To the reaction against philanthropy and the nonprofit sector and their activities, there’s a cause.
Many consider the current reaction against philanthropy and the nonprofit sector and their activities, as well as their privileged status in policy and society, to be unprecedented. It’s important to understand the question of “unprecedentedness” from the standpoint of those accused of it.
The populist insurgency behind the Trump restoration would admit—indeed, boast—that its approach is, in fact, unprecedented. But only because it’s reacting against what the insurgents would say is an unprecedented state of affairs in the country today.
They would describe it thusly: over the past several decades, the major institutions of our nation have been completely overrun by arrogant, detached elites, who rely on university and professional credentials to stake their claim that they know better than everyday Americans how to govern the country. The Sixties launched this, with the “long march through the institutions,” and one by one, the institutions fell. First, universities, of course, but then journalism, Hollywood, and governing bureaucracies everywhere, followed in the past decade by corporations, the military, and the intelligence services.
Squarely in the middle of this development were philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. In Reagan’s time, more than 40 years ago, it was still possible for conservatives to argue that civil society was a free-wheeling, independent, inventive, and trans-ideological sector. That was certainly the view of American Enterprise Institute’s “mediating structures” project, of which I was a part. It actually championed government funding for nonprofits as a way to preserve and even expand the welfare state in the face of growing dissatisfaction and inefficiencies.
That friendly posture toward nonprofits, incidentally, was an unbroken thread that ran from Reagan’s Private Sector Initiatives campaign; through George H. W. Bush’s “thousand points of light” program; through Newt Gingrich’s summons to civic renewal; and down to George W.’s “faith-based and community initiatives” effort, which actually called for including more nonprofits, those with a faith orientation, in government funding.
But over that time, today’s populists would say, foundations and nonprofits joined the other major institutions of society in becoming arrogant, detached, and politicized, staffed by elites who profess to know better than everyday citizens how public affairs should be managed. This isn’t just a reprise of the familiar historical dissatisfaction with the power of wealthy philanthropists. It’s an understanding of society that sees a uniform, pernicious ideology binding together the overbearing elites in all sectors of society, including philanthropy.
Against this unprecedented concentration of carefully concealed power, populism would say, unprecedented responses are called for. In former times, critical examination of the charitable sector would have taken the form of presidential blue-ribbon panels or Congressional hearings. A year ago, I would have said that those were the most likely threats to the sector.
But those devices are themselves now regarded as relics of a once highly regarded institutional order that no longer commands respect. I could not have anticipated anything as dramatic as Elon Musk’s DOGE backed by Trump’s executive orders. No matter the concrete outcomes of this process, their daily parade of seemingly absurd and politically offensive grants made to nonprofits is likely to leave a long-term negative public impression of the sector.
But to repeat, the unprecedentedness of that approach is a response to what they would say is an unprecedented state of affairs. There are those of us who tried to warn the sector that its behavior was likely to provoke this sort of furious reaction.
As you will recall, philanthropy denies that it should limit itself to meeting immediate human needs—the sort of mission that conservatives could get behind. Instead, our most sophisticated foundations are no longer willing to just put band-aids on our problems, but are determined to get to their root causes, as they say. In recent years, this has meant enhancing the reach of government; promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion; and dismantling the structural racism that has hopelessly corrupted our national life.
As you cannot fail to notice, these are precisely the targets of the Trump administration. It is determined to track down and expose these ideological projects not just in government, but throughout the educational, cultural, and philanthropic institutions of our society where they have flourished.
We can lament the unprecedented nature of the attack on philanthropy. But this might be an occasion for a re-examination of the hitherto-unchallengeable assumptions of the grandiose and utopian American philanthropic project, to which that attack, however intemperate, is the response.
