A Democracy Funder’s Confession: We May Be Making Things Worse
Philanthropy has spent a decade defending democracy — while the conditions it aims to improve continue to deteriorate. Here's what needs to change.
By Rachel Pritzker
Contributor
July 29, 2026 | Read Time: 8 minutes
- Democracy funders focus on defending institutions from threats, rather than pushing them to address the failures that have eroded public trust.
- Grant makers deepen polarization by supporting adversarial advocacy, which treats opponents as obstacles to overcome rather than parties to persuade.
- Most funders come from a narrow professional class whose values are out of step with much of the country, undermining the field's credibility as nonpartisan.
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Over the past 10 years, American philanthropy has mobilized to defend the nation’s democracy. After the 2016 election, sensing that democracy was under threat, donors dramatically increased their support of efforts to improve electoral and governing systems and institutions, including election protection and voting rights, litigation and policy advocacy, and structural reforms.
I’ve been intimately involved in this work. I co-founded both the Democracy Funders Network and Patriots and Pragmatists, a cross-partisan group focused on realizing the foundational principles of American democracy. In these roles, I have partnered with donors and practitioners committed to stabilizing our democratic system during a time of significant strain. Much of that work has been necessary and effective.
But after nearly a decade of substantial investment, it’s time for democracy funders to take stock of both our accomplishments and shortcomings. The democracy field has grown larger and better funded — reaching $6.7 billion last year, according to the U.S. Democracy Hub — while the conditions it aims to improve continue to deteriorate. Toxic polarization is worse. Americans trust one another less and are less optimistic about the future. Public confidence in most institutions is at or below its lowest levels. Satisfaction with American democracy is near a 20-year low.
Hard Questions
This is not a reason to abandon our efforts. But it is a reason to ask harder questions: What are the true goals and intentions of this work? Do we need to reconsider any of our strategies and assumptions? And are we, in some cases, worsening the problems we seek to solve? Three themes have emerged from my own reflections on these questions.
First, defense is not enough. Much of the past decade has been organized around protecting institutions and responding to threats. That work remains essential. Yet a primarily defensive stance has left our democracy vulnerable by failing to build what it needs most: an affirmative vision that a broad majority of Americans recognize as their own.
The field has too often operated as though the country’s chief problem is bad actors threatening good institutions. In truth, many institutions have failed to live up to their public purpose and have lost credibility as a result. Consider the case of universities, whose well-documented problems include ever-escalating tuitions, ideological bias, and the perpetuation of elite privilege. Rather than acknowledging these shortcomings and working with universities to address issues that undermine public trust, democracy nonprofits and funders have too often simply rushed to defend them from government pressure.
Drawing on lessons from Viktor Orban’s defeat in Hungary, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has argued that “the best political response to populism is usually to deal with its concrete policy demands, rather than insisting that a democratic emergency requires people to back the establishment no matter what.”
When institutions focus more on deflecting blame and attacking their critics than on meeting widely felt public needs, they only reinforce the perception that they are unable or unwilling to reform themselves. Our funding has frequently underwritten that posture.
Second, adversarial advocacy has costs. A significant share of philanthropy dollars, in the democracy field and beyond, funds adversarial advocacy, an approach to policymaking and politics that treats opponents as obstacles to overcome rather than parties to persuade or bargain with, forcefully pressures allies into extreme and often counterproductive positions, and defines success by the mobilization of those already bought-in rather than the building of broad and enduring consensus.
Consider the example of the For the People Act, which would have made sweeping changes to voting rules, campaign finance laws, and more. Passed by House Democrats in 2019 to bolster their democracy credentials, the bill had no path through the Senate. It returned almost unchanged in 2021 with 222 Democratic co-sponsors and no Republicans. Rather than engage Republican lawmakers in shaping a bill they could join, Democratic leadership and progressive funders spent a year using hardball tactics to pressure then-senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Democrats respectively of West Virginia and Arizona, to abolish the filibuster and pass the original bill on a party-line vote. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that push collapsed in January 2022, having consumed enormous political and financial capital, produced no law, and inflicted lasting damage on the bipartisan credibility of pro-democracy efforts.
In the same Congress, a bipartisan group led by Manchin and Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine enacted the Electoral Count Reform Act. Rather than attempting to solve every problem with American democracy, the bill addressed the clear vulnerabilities exposed by the 2020 election, including making the vice president’s role in the Electoral College vote count purely ceremonial and raising the bar for objecting to a state’s electors. Where the For the People Act left the public more cynical and divided, the Electoral Count Reform Act, at a fraction of the cost, created enduring democracy-protecting policy change.
Adversarial advocacy has also infected many other areas of philanthropy, often in ways that funders miss and that conflict with their democracy goals. For instance, while many donors support advocacy efforts to advance climate policy, such strategies often embrace polarizing tactics, including by making hyperbolic and maximalist claims about climate change and generally failing to build the bipartisan coalitions needed for durable policymaking. I’ve also seen what the opposite looks like, including a remarkably successful bipartisan push for nuclear power as a climate solution.
As the current and former chair of multiple policy organizations, including Third Way and the Breakthrough Institute, I know that advocacy matters. But adversarial advocacy, pursued single-mindedly, degrades democracy by deepening polarization, cutting off productive negotiation and compromise, and foreclosing the broad coalitions that democracy requires.
In the next decade of my democracy funding, I’ll be recommitting to a basic principle: first, do no harm — what I’ve been thinking of as a “Hippocratic oath” for philanthropy. If we value our democracy, we should ensure that our funding is not undermining it. Where we are making things worse, we should stop.
Third, we are not the public. Democracy funders often assume that our positions are both morally obvious and broadly popular — that we represent the public because we invest in public goods. But most funders are drawn from a relatively narrow professional class: highly educated, ideologically left-of-center, institutionally minded, and clustered in a small number of metropolitan hubs. Our values and priorities are out of step with a wide swath of the country. At best, we may occasionally recognize this disconnect. At worst, we judge our fellow Americans for not sharing our views.
The democracy field began with genuine bipartisan energy. But over time, longstanding habits and blind spots, including the commingling of partisan aims with democracy work, have helped it consolidate into a left-of-center ecosystem — a problem some progressive foundations are starting to recognize, as reported in the Chronicle last week. At precisely the moment when cross-ideological credibility is most needed, we have produced greater ideological homogeneity and greater distance from the public.
That homogeneity has a further cost: We are slower to notice and more hesitant to respond when allies cross democratic lines. We make grand proclamations about the rule of law, then turn a blind eye when President Biden preemptively pardons his son. We declare the end of the filibuster a democratic necessity or an unforgivable violation of democracy, depending on which party holds the congressional majority. We decry political violence, but are too slow to condemn violence from the left — whether celebrating antisemitic violence, including in the immediate wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, or embracing politically motivated petty crime or “microlooting.” As a result, we have helped create an environment in which democracy work is widely perceived as partisan politics by another name.
A Different Approach
I’ve come to believe that democracy is not a battle to be fought and won. It’s just the ongoing work of figuring out how we Americans can live together more productively and build a positive vision for our nation’s future.
To be effective democracy funders in 2026, we need to better understand the American public’s full range of perspectives and what is fueling their dissatisfaction with how the system is working. I’m personally attempting to accomplish this through sustained engagement with American leaders who have vastly different ideological commitments and constituencies and want to help write our country’s next chapter. That has involved getting out of my ideological echo chamber, greatly broadening the range of people I interact with, diversifying my information sources, and participating in conversations and conferences where I wouldn’t normally find myself. It’s already been an eye-opening and enriching experience, and I’m just starting.
Philanthropy has spent a decade funding the defense of a democracy that most Americans still don’t trust — and we may well be further fueling that distrust. Are we capable of changing course when the evidence suggests our approaches are not working? Asking that question honestly and publicly is an important first step.
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