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.
In J. D. Vance’s Munich Security Conference speech, echoes of the Pera-Ratzinger debate’s basic questions about identity, democracy, and the West—and the ability, the very place, of the people to democratically offer answers to those questions.
Philanthropy is uniquely unsuited for involvement in American politics. Indeed, what it considers its political strengths turn out to be serious liabilities. Nothing demonstrates this better than its role in the 2024 presidential election.
A call for more scrutiny and consideration of the role of elite grantmaking institutions and what they’re doing in, and to, America.
“It’s past time,” Vance said, to end allowing “these deals to escape tax liability.” Whitehouse said we should “get our government out of the business of subsidizing” them.
The College Endowment Accountability Act, according to Sen. J. D. Vance, responds to “a problem, borne of unfairness and of mass subsidy from the American taxpayer, that has now metastasized into one of the most-corrupt and one of the most politically active and politically hostile organizations in the United States of America, and that is elite colleges.”
Wealthy nonprofits, especially universities, increasingly demonstrate the same behaviors that led Congress to regulate foundations more than 50 years ago. The law should be updated to include these organizations.
ICYMI.
