Thoughts on philanthropy from books featured in The Giving Review in 2025

Editorial note: this essay originally appeared at The Giving Review.

*** Foreign agents and American nonprofits

American lobbyists Ivy Lee and Paul Manafort each contributed to nothing less than “the transformation of American industries.” Their work made industries and tax-exempt nonprofits “into platforms for foreign governments trying to upend and redirect American policy.

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“[F]or three-quarters of a century” following passage of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), it was “all but forgotten and ignored,” and “that lack of enforce­ment ushered in an explosion of foreign agents who saturated Washington, all in the secret service of foreign benefactors around the world.” FARA became “the most disappointing—and most frustrating, and neg­lected—piece of lobbying restrictions the nation had ever known.

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“[B]y the end of the Cold War—fully a half-century after FARA promised to finally shine light on the foreign lobbying and foreign influ­ence campaigns targeting Americans—FARA was little more than a shell of its former self. It was an afterthought. A backwater. Something the DOJ rarely considered, let alone enforced. Few were even familiar with FARA, or why successfully implementing and en­forcing it would actually matter.”

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The Fighting Foreign Influence Act “contains some of boldest proposals the country has ever seen. … Think tanks, universities, foundations, all those American nonprofits processing millions (and potentially more) in wealth linked to foreign regimes, all as a means of opening doors to U.S. policymakers, would finally have to disclose how much they’ve taken in …

[I]t is Congress that stands as arguably the last, best hope at preventing Washington from drowning in this flood of foreign lobbying.”

—      Casey Michel, Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, reviewed in “Foreign agents and American nonprofits,” January 21, 2025

*** Professional-class liberalism’s “philanthropic governance”

Post-New Deal, “the demographic growth of the professional middle class also meant that professional-class liberals’ life experiences, political cultures, and professional outlooks were reflected back to them by an increasingly vocal and well-resources plurality within the Democratic Party’s base and from within institutions of profound social, economic, and political influence, chiefly philanthropy, media, and universities. Professional-class liberals, then, emerged as political and state actors whose training, instincts, and social worlds were increasingly embedded in and defined by the globalized, financial, legalistic, and managerial capitalist systems they imagined themselves reforming.”

—      Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer, “Introduction,” in Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals Since the 1960s, reviewed in “Professional-class liberalism’s ‘philanthropic governance,’” May 12, 2025

“A bevy of anti-regulatory, pro-market, and state-shrinking measures endorsed across party lines from the 1970s through the 1990s smoothed the way for the rise of philanthropic governance. Together, they directed public funds and plaudits toward private foundations and other philanthropic bodies.

“By the final decades of the twentieth century, the logic and structure of philanthropy had permeated every realm of American power, from domestic and foreign policies to corporate practices to grassroots politics. In other words, no domain of American power operated bereft of the capital and logic of philanthropy. This fact served to lash together disparate political actors from the left and the right, who no matter their policy divisions all conceded to—and often lauded—philanthropic governance.

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“In its bid to solve liberalism’s most fundamental tension between private property and the public good, philanthropy made liberalism appear perfectible, but it did so by destroying liberalism’s lifeblood: the vital tension between the private and the public.

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“It is conceivable that philanthropy will weather the changes—or, even, that it is already funding them—but if it continues to serve as a governing strategy, it will almost surely be absent the liberal vision that crowned it king of the last century.”

—      Lila Corwin Berman, “How Philanthropy Made and Unmade American Liberalism,” in Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals Since the 1960s, reviewed in “Professional-class liberalism’s ‘philanthropic governance,’” May 12, 2025

*** National Review’s founding funding plan

“No one could honestly object to a liberal magazine that subsisted on charity. It was fully in keeping with the ‘statism’ of the New Deal programs The New Republic had supported. But Buckley had promised something different. ‘The only weekly of opinion that stands on the side of free enterprise’ would itself live out the free-market creed. It would be something new: a serious political journal that sustained itself fiscally. Buckley even promised that it would turn a profit.

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“David Lawrence, the conservative columnist who also the founding editor of U.S. News & World Report, advised WFB to set up his magazine as a nonprofit and seek donors willing to absorb losses.”

—      Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, reviewed in “Buckley and Buckley offer insights from founding funding plan for National Review,” July 14, 2025

*** Philanthropy, Frank S. Meyer, and fusionism

“In early 1954, the William Volker Fund agreed to pay” Frank S. Meyer “$1,000, and, more significantly, subscribe him to scores of scholarly journals, to act as a scout of sorts for the philanthropy. … One of the talents Volker identified in Meyer’s reviewing scholarship was Meyer” himself.

He “parlayed this relationship into stronger connections and more money. He had petitioned Volker to award him a grant for a history of the United States from a libertarian perspective that he had begun as the 1940s transitioned to the 1950s coeval with the anti-Communist Democrat Meyer’s transformation into a right-wing Republican. Harold Luhnow, the nephew of the charity’s last namesake, informed him in July 1954 of $9,500 awarded toward the project.

“The money validated Frank. His ego needed it less than his bank account.”

As Meyer began working for the Volker Fund, it “soon took intense notice of another of Meyer’s projects that eventually joined the auspicious list” of its grantees. …

In June 1955, just as Meyer’s controversial “Collectivism Rebaptized” article was published, the Fund wrote him: “The Directors of the Volker Fund have approved your request for a postponement of the one-year renewal of the grant for the book on American history” and “[w]e have acted favorably on your request for a grant of $4,750 for the preparation of a book on the New Conservatism during the next six months.”

Years later, both works ultimately were published, the latter of which laid the intellectual foundation for conservative “fusionism.”

—      Daniel J Flynn, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, reviewed in “Philanthropy and The Man Who Invented Conservatism,” July 29, 2025

*** Rules of the road for nonprofit leaders

Overall, entities categorized as nonprofits under Internal Revenue Code § 501(c)(3) unfortunately operate within “an outdated, complex, one-size-fits-all, and negative legal framework, which is further complicated by outmoded professional practices.” For leaders of these nonprofits, there are eight good precepts to follow even external to the context of any specific legal situation or questions that may arise. Adhering to them, however, will likely help avoid legal problems. They are:

“1.     Keep the mission front and center.

“2.     Govern wisely.

“3.     Fill the coffers.

“4.     Go into business?

“5.     Treat your friends and colleagues well—just not too well.

“6.     Advocate for your cause.

“7.     Complete the paperwork.

“8.     Know how to change course.”

—      Elizabeth M. Schmidt, Rules of the Road for Nonprofit Leaders: Using the Law to Achieve Your Mission, reviewed in “Rules of the Road for Nonprofit Leaders is helpful, common-sense, plain-English legal primer,” August 4, 2025

*** Philanthropy and the making of the MAGA New Right

“One of the most frustrating things about politics today—and here I am thinking about the New Right mainly, but certainly not exclusively—is the amount of money, energy, and talent that it churns through, wasted, when there is always so much to be done.”

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The Claremont Institute “has certainly benefited from its populist pivot. Its profile rose sharpy, in some quarters, since its turn to Trumpism, and its donor base expanded.

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“Generally speaking, those on the New Right who formed the activist arm of the movement (and so also those who were more beholden to donors and the right-wing base) tended to side with Ukraine and the American establishment’s support for it.”

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Postliberals “are not beholden to GOP donors, or to the GOP base. Which means that, with the exception of their influence on JD Vance, they have been the least influential thinkers of the New Right.”

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The American Enterprise Institute headquarters is “one of those places that feels overflowing with money: The building is gorgeous and the art is real.”

—      Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, reviewed in “Philanthropy and Furious Minds,”November 10, 2025

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/thoughts-on-philanthropy-from-books-featured-in-the-giving-review-in-2025/