Could a weaponized Trump IRS wreck the progressive infrastructure by attacking the entire nonprofit ecosystem?
As an influential paper written in 1997 by Sally Covington on “the strategic philanthropy of conservative foundations” explains, these strategies began in the 1970s. Right-wing funders like the Coors, Scaife, Olin, and Bradley families connected ideology to institutions to politics to policy. They invested in public intellectuals and in media. They saw their common project as movement-building, and they provided long-term funding.
Center-left funders did none of this. Their philanthropy was project-based, scattershot, and faddish. Priorities and grantees changed with new presidents. The idea that they were engaged in a long-term ideological struggle made them uncomfortable. “The resulting imbalance has had profound consequences for policy debates and legislative decisions,” Covington wrote. “It has also had serious implications for how well American democracy functions …” In addition, the quest for foundation support tended to intensify the left’s chronic tendency to fragmentation and rivalry, as applicants for grants sought to differentiate their group from other natural allies.
In 2003, a former Clinton official named Rob Stein reduced these arguments to a PowerPoint presentation, which he shopped around to center-left donors and activists. The result was the creation of the Democracy Alliance, intended to bring more strategic coherence to center-left funding. The DA was dominated by its largest funders, who had outsized influence on which groups were selected as priority grantees.
As Micah Sifry wrote in a withering appraisal, written just after the little-remarked passing of Rob Stein in May 2022, “Unfortunately, instead of building the kind of institutions and investing in the kind of leaders who could genuinely counter the New Right, the Democracy Alliance’s donors prioritized institutions that were meant to strengthen the existing Democratic party, not replace it with something more ideologically coherent or less beholden to corporate power.”
