And the damage likely to be done if it takes his advice to deepen involvement in partisan politics.
David Callahan, founding editor of Inside Philanthropy and one of the most-astute critics of American philanthropy, spent time recently talking to progressive foundation CEOs, trying to make sense of the “devasting defeat” of November 2024. As is the case with all his writings, the resulting article, “How We Got Here: Six Reasons Liberal Philanthropy Is Losing the Battle for America’s Future,” is worth the (hefty) price of a subscription.
Although he describes a series of deficiencies on the part of progressive philanthropy, the one that likely rankled him most is captured in this language: “‘Is it our job to get Democrats elected? I don’t think so,’ said one foundation CEO. Said another: ‘Every single group that is oppressed in society should have the ability to advocate for themselves without having to apologize or worry about the political fallout.’”
The likely rankling for Callahan comes from the fact that, for him, the job of progressive philanthropy is precisely to “get Democrats elected.” That not enough foundation leaders today worry about political fallout has clearly been disastrous for the causes they all champion, in his view. As he puts it, “left-of-center foundations and top individual donors have played a singular role in how we arrived at the present moment.”
But reading Callahan’s account, how could any reasonable citizen not wish to elect Democrats, given the challenges posed by the extreme conservatism of today’s Republican Party? After all, “the conservative movement has been clear about its radical goals since the days of Reagan: rolling back the New Deal/Great Society welfare state, gutting regulatory agencies, reversing the gains made by social movements since the 1960s, and slashing taxes while shrinking the overall size of government.”
This description of the conservative agenda at least has the virtue of consistency, tracing one unbroken line of authoritarianism from Reagan to Trump. Many of Callahan’s peers, by contrast, have taken to contrasting the fascist folly of the Trump administration with the suddenly discovered wisdom and moderation of Reagan and his immediate GOP successors. This development comes as a surprise to those of us conservatives old enough to remember the days of “Bushitler.”
Callahan’s description of the conservative agenda doesn’t necessarily have the virtue of accuracy, though. This isn’t the place for a thoroughgoing discussion, but here’s just one quote from the essay that deeply shaped my own conservatism, as well as that of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus opened To Empower People, their influential American Enterprise Institute (AEI) monograph from 1976, this way:
Partisan rhetoric aside, few people seriously envisage dismantling the welfare state. The serious debate is over how and to what extent it should be expanded. … [W]e suggest that the modern welfare state is here to stay, indeed that it ought to expand the benefits it provides—but that alternative mechanisms are possible to provide welfare-state services.
(Italics in original.)
The alternative mechanisms described in To Empower People were “mediating structures”—social and cultural institutions like the neighborhood, family, church, and voluntary association—that were small and intimate enough to engender popular confidence, yet organized enough to be entrusted with the delivery of social services. This was the intellectual source of Reagan’s “private-sector initiatives” effort; George H. W. Bush’s “thousand points of light” program; and George W. Bush’s drive to empower faith-based and community groups.
From the “neighborhood movement” of the Carter years through the decentralization push of the New Democrats in the Clinton administration, the mediating-structures approach to the welfare state was championed as well by centrist elements of the Democratic Party. The bipartisan drive to shift power away from distant, sluggish bureaucratic institutions in Washington back to local governments and civil associations was intended not to dismantle the welfare state, but to ensure that it was more responsive to citizens. Callahan’s cartoonish description of a savagely inhumane conservative agenda does not do justice to this widely shared, trans-ideological impulse.
But for Callahan, as for many other political commentators, that savage Republican agenda, funded now for many decades by billions of right-wing philanthropic dollars, demands the wholesale commitment of progressive philanthropic dollars to a countervailing political movement. After all, he notes, progress in all aspects of American life—the global trade order, the battle against infectious diseases and for reproductive health, the expansion of the welfare state, the increase in government regulation, and the extension of rights for minorities, women, and the LGBTQ community—was only accomplished with the full support of “philanthropy’s biggest players.” They are now obligated to defend those advances with every resource at their disposal.
Small wonder, then, that Callahan has little patience with those who quibble about minor considerations like the federal ban on philanthropic involvement in partisan politics. It is, however, still on the books more than five decades after being approved by an overwhelming, bipartisan Congressional majority in 1969. Callahan is, to his credit, one of the few commentators who is totally open about his disregard for this prohibition. As he put it in 2021 to those who signed up to receive e-mails from his Blue Tent organization: “Tax-deductible gifts to 501(c)(3)s supposedly can’t be used for electoral work. But that law is a joke. Any donor who does a little homework can find lots of ways to make ‘charitable’ donations that help their political party.” Indeed, Callahan established Blue Tent precisely to help donors do that homework.
Understanding the left’s lack of authority, but not the right’s discontinuity
The problem with philanthropic progressivism, though, is that much of it doesn’t share Callahan’s sense of urgency about full-on partisan engagement, despite three decades of his entreaties. The left believed in “permanent social progress,” and failed to see that American history is replete with episodes of “status hierarchies and traditional values” reacting against “social inclusion and cosmopolitanism.”
As a result of this oversight, Callahan notes, philanthropy has persisted in an outmoded approach to giving even as its vital presuppositions crumbled. From the early 20th Century on, he observes, foundations pursued a science-driven, expert-managed approach to problem-solving. He summarizes its “theory of change” this way: “Identify problems you want to solve, invest in research and policy development to find effective interventions, then get those solutions implemented”—often by persuading government to do it. Readers of The Giving Review will recognize this as the root-cause-driven “strategic philanthropy” that we criticize from time to time.
But, Callahan rightly observes, this approach only works so long as “expert knowledge carries authority and the facts matter.” Today, however, “elite experts are not only distrusted but often vilified. Facts matter less than the narrative, which can easily be shaped by misinformation.”
Given the collapse of truth, “donors on the right,” Callahan argues, have been able to pursue “a very different strategy: ‘flood the zone with shit,’ to quote Steve Bannon.” Conservatives have been able to do this, he notes, because of their disregard for facts, and their dominant “media and influencer ecosystem.”
Here, Callahan ignores the fact that for the past 50 years, conservatives were perfectly willing to play by the genteel rules of the intellectual game established by progressivism. Donors on the right pumped billions of dollars into building a well-credentialed, elite intellectual infrastructure closely mirroring that of the left. Consequently, the right today hosts scores of foundations, think tanks, scholarly journals, and activist nonprofits trying to match the left, intellectual initiative for intellectual initiative. As an AEI alum, I receive its lengthy “daily publication of independent research, insightful analysis, and scholarly debate” every morning.
But contra Callahan, Steve Bannon and his allies are completely disconnected from, and indeed are actively hostile to, this well-funded conservative intellectual apparatus. In fact, it became early roadkill on Trump’s and Bannon’s first drive to the White House. They insisted that the D.C. conservative establishment, in its polite, constrained repartee with the left, was fully complicit in the expansion of its globalist agenda.
No wonder that establishment desperately tried to stop the rise of Trump. In early 2016, essays by leading intellectuals across the right filled an entire issue of National Review, under the title “Against Trump.” NR’s editors insisted that “Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.” Today, shattered remnants of anti-Trump intellectual conservatism can be found in remote website enclaves, kept on life-support by sympathetic progressive donors.
The Trump/Bannon social-media apparatus—allegedly a massive, lavishly funded leviathan—was in fact hastily cobbled together during the past several years, largely without help from established donors. It refuses to abide by the staid, polite rules of engagement established by the leading intellectual institutions of the left and right. It is speaking in a populist vernacular so rough, so foreign to highly stylized elite discourse, that it just sounds like a “flood of shit.”
Callahan’s insistence that the present conservative movement is built on decades of consistent, cumulative funding overlooks this radical discontinuity between long-standing conservative D.C. elite institutions and their ad hoc, scantily funded, right-wing populist alternatives.
Too left to win
Callahan sees yet another progressive philanthropic failing, from an entirely different direction. If the old philanthropy is too plodding and procedural, there’s a new progressive philanthropy that is pushing too far, too fast, to the left, without regard to the political backlash it’s generating. By emphasizing issues like the elimination of fossil fuels, defunding the police, sustained immigration, and LGBTQ rights, donors on the left have pressed the Democratic Party to embrace political positions that are out of step with American voters—even those traditionally aligned with the party from ethnic and income considerations. Notes Callahan, “the liberal-left coalition occupies the worst of all worlds—as a political movement that’s seen as prioritizing cultural issues above people’s most pressing economic concerns and is wedded to unpopular positions on some of those cultural issues.”
The deeper problem here is indicated by the quote at the beginning of this article: funders of this school believe that “[e]very single group that is oppressed in society should have the ability to advocate for themselves without having to apologize or worry about the political fallout” (Emphasis supplied.) Indeed, as Callahan notes, many observers have argued that the obsession with what “The Groups” wanted is precisely what has pushed the Democratic Party too far to the left.
In order to get back to the real business of progressive philanthropy—electing Democrats—Callahan insists that it must venture into unfamiliar territory. In part, that “points to the imperative of remaining reasonably competitive in rural and small-town America—in effect, to lose by less.” Even such a half-hearted and transparently insincere courtship of those voters (just say enough to “lose by less”) is difficult, though, because “liberal grantmakers don’t view white people struggling with economic dislocation and its attendant problems, like opioid addiction, as oppressed enough.”
Speaking of economic dislocation, this is where Callahan thinks an appropriately election-minded philanthropy needs to focus its attention. “The centrality of the economy to 2024 voters was typical for a presidential election,” he writes. “Kitchen table issues are usually top of mind for voters in choosing a president, and tend to dominate most people’s concerns more broadly, with pessimism growing over the past two decades.”
The problem, though, is that the “best-funded left-of-center advocates,” which “operate in close concert with elected Democrats … have largely not been speaking to the material concerns of most people,” but rather “have been more focused on concerns that include racial justice, gender equity, and climate change.” The Groups’ “reflex to push back against MAGA’s retrograde cultural worldview helps explain philanthropy’s sidelining of economic concerns,” but it illustrates the problem that “philanthropy is largely run by highly educated professionals with little connection to the working class or material hardship.”
Given philanthropic prioritization of cultural over economic issues, Democrats face a long-term problem. Even the racial minorities on whose behalf they claim to speak have other priorities, which explains the gradual drift of low-income Black and Hispanic voters out of the Democratic column over the past decade. This has been concealed from foundation leaders by the lengthy list of vocal Black and Hispanic groups on their grant rosters, motivated primarily by cultural concerns—and the likelihood of funding. It turns out, though, that “many progressive groups actually don’t seem to be in sync with the top concerns of the populations they claim to speak for.”
To make this point, Callahan includes a particularly insightful observation from Greisa Martinez Rosas, director of United We Dream Coalition. It would have been denounced as structurally racist insensitivity had it been uttered by a conservative:
Many Latinos don’t primarily see themselves through the lens of systemic racial oppression. Rather, they see themselves as strivers pursuing the American dream, akin to past waves of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. That self-perception makes them more receptive to conservative messages on crime and immigration, especially when Democrats frame politics as a moral fight over racism rather than a populist argument about working families striving for economic security.
This growing appeal of the conservative message to minority groups makes the philanthropic mobilization of Democratic voters much trickier. Before, it was possible to run legal but implicitly partisan get-out-the-vote campaigns—or as Callahan decorously calls them, “activities related to civic participation and voter education”—simply by targeting minority census tracts.
Once the vote harvest from those communities is no longer reliably and overwhelmingly Democratic, though, philanthropy faces a dilemma. Either it can continue getting low-propensity voters, even non-Democrats, to the polls as a laudable act of civic duty—or, as Callahan suggests, funders instead can draw upon “randomized controlled trials, as well as other means of measuring impact,” to “generate higher participation by constituencies that believe in a more equitable economy and inclusive democracy.”
While this may ensure that Trump voters (who manifestly don’t share those beliefs) will be left at home on Election Day, the careful targeting of scientifically ascertained Democratic voters would be a clear violation of the law banning foundations from participating in electoral campaigns. However much of a “joke” that law may appear to some, that prohibition was one of the primary drivers of the 1969 Tax Act. The notoriously humorless Trump administration can be counted on not to get the joke.
Larger questions and likely damage
The larger question, though, is this: what would it mean for progressive philanthropy to turn now to material and economic concerns rather than racial and cultural ones? After all, philanthropy is still in the midst of its last major transformation, launched not all that long ago. It’s been busy hiring more, not fewer, of those “highly educated professionals with little connection to the working class or material hardship.” These increasingly culturally and racially diverse (in the approved manner) staffs have been trained by our leading universities to track down and dismantle structural racism and settler colonialism wherever they may be found. Those young and ideologically zealous program officers have, in turn, built long lists of activist grantees created in their own image, who have come to expect substantial, long-term grants. Now comes David Callahan to inform philanthropy that this is all headed away from, rather than toward, what should be its primary goal—rebuilding a Democratic majority.
Callahan is right, though, that materialist, “kitchen-table” issues, rather than cultural, racial, or ideological concerns, tend to be decisive in American politics. This was precisely as the Founders intended. They knew that such a politics was far safer for a popular democracy. Divisions along the lines of economic interests are more readily resolved by splitting differences through bargaining and compromise. This was a welcome modern substitute for ancient and medieval politics, where far-deeper differences along religious and moral lines tended to be absolute, irresolvable, and hence fatal to democracy.
Institutionalized American philanthropy is organized along very different lines. On the one hand, as Callahan notes, it was characterized for much of the 20th Century by “strategic philanthropy.” It sought to replace the chaotic clash of low, materialist interest groups with the careful, rational, systematic planning of credentialed elites. Their training became the purpose our first major foundations, through grantmaking to professional associations, research universities, and think tanks. Callahan is correct that the moral authority of those elites is today in some question, though that may have resulted more from their own demonstrated incompetence than from conservative propaganda.
Today’s more left-leaning philanthropy, on the other hand, also challenges the materialism of the “neoliberal economy.” It appeals to powerful ideological, cultural, and racial impulses that may mobilize specific segments of the electorate. But those impulses are, from the Founders’ point of view, difficult to bring to the bargaining table in order to hammer out a more-moderate and broadly appealing political platform. This becomes clear when, as Callahan observes, left-leaning philanthropy expresses no interest in (because it denies moral standing to) major segments of the American electorate—white voters, for instance, who may be “struggling with economic dislocation and its attendant problems, like opioid addiction,” but are not seen by philanthropists as “oppressed enough.”
Add in the fact that the “true” victims of structural racism prefer not to be viewed as such, opting instead to vote along lines of their base material interests, and it’s clear that this version of philanthropy is as ill-suited as “strategic philanthropy” to engage in American politics.
The institutions designed to function most effectively within the framework of the American commercial republic are (or were, until hamstrung by progressive reforms) political parties. They systematically amalgamated the vast jumble of divergent economic interest groups into two great but relatively safe and similar partisan alternatives for the voters. Within that system, it was primarily the labor union that performed the task Callahan now sets for philanthropy.
Unions addressed the kitchen-table issues of the working class, while delivering great swaths of votes to the Democratic Party. Even were private-sector unions still around today, though, they wouldn’t meet the high moral standards of contemporary progressive philanthropy. As left-wing organizers have discovered again and again throughout American history, union members consistently decline to mobilize behind grand ideological crusades, preferring instead to focus on “merely” improving wages and working conditions.
Callahan’s dilemma is posed by his determination to throw institutional philanthropy into the purely partisan struggle for progressivism’s rebirth. But philanthropy is not only ill-suited for that purpose. It’s also debarred by law from pursuing it. To his credit, Callahan doesn’t try to hide his extralegal Democratic Party intentions. When he argues that the line between philanthropy and politics is a joke, he’s only giving voice to the way most progressive foundation leaders behave.
But the current administration is now searching for any excuse to diminish or remove federal privileges, including tax exemptions, from institutions that, in its view, abuse them. Trumpism is particularly triggered by progressive activists who cloak themselves in the skin-suits of once proudly independent and nonpartisan organizations.
Despite that, philanthropy will, without a doubt, soon throw itself wholeheartedly into the struggle against what it regards as Trumpian authoritarianism, or even fascism. It will do so heedless of functional unsuitability and legal constraints. Given philanthropy’s immense regard for itself as progressivism’s privileged caste of warrior-priests, there’s no stopping it.
But it might do well, at the same time, to take a beat and quietly consider how much damage this is likely to do, not only to itself, but also to the political system it understands so poorly and treats with such disdain.
