The Uneasy Alliance Between Progressives and Billionaire Donors
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Jack dorsey is one of a handful of mega-donors whose giving has taken a left turn. Frederic Legrand - COMEO/shutterstock.
When the New York Times published its damning report on the tax shenanigans that let Donald Trump dodge his obligations to the public coffers for years, if not decades, the left’s indignation with the billionaire class peaked once again. “Donald Trump is a liar, a cheater, and a crooked businessman, yes,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted. “But he’s also taking advantage of a broken, corrupt and unequal system that’s built for people like him to do what he did.”
Warren’s opinion reflects what is fast becoming progressive canon: that the American economic system stands in need of a massive overhaul, one that will substantially diminish the wealth and power of those at the very top. For many, to be super-rich is to be super-complicit. And no amount of philanthropy, whatever surface-level good it accomplishes, can paper over the inherent injustice of today’s economic system.
To put it mildly, progressives don’t like billionaires very much right now. But at the same time, those of us watching big donors know that progressive movements have never been better-funded by the upper crust. More than at any point in recent memory, members of the nation’s far upper class are backing causes like racial justice, grassroots power-building, civic engagement among the underrepresented—even workers’ rights. MacKenzie Scott, Pierre Omidyar and Jack Dorsey are just a few of the biggest names whose giving has taken a sharply progressive turn lately.
While the contributions of those three alone are reshaping the financial prospects of many a justice-oriented nonprofit, deeper shifts are underway. The wider field of wealthy progressives is scrambling to send money downstream in the face of escalating crises. Left-leaning donors are getting more strategic, engaging in political combat via 501(c)(4)s and PACs, alongside movement-oriented 501(c)(3) nonprofits. There’s more direct acknowledgment of the ways in which racial injustice has given rise to economic inequality.
To be clear, only a small fraction of America’s billionaires and multi-millionaires have embraced progressive grantmaking. But that fraction isn’t as tiny as it once was, and the arrival of more unabashed justice funders at the top rungs of philanthropy may affect the giving behavior of the super-rich more broadly. In the short term, especially during a pandemic and a tumultuous election season, that support is crucial. But can progressive movements remain on course when they’re bankrolled by the one percent? And is revolutionary change really what these newly woke donors want?
A Sector in Transition?
Even if they’re still the exception to the rule among the donor class, progressive attitudes have become increasingly common among nonprofit professionals (check out coverage of our recent survey exploring this dynamic). To get a sense of this, imagine the reaction if newcomer MacKenzie Scott had announced $1.7 billion in grants to conservative think tanks and right-wing advocacy groups this summer. People would have lost it. But because she donated to racial and gender justice organizations, environmental groups and the like, no such outrage ensued. Instead, commentators inside and outside the sector lauded Scott’s new giving as a breath of fresh air from the billionaire class—Inside Philanthropy included.
Something similar goes for the evolving giving of Pierre and Pam Omidyar, which we’ve been covering a lot this year. Already a die-hard opponent of all things Trumpian, Pierre Omidyar has been nailing in his progressive bona fides with a program of economic justice grantmaking that’s very uncharacteristic for someone worth north of $18 billion. That new giving from the Omidyar Network comes on top of existing left-leaning giving for civic causes through the Democracy Fund and various social justice-centered media and journalism projects.
Another up-and-coming progressive mega-donor is Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has spent the past several months releasing a torrent of big grants to social justice organizations through his new LLC, Start Small. Despite the name, Dorsey’s plan seems to be anything but. Now worth approximately $10 billion, Dorsey has amassed around $3 billion in Start Small and an adjacent DAF. About $223 million of that has already gone out the door.
COVID response has been the primary thrust of Dorsey’s Start Small giving, but just take a look at some of the grants (conveniently outlined in this tracking document). Ten million went to the REFORM Alliance to get PPE into jails and prisons; $1.75 million went to the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. A total of $1 million went to Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives and the Color of Change Education Fund in June, with additional gifts through the summer to racial and gender justice initiatives. August saw a $10 million gift to Boston University’s Antiracism Center, and at the end of September, $2.5 million went to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.
Though they’re hardly the only big givers trending progressive right now, those three make telling examples because of the sheer size of their fortunes (together totaling over $80 billion), their relative youth and the fact that they represent first-generation wealth. They’re also living proof that no progressive mega-donor comes without his or her faults.
While some give her points for her split from Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott’s extraordinary wealth remains bound up in Amazon. The e-commerce giant’s monopolistic nature and poor treatment of its workers are poorly regarded by the left.
Dorsey, meanwhile, helmed Twitter as it became a controversial forum for those with, shall we say, extreme opinions to air their views and even harass others. Dorsey doesn’t get quite as much flack as Mark Zuckerberg, but the fact that Twitter is a certain U.S. president’s favorite app for late-night rants isn’t doing its founder many favors. Dorsey has also been criticized for vocally resisting tax hikes on Bay Area corporations meant to pay for human services.
As for Omidyar, eBay isn’t in the news as much as Amazon or Twitter, but it’s still a place for everyday Americans to exercise their capitalist energies while the firm takes a cut—fitting for a man once described as a “philanthrocapitalist.”
The origins of their fortunes aside, it’s also true that while these three billionaires’ giving may be progressive, it’s hardly democratic. They’re still exercising the right to pick by fiat which nonprofits get course-altering gifts. And while they may be ceding some of their power—especially in Scott’s case—by offering no-strings-attached general support, a case can be made that much of that power is going to their well-meaning, well-compensated consultants and staff rather than to leaders on the ground.
Promise and Pitfalls
In a time of rising support from the far upper class, movements need to be wary of “movement capture,” which political scientist Megan Ming Francis defines as “the process by which private funders use their influence to shape the agenda and strategies of vulnerable civil rights organizations.” In an article in HistPhil co-authored with Erica Kohl-Arenas, Francis outlines just how much the need to cater to institutional funders shifted the priorities of Civil Rights-era movement organizations, i.e., away from an initial focus on racial violence and toward educational reform.
Francis and Kohl-Arenas point to efforts by places like Arnold Ventures, CZI and the Charles Koch Foundation to advance reformism on matters of criminal justice—rather than abolition—as one area where movement capture may be underway today. The same moderating impulse is likely present wherever philanthropy and social justice intersect. As observers and participants in the field of philanthropy, we can’t simply note down some big donor’s gift to Color of Change or the Center for Popular Democracy and call that donor progressive without also considering how the promise of that money may alter how the recipient behaves.
The good news is that more left-leaning one-percenters seem to be aware of those dynamics these days. That’s particularly true among second- or third-generation heirs, some of whom have taken on prominent roles as donor organizers in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, and especially in the wake of the 2016 election. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, whom we profiled recently, is one such heir who played a founding role at both the Solidaire Network and Way to Win.
And while they’re older, Nicholas and Susan Pritzker’s Libra Foundation is becoming a hub for philanthropic organization around racial justice. Under the leadership of Crystal Hayling, Libra masterminded the recent debut of the Democracy Frontlines Fund, which saw both the Sobrato family and Eric and Wendy Schmidt take some of their first steps into full-on racial justice movement funding. Just to provide a sense of the growing diversity of that movement’s backers, a few other Democracy Frontlines Fund supporters include the MacArthur and Hewlett Foundations, investor Michael Moritz, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, and next-gen figures like James Walton and Nicholas and Susan Pritzker’s daughter Regan Pritzker.
Despite all that, conservatives also have a point when they sound off on progressive givers’ rising use of so-called “dark money” via 501(c)(4)s and DAFs, as well as massive PACs. Since 2016, left-leaning foundations and donors have sustained a long-term effort to become more strategic, especially by channeling funds to movement groups organizing in communities of color. More than ever before, they’ve sought to adapt the conservative playbook of longer-term, multi-pronged funding based more solidly in ideology and values than some technocratic measure of “good.”
Room to Breathe
By all accounts, that more-strategic approach has notched some decent wins in the form of electoral gains in 2018 and the continued normalization of justice critiques, particularly with regard to race. Still, wealthy converts to the progressive cause should take care that they don’t inadvertently steer the enterprise of progressive philanthropy onto a course where the one and only goal is quantifiable political impact. Because let’s be real: On both the right and the left, much of this movement and advocacy funding may be apolitical on paper, but it’s all too political in spirit. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, especially since progressives have lagged conservatives on that front for decades and may finally be on the verge of catching up.
My qualms have more to do with a potential erosion of meaningful civil society in a future where rival camps of billionaires use philanthropy, media and political giving to weaponize “movements” to do battle, sans any sense of bottom-up leadership. To read either side’s characterization of the other’s donors is to believe we’re already living in that world, and have been for some time.
But the same doesn’t hold true when one listens to either side’s description of civil society as it should be. Conservative philanthropy, for its part, has spent the half-century since the Powell Memo holding up community- and church-centered charity and the goodwill of enlightened businesspeople, which it casts as apolitical, as an antidote to an atomized society and blind government overreach. Progressive donors recognize that “traditional” American civil society has always been inherently political, in that it tends to privilege and empower the wealthy and the white.
In that context, funding Black-led movements and other forms of intersectional organizing isn’t just about building power toward potential legislative victories, although that’s part of it. It’s also about extending the boundaries of civil society to include those whom it has often turned away as full participants and leaders, not just as recipients of charity. If civil society is to be a bulwark against authoritarianism, it must recognize that under the status quo, a significant proportion of our society already lives under functionally authoritarian oversight by employers, landlords, courts and police, spouses, credit bureaus—the list goes on.
The very wealthy, who are subject to practically no oversight at all, have spent the past half-century making it not only possible, but practically encouraged, for a billionaire to pay just $750 in income tax. Trump’s example is extreme, but it’s still illustrative. As a class, the super-rich have accumulated near-unprecedented power and wealth. But they’re still individuals with their own ideologies, values and social circles. Perhaps instead of blanket condemnation, progressives should be using this moment of upheaval to further encourage a restorative justice mindset across our society—even at the very top. Judging from what’s happened so far in 2020, that actually doesn’t seem impossible.
