Minus the swipe at “Conservatism Inc., including flagship journals like the National Review and flagship think tanks like the Heritage Foundation,” as a “museum of mummies” — a characterization that I, as someone who does not self-identify as a mummy, am obligated to take issue with — Michael Lind’s new Tablet essay offers a fantastic systems-level analysis of the ideological influence of the left-wing foundation-NGO-industrial-complex in today’s elite progressive institutions.
“On today’s center left,” Lind writes, “the groupthink imposed by behind-the-scenes donors and their favored nonprofits and media allies is resulting in electoral disaster . . . for Democrats.” While “in the 1990s, The New Yorker, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly all represented distinctive flavors of the center left,” Lind argues that “today, they are bare Xeroxes of each other, promoting and rewriting the output of single-issue environmental, identitarian, and gender radical nonprofits, which all tend to be funded by the same set of progressive foundations and individual donors.” In essence, powerful progressive foundations now define the terms and parameters of debate:
Who decides what is and is not permissible for American progressives to think or discuss or support? The answer is the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and other donor foundations, an increasing number of which are funded by fortunes rooted in Silicon Valley. It is this donor elite, bound together by a set of common class prejudices and economic interests, on which most progressive media, think tanks, and advocacy groups depend for funding.
The center-left donor network uses its financial clout, exercised through its swarms of NGO bureaucrats, to impose common orthodoxy and common messaging on their grantees. The methods by which they enforce this discipline can be described as chain-ganging and shoe-horning.
Chain-ganging (a term I have borrowed from international relations theory) in this context means implicitly or explicitly banning any grantee from publicly criticizing the positions of any other grantee. . . . Shoe-horning is what I call the progressive donor practice of requiring all grantees to assert their fealty to environmentalist orthodoxy and support for race and gender quotas, even if those topics have nothing to do with the subject of the grant. It is not necessary for the donors to make this explicit; their grantees understand without being told, like the favor-seeking knights of Henry II: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” In the last few years, even the most technocratic center-left policy programs—advocating slightly higher earned income tax credits or whatever—have often rewritten their mission statements to refer to “climate justice” and “diversity” and routinely sprinkle grantspeak like “the racial reckoning” and “the climate emergency” throughout their policy briefs in the hope of pleasing program officers at big progressive foundations.
The influence of foundations and nonprofits like the Ford Foundation, whose elite ideological priorities are wildly out of step with that of most Americans, is one of the most significant long-term institutional problems facing the Democratic Party — and the broader Left — today. I made a similar point earlier this week in my piece “Don’t Expect a Sister Souljah Moment from Democrats Anytime Soon,” where I wrote that the Democratic Party “seems incapable of distancing itself from the Left’s increasingly radical stance on contemporary culture-war issues such as critical race theory (CRT) and radical sexual and gender ideology,” visible in the fact that “even in the face of a coming red wave, the party has continued to double down on the deeply unpopular left-wing cultural ideology that has captured the imagination of its activist class.” Like Lind, I think this problem has a lot to do with the institutional incentives on the contemporary Left, which make it impossible for them to moderate on social issues — even when it’s in their obvious political self-interest:
You’d think that Democrats facing difficult races in 2022 and beyond would be doing everything they could to distance themselves from their party’s national image on social issues. But the outsized influence of the party’s activist wing, powerful teachers’ unions, and the left-leaning corporate media make it difficult for even the ostensible moderates to pivot to the center on cultural issues. Think about the Left’s contemporary line on the culture war: CRT isn’t being taught in schools and, even if it is, that’s a good thing, because it’s actually just honestly teaching the history of race in America, and parental concerns about it are illegitimate and rooted in racism. Alternatively, teaching young children about gender identity is literally saving lives — and anyone who opposes the ideology in public schools is literally murdering transgender kids. These lines have become something approximating conventional wisdom in elite left-wing institutions — and those institutions define the worldview of the modern Democratic Party.
Against that backdrop, how could a moderate Democrat “pivot” on these issues? You can’t “moderate” on the murder of trans kids, nor can you “compromise” on actual, honest-to-God racism. It’s a “yes” or “no” question. If that’s really what’s at stake, any concessions are morally unacceptable. Moderate Democrats in both the House and the Senate have been willing to break with their party on economic issues such as spending and overzealous regulation. But on CRT, gender ideology, and other cultural issues, the entire party apparatus is in lockstep.
For the first time in decades, the Right looks like it’s positioned to take the upper hand in the culture wars, as I’ve discussed on numerous occasions in the past. That’s a historic opportunity — not just to actually win on issues that social conservatives care about but also to channel the electorate’s alienation from the Left into a broader, sustainable political coalition that can deliver on conservative priorities across the spectrum. For example, anti-critical race theory (CRT) activists like the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo, working with legacy conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation, are in the midst of capitalizing on the grassroots anti-CRT backlash to implement sweeping education reforms at the state level, including traditional conservative priorities like school choice. (And as an aside, Heritage’s work with Rufo on new issues like CRT complicates the story Lind tells about the “lobotomized” nature of legacy conservatism’s intellectual stagnation.) This year, 2022, is “going to be the greatest year for education reform in a generation,” Rufo told me back in December. In that sense, as I wrote at the time, “the new anti-CRT agenda is not so much a departure from the traditional conservative education movement as it is a renewal, providing new political capital for advancing those more traditional conservative policies.”
Conservatives rightly point to the Left’s increasing radicalism on social issues as reason for these recent victories. But we don’t spend enough time discussing why. That’s why essays like Lind’s are so helpful. Sun Tzu’s famous remark is applicable here: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” Lambasting progressive cultural radicalism is not enough. To fully capitalize on the Left’s institutional capture, the Right must first understand the nature of that dynamic. If it can do that, it will reap the benefits in the long term.