Five FAQs About “Taking Democracy for Granted”

As I had hoped, my recent SNF Agora Institute report, “Taking Democracy for Granted: Philanthropy, Polarization, and the Need for Responsible Pluralism,” is prompting spirited exchanges. Several recurring themes have emerged in webinars, workshops, zooms, and conversations about the report. Across these discussions, multiple people have asked me some variant of the following five questions:

• Isn’t the big problem here left-of-center philanthropists and the groups they support?

• What if funders want to back power-building to end structural racism instead of bridge-building to support pluralism?

• Are you saying advocates and activists have to engage with their ideological opponents?

• What if the Cassandras are right and democracy is on the verge of dying? 

• If philanthropy is once again going to be key to defeating Donald Trump, doesn’t that end justify the means?

These are good and fair questions. In the spirit of broadening the conversation about the report, let me share the answers I have been giving.

Isn’t the big problem here left-of-center philanthropists and the groups they support?

This question has surfaced in conversations with right-of-center and moderate Democratic colleagues and interlocutors. It is understandable. Foundations on the left form a much bigger institutional cadre and employ far more philanthropic professionals than their counterparts on the right. This is especially the case when you factor in all the consultants, fiscal sponsors, regranters, and evaluators servicing institutional and individual funders pursuing progressive goals. Taken together, they comprise an increasingly ideological monoculture. Moreover, the advocates and activists supported by progressive funders do pull the Democratic Party leftward, lessening its appeal to more conservative and moderate working class and rural voters.

But philanthropically-fueled polarization is not just a problem on the left. While right-of-center funders have leaner institutional footprints, they are just as apt to operate in an ideological echo chamber. And when you look at their impact on civil society and democracy, the result is of a piece with and plays off the polarization on the left. Project 2025 and the MAGA-fication of the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, and Hillsdale College have been underwritten by philanthropists operating as “shadow partisans.” The same holds for the explosive growth of think tanks founded by Trump acolytes like Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America and Stephen Miller’s America First Legal. And Leonard Leo’s plan to “weaponize” the $1 billion or so in philanthropy he directs “to crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power” is another recent example of this problematic pattern on the right. 

What if funders want to back power-building to end structural racism instead of bridge-building to support pluralism?

They are completely free to do so. Nothing in my call for philanthropists to practice responsible pluralism entails changing what causes they support. Rather, their opportunity and obligation is to preserve and enhance pluralism in civil society by changing how they make grants.

The first five steps of responsible pluralism, which I propose all funders supporting advocacy and activism should take, will help them do this. In a nutshell, these steps include:

• Admitting polarization is a problem

• Incorporating viewpoint diversity into their teams 

• Building expansive and varied coalitions

• Granting the initiative alongside funding

• Thinking in decades, not years

The sixth and final step — directly supporting democracy and pluralism through electoral reforms, bridge-building, depolarization, civic infrastructure, etc. — is purely optional. Only a subset of funders so inclined will need to take this step. 

All that said, funders seeking to end structural racism through power-building will increase their odds of success by taking two steps of responsible pluralism in particular. The first is granting the initiative alongside funding. Too often, philanthropic support for “power-building” imposes from the top-down the issues and approaches prioritized by the grant makers. Supporting bottom-up community organizing, in which the initiative is retained by members of the community and the goals are thus necessarily open-ended, does not come naturally to strategic philanthropists.

Second, these funders will also be well-advised to build expansive and varied coalitions that can bring about and sustain the necessary policy and systems changes. This means understanding and framing the challenge in ways that speak not only to the progressive vanguard but also to the potential pluralistic majorities that ultimately need to be enlisted. The visions for democracy recently cast by Michael McAfee and Abbie Langston in “A Revolution of the Soul” and by Hahrie Han in her Tanner Lectures are exemplary in this regard.

Are you saying advocates and activists have to engage with their ideological opponents?

Well, yes and no. If advocates and activists want to foster major changes in American public life, then yes, they do need to engage with people who disagree with them. Here my perspective is informed by the insights of the philosopher Robert Talisse. In a previous post on Talisse’s call to engage political opponents, I noted that, 

“The objective is not simply to respect and grant a hearing to good faith opponents for its own sake (not that there's anything wrong with that!). Instead, the goal is to increase the odds of realizing [one’s] goals for what justice entails. 

In our cacophonous democracy, we are obliged to develop expansive coalitions of allies who share our broad goals (if not all our specific orthodoxies). Ultimately, we need to engage our opponents not because of what we owe them, but because of what we owe our team members and coalition partners. Only by engaging with reasonable critics on the other side can we ensure we are being sufficiently hospitable to allies who are, or could be, on ours.

Note the task Talisse sets is a limited one. We don’t have to spend time engaging with our opponents’ affirmative arguments for their positions, or with bad faith critiques of our own. Rather, we just need to search out and reflect on reasonable criticism of our positions. We should do so not in an open-ended, ‘We could be wrong!’ stance, but instead in a focused, ‘Our views, work, and arguments for them could always be improved!’ stance.”

The advocates asking me this question after reading “Taking Democracy for Granted” have usually named what strikes them as a beyond-the-pale ideological opponent and assumed I was saying they needed to work with them. That is not the case. However, many of the constituents these advocates claim to speak for hold views that fall somewhere between their agenda and that of the rival they find so repugnant. In such instances, it behooves advocates to expand their coalition and invite more people to join them, lest their opponents beat them to it.

What if the Cassandras are right and democracy is on the verge of dying? 

This question comes from critical friends alarmed by the distempers in our body politic and the looming threat of authoritarian populism. I generally concur with the gravity of their diagnosis. However, I disagree with their standard prescription for keeping the patient alive: philanthropy funding a counter-mobilization to resist Trumpian populism. As I note in the report’s Coda,

“This has been the strategy that many philanthropists and grantees seeking to protect democracy have pursued during the rise, fall, and resurgence of Donald Trump’s political fortunes. Should he and his party prevail in the 2024 elections, calls to enlist in and fund the resistance will no doubt intensify even more. However, the demonstrated staying power of Trump and the GOP he has remade along populist lines — despite billions in philanthropy devoted to opposing them — indicate this is not a winning strategy. 

Such a defensive approach, in which philanthropy underwrites resistance to Trumpian populism in the elusive quest to protect democracy against itself, has several limitations. 

• It provides MAGA enthusiasts with nearly perfect foils — wealthy and unaccountable elites based in blue coastal enclaves financing efforts to counter the people’s will. 

• It accelerates polarization by fomenting an apocalyptic, fear-based politics in which the population is starkly divided into friends and enemies, darkly mirroring the populists’ Manichean worldview.

• It embroils philanthropy in the near-term political fray, where it enjoys little comparative advantage. It thus generates mounting opportunity costs in the form of forgone longer-term investments in the fertile expanse of our civic culture, where philanthropy is uniquely positioned to make a difference. 

• It overlooks the negative effects of illiberalism on the left that has come to predominate in and emanate from a range of institutions and professions in civil society, including outposts of philanthropy.

• And it does not begin to take responsibility for the tragedy of the commons in our public life. This tragedy — by hampering policy settlements on issues like climate, education, immigration, and policing — further stokes the fires of populism.”

As for my alternative prescription, I contend that,

“When it comes to populism, the way out is through. Philanthropy should adopt not a defensive stance but a proactive and engaging one. Its emphasis should be not on protecting democracy from populism but rather on practicing and promoting responsible pluralism. To be sure, such an effort will necessarily include some hard edges. It requires the vigilant safeguarding of civic space against mounting efforts to close it, regardless of the direction from which the attacks come. Likewise when it comes to ensuring free and fair elections. But holding these essential ramparts can and often will coincide with losses on substantive policy matters, even the most important ones, and indeed in elections themselves.”

Here we arrive at a more pointed and urgent variant of the Cassandras’ question, one that has been put to me by progressive critics:  

If philanthropy is once again going to be key to defeating Donald Trump, doesn’t that end justify the means?

This question unabashedly says the quiet part out loud about what many philanthropists and their advisors and grantees on the left have come to believe. They are convinced their efforts to register and mobilize voters demographically inclined to cast ballots for Democrats secured Trump’s 2020 defeat. Candid progressives acknowledge that the intermingling of philanthropically-funded efforts with electioneering activities is a feature, not a bug, of these strategies (albeit one that leaves them in a rather precarious position).

The coalition pursuing this approach has once more lit up the bat signal to marshal philanthropic support in the run up to the 2024 election. They see the prospect of a second Trump term as posing an even more profound threat to democracy in America. Thus they feel even more justified in exploiting loopholes in the tax code’s ban on electioneering to secure another victory for their side and — they self-confidently assert — for democracy itself. 

There is plenty of evidence for the efficacy of the sort of voter engagement that progressive funders and their grantees use toward these ends. However, amid the swirl of factors that determined the electoral outcome in 2020 and will again in 2024, I hesitate to attribute the marginal difference to efforts funded by philanthropy. Data clearly establishing such a decisive role would be extraordinary, and obviously incendiary, which may be why it is not in broad circulation. In its absence, the funders, advisors, and grantees relying on this strategy are at liberty and incentivized to persuade others that what they are doing is necessary and game-changing. 

My hesitation aside, I will stipulate their empirical claim in answering this question. And I also happen to share their view that democracy in America would be better off if Donald Trump does not return to the White House. Nevertheless, the end does not and cannot justify the means of this approach. It is unsustainable for progressive philanthropists and their grantees to manipulate the tax code regulating charitable contributions to subsidize their efforts to defeat their political opponents in elections. Pushed to the brink, this strategy risks collapsing, sooner rather than later at the current rate, under the weight of its democratic illegitimacy. If or rather when it does, philanthropy and democracy will be even more cynically regarded than they are today, and rightly so.

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There you have it — a recap of the most frequently asked questions about “Taking Democracy for Granted” and my answers to them. Please let me know if you have any additional questions for me. I look forward to hearing from you!