Thoughts on Philanthropy from Books Featured in the Giving Review in First Half of 2024

Denuded National Identity

George Soros “was making severance payments to many of his philanthropies to focus on fighting the nationalist, tribal backlash that has made him—and his foundation—persona non grata in his native land of Hungary and has made Eastern Europe not one open society but dozens of distinct nationalities. What [a 2021 New York Times article] didn’t say is that Soros himself helped cause the tribal backlash and, in the process, he has proven the limits of his own vision: the open society and the open market that came with it, what we call neoliberalism or globalism, is not a beneficial thing when it’s pushed to its extremes—when it means the denuding of the nation-state or of national identity. What we’re seeing now, politically, is what comes from that extreme push.”

—Martin Peretz, The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center, reviewed in “Martin Peretz on George Soros and his philanthropy,” January 22, 2024

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Missed Opportunity

There was “a post-pandemic labor boom” that “was like emerging from a dark cave into a daytime fireworks show. It was all going down! The party had started! Get on the dance floor or be left behind!

“And what happened? Did the institutions of organized labor—the AFL-CIO, the biggest unions in America, the richest nonprofits—spring nimbly into action to guide and nurture and take absolute advantage of this newfound hunger among working people? Not at all.”

— Hamilton Nolan, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor, reviewed in “Philanthropy, The Hammer, and the open question,” February 26, 2024

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Oligarchic Control of Progressives’ Political Vehicle

“There is another twist to this story—a cohort of what [David] Callahan called wealthy ‘left-wing heirs of the sixties generation’ who have established foundations that have organized and funded left-wing causes.

…

“There is a deep irony here. Academic progressives in this country and elsewhere in the Anglo-American world have long imagined themselves as the future aristocracy in a radically revised capitalism. It hasn’t worked out that way. They are not captains of the ship that they constructed; instead, they comprise the crew.”

To “clear-eyed Americans on the left …, the gradual capture of their political project and the Democratic Party, its instrument, has also sunk in. … [W]ealthy ‘liberals’ and their heirs are the captains of the progressive ship … and legions of journalists and academics pull the oars in the galley.

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“The appetite of intellectuals to regulate the affairs of others led a generation of post-Civil War Americans, trained and inspired by Germany’s academic socialists, to propose a society in which prestige, status. Unfortunately for the academic descendants of the original progressives, it is ultimately their wealthiest capitalist students who have assumed oligarchic control of their political vehicle, the Democratic Party.”

—Jeffrey E. Paul, Winning America’s Second Civil War: Progressivism’s Authoritarian Threat, Where It Came From, and How to Defeat It, reviewed in “Philanthropic captains, progressive crews,” March 4, 2024

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Power, Politics, Public Policy

“We must recognize at all times that billionaire philanthropists are not neutral charity workers or unimpeachable humanitarians, but, in fact, powerful political actors who seek to use their wealth to advance their own interests and reputations, often in ways that harm society and democracy.

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“Bill Gates is not simply donating money to fight disease and improve education and agriculture. He’s using his vast wealth to acquire political influence, to remake the world according to his own narrow worldview.

“In short, we’ve been made to understand that Bill Gates is a philanthropist when he is, in fact, a power broker. And we’ve been made to see the Gates Foundation as a charity when it is, in fact, a political organization—a tool Bill Gates uses to put his hands on the levers of public policy.

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“Gates’s financial influence can also be seen in its charitable giving to politically connected organizations, including the nearly $10 billion the Gates Foundation has donated to organizations based in the nation’s capital—three thousand charitable grants, including donations to a never-ending stream of advocates who help put Gates’s agenda in front of Congress and other political tastemakers. If we expand the geography slightly to the Beltway suburbs that comprise the DC metro area, Gates’s giving crests to $12 billion. That’s more than twice as much money as the foundation gives to the whole of Africa, a clear signal of where is real priorities lie.

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“By funding news outlets and also the expert sources these outlets cite in ways that that are often not transparent to news consumers, the foundation has an extraordinary ability to shape the public discourse, to change the very intellectual firmament around what we know about it and how we think about the topics it works on.”

Instead of journalists playing their proper role of holding power to account, “they have been unwilling or unable to understand that the Gates Foundation is a structure of power, a political organization whose billions of dollars in charitable giving present exactly the kinds of conflicts of interest and money-in-politics problems that journalists are built to interrogate.”

—Tim Schwab, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, reviewed in “The Bill Gates and Big Philanthropy problems—and ours,” March 18, 2024

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Professionals Who Publish Instead of Protests and Strikes

During the decades following the successful civil-rights movement, scholars have “documented the way the neoliberal turn was, for the activist Left, characterized by a shift to a shallow, professional, and often philanthropically funded model of ‘advocacy,’ one that elevates self-appointed leaders and elite experts to speak on behalf of constituencies to whom they are not directly accountable. Rather than organizing people to fight for themselves, these groups promote professionals who attempt to exert influence inside the halls of power. Instead of protests, they publish white papers; in place of strikes, they circulate statements; instead of cultivating solidarity, they seek access to decision-makers.”

—         Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, reviewed in “Philanthropy in (as self-defined, a ‘transformative’) Solidarity,” April 2, 2024

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Political Parties, Polarization, and Plutopopulism

“By the Trump years, the Democratic party blob was collectively better coordinated, more politically focused, and much butter funded than ever before. Law, technology, and political polarization all came together to flood progressive politics with cash. Reflecting the general hardening of partisan teamsmanship, many nonprofits traditionally organized as 501(c)(3) ‘charitable’ organizations, from the NAACP to the ACLU, either branched off or fully converted into 501(c)(4)’s, able to engage in open lobbying and electioneering. But the party blob’s very growth, encompassing an endless array of old and new, worsened, rather than mitigated, Democrats’ difficulties in setting priorities, forging cohesive projects, and building meaningful connections with ordinary Americans in their communities.

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“Contrary to much commentary, the Trump years hardly occasioned the displacement of business-friendly politics by populism on the right. … Since the 1970s, the pro-capital strand and the us-versus-them populist strand have braided tightly together inside the Republican Party. In the making of this ‘plutopopulism,’ long-standing patterns have intensified—not transformed.”

The “plutopopulist synthesis” on the right “rests upon the support of critical elements in American business. In an age when business loyalties vary tremendously by sector, Republican loyalists concentrate in what Godfrey Hodgson termed ‘Little Big Business’—firms dependent on low-wage labor and centered in manufacturing and extractive industries far from the global cities that prospered in the neoliberal era. Elites tied into the political economy of the South and the nation’s interior prove key. Charles Koch and his network of fellow super-rich ultra-conservatives come from exactly this milieu. Resistance to taxes and regulations mingle with the same rock-’em, sock-’em style that colors the Right’s battles over race, gender, and status. Look at business with an eye less to explain discrete policy outcomes than to understand the particular character of the contemporary Republican Party, and these sectoral and geographic influences snap into place.”

—         Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, reviewed in “Donors, The Hollow Parties, distance, and democracy,” May 20, 2024

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Lewis Powell’s Clairvoyance

A memo written in 1971 by corporate lawyer and soon-to-be-Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce “struck a reactionary tone akin to” Milton Friedman’s, “but it was also full of practical strategies covering a range of issues, making it one of the most significant documents of the neoliberal revolution in America. Its importance flows not from its originality—many of the ideas within it were already common talking points on the right—but from its clairvoyance.” The memo, “circulated in secret and stirring controversy when leaked, predicted the world we live in today. The future was forged by those who fought hardest against progress.

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“It is difficult to know whether the Powell memo caused the surge of corporate activism that followed or was merely reflective of it, but it is clear that what Powell said should happen did happen. … Reading the Powell memo led Richard Scaife, the Pittsburgh-based billionaire and supporter of anti-Clinton movements, to begin funding right-wing foundations, the cause to which he would devote the rest of his life and fortune.”

—         Mehrsa Baradaran, The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, reviewed in “More overstatement of ‘the Powell memo’s’ role,” May 28, 2024

This article first appeared in the Giving Review on August 1, 2024.