Today’s polarization between left-wing Democrats and populist conservative Republicans is also a polarization between two radically different understandings of giving.
Philanthropy is already in panic mode over recent executive and legislative branch challenges to its prerogatives. But The New York Times just introduced a new series on the parlous state of the Democratic Party that, properly understood, should crank the philanthropic panic level up to “11.”
As the Times observed, Donald Trump didn’t just win the last election. Rather, he has been riding a decade-long demographic shift away from the Democratic Party, especially among parts of the electorate that had long been considered its base. The article introduced the notion of “triple-trending counties”—those that became more Republican in each of the past three presidential elections, including the one Trump lost in 2020.
The scale of Mr. Trump’s expanding support is striking. While roughly 8.1 million Americans of voting age live in triple-trending Democratic counties, about 42.7 million live in Republican ones.
Even more ominous for the Democrats are the demographic and economic characteristics of these counties: The party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.
Yet Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.
Why should this be alarming for philanthropy? Because the “sparse areas of growth” for the Democratic Party—“America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets”—are also the only parts of America likely to be involved in, and therefore support, institutional grantmaking.
Only the wealthiest, of course, have sufficient resources to establish foundations or other formal giving devices. And the philanthropic labor force is overwhelmingly comprised of the most educated. They both staff foundations and develop and propagate the narrative justifying their role in a democracy.
They reliably argue that the proper mission of institutional philanthropy is to penetrate beneath the surface of problems in order to get to their root causes. This has been the central rationale for big philanthropy since its pronouncement by John D. Rockefeller in the early 20th Century. But it’s likely to be appreciated only by those who went to college. And only those with college degrees have been trained in the sciences of root causes, qualifying them for the proper work of foundations.
Meanwhile, an entirely different kind of giving is practiced among working-class communities of all religions and races. It’s what we understand as traditional charity: making gifts to those within the immediate community to meet specific and concrete needs. (For more on this kind of giving, see recent contributions by Jason Lewis and Jeff Cain.) There’s no pretense here of getting to the root causes of problems, which is why institutional philanthropy dismisses it as merely treating symptoms. But for the vast majority of Republican “triple-trenders”—those with less wealth and college education—this is what charity looks like.
It’s almost invisible to students of formal philanthropy because it goes largely undetected by the sector’s formal monitoring instruments, like tax filings. (And by the way, the argument that donor-advised funds will somehow “democratize giving” would be puzzling to grassroots donors, who are no more likely to establish DAFs than private foundations.)
As institutional philanthropy increasingly comes under fire, though, it drops—at least temporarily—its longstanding contempt for mere charity and pretends that charity is really what it’s been doing all along. It says to suspicious lawmakers: “You may think you’re imposing a tax on vast concentrations of idle wealth, managed by us elites. But in fact, you’re snatching food from the mouths of the poor.”
However appealing this Rube Goldberg connection may be to the college-educated, it’s probably less persuasive to the multiracial working-class communities shifting away from the Democratic Party. For them, there’s an enormous difference between meeting immediate needs, on the one hand, and on the other, supporting well-paid professionals to dribble out tiny, minutely managed fractions of massive endowments to fund university-bred social experiments. They know full well that stockpiling wealth in the bulging coffers of distant foundations is at best only remotely related to feeding and clothing one’s immediate neighbor.
So today’s polarization between left-wing Democrats and populist conservative Republicans is also a polarization between two radically different understandings of giving. Heretofore, big philanthropy could always rely for protection during right-leaning eras from the wealthy, foundation-establishing conservatives within Republican Party leadership. But they don’t call the shots within the party anymore. They’ve moved over to the Democratic Party, where their children imbibe the ideologies of social justice that will guide their work in their parents’ foundations.
If the “triple-trenders” become the electoral base for an enduring Republican majority, it will be comprised of voters whose idea of charity is radically at odds with the elite’s understanding of philanthropy. Working-class, non-college-educated voters will wonder why they’re paying hefty taxes to the government and making non-deductible charitable gifts to their neighbors, while at the same time, the rich pour fortunes into swollen foundation endowments that go without significant taxation and supply their college-educated children with well-remunerated professional positions.
Note that this problem for institutional philanthropy is related to, but deeper than, the distinctly leftward ideological tilt of most big foundations today. Momentarily toning down or even retreating from cutting-edge social-justice crusades might help to alleviate the immediate legislative and executive hostility to philanthropic prerogatives. But it will do nothing to address the underlying demographic shift, which is shrinking the base likely to be supportive not only of the Democratic Party, but of institutional philanthropy as well.
The immediate political challenges to philanthropy may pass. But the tension between radically different approaches to giving is likely to persist, and fuel ever more substantial challenges in the future.
