In the spring of 1920, not long after American troops returned home from Europe flush with both the elation of victory in the Great War and the virus that signaled the deadliest pandemic in world history, Ohio Sen. Warren Harding began his campaign for the presidency with the slogan “Return to Normalcy.”
Today, people are asking “When can we get back to normal?” When can we return to work and business and to so many of the long-missed activities of daily living? When can we get back on the road to recovery and prosperity?
But perhaps the more crucial questions, and not just for philanthropy, are: Should we get back to normal? Is business as usual good enough? If not, what might a different, better normalcy look like, and how do we get there?
Humans have evolved to have long-term vision, ingenuity, and stick-to-itiveness, so we should be able to figure this out. But we’re not using our power of memory when we most need it. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, we’re thinking way too fast when we need to ponder.
We should have seen this coming. No, that’s too easy, letting us off the hook. We saw this coming, and most willfully ignored it. Too many of us trust snake-oil salesmen more than experts these days.
The prophets, the oracles, the Cassandras of what unpreparedness meant and still means are legion. Laurie Garrett, John Barry, and Bill Gates forecasting the pandemic. Elizabeth Kolbert telling us how our world ends. The 9/11 Commission chaired by former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean. Donald Trump’s own National Security Council. Novelists like Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth painted a picture that now seems all too real. Yes, it has happened here. We failed to listen and apply the lessons not just of the past but of the future we knew was coming if we didn’t act. We are terrible learners, and we need to wise up quick.
During a federal-budget standoff that looks trivial when compared with the global devastation and socioeconomic catastrophe that is this pandemic, then-Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Not only can we not let this cataclysm go to waste, but we need to apply the right lessons if we’re not to repeat it, again. What 9/11 helped teach us, rightly, is to be more vigilant. But we were vigilant about the wrong things.
“Return to normalcy” is nowhere near good enough. Getting back to the old normal would be a huge undertaking, but the old normal wasn’t so great. Creating a better normal will be monumental. But it’s doable. Maybe.
Genuine Partnerships
What might foundations and philanthropists do to help create the better normal? First, simply what they’re now doing to provide support to their grantees who desperately need it, just more of it and quicker. And just do it; it’s a waste of time, space, and money to crow about it.
Second, embrace what is an all-too-alien concept in philanthropy: real partnership. Grant makers talk about partnership but rarely engage in it. Multitudinous announcements by foundations tell the story of what they are doing individually, but not much about what grant makers are doing together.
There was a golden age of partnership in philanthropy about 30 years ago, when foundations joined to create enduring independent organizations like LISC, the Corporation for Supportive Housing, and the Energy Foundation. As grant makers have become more individualistic, more professional, and more prone to claim “uniqueness,” they have become less willing to unite on a common cause.
The Detroit “Grand Bargain” negotiated after the city declared bankruptcy in 2013 is perhaps the best recent example of real partnership among grant makers, nonprofits, government, labor, and business. Ten foundations put up nearly a half-billion dollars in philanthropic support to shore up the city’s pension system, protect its world-class art museum, and help lift the city from insolvency.
The bargain was the idea of a creative federal judge, but a grant-maker partnership was the engine that made it happen. While I thought the outcome was terrific, I was initially skeptical about the process because I believed it set an unwise precedent in which philanthropy would be called on regularly to shoulder what should have been a function of government.
This pandemic has proved me wrong (or maybe, ironically, right) because the federal government, in the form of the Trump administration, has failed utterly to fulfill its fundamental mission to protect health and public welfare. Others, including states, municipalities, and foundations, must step up in the wake of that abysmal failure, but without letting our federal government off the hook.
A Real Stimulus
What we need to follow the pandemic is a Grand Bargain on steroids, and this time foundations can and should pull together business and government to help emerge from the pandemic with a fairer America that works for the many, not just the few.
What’s needed beyond the federal “stimulus” packages passed in the past month is a bold WPA/Marshall Plan for public works and infrastructure that would put particularly young people and those in our most devastated urban and rural communities — the demographic that will be most affected in the pandemic’s aftermath — back to work and keep the businesses that build and supply the infrastructure humming. I mean real public works — parks, bridges, tunnels, levees, airports, rails, ports and harbors, schools, libraries, and government buildings. Emphasize renewable-energy sources.
This would be permanent productive capacity, real stimulus, creating infrastructure and new jobs that would make America more resilient, not simply printing money and moving it around as if playing a shell game. Focus on creating jobs and greater equity in the communities that have been hit hardest by the pandemic. Covid-19 is an unequal opportunity destroyer. Just look at Chicago or rural Louisiana.
Many will say that after all the deficit spending that’s been enacted, such additional stimulus will be too much. But we can’t afford not to. Trump and Congress have already set America on a course of deficits and debt far beyond what the eye can see, well into the next century.
Here’s one place where job creation should start right away: Add more person power to the 2020 census. Foundations can help ensure a more accurate count. Even before the pandemic hit full force, a substantial undercount of more than 4 million blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans was projected. There are millions of people without jobs in the most affected communities right now, including millions of college students facing no current or summer employment. The federal government and states should hire tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of census counters. They can start working now online and remotely, then visit American homes when it’s safe to do so. And extend the census to cover the time lost to the coronavirus.
A Guiding Force
We also need to take new action to hold philanthropy accountable, such as an effort like the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs, often called the Filer Commission after its chairman, John Filer, who headed the Aetna Insurance Company.
Established not long after the Tax Reform Act of 1969 reined in insider deals and other abuses by foundations, the independent commission, the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller III, was the force behind the structure and infrastructure that continues to guide the relationship between U.S. foundations and the organizations they support and between nonprofits and government. If we’re to have a better normalcy, we’re going to need a new guiding force. I have a few ideas about who might be on such a panel (are you listening, Warren Buffett?). As with the Filer Commission, there should be no current government officials. And fewer white males.
And as with the Filer Commission, tax policies governing philanthropy and charitable giving should be among the top priorities. Examine, in combination, ideas that have been, pre-pandemic, considered controversial, some even existential for foundations and individual donors, such as:
- Establishing a wealth tax.
- Raising the top marginal tax rate.
- Increasing the minimum percentage of assets foundations must give annually above today’s 5 percent floor, which too often acts as a ceiling.
- Lowering the threshold at which the estate tax kicks in, to cover more than just the few thousand inherited estates subject to that tax.
- Requiring foundations to spend all their assets in a certain period rather than allowing them to exist in perpetuity.
- Eliminating the annual limits on percentage of income that wealthy people can deduct when they put money into their foundations. Today, they can’t deduct donations that exceed 30 percent of their income.
And if we are really going to make a dent in socioeconomic and racial inequality, such a commission should look deeply into the matter of reparations for slavery.
I suspect that sometime very soon, President Trump, continuing to play the blame game, will suggest trying to repatriate funds America has spent since the Second World War building up “ungrateful” multilateral organizations like the WHO, maybe even the OECD and NATO, that have made us safer and stronger, not weaker. And perhaps calling in massive amounts of U.S. debt held by countries like his new enemy, China. It’s hard to imagine anything more stupid or dangerous to what we can still call global stability. But that would rightly give black Americans even more justification to call in the debt owed them, the unpaid back wages from America’s original sin.
‘Virtue and Vigilance’
Can we get to this better normal? Yes, if we believe foundations are the risk capital for the social sector, then grant makers can help, must help, make it happen.
One of the great wonders of my world is the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, where I often studied in its majestic Rose Reading Room. The library is guarded by two marble lions, one named Patience, the other Fortitude. America, and its foundations, will need both.
Do we have enough fortitude to create a better normal? I wish, but history tells us a little different story than the one I want to paint.
In the book The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel, a Stanford professor, explores socioeconomic inequality throughout history, from before the hunter-gatherers. His conclusion is that only four occurrences result in fundamentally greater equality: famines, pandemics, mass warfare, and revolution that results in state collapse.
If that sounds promising for those who think a more egalitarian society might emerge out of this pandemic, it isn’t — because the greater equality that results from these disasters is based on compression, meaning those at the top lose way more than those at the bottom gain. Public policies designed to redistribute wealth have only a marginal and ephemeral effect. Say you want a revolution?
But maybe foundations can help bend the curve of history, too. It’s well worth the risk.
The New York Public Library’s guards, Patience and Fortitude, together represent a third essential national characteristic. When we think of Lincoln as a war president, we often think of his second inaugural address, at the end of the Civil War, when he called for binding up the nation’s wounds.
But in his first inaugural, on the eve of war, when the nation was dividing but not quite yet split, he called for vigilance: “While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no Administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the Government in the short space of four years.”
What I suggest foundations collectively undertake cannot, will not, be initiated or achieved by a government that has failed to exercise vigilance on behalf of the American people.
Therefore, we must be even more vigilant. Job one for America’s foundations and philanthropists over the next five months is to protect the constitutional right to vote and to make sure that right can be exercised. If Congress and the administration cannot be vigilant on the people’s behalf, the people must be vigilant themselves, at the ballot box. While whom you vote for may be a partisan act, the act of voting is decidedly nonpartisan. So have more fortitude and less patience, foundations.