Opinion

Understanding Trump’s victory: philanthropy played a role, but not in the way it intended

Nov 14, 2024
(Wikimedia Commons)

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.

In a recent Chronicle of Philanthropy op-ed, former Hewlett Foundation program officer Daniel Stid offers some sage counsel for progressive foundations seeking a path forward from the elections of 2024: don’t automatically revert to the uncompromising anti-Trumpism that characterized philanthropy’s response to his first administration.

As Stid puts it, giving in to the impulse to “counter-mobilize and once again join the vanguard of the resistance to Trumpist populism” would be a mistake. It would be wiser to try to mitigate the fierce ideological divisions in America—which, he courageously notes, foundations have in fact done so much to exacerbate. His solution—seek to build “expansive and varied coalitions” for preferred policies through a revitalization of pluralism—is modest and appealing. But it will be completely ignored by philanthropy.

That’s because 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.

Eggs, gasoline, and jobs

While the post-mortems are still being developed, it’s already clear that the election turned on some practical, nitty-gritty economic issues, like the price of eggs and gasoline and the disappearance of blue-collar jobs. These issues were so compelling that they even drove working-class voters from hitherto solidly Democratic racial and ethnic groups into the Republican column. Experts did their best throughout the campaign to persuade voters that these problems were mirages.  But the voters weren’t buying it.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, for instance, Scott Pelley had this exchange with a small-town restaurant manager and life-long Democrat. “Inflation is down by more than half,” Pelley insisted. “Interest rates are falling, mortgage rates are falling, wages are going up. Are you not feeling that?” “No!” she replied. No one she knew had gotten a raise recently. That’s why she had voted for Donald Trump.

Philanthropy has long been the driving force behind the emergence of a politics that privileges expert judgments like those cited by Scott Pelley over the petty and immediate concerns of mere restaurant managers. This conviction made an early appearance in longtime Rockefeller Foundation president Raymond Fosdick’s account of its first board meeting, in 1913.

Fosdick noted that the board had to face this question: how would the foundation serve its stated mission to secure the “well-being of mankind throughout the world?” As might be expected, “a large number of applications had already been received, and it is significant that they were all declined, including one from the YMCA for the rehabilitation of buildings located in Dayton, Hamilton, and Marietta, which had been damaged in the recent floods along the Ohio River Valley.”

Rockefeller advisor Frederick Gates explained this decision in now-familiar terms:  

The Rockefeller Foundation should in general confine itself to projects of an important character, too large to be undertaken, or otherwise unlikely to be undertaken, by other agencies. This was in line with the emphasis which Mr. Rockefeller himself, six years earlier, had placed on what he called “finalities.” The best philanthropy, he had said, involves a search for cause, an attempt to cure evils at their source.

The search for “root causes” of social problems has been the governing paradigm of American philanthropy ever since. It absorbed this point of view from the Progressive movement, which arose at the same time as our first major foundations. Progressivism believed that the new, complex problems of the 20th Century could no longer be resolved by a political system anchored in localized, petty, material interests. Vast social and economic forces were remaking the nation, and only professional experts trained in the new natural and social sciences had the ability to understand and ultimately master those forces. Only they knew how to get to the root causes of our problems.

For philanthropy, this initially meant funding think tanks, municipal research bureaus, scholarly journals, and research universities to develop the sciences and export them to public affairs. It also meant the rationalization and systematization of American professions like law, medicine, social work, education, and theology. These new and reformed institutions would bring scientific objectivity and order to American politics, displacing petty, parochial concerns like rebuilding flooded YMCAs.

Now, the experts have changed their minds quite a bit over the decades about just what the real root causes of our problems are. But progressive philanthropy’s most-recent version really digs deep. In fact, it holds, the root cause can be found in the very origins and design of the American polity itself. It is so riddled by structural racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other reprehensible prejudices that nothing less than total systemic transformation is required.

Deliberately tilted to resist the gravitational pull

This is precisely the sort of root cause problem that philanthropy is—in its own view—peculiarly equipped to address. After all, foundations are massive repositories of wealth that are almost completely insulated against the political and economic pressures which invariably deflect lesser organizations from pursuing controversial, large-scale solutions. They’re actively recruiting program staff, management, and board members from the hitherto marginalized racial and gender categories whose interests must now be paramount in the struggle for justice. And they’ve become quite adept at circumventing customs and laws that had seemed in the past to restrict their political activities. 

So today’s progressive foundations are deeply committed to vigorous programs of diversity, equity, and inclusion; critical race theory; reproductive rights; and environmental and gender justice throughout America’s institutions. They’ve become especially bold about introducing these issues into electoral politics, through vigorous and well-funded nonprofit lobbying and election-adjacent campaigns, including massive get-out-the-vote campaigns.  

This effort to bring about fundamental, root-cause changes to our political order, however, has been a distinctly mixed blessing for its primary electoral vehicle, the Democratic Party. Dedicated progressive donors have indeed filled the party’s coffers with billions of campaign dollars, and fiercely committed nonprofit activists have knocked on tens of thousands of doors during election season. The problem, though, is that to be successful, an American political party must find a way to temper its ideological purists. It must instead be able to trim, compromise, modulate, and maneuver, in order to assemble a winning electoral coalition from among a vast and diverse array of interests. And those interests are overwhelmingly concrete, practical, and economic.

That’s precisely the way the Founders intended it. As James Madison argued, within the extended commercial republic established by our Constitution, citizens would be inclined to divide along lines of immediate material self-interest and personal ambition rather than according to the grand visions of justice that had torn apart all democracies throughout human history. As political scientist Martin Diamond put it, “The American political order was deliberately tilted to resist, so to speak, the upward gravitational pull toward the grand, dramatic, character-ennobling but society-wracking opinions about justice and virtue.”

Contemporary progressive philanthropy, by contrast, welcomes and encourages just such a “society-wracking” showdown, pitting the grand vision of Our Democracy against Trumpian fascism. This supreme conflict cannot be addressed or resolved by paltry compromise among limited economic interests. The effort to dismantle settler colonialism and combat structural racism must take priority over such petty partisan maneuvering.

All of which makes life difficult for a Democratic party seeking to win elections. As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued in Where Have All the Democrats Gone?foundations are foremost among the institutions of the left’s “shadow party.” Along with universities, the media, and activist nonprofits, foundations have sidelined the economic concerns of the working class in favor of the ideological dispositions of “young professionals in the large postindustrial metro centers and in college towns.” As they note, “On many of the cultural issues concerning race, gender, and immigration that divide our politics, they have taken the most radical positions.”

It should not have been surprising, then, that moderate Democrats this year had been frantically signaling from the sidelines that voters were overwhelmingly concerned about economic matters like job loss and inflation rather than, as one of the most effective Trump ads had it, insuring that prisoners had access to tax-funded transgender surgery. Old-line progressive Democrats had likewise been warning that the focus on abstruse cultural concerns threatened to erode the party’s traditional commitment to the working class, and pointed directly to the disproportionate influence of wealthy donors as the cause. As Sen. Bernie Sanders noted after the election, “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?”

Yet the party was blocked from addressing those concerns by the determination of big progressive donors and activist nonprofits to keep the focus on abstract ideological concerns like racial and gender justice. 

Chief assets and alienated, unconsulted citizens

It turns out that the chief assets that foundations claim to bring to public affairs—massive concentrations of wealth, guided by professionally trained experts, managed by determined advocates of social justice, and suspended far above petty economic and political concerns—instead encouraged the party to be ideologically rigid and abstract, with no feel for the actual expressed economic concerns of voters. Those alienated voters ironically included many drawn from the very racial blocs on whose behalf foundations had insisted they were acting, but whose self-perceived interests they had never consulted.  

As contemporary progressivism seeks a way out of future electoral losses like the one in 2024, philanthropy is a prime place to locate blame, but the last place it should look for solutions. For well more than a century, it has been determined to transcend the paltry concerns of everyday citizens, looking instead to the professionals it hires and the expert institutions it funds to get to the root causes of our public problems. The root-cause solution dominating today’s philanthropic landscape has proven to be particularly remote from the genuine, real-world interests of voters, as expressed in this year’s electoral outcomes.  

Foundations will no doubt produce their own election post-mortems. But they will be focused exclusively on “messaging”—ways to persuade voters, especially errant racial minorities, that progressivism’s exalted vision of social justice is far more important than the price of eggs. They will not heed Stid’s wise advice to downplay ideological purity in the name of a renewed pluralism, and so will continue to contribute to, rather than help ameliorate, our deep political divisions.

Philanthropy started down this path when, in its search for “finalities,” it contemptuously declined those appeals to help rebuild flood-damaged YMCAs in small cities along the Ohio River. Sen. J. D. Vance, by contrast, would no doubt have acted on those appeals, just as he did after a train derailment brought massive suffering to his constituents in East Palestine, Ohio. As now Vice President-elect Vance could tell us, addressing such seemingly minor problems is far more important politically than undeviating pursuit of distant ideological goals.  Philanthropy’s inability to understand that is why it will drag down any political party foolish enough to let it dictate its platform.