A Conversation with The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner (Part 1 of 2)

Robert Kuttner co-founded The American Prospect, a flagship publication of the progressive left, almost 35 years ago. Currently a co-editor of the magazine, he is also a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management.

Kuttner was a longtime columnist for BusinessWeek and writes columns for The New York Times’ international edition. He also co-founded the Economic Policy Institute and serves on its board. He has authored 13 books, the most-recent one of which is 2022’s Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy.

A forthright, insightful, and historically informed article about philanthropy that Kuttner wrote for the August American Prospect, “The Left’s Fragile Foundations,” caught our attention. Beginning the more than 5,600-word piece, he notes that “[t]he great social justice movements of the mid-20th century were all built on self-funding and direct organizing, often at heroic personal risk,” and he then describes some of those movements. “[T]oday’s progressive infrastructure is heavily dependent on foundations,” he writes, then also describes that infrastructure.

August 2024 Issue

“Progressive electoral machinery,” according to Kuttner’s description, “has become reliant on a model that uses two categories of tax-exempt nonprofits—501(c)(3) and closely connected 501(c)(4) groups—to target, register, and mobilize voters.” While advantageous, “using tax-exempt political organizations is also risky, because the IRS has never clarified just what (c)(3) and (c)(4) groups, which are supposed to be charities, may legally do in politics,” he continues. “That makes the model a potential sitting duck for a Trumpified, weaponized IRS, which in turn could intimidate foundation funding for progressive groups generally.

“The only effective defense is for progressive to go back to our roots,” Kuttner later writes in the article—citing Theda Skocpol’s 2013 Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, which laments the professionalization of voluntarily arisen, usually nonprofit organizations in civil society. Consistent with Skocpol’s critique other progressives’ more-recent calls, he urges a return to genuinely participatory, grassroots-organizing, membership-based and -funded groups and movements.

Kuttner was kind enough to join the two of us for a recorded conversation earlier this month. The just less than 17-and-a-half-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. In the first part, we talk about his article; philanthropy and politics in general, including funding of voter-registration projects in particular; and liberal and conservative grantmaking, including in the wake of populism’s ascendance.

Foundations, meaning the basis or groundwork

“I have a terrible weakness for puns,” Kuttner tells us, and the title of his article—“The Left’s Fragile Foundations”—“is a pun,” he says.

To the extent that progressivism in the United States has gotten very dependent on foundation funding—and foundations are notoriously fickle and notoriously faddish—that’s a fragile foundation, because if you look historically at the great gains of American progressivism, they have been based on the power of social movements.

As examples, Kuttner provides the labor, civil-rights, LGBT-rights, women’s-rights, and disability-rights movements.

“And foundations are a little bit uneasy about funding movements,” he continues.

What happens is, foundations are much more comfortable—program officers, with a few exceptions—finding people who are socioeconomically and professionally just like them. So you end up with a jillion Washington-based groups of nicely paid professionals who speak a good game in terms of liberal objectives, many of whom couldn’t organize their way out of a two-car funeral. And that’s the problem.

Kuttner adds that he doesn’t “mean to denigrate all foundations or all think tanks that depend on foundations, but I think it blunts the force of what progressivism ought to be.”

“Sitting ducks”

Discussing his concern about potentially forthcoming investigations of political and politically adjacent philanthropic funding, Kuttner says, “groups that depend on foundations are sitting ducks because it’s very easy to demonstrate that, Well, you pretend to be a 501(c)(3)” public charity, “but you’ve got this first-cousin relationship with a 501(c)(4)” social-welfare group,

which is allowed to do politics, sort of, some of the time. … [T]he distinction between the (c)(3) and (c)(4), which I call a “see-through,” is sort of a sham. I mean, I could write the script. They don’t need me to write the script, because they’ve thought of it.

Recounting the years preceding the 1969 Tax Reform Act that essentially still legally structures the nonprofit sector, including its (c)(3) and (4) statuses, “foundations, mainly in the civil-rights context, are underwriting voter registration, and they’re also being a little bit partisan in that,” says Kuttner—citing Ford Foundation funding of groups prior to the 1967 Cleveland mayoral election, which Democrat Carl Stokes won. “They’re targeting voter registration to people who are going to vote for him, which was a little bit incautious if you’re a foundation.” Ford also gave fellowships to top aides of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who assassinated during the 1968 presidential campaign.

“Well, this was sort of the last straw and so Congress decides it’s time to crack down on the tacitly political or partisan activities of foundations,” as Kuttner accurately describes. “What happens is, the foundations for about 15 years pull in their horns. This is a shot across their bow, and they stop doing voter registration. They continue to do some of it, but they’re very, very careful to make it nonpartisan now. I think they’ve gotten over that.”

He notes that

once you allow philanthropies to get involved with voter registration, I don’t see how you can prohibit de facto targeting. That is to say, if I’m the New Georgia Project and I just do a ton of voter registration and it just happens that a lot of the unregistered people happen to be African-American and a lot of them happen to have Democratic voting propensities, how do you legislate against that? You can’t. You can put some constraints on how explicitly partisan it is.

It is, Kuttner says, “good to see philanthropic money going into voter registration. The essence of a democracy is that we need people to vote. … Expanding the universe of people who can vote is a good thing,” though “I think there’s some clean-up that needs to be done around the edges so that you don’t have explicitly partisan abuses of this process.”

Coherence, ascendance, uneasiness

Comparing liberal and conservative philanthropy, he observes a historical “ideological coherence that our friends on the right enjoy, and I think that explains some of the success of the right.” Asked whether that remains the case in the wake of Donald Trump’s political ascendance, Kuttner says “I think these guys were intellectually serious conservatives, and they were blindsided by right-wing populism.

“If you screw ordinary working people for 40 years, which American capitalism has done, sooner or later you’re going to get a right-wing populist outburst,” Kuttner adds.

Either the right is going to capture this, or the progressive left is going to capture this. But somebody has to articulate all of the frustrations of ordinary working families who’ve just gotten further and further behind economically after 40 years of neoliberal policies. And because of his success as an entertainer and a celebrity and his brilliance at using television, [Trump] did this better than anybody else. So he was the guy who got to be the tribune of frustrated, white, working-class people.

While “you had alliances of convenience between some of the right-wing foundations and the right-wing think tanks and Trump, Trump made others of them rather uneasy. I don’t think they saw him coming.”

In the conversation’s second part, we talk about donor-advised funds and the challenges of, and prospects for, potential reform of the laws and regulations structuring the nonprofit sector more generally.

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This article first appeared in the Giving Review on October 15, 2024.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-conversation-with-the-american-prospects-robert-kuttner-part-1-of-2/