Editors’ Note: HistPhil co-editor Benjamin Soskis examines the place of philanthropy within the recently surging critique of “The Groups,” the term applied collectively to progressive advocacy organizations, which some have blamed for the Democrats’ November defeat.

In weeks after November 5^th, amidst the maelstrom of election post-mortems, an interview that journalist Ezra Klein conducted with the writer Michael Lind came to represent an especially thoughtful version of one leading response: it was the fault of “The Groups.” This was the nebulous, somewhat sinister name given to the totality of progressive single-issue advocacy organizations that critics griped had pushed the Democratic party over the last several years to endorse unpopular positions on “cultural” (read non-economic) issues, stances that came back to bite them with voters. Increasingly, these groups function as the real power base in Democratic politics, Lind and other proponents of the critique contend.

Klein, the pundit-Pope of center-left reasonableness, pushed back a bit on some of Lind’s claims, but seemed to agree with his general diagnosis, and about “the power of this nonprofit complex in the Democratic Party” more generally. The Biden Administration seemed to offer them a de facto veto over many components of policymaking, he suggested, and sometimes even to offload major decisions onto them. He added that in his own reporting, he’s noted how often individuals move back and forth between philanthropy, nonprofit advocacy, and politics, all engaged in a shared insular discourse. “There’s been this dynamic where you have these groups that are claiming to speak for very, very wide swaths of the electorate and persuading Democrats of things that those parts of the electorate simply don’t believe,” he said. “But it has proved to be a misleading form of politics. Because these aren’t mass-membership groups.”

Similar indictments have proliferated on blogs and op-ed pages. In the New York Times, Adam Jentleson, Sen. John Fetterman’s former chief of staff, counseled Democrats to “declar[e] independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win.” The writer Ruy Teixeira urged Democrats to “throw the Groups under the bus,” arguing that they helped to convince the working class that their welfare “is no longer front and center” in the party’s calculations. You didn’t have to look far to find many, many more examples.

By now, most HistPhil readers have likely had their fill of them. So why make these recriminations the basis for a post? Because, beyond their role in debates over electoral strategy, they represent an important, if subtle, new chapter in the long history of Americans’ critical engagement with philanthropy and its relationship with democracy.

This might come as a surprise, if you’ve read the standard progressive counter to “The Groups” critique, which frames it as the predictable, almost reflexive, “punching left” response of centrists to electoral defeat, a warmed-over reworking of the complaints about “special interests” or the “Professional Left” that Democratic elite have gravitated toward in the past, with an added dash of anti-wokeness, and sprinkling of recent take-downs of the PMC.

There is some truth to this assessment. Much of “The Groups” critique does sound familiar. But there are some novel elements within it worth highlighting. And one of them is the prominent place granted to progressive donors that were rarely found within previous grievances. Centrist complaints about progressive “special interests” are now also complaints about the influence of left-leaning philanthropy, without a clear sense of where one begins and the other ends. Lind, for instance, argued that progressive nonprofits championed extreme positions not as a response to grassroots pressure but “to pry open the wallets of a small number of billionaire megadonors.” After all, he told Klein, “if you just are advocating for what everybody believes…then you’ve won. Nobody’s going to write you a check.”

To appreciate the novelty of this line of critique, it’s important to situate it alongside other dominant ways of understanding the relationship between philanthropy, social movements and civic life. “The Groups” critique can be clearly differentiated from two other approaches to this tangle of issues. The first, which has deep roots within progressive circles, is the charge that funders co-opt—or “capture,” in the phrase of political scientist Megan Ming Francis—movements, moderating them or shifting them in directions that reflect donor preferences and strategies. The second, advanced by political scientist Rob Reich most notably, is that one way in which philanthropy can claim democratic legitimation is by exerting a counter-majoritarian influence in the supply of public goods, and to experiment and take risks that politicians or the market do not have strong incentives to embrace. “The Groups” critique clashes at various points with both. It sees less antagonism between funders and movement grantees than the first does, and finds philanthropy’s support for minoritarian positions not a source of democratic legitimacy but a sign of democratic erosion.

On the other hand, “The Groups” critique shares significant points of overlap with one of the most influential conceptualizations of transformations in civil society of the last several decades, identified most closely with Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol. In her work, Skocpol has charted the shift from a civic culture dominated by broad-based, cross-class, federated membership organizations, requiring and encouraging active participation, to one dominated by large, professionally managed national organizations, for whom membership is largely defined by the act of making a financial donation. It’s not uncommon for proponents of “The Groups” critique to invoke Skocpol for both historical context and normative framing, with the ascendence of “The Groups” marking the finale of her declension narrative, one that demands a return to a more participatory ethos.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there is also overlap between the “The Groups” critique and another critical lens that has been applied to recent trends in the growth of civil society, one associated with the term “the nonprofit industrial complex.” For much of the last two decades, that term has been closely associated with the left and with a radical structural critique of the nonprofit sector. The term builds on President Eisenhower’s warnings about the “military-industrial complex,” made in his 1961 Farewell Address, and first gained prominence beyond radical circles through The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, a volume published in 2007 by INCITE!, a women of color collective dedicated to anti-violence.

Taking inspiration from theories of the “prison industrial complex,” the authors understood the nonprofit industrial complex as “a system of relationships between the State (or local and federal governments), the owning classes, foundations, and non-profit/NGO social service and social justice organizations.” They were particularly concerned with the pressures experienced by radical movements to incorporate into the complex, largely by taking on nonprofit status, which in turn compelled activists to moderate their ambitions and to shift focus from organizing to corporate management, professionalization, and fundraising. Ultimately, the authors warn that “the framework of funding, in which organizations expect to be funded by benefactors rather than by their constituents, negatively impacts social movements” by distancing them from the communities they purport to represent.

Yet if the term originated on the left, by now indictments of the “nonprofit industrial complex” are just as likely to come from the right or center. And, in fact, it has often made an appearance in “The Groups” critique. The common use of the term points to convergence around a key claim: that philanthropy erodes the bonds of accountability that connect movements to the broader publics they serve. Plenty of people who do not agree on much when it comes to policy or ideology seem to agree on that point.

“The Groups” critique is having its day in the sun, but variants of it have been percolating for years. Lind himself published a version of it in Tablet in 2022, in which he sketched out a much more detailed case against the the “billionaire-funded bureaucratic apparatus” that is “the nonprofit industrial complex.” “The center-left donor network uses its financial clout, exercised through its swarms of NGO bureaucrats,” he argued, “to impose common orthodoxy and common messaging on their grantees.” His chief concern in the piece is the groupthink fostered by this network; he claims it has shrunk intellectual space to the extent that he could pronounce “The End of Progressive Intellectual Life”:

“[I]n one area of public policy or politics after another, Progressivism Inc. has shut down debate on the center left through its interlocking networks of program officers, nonprofit functionaries, and editors and writers, all of whom can move with more or less ease between these roles during their careers as bureaucratic functionaries whose salaries are ultimately paid by America’s richest families and individuals. The result is a spectacularly well-funded NGO-sphere whose intellectual depth and breadth are contracting all the time…

“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.”

This narrative stems from a very different reading of the history of philanthropic support for movements than the one progressives often subscribe to, in which they point somewhat jealously to conservative philanthropists’ success in building up a movement which came to dominate the political and intellectual scene with patient, long-term funding. Lind doesn’t deny the power of conservative philanthropy, but he regards it less as a model than as a cautionary tale, given that he believes right-wing funders came to squelch dissenting voices within the movement, leading to a stultifying orthodoxy within conservative research organizations and publications. He called this a “foundation-driven extinction-level event in our nation’s intellectual life” and warned that it was happening again, this time on the other ideological pole.

This emphasis on insularity and homogeneity, and on the frictionless traffic between various nodes within the “nonprofit industrial complex”—academic institution, think tanks, media outlets, foundations and funding organizations, advocacy groups, and then public office—is another important feature of “The Groups” critique. It picks up more specifically on a relatively new development within the foundation world: more and more senior leaders, to say nothing of junior staff, are coming from nonprofit and activist backgrounds, as opposed to from academia, business, or government. The journalist Matthew Yglesias certainly overstates the case when he claims, “One of the most underrated aspects of contemporary politics is the extent to which ‘activists on the left’ and ‘major funders’ are the same people.” But it is indisputable that the space between the two camps is shrinking, with the points of cultural overlap between grantor and grantee expanding. Given the political reality of class dealignment between the parties, this now means that for many policies, progressive nonprofit leaders are closer to the donor class than to the working class, or at least are more vulnerable of being presented as such by their ideological antagonists.

Even given the shared analytic framework of a nonprofit industrial complex, there are still differing views with respect to the vectors of power and influence working within it; to recognize that actors move freely between the different nodes is not to agree on which of them are leading the way. For many of those promoting “The Groups” critique, progressive donors ultimately shape the agenda, sometimes affirmatively, by prioritizing certain (most often cultural) causes, and sometimes negatively, by neglecting others (chiefly economic ones). This is, in many respects, just a reformulation of the “movement capture” thesis (and the Big Donor theory of politics that the Right has embraced to train on George Soros), but with an inverted politics. Others, however, assume activists to be the driving force, pulling docile funders along with them.

Another complication to this component of “The Groups” critique is the recognition that the institutions that make of the “complex” are not themselves internally uniform in their political orientation, but are marked by internal splits, with junior staff often pushing senior leadership leftwards. Relatedly, another element of the critique focuses on the lack of accountability enabled by progressive advocacy organizations’ reliance on progressive foundation funding, which in turn has sowed institutional dysfunction. An influential article by Ryan Grim in The Intercept from June 2022, for instance, which outlined internal turmoil at several major progressive nonprofits, cited multiple anonymous executive directors who claimed the discord was exacerbated by foundations who “reflexively sid[e] with staff uprisings and encourage[e] endless concessions.” One nonprofit leader spun the critique out even further to Grim: “Unlike labor unions, church groups, membership organizations, or even business lobbies, large foundations and grant-funded nonprofits aren’t accountable to the people whose interests they claim to represent and have no concrete incentive to win elections or secure policy gains.”

Finally, “the Groups” critique is closely associated with the “popularist” pitch advanced by Matthew Yglesias and others (like David Shor and Jonathan Chait) since the 2020 campaign, in online battles with the activist left. Popularism posits that progressive candidates should avoid taking “high-salience public stances in favor of unpopular progressive causes” and instead should be encouraged to “embrace popular progressive causes and [be] allow[ed] to make tactical retreats from fights where conservatives have public opinion on their side.” Popularists like Yglesias, and other center-left Democrats, have counseled a sort of political pragmatism and raised alarms that progressive funders have been encouraging activist and advocacy groups to promote positions that were “flat-out politically toxic and that undermine our collective goals.” As Rob Stein, one of the founders of the Democracy Alliance, told New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall in 2022, “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, Stein writes, is that “some progressive politicians and funders are contributing to divisiveness within their ranks and giving fodder to the right.”

In fact, Yglesias has accused progressive funders of a sort of willful misappropriation of Skocpol, boosting organizations like the climate justice Sunrise Movement that he claims are only “a simulacrum of a vast and highly energized social movement” without actually bearing any accountability to a broad-based membership. “This Potemkin Village version of what Skocpol called for does deliver some of the benefits of real mass mobilization (mainly by fooling gullible journalists),” Yglesias has written, “but it doesn’t move the needle on things that really matter.” (He’s not alone in making the Potemkin critique; “If you’re your average foundation-funded NGO, you now want to say, ‘I am a social movement, not just a foundation-funded NGO,’” the political scientist Daniel Schlozman told the leftish journalist Sam Adler-Bell. “But if you press down on this assertion, Schlozman continued, “it turns out it’s all money from Ford and Open Society. And they’re not doing much of anything except talking to each other”).

These areas of convergence can also help make sense of one of the leading retorts to the post-election “The Groups” critique: the Harris campaign wasn’t pushed in electorally disastrous directions by progressive advocacy groups, but by wealthy donors and their surrogates, who insisted the campaign abandon some of its initial populist gambits. But there’s a shared diagnosis in both of these arguments: in each case, the Democratic establishment’s accountability to its potential grassroots base, which would have likely produced a policy agenda more in tune with voters’ preferences, was short-circuited by an opportunistic intermediary, who held the purse strings.

It’s worth returning to “The Groups” critics’ invocation of Skocpol, because her work represents a bridge between that critique and another powerful one which has also emerged out of the ashes of the Democrats’ November defeat. This one also targeted an overreliance on philanthropy as responsible for eroding the party’s accountability to a broad-based constituency. But it has been less focused on how such dynamics have warped policy decisions in certain directions—say toward cultural issues or away from economically populist ones—and more toward how it has impoverished the “civic structure of the Democratic party.” And so the prescription tied to this variety of critique is not for Democrats to embrace one cause over another, but to commit to building a broad-based civic movement.

Skocpol offered similar guidance in assessing the strengths and shortcomings of the anti-Trump Resistance of previous years. Thousands of anti-Trump grassroots groups sprang up in the anguished wake of his election, with the Indivisible network, whose leaders initially “spoke dismissively” of “the DC-based nonprofit industrial complex,” attempting to link them in one national federation. The groups mobilized millions to march, call their representatives and donate to progressive organizations, but according to Skocpol and other like-minded analysts, they ultimately left little durable local organizational infrastructure. Indivisible, meanwhile, turned toward deep-pocketed Democratic donors and established itself as a centralized, professionally staffed DC-based nonprofit, partnering with other national progressive advocacy organizations. “If progressive-minded Americans want real change, most of the expertise, money, and time we can muster should stop flowing into national advocacy bureaucracies engaged in symbolic maneuvers and purist politics,” Skocpol and Caroline Trevo wrote in the American Prospect in 2021. “These resources should flow instead to participatory citizens’ groups intertwined with reformed Democratic Party committees in every state and local community.”

There’s a strong connection between the Skocpolian critique of checkbook membership and political affiliation, and the recent surging critical appraisals of the “hollowness” of the Democratic party and of the “fray[ing] bonds between working people and the party that governs in their name.” Establishment Democrats, critics contend, have too long focused on mobilizing voters as opposed to organizing communities, and have failed to forge organic bonds between individuals and the party that could persist and grow outside election season. There was plenty of evidence of this in the final GOTV frenzy this fall, with the party relying on hordes of committed volunteers, “traveling salesmen,” in Micah Sifry’s phrase, who would parachute into a neighborhood with “persuasive content” supplied by the national campaign, knock on doors and talk to potential voters, but without establishing “relational networks” that would allow those contacted to re-connect with the campaign. Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell picked up on this theme in a recent blog post: “What if the Democratic party’s problem is not that it is too left-leaning, or for that matter, too moderate, but instead is too disconnected from the lives of the people whom it wants to appeal to?”

Skocpol lurks in the background of nearly all this analysis. In a compelling recent piece in the Nation, for instance, Pete Davis opened by stating that if he could make everyone at Democratic National Committee headquarters to read one book, it would be her 2003 Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (seriously…go read it if you haven’t). His piece was in many respects a post-2024 election update of Skocpol’s earlier critique of the Democratic party:

“Instead of funding itself primarily through membership dues, the party offers fancy events for the wealthy and ceaseless, disrespectful texts for the rest of us. Parasocial relationships with celebrities and famous politicians are emphasized over real relationships with fellow neighbors and local chapter leaders. When you go to Democrats.org, clicking “Take Action” does not direct you to a page with your local Democratic committee’s meeting times and locations. The bolded call-to-action button on the party homepage is “DONATE,” not “JOIN.”

Amidst the din of post-election recrimination, this democratic critique—and there are many other sources that I might have also cited (Lara Putnam is especially worth reading)—has emerged as the most compelling, and the most constructive. As with “The Groups” critique, philanthropy is almost always targeted as part of the problem. But how might it also be part of the solution? What should progressive philanthropy’s response be to a reckoning with the points of intersection between “The Groups” critique and the “hollow parties” diagnosis?

I think there are two related responses. The first is simply for progressive funders to take more seriously their role as actors in the political landscape, even as they maintain official commitments to nonpartisanship as dictated by their c3 status. Three years ago, contacted by the New York Times’ Edsall about the damage progressive philanthropy might be doing to the prospects of the Democratic party and the agenda it espoused, Ford president Darren Walker replied that the foundation had “no interest in the Democratic Party’s strengths or weaknesses.” As he explained, “We support issues that are about progress and inclusion and justice, but the chips fall where they fall.”

It’s clear to see the legalistic tightrope Walker is forced to walk here; by law, foundations cannot support a party and cannot explicitly take its prospects into consideration when designing their programs—and there plenty of folks out there just waiting to pounce if Ford’s leadership trips up on that front. But there is a certain irony in the Olympian detachment of Walker’s remark. For decades, Ford has been a pioneering institution in pushing philanthropy to move beyond the safe spaces at a remove from the political realm and to engage in the messy world of policy advocacy. But to do so blind to the ways in which those interventions themselves shape that world, through the even messier realm of electoral politics (including how progressive philanthropy’s interventions will be exploited by those opposing the policies it favors), means practicing a sort of anti-politics that undermines the advocacy. There seems to me to be plenty of room between avoiding restricted partisan activity and embracing a “chips fall where they may” political naivete. Progressive philanthropy needs to get even more adept at maneuvering within that middle ground.

Which brings us to the other response to the critiques outlined above. This does not necessarily entail progressive funders championing the Democratic party, potentially jeopardizing their tax-exempt status if they do so through c3s and not c4 organizations. Nor should it involve progressive funders abandoning their support for progressive advocacy organizations, hanging “The Groups” out to dry. But taking these critiques seriously, with respect to the place of philanthropy in our civic life, means progressive funders accepting a similar project of tough self-assessment that these critics are prescribing for the Democratic Party. If there is constructive work to be done restoring the civic bonds between working people and the party and replenishing a culture of membership, philanthropy should also consider the ways in which it contributes to the “civic deserts” that work seeks to revivify—the ways in which it is part of the problem. And if there is work to be done in terms of what Pete Davis has called “civic reforestation,” philanthropy must consider as well how it can—and must—be part of the solution. This might involve changes in grantmaking, including an embrace of participatory and trust-based measures, and a shift in funding priorities, to include more support for the civic ecosystem. It might even involve boosting a civic infrastructure that would allow more progressive organizations to support themselves through mass membership dues, and less on philanthropy.

But more uncomfortably, progressive philanthropy must look hard at the ways in which it might encourage the formation of closed networks, insular cultures, and an unaccountable “complex” encompassing its own offices and the advocacy organizations it funds. To the extent that the apparatus of progressive philanthropy is suffering from a similar sort of “hollowness” as that which afflicts our political parties, the only response is to fill the empty spaces with the viscera of an engaged, grassroots constituency.

-Benjamin Soskis

Benjamin Soskis is a senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy and a co-editor of HistPhil. In 2025, he will be a visiting scholar at Independent Sector.