Author interview: Why Democracy Needs the Rich (part 1 of 2)

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

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John O. McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and a prolific and influential writer and commentator in both the scholarly and popular press. He served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice from 1987 to 1991 and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

He co-authored Originalism and the Good Constitution with Michael B. Rappaport and authored Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance through Technology. He writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Law & Liberty, and City Journal, and his work has also appeared in National Affairs and Policy Review.

In his new Why Democracy Needs the Rich, from Encounter Books, McGinnis contests the seemingly increasingly common view that the ultra-wealthy are eroding the practice of democracy in America—contrarily arguing that they are actually vital to preserving, and in fact strengthening, democratic systems.

Wealth “is not democracy’s rival,” McGinnis concludes, “but one of its catalysts: the reserve of independence that checks conformity, the counterweight that steadies the scale against rival elites, the reservoir that funds excellence, and the restless engine that helps renew liberal democracy, generation after generation.” Offering examples, he frequently cites the wealthy’s philanthropy as part of its democracy-catalyzing.

McGinnis kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation last month. The almost 19-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. During the first part, we talk about the “clerisy” and how to think about the relationship of the wealthy and their philanthropy to it.

Pluralism?

Why Democracy Needs the Rich presents a “variety of arguments about what the rich do for democracy, why they’re a positive effect on democracy, unlike what many people think,” McGinnis tells me. “One that’s important is that they serve as a counterweight to other people with more influence. A premise of my book is that not everyone has equal influence in democracy, in a representative democracy,” and it’s “impossible to make sure that they have equal influence.

“The real question is, Do we have a pluralism of views and perspectives?” he asks.

The rich do have that pluralism, and they are one of the few groups—because of their independence and resources—that can counter what I call professional influencers ,who obviously have a lot more influence, because that’s what they do for a living. They include the media, they include academics, they include entertainers, and they include the bureaucracy. And all of those groups, unlike the rich, lean in one political direction: all to the left, and sometimes very dramatically so ….

In the book, McGinnis places these groups in historical context, referencing “the clerisy” of influential intellectual elites, as it’s been characterized by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, among others. Others have seen contemporary philanthropy as part of this clerisy—in fact, since the time of David Rockefeller and other initial big American foundations, perhaps even as creating and then maintaining it in its current, monoculturally progressive form.

“I would say that the clerisy certainly does not begin with support from the rich,” however, McGinnis says. “That term comes from Samuel Coleridge, so it’s a term that comes from a long time ago.” Coleridge and others thought that “with the decline of the nobility and the clergy, there will be some group that would be shaping society and that’s the name he gave to it,” according to McGinnis.

“I think they’re quite independent of the wealthy. I think their views are also quite independent of the wealthy,” he continues. “They’re worried about the influence of the rich and would like to cut it down, because they’re an alternative source of influence.

Balance?

Maybe philanthropy gives the clerisy “more resources to use, we can talk about that, but they’re not the cause of the clerisy,” McGinnis later says. “I would certainly acknowledge that” the country’s establishment foundations “give more resources to places like Harvard University, that’s absolutely true,” but “if they didn’t exist, Harvard University would still be, I think, pretty much the same ….”

As for what some would consider the non-conservative “managerial elite” of “symbolic capitalists” in America’s big philanthropic institutions, “Well, they have some of the same interests as the clerisy and so when they capture a foundation, they look a lot like the clerisy,” according to McGinnis. “I would still claim even with these foundations that are the from the legacy rich, that we’re still on the whole better off. …

He cites initiatives funded by conservative philanthropy, including: in law schools, the Federalist Society and the law-and-economics movement; in higher education more generally, the creation of discrete centers promoting classical liberal thought, like the James Madison Program at Princeton University; and in the K-12 context, school choice.

To McGinnis, addressing the inclination on the part of some to contemplate aggressive reform of the nonprofit sector, including philanthropy, “the question is the counterfactual: if we clamp down on the rich—if our view is that, ‘Well, it’s just a mistake to allow, as some people think, to allow the … tax deductions for philanthropy’”—he asks, “would this, on net, be good for democracy? I think not.”

McGinnis’ point in Why Democracy Needs the Rich, he says, is that the clerisy and the wealthy

have some balance to one another, and if you start clamping down on the wealthy, you’re not going to get a better world. Now, maybe you get a better world if you could simply get rid of the liberal wealthy, but that’s really not a plausible world either, right? You just can’t have a structure like that. We can’t give the government the power to make those decisions, because that would be, again, worse than the disease.

The wealthy are “willing to take risks” and “they’re willing to occupy the ideological space that we might not otherwise see and that’s an advantage, because then we got to evaluate these ideas,” according to McGinnis. “It’s good to have the wealthy be able to fund public goods without the agreement of the government and the tax incentives help them do that. We get more than we would if they don’t have those tax incentives. So, I think on balance, that’s a good idea.”

In the conversation’s second part, McGinnis discusses America as both a commercial republic and a philanthropic republic; the relationship between the civil society about which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote and the tax-incentivized nonprofit sector in its current form; the wealthy and artificial intelligence; and sensible regulation and who’s best positioned to formulate it.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/author-interview-why-democracy-needs-the-rich-part-1-of-2/