Progressive Foundations said to be hurting Democrats

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The killing of George Floyd and the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that followed drove an exceptionally large increase in foundation grants and pledges to criminal and racial justice reform groups and other causes, ranging from the United Negro College Fund to the Center for Antiracist Research and from the National Museum of African American History to the Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.

Candid — a website that connects “people who want to change the world with the resources they need to do it” — published “What does Candid’s grants data say about funding for racial equity in the United States?” by Anna Koob on July 24, 2020.

Koob wrote:

In the months since George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, we witnessed a surge in attention to longstanding anti-Black racism in the United States. Although racial inequality is hardly a new phenomenon, the public reaction to these events does feel bigger and more broad based, a trend that’s reflected in the well-documented rapid increase in related philanthropic giving to racial equity in a matter of weeks.

Before Floyd’s death, Candid found that philanthropies provided “$3.3 billion in racial equity funding” for the nine years from 2011 to 2019. Since then, Candid calculations revealed much higher totals for both 2020 and 2021: “50,887 grants valued at $12.7 billion” and “177 pledges valued at $11.6 billion.”

There are Democratic strategists who worry about unintended political consequences that could flow from this surge in philanthropic giving. Rob Stein, one of the founders of the Democracy Alliance, an organization of major donors on the left, argued in a phone interview that while most foundation spending is on programs that have widespread support, “when progressive philanthropists fund groups that promote extreme views like ‘defunding the police’ or that sanction ‘cancel culture,’ they are exacerbating intraparty conflict and stoking interparty backlash.” The danger, according to Stein, is that “some progressive politicians and funders are contributing to divisiveness within their ranks and giving fodder to the right.”

Matt Bennett, senior vice president of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, argued in an email

“Whether inadvertent or not, some progressive foundations are funding work that is shortsighted and harmful to the long-term progress they hope to achieve. “

However, Bennett continued, “It’s crystal clear that some ideas being pushed by activists and funded by lefty foundations go beyond that paradigm, treading into territory that is flat-out politically toxic and that undermine our collective goals.”

Bennett cited a post-2020 election study commissioned by Third Way and other groups that “found that Republicans used ‘Defund the Police’ as a cudgel against moderate Democrats, and it played a major role in the loss of more than a dozen House seats. These losses brought us to the brink of handing an insurrectionist the Speaker’s gavel.”

“It’s also clear,” in Bennett’s view,

that this work has led to a backlash, and it’s not confined to white voters. In Minneapolis, where a Defund the Police ballot initiative failed by a wide margin in November, it performed worst in the two districts with the heaviest Black populations. You have probably seen the Pew Research from October that showed declining support across the board for less funding for police. What’s even more striking is that on the question of whether police budgets should grow or shrink, Black and Hispanic Democrats are more in favor of higher police budgets than white Democrats

Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, wrote at the end of November, “It’s an undeniable fact that Democratic Party elites, progressive activists, foundation and think-tank officials, and most opinion journalists are well to the left of the party’s rank and file.”

It’s possible, Tomasky continued, “that certain issues, or ways of talking about certain issues, will be established as litmus tests within the party that could be quite problematic for Democrats trying to run in purple districts“

Tom Perriello, a former congressman from Virginia who is now executive director of George Soros’s Open Society-U.S., strongly defends the role of foundations.

Leading up to the 2020 election, foundations invested “$700 million in voter protection that probably held democracy together,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “Philanthropy saved the day.”

Critics who focus on the small set of controversial foundation programs that may be used by Republicans against Democrats, Perriello said, fail to recognize that “what is hurting Democrats is that there is not a core economic message and that allows Republicans to set these (cultural and racial) issues as a priority.”

Perriello cited same-sex marriage as an example of philanthropy initially “pushing the Overton window” farther than the electorate was willing to go, but, over time, “now it’s a winning issue.”

Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, argued in a phone interview that no consideration is — or can be — given to partisan political consequences

I asked Walker about the concerns raised by Stein and Bennett. “We support issues that are about progress and inclusion and justice, but the chips fall where they fall,” Walker said.

I also asked Walker about a subject that became a central issue in the 2021 Virginia governor’s race: “critical race theory.” Walker said that the foundation supports proponents of the theory

The Nov. 2 Minneapolis election provided a case study of the complex politics of the defund-the-police movement. Voters in Minneapolis rejected — by 56 percent to 44 percent — an amendment to the city charter that would have dismantled the police department and replaced it with a department of public safety.
All three wards with majorities or pluralities of Black voters — wards 4, 5 and 6 — voted against the amendment by margins larger than the citywide average, at 61.2 percent to 38.8 percent. Voters in three other of the city’s 13 wards — 8, 9 and 10 — strongly supported the amendment to disband the police department, 57 percent to 43 percent. Voters in wards 8, 9 and 10 are majority or plurality white, with whites making up 54.1 percent of the population of the three wards taken together, according to data provided to The Times by Jeff Matson of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

The battle over the amendment reverberated into the races for City Council, resulting in the defeat of some incumbents who supported dismantling the police department.

Some philanthropies, in the view of Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, have inadvertently become trapped in the politics of polarization.

This set of beliefs is particularly problematic at this juncture, Kramer continued, because “the public has lost faith in all our institutions. Neoliberalism is dead, but in the absence of something better, people are drifting toward ethnonationalism as a way to explain what seems wrong about the world to them.”

For leaders of the Democratic Party, these developments pose a particularly frustrating problem because they pay an electoral price for policy proposals and rhetoric that are outside party control.

Some might argue that Republicans have the same problem in reverse, but that is not the case. The Republican Party cannot rein in its radical wing and has shown no real inclination to do so. Worse, to succeed in 2022 and 2024, it may not need to.