Democracy funders ponder "now what?"

A new survey demonstrates worries and regrets

Democracy reform supporters within philanthropy understand the state the American system is in and are broadly pessimistic about its future. They’re starting to lose faith in their own ability to strengthening it. Is the field’s muddled understanding of the democratic system actually limiting its impact?

That’s the question I’m taking away from a follow-up round of polling released Thursday by Democracy Fund that took the temperature of different types of funders in the field. DF asked funders some of these same questions about a month before the 2024 election as part of its admirable effort to raise understanding of philanthropic support for democracy reform above the anecdotal. President Joe Goldman and the survey team do a great job highlighting the top takeaways so I encourage readers to check out the report directly, noting as the survey team does that the data isn’t complete enough to give more than suggestive notions of overall attitudes. ¹

(If you are new to this newsletter, I wrote early on about how little information about sector funding trends exist)

I think the responses demonstrate more than a lack of collective confidence in what to do about the surge of autocratic governance in the new administration, which I think everyone in the democracy reform space shares to some degree or another. The data contains signals of knowledge gaps, insufficient strategic thought, and unshakable assumptions about democracy that negatively impact its effectiveness. I have no illusions that philanthropy will play the determinant role in reversing this post-constitutional assault: that’s a societal-level challenge now. But the survey spotlights behaviors and assumptions that contribute minimally to the cause.

Knowledge gaps

The way the DF survey team break out responses from different sizes and types of funders is really helpful to inferring how the different capacities to gather knowledge about the democratic system impact different types of funders. Foundations, obviously, have much greater staff capacity dedicated to learning and research than individual funders and donor advised funds. I get the sense here that individuals and DAFs are struggling.

Small donors, for example, are the most optimistic of all funders about the ability of the current set of democratic institutions to address “emerging challenges.” A straight majority (51%) think this, whereas only 29% of large donors do. Oddly, almost all (94%) small donors who responded said they were "very concerned” political polarization as a challenge to the democratic system.

Political polarization certainly has received plenty of attention over the last decade, including the coveted Ezra Klein treatment. But scholars are walking back the popularized idea that polarization itself is a threat to democracy, rather than a bi-product of the contestation for political rights in the system. The dimensions of polarization are morphing once again in the new Trump Administration to reflect a simple pro and anti-regime position.

What I see in the small donor data is a group of politically moderate people whose partisan factions have evaporated in Congress, especially on the GOP side. Their understanding of good political health is nostalgic. They probably have overconfidence in their own understanding of the democratic system because they’ve made a lot of money, and some are frittering it away on politically-themed social cohesion work.

The donor advised fund community is very slippery to grasp strategically because it’s fragmented and gated behind advisors. Advisors theoretically should be providing more support to their clients than donors doing it on their own. Nevertheless, networks and advisors of funders were the only subset to report a planned net decrease of giving to democracy-related organizations — 36% reporting decrease versus 28% increase or steady state. A large majority (63%) were unsure of their planned giving last year, so they seem to be breaking away from the field fairly rapidly. Obviously, that’s bad.

I am very curious about the informational resources DAFs and donor provide to individuals about American democracy itself. It’s my understanding that most of the advice these mechanisms provide individual funders is about possible areas of activity in which to invest. Are there people who actually know something about the complexities of American politics and institutions working with such donors? A lot of that work is probably falling to other larger funders, who may not have enough resources themselves for a strategic approach to such knowledge formation.

Please sound of in the comments, but do some of these people really know what they’re doing? Are they making funding decisions based on what they read in The Atlantic? I have met folks in this category who know a ton about the democratic system and its problems, but it falls on them to do the educating and the time suck is real. How can we collectively help?

The hollow parties

Federal tax law prevents philanthropic donors from engaging in election-related political activity on behalf of parties or candidates. Nevertheless, the two activities that survey respondents identified as needing the most new attention are “investing in movement building and grassroots organizing” and “supporting effective messaging on key issues.” These sound like functions political parties should (and of course, do) take on themselves.

This similarity isn’t a sign that philanthropy is skirting the rules. I think it reflects the current “hollow” state of the national parties that Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld describe in their recent book. Parties used to be engines of local political organization and mobilization when they were more prominent social institutions because that stuff was quite a number of party members’ paid jobs. What we call “messaging” would have been the product of struggles within parties over policy preferences and supremacy among constituent groups that played out in a ladder of party of conventions, percolating up from the wards.

For Democrats, a lot of that work now has been assumed by organizations connected to core constituencies. Progressive philanthropy is on the outskirts of that outsourcing process, promoting the organizing and mobilization of issue-based and constituent-based activism can include voter mobilization. This work is to some extent subsidizing the Democratic Party. The hollowness of the party as a membership organization, according to Scholzman and Rosenfeld, means that party officials often find themselves orchestrating balance between various activist factions against the legacy of neoliberal policy choices favored by its growing professional class core. The result is a mishmash of incoherent ideas that neither satisfy nor empower those mobilized, assuming Democrats win governing majorities in the first place.

The irony is that grassroots organization and mobilization were developed as political tools to be used when party politics failed to be sufficiently responsive/were partly antagonistic toward: think union organizing before the late-1930s, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement. One of Scholzman’s other books discusses how the labor movement eventually successfully integrated itself into the core of the Democratic machine.

The Hollow Parties closes with a reassertion of the value of such integration of constituent group and party for building actual political power. “To allow parties space to grow, funders should resist giving to groups, often weakly tied into local networks, that impinge on parties’ core tasks,” the write. “And they should recognize the distinct roles of genuine social movements and genuine political parties powered by ordinary citizens working to improve their communities.” Although I doubt that advice applies directly to very many of the organizations DF surveyed, it is nevertheless worth heeding for democracy reform funders supporting mobilization efforts. Parties not only play a critical (if now socially diminished) role in American political life, but they have been traditional avenues of power for people who need it. Redirecting grassroots energy toward local and state party engagement is an alternate pathway for empowerment in a field often hostile to political parties in the first place. It would be a case of doing more by doing less.

What we talk about when we talk about strategy

The one area of the survey I found most concerning was on donor strategy and related activity. This round of the survey asked funders directly if the field did not have strategies to “significantly improve U.S. democracy.” Seven in ten respondents it did not.

My working definition of strategy is the plan of action to achieve an end-state goal. The challenge of the end-state goal dictates what activities to include in the plan. For example, the end state of the major organizations of the Civil Rights Movement was the elimination of de jure segregation and restoration of African-American voting rights. The most efficient way to achieve that goal was not to overturn every state Jim Crow law, but to have Congress act. The Movement then created tactics that would compel Congress to do so where no significant political momentum yet existed.

The survey proceeds to ask respondents what the pro-democracy movement needs to invest in more substantially “in preparation for future election cycles.” It also asks respondents whether they agree or disagree with statements about where the coalition made mistakes in its strategy, like “underestimated the pervasiveness and resilience of the authoritarian movement” (83% agree).

The end state described behind this section is a string of election cycles where an authoritarian presidential candidate doesn’t win a free and fair election and the level of political activity in support of that autocrat is diminished. As good as that sounds right now, it no longer reflects a workable end state for the democracy. In truth, it never did. Satisfaction with governing institutions is a generations-long problem. The Trump Administration may be bulldozing executive branch capacity, but it was in need of massive renovation anyway. The balance of power within the democracy is severely tilted toward the wealthy interests.

Some element of the pro-democracy movement has to be defining an end state for the system to restore equal justice. This end state will have multiple components for different branches of government. It might not even reflect the current constitutional structure. Countering authoritarianism, building a grassroots movement to support various forms of equality, improving the content of media markets, reforming institutions: these are tactics to strategic goals. The pro-democracy field has an under-theorized conception of its end-state goals. It needs to invest in imagining the right end state and then fund reform projects that contribute directly to that vision. This kind of purpose will be more satisfying and effective than living election cycle to election cycle, hoping the right mix of elected officials emerges to fix all the problems.

1. Although I worked for Democracy Fund, I have no insight into these surveys nor do I speak for the organization in any way.