Hi everyone, this week is my birthday, when I’m officially a year older. But joke’s on the universe, since I’ve always looked ten years older than my biological age! If you’d like to help me celebrate, please donate $44 (or whatever you can afford) to nonprofits serving transgender people and advancing trans rights, such as the Trans Continental Pipe and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute.
Also, at the advice of our colleague Thaddeus Squire in his article “Four Ways the Nonprofit Sector Can Tell the Trump Administration to F**k Off,” I’m forming a religion, Vuism, to fight injustice, since religious organizations have almost zero oversight in this country and can take tax-deductible donations. Part of Vuism is the observance of Vumas on March 12, which requires all nonprofit professionals take the day off, eat hummus, and use the Oxford Comma to send one another good wishes.
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Over the past few days, you may have noticed the uptick in conversations regarding foundations’ increasing their payout rate during this sharknado shitstorm of fascism, cruelty, and ignorance (Marked by things like people protesting and destroying posters at a neuroscience conference in Orlando because scientists were talking about “diversity of efferent firing in the cochlea” and these MAGAts’ hate-infused brains thought it was about DEI and started foaming at the mouth).
I am glad the conversation is happening. According to research, US foundations’ cumulative assets have grown 15 times over the past 35 years, including an astounding 46% during the pandemic. There’s now 1.53Trillion US dollars hoarded by private foundations, and it’s still growing (unless the market crashes or something). If foundations increase their payout on average from 5% to 6%, experts estimate it would free up an additional 15 to 20 billion dollars each year. Think of the good that would do when the federal government and oligarchs continue to attack marginalized communities, revoke civil liberties, and work to dismantle nonprofits.
However, I’m afraid left-leaning funders (and many influential nonprofit leaders) still do not have an accurate analysis of what happened that got us to this horrible point in history and what’s needed to set things right. Over the past several decades, conservative forces, backed by right-wing funders, had a clear, long-term strategy to shift society to align with conservative values. I like to cite Sally Covington’s report, commissioned by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations.”
The whole 58-page report is illuminating, but here’s a quote that summarizes how conservatives have been so successful:
“Proclaiming their movement to be a war of ideas, conservatives began to mobilize resources for battle in the 1960s. They built new institutional bastions; recruited, trained and equipped their intellectual warriors; forged new weapons as cable television, the Internet, and other communications technologies evolved; and threw their full resources into policy and political battles.”
While all their strategies have been extremely effective, the one where they “threw their full resources into policy and political battles” is what left-leaning funders have failed spectacularly to counter. Or even consider countering. While left-leaning funders mostly avoided funding politics (or, really, anything remotely even seeming political, such as advocacy), viewing it as beneath them, conservative funders went full-steam into supporting right-wing candidates and judges at all levels, backing gerrymandering, funding efforts to pass voter suppression laws, setting up political think tanks, and doing other things many in left-leaning philanthropy would consider “distasteful.”
An example of how astoundingly effective conservative funders have been in the political arena is the Federalist Society, a powerful organization that has worked for several decades to shape the judiciary system. It’s funded by conservative foundations like the Charles Koch Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Scaife Foundation, and Mercer Family Foundation, along with dark money groups like DonorsTrust. Its key leader is Leonard Leo. According to this article, Leo and his organization “helped [Trump] appoint and confirm more than 200 nominees to the federal bench, most famously Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.” (The Federalist Society was also instrumental in the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito).
The Covington Report was published nearly 30 years ago, and the Federal Society was founded in 1982. Since then, conservative funders and donors, seeing how effective their strategies have been, doubled down on them. Three years ago, as the article above mentioned, billionaire Barre Seid donated $1.6 billion dollars—the largest donation to a political group in US history—to a new organization run by Leonard Leo, to continue shaping the judiciary until it’s entirely right-wing. This $1.6B, focused on seating conservative judges, will have ripple effects that will cost our sector multiple times more to address.
We’re now living in terror because of how effective right-wing funders and movements have been. And they’ve been effective because they see clearly that politics is the most potent weapon, and they invest heavily and unapologetically in it.
Left-leaning funders, meanwhile, for the most part will do anything except engage in politics. As David Callahan said recently on LinkedIn: “While I expect we’ll see philanthropy step up with a lot more emergency funding in the coming months as budget cuts kick in, I’m less confident about philanthropy’s capacity for political combat.”
What we need from left-leaning funders in this moment is acknowledgement that their disdain of and refusal to engage in politics has been a fatal mistake, followed by a full-throated commitment to fund and engage in political warfare against the right-wing. (Yes, it is political warfare; left-leaning funders’ denial of what it is has contributed to their ineffectiveness. You can’t successfully fight in a war if you refuse to believe you’re in one).
What does this mean? It means at the very least, left-leaning funders need to invest AT MINIMUM $1.6 billion dollars immediately to place progressive judges across all levels, with the Supreme Court as a long-term target, to counter Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society’s actions. Progressive-leaning judges have served as a firewall against the injustices we’re seeing; we need more of them at all levels and jurisdictions. $1.6B is not a lot of money to literally save democracy, and a lot of foundations have that just sitting in their endowments. Ideally, they’d invest 20B (to start with) to make up for decades of investing little to nothing in this area.
It means funding 501c4s, PACs, Super PACs, and other organizations that can fully work to elect progressive candidates into office. Conservative funders have no qualm supporting right-wing political candidates, while liberal-leaning funders have been horrified at the idea. I talked to a colleague who had been a part of right-wing circles before she realized it didn’t align with her values. She said, “Conservative donors and funders are not afraid to buy political candidates.”
It means funding the left’s equivalent of powerful right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Prosperity, Family Research Council, FreedomWorks, American Legislative Exchange Council, Claremont Institute, Eagle Forum, and other groups shaping politics to advance conservative values. We have amazing progressive nonprofits and movements doing incredible work protecting and advancing democracy, but they never have enough funding support. Fund them whatever it takes so they can play on the same level as the right-wing groups mentioned above.
It means vastly more money into progressive journalism and punditry, to counter the likes of extreme right-wing sources of misinformation, propaganda, and hate-fuel like Fox News, Breitbart, the Daily Wire, RedState, Infowars, the Federalist, and the dozens of podcasts and other platforms held by persuasive right-wing individuals. We need funders to release money to do more radical stuff like what The Onion did when it tried to buy Infowars.
The left needs a similar constellation of powerful organizations working in tandem, as the right has for decades. To get there, these organizations need the same level of funding and same level of trust that conservative funders have been providing their grantees, meaning with huge influxes of unrestricted money for 20 or more years.
Last week, I talked to a colleague, a funder who reassured me that philanthropic leaders have been getting together and talking through strategies, but that it’s hard to make these strategies public for fear of the opposition getting wind. That’s good to know.
But if these funders—who often meet without nonprofit or movement leaders present—don’t diagnose the problem right, if they fail to acknowledge the political reality and the roles they’ve played in letting conservative funders run circles around them for the past 50 years, and change course quickly, then inequity and injustice will continue to worsen. You could free up an additional $20B each year in emergency funds for nonprofits, and that would do a lot of good, but it will barely address the symptoms of the worsening crises facing our world. We need significant funds to both stop the bleeding as well as engage in bold strategies that prioritize political engagement on the same level as the right.
In 2020, after we endured the nightmarish four years when Trump was elected the first time, I wrote “This is the wake-up call for nonprofits and foundations to get political,” where I used the analogy of people setting houses on fire, and left-leaning funders only funding burn ointments and research projects to find out which marginalized communities have been most burned, refusing to fund actions that would remove the blowtorches from the arsonists and make them unable to set fire to everything and everyone they dislike.
We could spend time analyzing the neoliberal, white-moderate philosophies and values that have been fueling progressive-leaning foundations’ reticence to engage in strategies the right-wing has been using so effectively, but let’s save that for another post. With everything being so dire and getting worse, I hope funders clearly see that the country is in flames and commit to fighting fire with fire.
