A little over three years ago, I opened an online presentation to the board of the Ford Foundation this way: “It’s an honor to be here this morning, despite the fact that you’re a cancer on American society.”
Fortunately, I wasn’t seeking a grant. Instead, I had been asked by Ford President Darren Walker to talk to his board about the newly emerging threat of populist conservatism to endowed institutions such as the one he led. He didn’t ask to review my comments in advance. He and his board wanted to hear the challenge straight up, in its harshest language. And that’s what they got.
The immediate stimulus for Walker’s invitation was the sharp criticism of Ford and other endowed institutions from a long-shot U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio: JD Vance. As he put it on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program in September 2021, endowed institutions such as Harvard University and the Ford Foundation “are fundamentally cancers on American society, but they pretend to be charities, so they benefit from preferential tax treatment.”
He went on to say that these organizations are run by “left-wing radicals” who “care more about identity politics than lifting up the American worker.” Vance concluded, “Why don’t we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give [them] to the people who have had their lives destroyed” by their policies?
Walker wisely sensed that this was a far more radical critique of progressive philanthropy than what he typically heard from established conservative institutions such as the Philanthropy Roundtable. Considered the primary foundation membership organization on the right, the Roundtable might offer quiet dissent from particular left-leaning grant-making programs. But it would never propose taxing endowments substantially or otherwise interfering with the right of wealthy donors to do as they please with their foundations.
However, as I explained to Ford leadership that day, populist conservatives have no such scruples. Progressivism, they argue, has for too long counted on the right’s traditional respect for institutions to head off fundamental challenges. But no longer. Now foundations were to be treated as yet another set of institutions, along with universities, Hollywood, the media, and “woke” corporations, that have been captured by the left.
According to standard populist thinking, these organizations are run by detached, privileged elites who are far more comfortable in Davos — or in Ford’s Manhattan headquarters — than in Dubuque, Iowa. With their cosmopolitan, globalist views, they have nothing but contempt for everyday Americans, who cling to hopelessly backward notions of individual enterprise, patriotism, local community, and traditional religious values. When citizens try to defend those values, I noted, they’re told that they are simply manifestations of structural racism — the last resentful effort of white supremacy to defend itself against the inevitable globalist future.
Walker’s Prescience
Given that the long-shot Ohio Senate candidate of three years ago is today the vice-president-elect, Walker was prescient in asking his board to pay heed to Vance’s critique. The incoming Trump administration is determined to challenge what it considers progressivism’s entrenched positions within all major institutions, and that inevitably includes philanthropy.
Early opportunities for attack are likely to appear in deliberations over renewal of 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, during which Republican leaders could consider hiking the law’s excise taxes on large university endowments and on what they see as excessive foundation executive salaries. Expansive plans by Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to reduce government spending while protecting previous tax cuts could lead to a serious re-examination of many tax breaks, including the charitable deduction.
Meanwhile, many analysts of the 2024 election results are blaming progressive foundations and nonprofits for the Democratic party’s dismal showing. Thanks to substantial funding for voter education and turnout supplied by progressive donors, Democrats were obliged to embrace philanthropic positions on a range of controversial issues.
Republicans had a field day with this. They charged their opponents with promoting open borders, defunding the police, wanting to end fracking, introducing LGBTQ themes to elementary-school students, and championing racial preferences over equal opportunity. One of the most effective Republican ads insisted that “Kamala stands for they/them; President Trump stands for you” — a politically compelling shorthand reference to the arcane ideological commitments that seemed to take precedence over more immediate concerns like inflation and crime.
As Republicans and Democrats alike reconsider their views of philanthropy, progressive foundations are in a bind. For them, the programs they pursue in fields such as immigration, climate, policing reform, and gender and racial justice aren’t negotiable policy preferences. They reflect the very purpose of philanthropy.
For well over a century, the nation’s leading foundations have prided themselves on their ability to get to the root causes of our nation’s problems rather than merely applying Band-Aids as traditional charity did. Foundations saw themselves as uniquely equipped for this role. Their vast and largely unregulated endowments insulated them from the petty and immediate concerns that encumber the political and economic sectors, and their professionally trained staffs made grants aimed at long-range strategic reform rather than limited, short-term charitable amelioration.
In its most recent incarnation, this root-cause philanthropy has meant tackling what funders consider the structural racism and settler colonialism at the heart of our nation. That led donors to pursue the goals that proved so controversial during the 2024 presidential election. Everyday voters might consider these obscure ideological obsessions. But resolutely and uncompromisingly pursuing them is the heart and soul of progressive philanthropy, and vastly more important than paltry considerations like lower grocery prices or safer streets.
Ideological Intransigence
Darren Walker grasped early on the limitations of this intransigent ideological approach to philanthropy. He realized that it faced a new populist challenge far more radical than that posed by the housebroken conservative nonprofit complex in Washington, D.C. But by 2021, Walker had become a skilled navigator of difficult ideological terrain.
Several years earlier, he had served on a commission that suggested closing the city’s troubled prison on Rikers Island but replacing it with four smaller and more humane detention facilities. After he defended this as a “nuanced” approach, he came under attack on the streets and in print from advocates of the total and immediate abolition of prisons — including 1960s icon Angela Davis and more than 100 current or former Ford fellows. Walker later professed to having been “profoundly wounded” by this experience but refused to second-guess his position.
He was also one of six bipartisan signatories to a Chronicle of Philanthropy op-ed arguing that “philanthropy provides the greatest value when donors enable and encourage pluralism by supporting and investing in a wide and diverse range of values, missions, and interests.” This is a far cry indeed from progressivism’s determination to impose a unified vision of social justice on our national institutions.
As progressive philanthropy digests the results of the 2024 presidential election, it should learn from Walker’s preference for pluralism and nuance over rigid adherence to abstract ideological goals. And it should understand, as he did, that there’s a new populist challenge to the basic rules of the philanthropic game, never previously questioned by the complacent, old-line conservative establishment.
This might lead philanthropy to re-evaluate its hubristic determination to remake American society according to root-cause solutions that everyday voters find remote and offensive. Nonprofits might even consider taking up once again their more modest and traditional role of charitably attending to America’s immediate needs. Were it to go that route, the sector would remove a dangerously polarizing element of American politics and return philanthropy to a purpose that once made it an indisputably trusted and cherished part of American civil society.
