Not So Fast

There is a strong temptation to dismiss Big Philanthropy’s “transformative role in rehabilitating democracy” or, as Ibargüen put it, “managing democracy,” as a thinly veiled partisan and politically liberal effort to manage electoral outcomes.

After all, the “fragility of democracy” seems to have first appeared around the time George W. Bush ascended to the White House in 2000. Democracy made an extraordinary eight-year recovery during the Obama presidency but became even more frail when Donald Trump won election in 2016. Now democracy itself, as President Biden has campaigned, is on the ballot in 2024.

Let’s take Big Philanthropy at its word, however. After all, many of the largest so-called conservative foundations in America — the Charles Koch, Scaife, and Bradley foundations and the Searle Freedom Trust — also believe that they have a special role to play in architecting the restoration of American institutions. Their work, however, is more often cast in the language of strengthening citizenship, free markets, and America’s founding principles rather than democracy itself. Nevertheless, their philanthropic organizations and methods look like and behave similarly to their liberal counterparts.

Liberal or conservative, the professional philanthropic class shares a fundamentally progressive belief that it can design America and Americans from above: Salvation comes by way of experts and elites, top down, not bottom up.

Should Americans look to the nation’s largest nondemocratic, publicly unaccountable charitable foundations to save democracy?

Americans’ regard for elite institutions, including nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, is in precipitous decline. Gallup records a “historically low faith in U.S. institutions.” Last year Edelman found that trust in nonprofits decreased by 4 percentage points over the prior year and that 26 percent of those surveyed had “low” trust in philanthropy, a 5 percentage-point increase.

What’s more, 20 million households have stopped giving to government-sanctioned charities. Volunteering is in generational decline. And year-over-year charitable giving in the form of nonprofit donations saw its largest recorded drop in 2022, according to “Giving USA.” Additionally, that giving is concentrating at the top. Average Americans are shying away from the very institutions that propose their salvation.

Americans have every reason to be suspicious of Big Philanthropy. It has coalesced and concentered over the past 50 years as income and wealth inequality divided the nation. The ranks of the billionaire class swelled, and their philanthropic machinery and resources grew to scales unimaginable to most Americans. That behemoth philanthropy can somehow right our nation’s underlying economic wrongs and heal the social wounds that fueled its growth is a self-justifying fiction.

Big Philanthropy can’t possibly unite a divided nation for the simple reason that its very being is a symptom of a diseased economic and social order and, by extension, a broken and corrupt body politic. The liberal economic order that propels Big Philanthropy also undermines the equitable scatter of economic, social, and cultural goods. The rise of megadonors and accompanying megafoundations is a flashing red warning light that our system of democratic institutions is broken.

For all its talk about change, equity, and empowerment, philanthropy can’t help but conserve the inequitable structure that keeps it in power. America’s system of tax-incentivized giving encourages the creation of large concentrations of unaccountable wealth in the form of endowments, donor-advised funds, and perpetual foundations that allow powerful individuals to impose their will onto others in a wholly undemocratic way.

That’s why foundations — conservative and liberal alike — band together with America’s largest financial-services corporations to oppose any change to the self-serving laws governing tax-advantaged charitable giving. Before Big Philanthropy saves democracy, it must first preserve its tax advantages.

Herein lies the irony: By ensuring that they have a leg up on their fellow Americans through the tax code and a vast swath of other social and cultural institutions where they command extraordinary privilege, megadonors and the professional philanthropic class embody not democracy’s salvation but its antithesis.

Big Philanthropy’s ascent hastened democracy’s decline and weakened the civic bonds that foundations now aim to mend. The concentration of wealth and power obviates the need for voluntary association because, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in his Democracy in America, it’s in the absence of concentrated power that men and women must band together to accomplish great things. In a democracy, no one person has the power or resources to do great things of themselves, Tocqueville observed. So democratic citizens must unite and work together through the art of civil association.

This is not the case for the aristocracy, Tocqueville observed. Like today’s behemoth philanthropies funded by the superrich and governed by elites, Tocqueville’s rich and powerful had no need to marshal, confer, or band together with their fellow citizens to get things done. They could do great things by commanding they be so. And they did.

Thus, when Carnegie president Dame Louise Richardson pronounces, “We at Carnegie Corporation of New York believe that engaging in national and community service can help to inculcate an appreciation of the value of democracy and bring together people from all races, regions, and backgrounds and thereby strengthen the forces of social cohesion in our country,” we hear the imperial din of an aristocratic age, not democracy’s salvific chords.

Jeff Cain has served in leadership roles at numerous foundations, nonprofits, and for-profit corporations. He was a founding partner of American Philanthropic, from which he retired in 2017.

Ever since, Americans have viewed philanthropy and the nonprofit sector — “civil society,” in other words — as bedrocks of democracy. But a great deal has changed since the 1830s. Government now provides many of the services civic groups once did. Business and philanthropy now underwrite activities that once depended on individual contributions of time and money. Through marriages, residences, and jobs, Americans have sorted themselves into communities that consist of people more like themselves than otherwise. Divisions — along ethnic, religious, racial, income, gender, and many other lines — have multiplied and erected barriers to working together.

Nearly two centuries after Tocqueville’s visit, Americans are less likely to join civic groups — the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon documented by social scientist Robert Putnam in the late 1990s. And when they do, they have less need to moderate their views, since they are more often in the company of people with whom they agree.

Organizations that used to “bridge differences,” such as political parties or federations of civic clubs, are no longer as influential as they once were. And the forces that once worked alongside them to create civic bonds are withering as well. Tocqueville saw newspapers as important for democracy, since they gave widely dispersed residents a common lens through which to view community problems. Today, not only is local journalism a shadow of its former self, but the proliferation of other sources of information — social media chief among them — is also likely to amplify differences more than lessen them. Not least important, long before Donald Trump arrived on the scene, leaders in politics and other walks of life had learned that polarizing rhetoric, such as negative advertising, worked.

Against these and other long-term trends and changes in American society and politics, what exactly can philanthropy do?

Philanthropy — especially as practiced by foundations — has long seen its role as addressing the root causes of problems, not just their symptoms. In recent years, it has launched a variety of high-minded efforts to reduce polarization in American society, such as enhancing civic education and culture, improving election laws and governance, redesigning economic institutions, and more. Pursuing any of these on a large scale — for example, in the nearly 17,000 school districts in the United States or still larger number of election districts — would challenge even the biggest grant makers. In any case, philanthropy can never be entirely disinterested but, to one degree or another, reflects the interests of its donors, trustees, and staffs. What they intend as a well-meaning effort to increase participation in elections or disqualify ineligible voters, for example, may look like an attempt to favor one party’s supporters over another’s.

For better or worse, philanthropy suffers from elitism. To paraphrase what a political scientist wrote several decades ago, “The heavenly chorus” of civil society “sings with an upper-class accent.” To offset that, many grant makers and nonprofits are inviting others into their decision making, even, in some cases, allocating funds to community groups to spend on what they consider priorities. However, the problem with this kind of participatory grant making (as it is often known) is that “the community” has many parts to it; deciding whom to support inevitably requires choosing some portions over others, usually favoring those who are most attuned to the donors. Moreover, if we really have less sense of common purpose, philanthropy may not like what the groups it supports wind up doing.

Another approach that will be featured in the Council on Foundation’s meeting is underwriting organizations like Better Angels that promote dialogue among people with differing views, religious beliefs, or partisan affiliations. Such efforts have a long history; for example, Chautauqua societies, which encouraged local discussion and character-building amid tent-show entertainment, were prominent features of American life in the 19th and early-20th centuries. But whether modern versions will be as influential is doubtful. So many other ways of spending one’s (limited) free time are now available that such conversations are likely to draw only those already committed to finding common solutions to local problems. And unless discussions are tied to action, they may resemble nothing more than a public-spirited debating society. (John Wood Jr., the national leader of Better Angels, is a Chronicle board member.)

At a Council on Foundations meeting in 1980, Irving Kristol, an influential writer and thinker who helped create the Philanthropy Roundtable, pointed to a more promising approach. Philanthropy, he argued, should abandon its fixation on tackling root causes and instead focus on more concrete problems that its resources could improve. Rather than trying to reform education or end poverty, Kristol said, grant makers should underwrite better schools or help deliver more effective social services.

This is exactly what Americans of Tocqueville’s day did. Despite the growth of government (and philanthropy) since then, widespread unhappiness with schools, health care, and other public services suggests a lot that still can be done — and some promising efforts are already underway. A noteworthy example: the Philanthropy Roundtable’s Opportunity Playbook, which connects foundations and donors to community problem-solvers. By providing support for civic action to address real problems (or help reduce barriers people face in doing so), philanthropy will also do more to develop the habits and attitudes of democratic citizens.

Leslie Lenkowsky is a professor emeritus of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University and a regular contributor to the Chronicle for more than 30 years.