Restoring trust, and Tocqueville.
Republished with permission, the below review originally appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Modern Age, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
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Since 2020, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been transformed from what was basically a leftist academic theory into a protest. “These are now fighting words,” writes Greg Berman in The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars. In the book, he offers incisive, crosscutting critiques of the nonprofit sector, describing well-intentioned but disruptive “younger employees actively revolting against leadership that they view as racist, sexist, autocratic, and out-of-touch.” He laments that because of their politicization, nonprofits have become “both victims and purveyors of polarization.” From across the ideological spectrum, a “powerful DEI backlash has emerged that shows little sign of abating soon.”
Sounds serious, and it is.
Berman knows the sector well, and it shows in The Nonprofit Crisis. Readers who learn from the knowledge and wisdom in the book will be unable to avoid the crisis he expounds. With the help of his recommendations, they may at least have a chance to mitigate its damage.
The civil society described by Alexis de Tocqueville, made up of voluntary associations such as clubs, churches, civic groups, reform societies, business organizations, and unions, has always been central to the American experience. Since the country’s beginnings, citizens have joined to pursue common purposes through means other than the state or the market. Yet the nonprofit sector with which too many now conflate these organizations has always had a nebulous place in the American polity.
Nonprofit status derives from the tax code, which didn’t exist in Tocqueville’s time. As a matter of policy, the code incentivizes the creation and support of charities for the common good. Giving to nonprofit charities by institutional philanthropy, also tax-incentivized, is neither fully public nor pristinely private in its legal structure or self-understanding, much less that of the citizenry.
By the numbers, nonprofits are small but powerful. In 2024, the IRS officially recognized more than 1.7 million nonprofit groups, up from a little less than 800,000 in 1991. Recent estimates put these groups’ collective size at about 5.3 percent to 5.9 percent of gross domestic product. The modern nonprofit economy is marked by blurred boundaries: It is filled with large, commercially oriented tax‑exempt entities that many argue should fairly be taxed more like the for‑profit sector. And a substantial share of nonprofit revenue now comes from the government, in the form of grants and contracts; at least 30 percent of U.S. nonprofits report receiving government grants, totaling roughly $300 billion annually in grant revenue.
“But numbers don’t adequately convey the extent to which the nonprofit sector functions as the warp and woof of American society,” Berman writes. Defenders of the sector maintain that it has helped build core American institutions in education, health, and civil rights, among other things. They note that it has filled “gaps” that both the market and government have not been able to fill, from local safety‑net services to national advocacy campaigns.
The place of the nonprofit sector, of which philanthropy is a pillar in America’s social contract, is becoming even more delicate as popular faith and trust in it erodes, along with that in so many other institutions. Readers who work in the nonprofit sector should thus take Berman’s book seriously, though his observations and critiques may challenge their beliefs about the sector, its problems, and the proper solutions.
Berman is a trustworthy guide through the challenges facing nonprofits. He founded and for decades ran a New York City nonprofit now called the Center for Justice Innovation and is a distinguished fellow of practice at the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He previously co-authored 2023’s Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age.
His overall worldview is not radical. He values pluralism, tolerance, humility, and, as Gradual shows, he favors slow, persistent efforts to improve the common good. His approach to problem-solving is thoughtful, realistic, and pragmatic, actively averse to the temptations of ideological purity tests or extremism.
Berman’s own critiques of the nonprofit sector touch on ideology, though they don’t arise from or dwell in it. They include the sector’s generational challenges in relation to ideological activism, politicization leading to polarization, and reliance on DEI initiatives and reasoning.
Placing nonprofits’ generational revolt in a historical framework, Berman recognizes that “perhaps every generation ends up reshaping the world of work, but the Millennial generation has done so particularly quickly and profoundly.” And while there is a long tradition of “young people being more left-wing than their elders, something feels different about the political orientation of this generation. Perhaps they hold their convictions more fiercely than their predecessors. Or perhaps they have just lost faith in American institutions.”
He describes the failure of a particular nonprofit, Youth on Boards, Action on Climate (YOB), as a case in point. YOB was launched in 2022 to help place young people on the boards of nonprofits and companies in Maine and bring “younger voices into the room would help shift organizational thinking around climate decisions.” The effort fell apart within two years. He writes, “The primary culprit was not so much politics—basically everyone thought of themselves as progressive—but a dispute about whether social justice should be prioritized always and everywhere.”
Berman contends that disputes like these have become a sector-wide problem. “In truth, the political atmosphere within any given nonprofit is of little concern to the rest of the world,” he writes. “But when the same thing happens over and over again, across a variety of nonprofits in different settings, the cumulative impact can be significant. As nonprofits become increasingly hostile environments for conservatives, moderates, and the disengaged, the ripple effects are felt both internally and externally.”
“In many respects, 2020 serves as a dividing line for the American nonprofit sector,” Berman says. “The most obvious change was that it seemed like almost every nonprofit, more or less overnight, decided that they were a racial justice organization.” For the groups themselves, this has had many negative ramifications: diversions from their missions and visions; devotions of time, energy, and resources to facilitated introspection and “training” in pursuit of decidedly different goals; and the driving out of methods by which to institutional and individual performance.
In society more widely, Berman notes, while some of the negative reaction to DEI results from the work of right-wing activists, “some of the backlash to DEI has been an organic reaction to what many people—right, left, and center—have come to feel are the mistakes, injustices, and overreach of DEI programs.” He notes that “junior staffers at nonprofits are often the ones actively demanding greater investment in DEI.”
Berman lists a variety of reasons for DEI’s “hemorrhaging support”: challenges to the activities and behavior of those invoking DEI from the Jewish community after the attacks on Israel of October 7, 2023; resentment of separate, exclusive racial-affinity groups formed by DEI supporters; their characterization of “white supremacy culture,” defined to include things like “hard work” and “rational thinking”; and the lack of viewpoint diversity in the D of DEI.
Berman criticizes DEI because he himself believes strongly in viewpoint diversity. “It would be a tragic mistake for nonprofits to give up on the core goals of DEI programs,” he writes. “But it would be sheer folly to continue to insist on vocabulary that has become politically polarizing and approaches that can show little evidence of efficacy and run a demonstrable risk of violating civil rights law.”
Practical recommendations
The second half of Berman’s book—thankfully, much more than merely the customary final chapter for such an exercise—makes practical recommendations for restoring trust in the sector. He thinks it must rebuild trust to “save” itself. He’s optimistic that it can do so. For the most part, his recommendations would lead to reasonable, incremental gains, consistent with his Gradual approach.
In addition to their other duties, “nonprofit executives must also navigate the three challenges outlined in the first half of this book—polarization, the generational divide, and calls for racial justice,” Berman says.
“To do so effectively means navigating a path between denial and overcorrection,” he continues:
Nonprofit leaders must avoid both knee-jerk capitulation to the demands of their most radical staffers and the kind of symbolic battles that can drain organizational energy and effectiveness. This patient, tactical approach to managing institutional tensions might seem cowardly and insufficient to anti-woke advocates and left-wing activists, both of whom seek the catharsis of confrontation. But leaders can only govern with the consent of the governed, and few people are interested in being martyrs for abstract causes like free speech or due process.
Berman seeks to help nonprofit leaders forge a “middle path”—though he adds that “you could probably do all of the things outlined in this book and still end up a failure.”
Generally, he calls for nonprofits to exhibit emotional intelligence, flexibility, humility, and long-term thinking. He recommends that they think about and implement answers to four “real-world” questions, each warranting its own chapter: Is it possible to expand the number of people involved in meaningful organizational decision-making? How can leaders effectively engage in mentoring across the divides of race, ethnicity, age, sex, gender, and sexuality? Can mission creep be avoided? And when is the right time to step down?
Berman aims to offer solutions to the nonprofit crisis that will be useful for both right and left. But in the midst of our culture war, that is a difficult task. “Both sides of the American cultural war debate like to bash the nonprofit sector these days,” he writes.
To be sure, the language and the targets of right-wing activists are very different than the language and the targets favored by the left. But if you listen to the underlying music, it sounds pretty much the same. Both sides tend to suggest that the nonprofit sector is a tool of undemocratic and unaccountable elites who use the sector to advance their political goals at the expense of the people.
The fact that both sides of the political aisle now distrust the sector as an institution is a warning sign of a deeper problem that needs serious attention instead of partisan bomb-throwing against dark money or wokeness. “Now is the time to move with purpose to strengthen trust in nonprofits,” he says. “We should proceed with a healthy sense of urgency.”
Berman’s cautious belief that the nonprofit sector is redeemable, one could suppose, is admirable. Whether his recommendations, if adopted, would be enough to “save” it is an open question, and the time for its answer seems to be short.
Given larger historical trends, the belief in the possibility of internal redemption for the sector may be overly optimistic—as are some on the right who share that view. An external, policy-driven movement toward the kind of civil society Tocqueville praised—free of any preferential tax-code provision and not dominated by an elite that perpetuates the nonprofit sector’s current structure—should perhaps be considered. For those who see value in American civil society, it is worth facing the challenge with patience and persistence.
