Burke

If proponents of participatory philanthropy are looking to attract receptive conservatives to their cause, it may be impossible if participatoriness comes to be—or even to seem—just another mechanism to rationalize tax-incentivized philanthropy in furtherance of one particular ideological or partisan political end. If conservative philanthropy is honestly and self-critically looking to exemplify anti-elitism in and improve its grantmaking, however, it would more aggressively explore options to humbly check what might be its own elitism and increase participatoriness in that grantmaking.

In Laura K. Field’s book on the “making of the new MAGA right,” there could be no mythologizable, pre-2016 “Powell memo.” Since ’16, a different conservative intellectual infrastructure has arisen and is still developing, with new thinking and organizations and changed old groups—all with generally also-different and still-developing funding support.