and maximalist claims about climate change.”
Finally, she acknowledges that democracy funders “often assume that our positions are both morally obvious and broadly popular—that we represent the public because we invest in public goods.” However, she points out, “most funders are drawn from a relatively narrow professional class: highly educated, ideologically left-of-center, institutionally minded, and clustered in a small number of metropolitan hubs.” Thus, “our values and priorities are out of step with a wide swath of the country.”
Pritzker concludes that, as a result of the “commingling of partisan aims with democracy work,” the democracy field has become nothing more than “a left-of-center ecosystem.” Writers at The Giving Review have been second to none in pointing out that much of the high-minded, public-spirited rhetoric of the philanthropic establishment only (and increasingly futilely) conceals a progressive political agenda. But it’s rare that someone in that establishment arrives publicly at the same conclusion.
Defending, but not doing, democracy
Pritzker’s arguments will not be well-received in the field of democracy work. In a Chronicle piece by Alex Daniels a week before Pritzker’s op-ed, he suggests that awakenings like Pritzker’s are increasingly common among progressive funders. But they’re hardly universal. Pamela Shifman, president of the progressive Democracy Alliance, told Daniels that “one of the biggest priorities for groups like hers is to broaden participation in the movement to stop authoritarianism” and she “disagrees with the notion that overreach by progressives contributed to polarization. She blames the MAGA movement for waging war on constitutional freedoms and basic democratic institutions.”
Deepak Bhargava, president of the progressive Freedom Together Foundation, echoes Shifman in comments to Daniels. “The whole experience of authoritarianism in this period speaks to the importance of mass engagement, mass organizing, and mass mobilization. There is simply no substitute for it.”
These comments only confirm Pritzker’s insight. When you’re persuaded, as are Shifman and Bhargava, that you’re defending democracy itself, then it’s very difficult actually to do democracy. That would require an effort to understand and appreciate the other side’s point of view.
If the line in our politics today is drawn between democracy and authoritarianism, however, that’s almost impossible. Of course we must unquestioningly defend every institution under fire. To consider reforms at such a time would only fuel further disillusionment. Of course divisions must not be avoided, but rather clarified and sharpened, so that the forces on our side can be more effectively engaged, organized, and mobilized. Of course our cause is morally obvious and broadly popular, because it involves the ultimate “public good,” the preservation of democracy itself. The fact that democracy workers are highly educated elites working in politically insulated foundations is precisely why they’re peculiarly equipped to recognize and combat the “authoritarian personality” that, as Theodor Adorno argued, has always dominated the American working class.
Actually to do democracy, however, would demand, as Pritzker proposes, that philanthropy “better understand the American public’s full range of perspectives and what is fueling their dissatisfaction with how the system is working.” Dame Louise Richardson, president of the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, made a similar point in her conversation with Daniels: “Unwittingly we [democracy funders] were actually contributing to polarization. And so I invited our staff to think about … how [our grants] might look to somebody whose political perspective was the opposite of their own.”
But it’s hard work to break away from the much-simpler, nobler, and more-galvanizing claim that, to paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, “we stand at Armageddon and we battle for democracy.” Actually doing democracy demands flexibility, bargaining, compromise, and a willingness to consider that the other side might have some valid points. None of that is possible when the political division of our time is understood apocalyptically as democracy versus authoritarianism.
Pritzker’s view that democracy work has been commingled with “partisan aims” is readily confirmed by the remarkable similarity between the way foundations, on the one hand, and the Democratic Party, on the other, pursue the democracy agenda. Denouncing President Trump as an authoritarian despot has been standard rhetoric from all segments of the political and philanthropic left for the last 10 years. If democracy funders are frustrated by the inability of their $6.7 billion treasury to move the needle on the authoritarian question, that is a pittance compared to the tens of billions of dollars the Democratic Party has spent over that decade in the same futile endeavor.
Nonetheless, a major change is coming soon to the American political landscape. More than likely, the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate will be in Democratic hands following the November elections. Given historical trends, the president’s party invariably loses a great many seats in Congress at this point in the course of an administration.
It’s also inevitable, however, that hard-core democracy funders will attribute this result not to timeless electoral cycles, but rather to their own courageous and resolute resistance against Trumpian fascism, at last bearing fruit. The irony that this will come about following free and untrammeled elections—something for which authoritarianism is not known—will be lost on them.
Funding may indeed begin to flow out of democracy work, though, because Pritzker will have been proven right. Once the narrow partisan purposes of democracy’s grand civic crusade have been met, the money will move on. Some of it, though, will go toward tracking down and extirpating every last vestige of Trumpism. This will involve widespread Congressional investigations, possible impeachments, and the pursuit of massive changes to the American Constitution. These measures will not, however, elicit the same concerns about authoritarian tendencies that Trumpism did in the first place.
