Philanthropists seeking to bolster U.S. democracy are pulling out the stops in the run-up to the election. Based on a recent Democracy Fund report, we can expect that annual funding to support democracy will exceed $3 billion this year. Indeed, many prominent grant makers and donors will make their 501(c)(3) election-related grants earlier than normal thanks to the All by April campaign, which aims to get money into the field sooner to, in part, help ensure that “the American people can be confident in the integrity of our election system.”
Confidence in our elections will again be tested in an excruciatingly close contest between two parties and presidential candidates presenting starkly divergent alternatives. Early polls suggest that control of the White House and Congress remain toss-ups. Americans’ party affiliations, and the consistent leanings of voters who claim not to identify with either party, have been split down the middle for years, fluctuating within narrow bands.
The median voter theory in political science predicts that, in a situation like this, one of the two parties will moderate its appeals to win persuadable voters in the center, thereby gaining a governing majority. The stage appears to be set for this dynamic to play out. Researchers find that a majority of Americans cluster in the political middle, from the center-left to the center-right. On a range of contentious issues — e.g., abortion, climate, crime, guns, immigration, and race — most Americans’ viewpoints fall somewhere between the lines set by activists and elites in the two parties, including those serving in Congress.
Yet the two parties hold fast to ideologically constrained positions on the political poles, and gridlock persists. Our political and social fabric continues to fray as these pressing problems go unaddressed. Waiting for median voter theory to kick in has become like waiting for Godot.
Given what is at stake, we need to reckon with how philanthropy — in aggregate, not just in the democracy field — is compounding our chronic political impasse and the strains it places on U.S. democracy. Across policy domains, philanthropy underwrites activists and advocates whose all-or-nothing, combative stances keep the parties tethered to the outlying ends of our politics.
How Philanthropy and Nonprofits Contribute to Polarization
John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira have recently given us a helpful concept to use in this reckoning. In Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes, the authors write as friendly critics of the Democratic Party. They lament the accelerating shift to the GOP of working-class voters with more moderate social and cultural views — including, increasingly, people of color.
Judis and Teixeira assign much of the blame for the Democrats’ inability to move to the center and retain working-class voters to what they call the shadow party on the left. Shadow parties, they write, consist of “the activist groups, think tanks, foundations, publications and websites, big donors, and prestigious intellectuals who are not part of the official party organizations but who influence and are identified with one or the other of the parties.”
Who belongs to the shadow parties? Judis and Teixeira’s illustrative list of those who have led the Democratic Party astray includes Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise Movement, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the Center for American Progress, the New York Times, Vox, MSNBC, and the Open Society and Ford foundations. Their counterparts on the right include Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, the Center for Renewing America, Fox News, Breitbart, and the Koch network. Judis and Teixeira observe that “these groups on the left and right subsist within their own closed universes of discourse, each shadow party using the extremes of the other to deflect criticism of their own radicalism.”
Members of the shadow parties on the left and right, respectively, do not all share the same views, priorities, and styles. But they all have some ability and a strong drive to influence policy and the electoral party proximate to them. They seek to establish and enforce ideological orthodoxies yet are insulated from the pressures that face candidates and elected officials courting votes — pressures that can lead to pragmatism and movement to the center on issues. They care deeply about who wins elections, but they are never on the ballot themselves.
Shadow partisans operate, to borrow another helpful phrase from political science, as “intense policy demanders.” They view the parties as a means to their ends, pushing them in the direction they believe necessary to accomplish their ideological goals. Given the intensity with which policy demanders hold their goals, they keep their coalitions from moving toward the center and the median voter.
Underwriters of the Shadow Parties
Judis and Teixeira are spot-on in observing that many foundations and wealthy individual donors are active members of the shadow parties. If anything, the authors may not place enough emphasis on philanthropy’s influence. Beyond their policy demands, institutional and individual donors wield power by underwriting the activists, advocates, intellectuals, think tankers, and commentators that compose the shadow parties.
Philanthropists need to take responsibility for their contribution to our polarized political impasse. The high-octane advocacy, activism, and organizing they finance across multiple policy domains perpetuate polarization. Ironically, this pattern undermines philanthropists’ goals by making it harder for the party closest to them, the one most committed to their policy objectives, to win an enduring governing majority.
This doesn’t mean philanthropists cannot support grantees who espouse distinct, diverse, and principled viewpoints. But they should do so as philanthropists, not as shadow partisans. This means supporting pluralism, nuance, and broad policy coalitions alongside uncompromising perspectives. It frequently means leading as an in-group moderate to broaden the coalition supporting a reform idea or movement.
The goal, after all, is not to get 50 percent plus one but a more than ample share of the public to support one’s preferred policies so they can be enacted and sustained. As civic activist and philanthropist Nick Hanauer recently told the Bridgespan Group, “You can’t win without a narrative that is appealing to 70 percent or more of the public.”
In a promising development, some unexpected exemplars of this approach to philanthropy have emerged in recent years. Indeed, they oblige us to update our priors for at least some of the shadow-party members identified by Judis and Texiera.
The pattern-breakers include Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, as well as Charles Koch, the libertarian megadonor, and Brian Hooks, president of Stand Together, Koch’s philanthropic network. To be sure, these leaders remain committed to the values and principles that have long animated their philanthropy. Walker is more dedicated than ever to his vision of social and racial justice. Koch and Hooks continue to be stalwart in their convictions about classical liberalism and limited government. But they are not operating as shadow partisans in pursuing them.
Despite their disagreements on many policy questions, Walker and Hooks were among the co-authors of a timely defense of philanthropic pluralism in the Chronicle last year. In the essay, they rejected the growing expectation that donors “pledge allegiance to one or another narrow set of prescribed views.” Instead, they emphasized the pressing need for a more robust pluralism and a marketplace of ideas in civil society. They also called for and modeled a modicum of respect and reciprocity between and among philanthropists and grant makers who see the world differently.
Predictably, their defense and practice of philanthropy’s role in upholding pluralism and the values underpinning liberal democracy outraged shadow partisans on the left and right alike. These critics had presumed these philanthropic leaders were on their side and equally zealous; here they were going out of their way to collaborate with the enemy!
Walker, Koch, and Hooks nevertheless persist in seeking to defend nuance and expand their partnerships and coalitions to realize more progress toward their long-standing and deeply held goals. No doubt this will continue to earn them condemnation from shadow partisans. That is all the more reason those of us who believe in the beneficial role of “a truly healthy independent philanthropic sector” need to give credit where it is due. We can help advance the causes we care about most by following their example.
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