Conceptions of civil society among populist conservative writers and thinkers and in magazines and journals open to populist conservatism.
The below article, republished with permission, originally appeared in HistPhil on March 18, 2025.
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Generally, Republican presidents at least since Richard Nixon have positively characterized civil society and its role in American life. Recall, for example, some of the old standbys: Ronald Reagan’s fondness for voluntarism and the voluntary sector, George H. W. Bush’s “thousand points of light,” and George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism and faith-based initiative.
These ways of thinking and talking about civil society were genuinely held. Many if not most of the policy proposals to which they gave rise were good ideas. In truth, we chafed at the reaction of others in philanthropy and the sector who discounted the motives and aptitude of those thinking and talking this way, as the second in this two-part series will make clear.
Donald Trump does not think and talk like this, though. Now, in these (again) turbulent times for nonprofitdom, one can look a little askance at liberals’ “strange new respect” for Reagan’s voluntarism, H.W.’s points of light, and W.’s conservative compassion. We guess we weren’t quite picking up on all those warm embraces from the philanthro-establishment before, when conservatives were looking for friends and allies in it.
Alexis de Tocqueville and his little platoons do not feature in current GOP presidential-level discourse. There are many reasons for that. Foremost among them, we’re in a populist-borne realignment, and conservatism has changed and is changing—perhaps, and we hope, for the better.
Also among these reasons, though: liberalism and progressivism have changed too, and this explains much of the changed, far more negative attitudes from the right towards the big, tax-incentivized foundations and the whole exempt sector. Tax-advantaged Big Philanthropy and nonprofits are on the defensive in large part because they have for decades been getting much bigger, way more aggressively progressive, and far too politicized and even partisan. What did they think was going to happen? There should be a tempest, an “unprecedented” one.
Look askance all you want, progressives, but the allies are there
“Tax-incentivized Big Philanthropy … has reconstituted the very system that Alexis de Tocqueville once famously lauded Americans for not having in his Democracy in America,” according to experienced conservative foundation and nonprofit leader Jeffrey Cain in his lead essay for our Giving Review’s early-2023 online symposium, “Conservatism and the Future of Tax-Incentivized Big Philanthropy.”
“The rise of Big Philanthropy has contributed to the stagnation of voluntary associations, broad-based charitable giving, and civil society,” Cain continues. “It has helped to create a popular loss of faith in the American system, its institutions, and its leadership and managers. Big Philanthropy is fundamentally un-American.”
To the degree that the overwhelmingly progressive philanthropic establishment and the nonprofit recipients of its largesse might be looking for friends and allies on the right who have a genuine respect for Tocqueville’s platoons, we urge them to seek and find. Look askance all you want, but they’re there. You might not like them, or their “ground rules” for engagement, but it’s worth the risk of exploring opportunities. Such opportunities might be riper, in fact, for those further on the left.
“[M]eaningful reform of the tax-exempt sector will be driven by populists outside of Big Philanthropy instead of from conflicted parties within it. These reforms will be of the hatchet, not the scalpel variety,” Cain also writes in his Giving Review symposium contribution, “and they will come from both the political right and left. Occupiers. Tea Partiers. Democratic socialists. Trumpers.”
Intellectual energy on the realigning right
Trump’s 2016 political ascendance was not the result of any philanthropically supported intellectual infrastructure. In fact, he quite explicitly ran against the one existing at the time. Conservative philanthropy was caught as flat-footed by his rise as anyone else, as were many of its largest policy-oriented grantees. “[T]he massive political realignment Trump ushered in has knocked many of those onetime mainstays from their vaunted position,” as Politico’s Megan Messerly wrote earlier this year.
Since 2016, there have been a number of new think tanks, activist organizations, and magazines created to add cerebral heft to populist conservatism. Relatively “new kids on the block,” they and some new magazines and journals are where the intellectual energy has been on the realigning right during these past years. Some of the old kids, moreover, have pivoted into a receptivity towards populist ideas—some substantially, including the Claremont Institute, and some partially.
Institutionally, the “new-kid” think tanks, centers, and activist groups on what many call the New Right include (but, of course, are not limited to): the America First Policy Institute; American Compass; the American Cornerstone Institute; American Moment; the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosts the National Conservatism conferences; Claremont’s D.C.-based Center for the American Way of Life; the Center for Renewing America; and the Conservative Partnership Institute. There are new legal groups, as well.
Thoughtful magazines and journals founded since 2016 that might fit in, be adjacent to, or regularly publish pieces by authors in this category include (but, again, are not limited to): American Affairs; Claremont’s The American Mind; Compact; American Compass’ new Commonplace; and UnHerd, founded in Britain in 2017. Substack hosts a bevy of brainy writers of relevance here, too.
Anger at elites, including philanthro-ones
It was at a 2021 conference of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life where Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance, before his Senate candidacy, delivered his speech calling for the elimination of tax privileges for foundations. “All across our country, we have nonprofits—big foundations—that are effectively social-justice hedge funds,” the Senator-to-be and now V.P. said.
“[W]e should eliminate all special privileges that exist for our nonprofit and foundation class. Why is it that if you’re spending all your money to teach literal racism to our children in their schools,” Vance continued, ”why do we give you special tax breaks instead of taxing you more? The decision to give those foundations and those organizations special privileges is a decision made by public policy. It was made by man, and we can undo it.”
Claremont’s The American Mind has featured pieces critical of philanthropy (including by one of us), including conservative philanthropy and philanthropists, as has the Claremont Review of Books, including a lengthy piece last Fall by Giving Review senior fellow and Chronicle of Philanthropy columnist Craig Kennedy entitled “Dark Charities.”
Just as Cain pays heed to Tocquevillian nonprofits in his “Conservatism and the Future of Tax-Incentivized Big Philanthropy” symposium contribution, Kennedy similarly begins his CRB essay by touting those “devoted to providing spiritual and material sustenance,” acknowledging they “account for the vast majority of charitable groups operating in the U.S.”
“Tax policies encouraging their work have reflected a consensus in favor of civic engagement and strengthening the bonds of civil society through voluntary private efforts rather than government programs,” continues Kennedy, who contributed to the 2023 Giving Review symposium, as well. The former Joyce Foundation and German Marshall Fund president does not consider himself a populist, but rather a “rule-of-law” conservative—the law in this context being the 1969 Tax Reform Act, what has been called by scholars the “Grand Bargain” and which essentially still structures philanthropy and the entire nonprofit sector.
“How did a sector long known for social services, education, and culture,” Kennedy plaintively wonders, “become one where some groups pursue, with little scrutiny, agendas at the far edge of our ideological and political spectrum? Gradually, then suddenly, as Ernest Hemingway once wrote,” he answers. “Laws and regulations designed to separate charity and politics have been twisted and stretched by smart lawyers, clever tax advisors, and ambitious political operatives.”
Albeit to varying degrees, in Cain, at Claremont, and in Kennedy, there is an anti-elite desire to fight—to “make [something] great again,” in this case, civil society, or philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. And there is an anger about that which has been done in the name of, and with the tax exemption for, charity.
Burdened by what has been
Other Giving Review symposium authors include American Affairs editor Julius Krein; Michael Lind, now an editor at American Compass’ Commonplace; and Joel Kotkin. Reflecting the interesting ideological churn in conservatism, and beyond, the symposium authors and other individual thinkers might not concede to being so easily categorized as populists, or even as conservatives. Their placement in the populist category may be driven more by that which they’re against than anything else—a prominent characteristic of populism writ large, after all.
Krein’s American Affairs has featured pieces critical of philanthropy—including about corporate philanthropy, by the Center for the American Way of Life’s John Cohen, and (by one of us) about the Grand Bargain, the tenuous place of philanthropy in America’s social contract, and foreign funding of American nonprofits. Cohen begins his article with the familiar, Cain- and Kennedy-like lament, “Gone are the days when corporate giving was confined to Little League, food banks, and other traditional causes. On today’s corporate websites, politically charged initiatives to end social or economic ‘inequity’ or advance racial or environmental ‘justice’ have largely replaced references to noncontroversial charities serving the common good.”
As a phenomenon, the “new” populist conservatism is—from its standpoint, properly—informed and burdened by what has been, and what could perhaps be again. Blessed by the burden, in fact, some within it might think.
Lind has long considered foundation professionals to be part of an overbearing, self-protective “managerial elite.” Kotkin, who considers his to be a social-democratic worldview, creatively considers contemporary philanthropy to be part of a First Estate “clerisy.” Philanthropic managerial elitism, to Lind, is harmful to true grassroots citizen engagement with each other in the polity overall and even internally, in its intellectual constriction—evidenced in both its Conservatism, Inc. and Progressivism, Inc. iterations.
“Scholars like Robert D. Putnam have documented the collapse of the once-flourishing network of American mass-membership civic federations like United Way and the American Legion,” Lind writes in his 2020 book The New Class War. “Overall, the shift of the center of gravity from local chapter-based member associations and church congregations to foundations, foundation-funded nonprofits, and universities represents a transfer of civic and cultural influence away from ordinary people upward to the managerial elite.”
He then cites the knowledgeable and insightful Theda Skocpol—whose work on the withdrawal of elites from cross-class organizations to those of a nonprofit overclass will likely conceptually undergird any even-temporary alliance between populist conservatives and progressives on these matters. While not part of Skocpol’s main argument, populist conservatives plausibly blame this same overclass and its distance from the citizenry for the unrepresentative wokeness against which they have been and are now so strongly, so supposedly unprecedentedly, reacting.
A different, necessary distance
“[T]he nonprofit sector, which shares its early 20th-century culture of technocratic progressivism with the universities, has ballooned in the last few decades, as tech and finance billionaires have poured large fortunes into it,” Lind notes in a 2021 Tablet article about the “COVID class war” and what it portends for the future. Sooner or later, he warns, “there will be another crisis,” and the philanthropically bolstered “dominant culture of technocratic progressivism and its adherents will insist it can only be addressed by expert-led, top-down, centralized government allocation of resources or jobs.”
In a conversation with our Giving Review later in ’21, Lind said that “the disempowerment of much of the working class in the U.S. comes from the disintegration of these intermediate organizations—some of which conservatives like, like churches, and some of which they don’t necessarily like, like trade unions.” Conservatives and conservative philanthropy “can still try to influence debate,” he concluded, but they “need to build up particularly city-level or neighborhood-level organizations” that try to solve problems like these groups do.
As for progressives, Lind writes in his contribution to the recent great Vital City issue on nonprofits, the grassroots backlash democratically expressed by votes against their policies “can be viewed as referendums on the dominant model of Democratic urban governance in the last generation—a model in which the Democratic Party has been largely fused with” philanthropically supported
progressive nonprofits in the form of both advocacy groups and municipal service providers. The Democratic agenda at city, state and national levels has been shaped by the demands of various single-issue advocacy nonprofits pushing issues like defunding the police, decriminalizing drugs and minor theft, treating homelessness as a right, pressing cities to become ‘sanctuary cities’ that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration law enforcement, and promoting radical gender ideology. On issues ranging from banning gas stoves and gas lawnmowers to claiming there is no immigration crisis, Democrats have frequently adopted unpopular positions pushed by single-issue advocacy groups on the left, instead of taking stances that, according to polls, are popular with Democratic voters and swing voters.
He concludes, “What is needed, particularly in the big cities and college towns characterized by one-party Democratic rule, is greater distance between nonprofit and party and greater separation of nonprofit and state.” A different, necessary distance. In Compact, we’ve been able to note such a need in San Francisco, where a prominent progressive foundation became frustrated at its failed attempt to override democratically expressed policy preferences.
A “long march” back
In his address to the National Conservatism conference in Brussels last year, the pseudonymous Substack writer N. S. Lyons took up a theme that’s growing in visibility within right-wing circles nowadays: conservatism’s utter failure to counter the left’s “long march through the institutions”—cited and lamented by Cain, Kennedy, Cohen, and Lind—and the need to begin constructing a “parallel polis.”
As an example, he said, Hungary’s Civic Circles movement
focused on establishing community organizations across the nation to bring people together in grassroots civic action, volunteer work, and education in practical self-governance. Its chapters of local volunteers collected trash, and helped with childcare. They founded new parallel educational and media institutions, and provided forums for intellectual discussion. They promoted art and culture that celebrated national pride and conservative values, and served as a patronage network to help launch promising young talent throughout society.
This analysis of Lyons’ tracks with growing numbers of thinkers on the wider right today who have returned to the notion, which one of us worked with others to develop while at the American Enterprise Institute in the 1970s, that “mediating structures” are indeed essential to our future as a nation. He noted that America and the West today “is awash with economic, social and spiritual problems, from drug addiction, depression, and loneliness, to financial precarity and the breakdown of family formation. Everywhere people are struggling, and suffering. Meanwhile, trust in almost every institution has cratered, with incompetent governing elites seemingly determined to destroy their own legitimacy.”
And he offered some good advice—which, from our standpoint, one of us heard as basically recommending the kind of philanthropy we tried to practice while on the program staff of Milwaukee’s conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation:
The situation is ripe for anyone who can step in to fill the vacuum by actually addressing even some of these problems directly at the community level. This vacuum is the one great untapped wellspring of authority and power in the West today. And it’s inevitable that someday soon somebody is going to successfully tap into it, whether that’s the right, or some faction of the far left. Whoever does so first is likely to claim the future mandate to rule.
The next National Conservatism conference, later last year, featured a panel on Lyon’s suggested “parallel polis”—versions of which, we think, already exist in the nation’s urban areas and just need to be found by grantmakers to support. They’re there, too. Conservatives might not like them, or their “ground rules” for engagement, either, but it’s worth the risk of exploring these opportunities, as well. Lyons didn’t say so, but such opportunities could perhaps be pursued by both left and right, maybe even together at times.
The NatCon discussion was well-moderated by Daniel McCarthy of the storied conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, founded in 1953, and its revitalized Modern Age journal, where one also finds an intellectual energy and receptivity to exploring the reasons for and policy ramifications of realignment.
Worth remembering, worth engaging
So, Trump doesn’t articulate a theory of civil society. Many of those within and around the ascendant populist conservatism have one, though—and not surprisingly, it harkens back to an earlier understanding. Risking oversimplification, it’s a pre-politicized, Tocquevillian conception. It’s essentially been forgotten, unfortunately—or perhaps knowingly ignored. At any rate, it should be forgotten no more.
Charity can and, as Lyons argues, should be seen as subversive of the state—not a part of or even allied too closely with it, much less part of or allied with one faction at work to control or direct it. There is great benefit, we believe, in a proper balance between philanthropy and civil society, government, and business.
The imbalance between sectors, and the overwhelmingly progressive monoculture that has overtaken the one sector of philanthropy and civil society, has had immensely negative effects—principally including a loss of trust in the tax-created nonprofitdom that currently seems to want to define itself as encompassing all of civil society.
Populist conservatism and many of those at work to define, or clarify, and effectuate it—perhaps with sympathetic progressive allies who also resent the anti-democratic redefinition of charity—are inclined and well-positioned to defend the pre-politicized conception of civil society, in balance with other parts of society. They’re there, and they’ll be there post-Trump. They’re worth engaging.
