Skocpol

The mailing list and its extensions have been the quiet architecture behind the very decline we are now struggling to comprehend.

Now, in a moment of political backlash and financial scrutiny, those same institutions are asking everyday Americans to stand with them against proposals for increased oversight and higher excise taxes on their endowments. It’s a tough ask. Because the truth is most people haven’t seen that tax-incentivized wealth show up in meaningful ways—not in their neighborhoods, not in their schools, not in their civic life. When Big Philanthropy backed the wrong theory of change and cut itself off from the concerns of working-class Americans, it made a trade-off. And now the cost of that trade is coming due.

The point wasn’t to organize people—it was to acquire them.

And the new current unrest it has wrought.

Conceptions of civil society among populist conservative writers and thinkers and in magazines and journals open to populist conservatism.

With whom, though, and for what? In Leah Hunt-Hendrix’s and Astra Taylor’s new book, unfortunately, it seems as if meaningful, bottom-up anti-centralism might be too constrained by their modifying adjective.