Editors’ Note: Benjamin Soskis examines the emerging trans-ideological coalition in defense of civil society in the U.S., the commitment to “prudential pluralism” that fuels it, and the conception of history on which it stands.
If this is a time of peril for U.S. civil society, it is also a time that has established civil society’s resilience, demonstrated in the construction of broad-based coalitions formed in its defense. At a local level, we saw this vividly last year on the streets of Minneapolis, where individuals came together under a shared ethic of what one commentator called “neighborism” to protest ICE raids in the city. On a national level, we have seen this most clearly in the broad, if loose, alliance of nonprofit and philanthropic leaders that have come together to defend civil society from the threats it faces from the Trump Administration. It is not surprising that progressives have featured prominently in this coalition; more striking has been the role played by a number of conservative leaders from the realms of philanthropy and politics.
As a historian of philanthropy and civil society, I’ve been watching that coalition grow over the last two years, tracking the ideas and narratives that hold it together, and trying to learn more about what is gained, and what potentially lost, in the forging of those bonds. Among the most powerful of these ideas are those that link the present moment to some usable past—what is the shared sense of history scaffolding this emerging coalition?
I.
Hoping to get some answers to those questions, last fall I reached out to one of the coalition’s leading conservative voices, Lawson Bader, the president and CEO of DonorsTrust, a DAF-sponsoring organization for conservative donors.
In response to news that President Trump had issued a memorandum targeting “domestic terrorism,” and his suggestion that this would require the federal government to go after a host of progressive donors and nonprofits, Bader was one of the most vocal on the right to caution the administration, as he did in an interview with the Free Press, that doing so “narrows the important boundary between citizen and state.” He might disagree with nonprofits advocating for pro-choice policies or against income inequality, he insisted, “but the way we battle it out is in civil society,” not by weaponizing government.
Bader elaborated on these views in our conversation, making it clear that he did not come to them only as a reaction to the Trump administration’s actions. He remarked that he found it “humorous” that he’d recently become “the supposed darling ‘right winger’ of the left, when it comes to defending civil society… as if I’ve either just changed my mind, or stepped up on the issue.” On the contrary, he had been defending philanthropic freedom for the last decade, since he took over DonorsTrust, “and haven’t changed my tune. I was just as critical of Barack Obama and Joe Biden over the issue and will continue to defend [that freedom] whoever occupies in the White House, or controls Congress, or, for that matter, controls a State House, because this can also be a problem at that level, too.”
He continued:
To me, the principles remain the same and need to be defended. And maybe somebody like me, a publicly known conservative, willing to speak out against those currently in power and mostly aligned with that same philosophy, might be an encouragement to those who lean progressive, who would be willing to act similarly when their guys are in power and DonorsTrust or other entities are being targeted. I am equally bothered by Donald Trump labeling those with whom he disagrees as domestic terrorists as I am with the Southern Poverty Law Center labeling conservative groups as hate groups. I just think all of it is a dangerous precedent, period.
I asked about what the response had been from the Right—including from the donors who support DonorsTrust—to his public stand, and he claimed to have received very little pushback. “I have yet to have a single criticism by anybody on the right over my public comments. None at all. Zero. Not a single ‘how dare you?’ Nothing.” (Though he did acknowledge that he probably wouldn’t be receiving an ambassadorship anytime soon.) In fact, he claims that there was a broader base of support for the defense of civil society on the Right, even if they are not taking as public a stand on the issue. “There is no question support for these views [on the Right] is greater than the impression that’s been created. And some have been keeping quiet because they are more able to just pick up a phone and engage directly with political actors on the Right, and I want that to continue.”
I wanted to believe this was true, though of course the claim was by definition unfalsifiable. In this respect, the “behind-the-scenes conservative defender of civil society” bore some resemblance to the famed summer-camp girlfriend who-you-don’t-know-and-who-lives-in-Canada, a figure whose convenience and value relies on the impossibility of public validation. But there had been just enough public pushback from conservatives that Bader’s report seemed plausible. And he made it clear as well that even before that pushback began, he had cultivated peers across the ideological spectrum in philanthropy, on the left and center, who hold a common commitment to defending civil society.
II.
In our conversation, and in Bader’s other writings—and, more generally, in the broader discourse undergirding the coalition he invoked—one can discern two distinct but overlapping conceptual approaches to that defense.
One might be called principled pluralism. It calls for the uniform extension of the freedoms to give and of association across the ideological, social, and political spectrum and so represents a unifying ideal threading throughout and braiding together civil society marked by profound differences of interests, perspectives, and values. It is “principled pluralism” that Stand Together’s Brian Hooks rallied behind in a piece he wrote last year in Stanford Social Innovation Review. “The sector needs to mount a united defense of philanthropic freedom that does not discriminate based on the content of the actions or the persuasion of the actor,” he wrote. “A clear expectation that, while those of us who work in philanthropy may disagree with each other’s ideas, we must defend each other’s right to exist… Crisis has the potential to unite even the most unlikely allies.”[1] Similarly, Bader gestured toward principled pluralism in writing, “When President Trump threatened to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after it opposed certain federal mandates, he launched a political attack not only on one institution but on the entire framework of American charitable independence.”
But such a view can subtly shade into a different theory—one that suggests not that a targeted attack on one domain of civil society represents a symbolic attack on another, but that an attack on one can presage, and serve as a justification for, an actual future attack on the other. I call this prudential pluralism; it is an approach to the defense of civil society, marked by diverging interests, ideologies, and values, grounded in the sense that, even if one’s own allies are not currently under threat, in the future, they may be, given that one attack can license or precipitate another.
In our conversation, and in his own writing, Bader made use of prudential pluralism. “I’d like to think that my own ‘allies’ who perhaps would be discouraged by my criticism of the sitti`ng President of the United States would also recognize that that criticism is actually protecting them” against potential “payback,” he told me. “The whole conversation needs to tone down,” he commented to the Free Press. “I think it’s going to come back to haunt us.” And on the DonorsTrust site he’s written, “Cheering on presidential threats against institutions like Harvard opens the door for future administrations to retaliate against faith-based charities, private foundations, or think tanks that dissent from prevailing orthodoxy.”
Prudential pluralism has been a key strain running through the recent conservative defense of civil society, more generally. “Some conservatives are cheering on Mr. Trump,” the Wall Street Journal warned in an April 2025 editorial, responding to President Trump’s threat to revoke Harvard’s tax exemption. “They might not like it when President Ocasio-Cortez is in charge…A Democratic President could declare a think tank that opposes its climate or transgender bathroom rules to be acting contrary to ‘established public policy.’” Similarly, the Philanthropy Roundtable, in a statement against a proposed foundation endowment tax, warned, “Lawmakers should remember they aren’t just setting policy, they are setting precedent.” Or as one Indiana lawyer opined in the New York Times, “Today Harvard is the target. Tomorrow it could be your church.”
To some extent, this logic follows in the grand tradition of liberal toleration, which emerged out of the bloody religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. One can also hear echoes of the restraining Cold War theories of mutually assured destruction and hints of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance. Or perhaps it borrows more from the examples of mutual deterrence threading throughout our daily lives, when we refrain from escalation—going there, crossing lines—for fear of blowback. Whatever its roots, it seems that prudential pluralism is especially well adapted to a period of hyper-polarization like the present. It might just be the sturdiest plank in the broad-based bulwark being established to protect and preserve civil society.
III.
As I came to give it more attention, it became clear that prudential pluralism rests on the maintenance of a delicate historical equilibrium, one in which past grievances are close at hand and at the ready to be balanced against those of one’s ideological, partisan, or sectarian antagonists. In the current moment, this means that conservatives who embrace prudential pluralism in defense of civil society almost always arrive at the same terminal point: the 2013 IRS controversy.
As the Philanthropy Roundtable declared in an April 2025 post, “The Right knows the danger of wielding the tax code as a weapon better than most with the politically motivated IRS attacks on conservative nonprofits during the Obama Administration etched in recent memory.” And in his SSIR article, Brian Hooks similarly invokes the IRS scandal in discussing the threat the current Trump administration poses to civil society:
These threats are alarming. But they’re not unique. We’ve seen similar efforts to regulate, exclude, and intimidate nonprofit organizations from previous administrations, members of Congress, and others in positions of political authority. Those efforts were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the current targets appear to be organizations associated with the progressive left, former IRS official Lois Lerner acknowledged the government targeted groups on the conservative right between 2010 and 2012.
The 2013 IRS controversy was sparked when Lerner, the head of the IRS Exempt Organization Division, was asked at a Washington, DC event about how the IRS handled the applications of conservative groups for tax-exempt status. She offered a public apology for the way in which the agency used certain key ‘terms’ to screen their applications and acknowledged that her colleagues “didn’t use good judgment” in doing so. Indeed, further investigations showed that, between 2010 and 2012, the agency subjected organizations with certain right-coded words, part of a BOLO (“be-on-the-lookout) list—like “patriot,” or Tea Party”—to extra scrutiny, resulting in some cases in lengthy delays for their applications to be approved. The revelation led to a frenzy on the Right, which saw it as validation of their claims that the Obama administration had long been involved in political targeting. Lerner was placed on administrative leave in May 2013 and retired from the IRS that September.
Indeed, one gets the sense that if Lois Lerner didn’t exist, the Right would have invented her. And perhaps not just the Right. At the time, there seemed to be an impulse among the mainstream press, as well as among some Democrats, to show their commitment to principle of viewpoint neutrality by their willingness to lean into the plausibility of the allegations against Lerner and the Exempt Organization Division. “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and nonpartisan way, then that is outrageous. It is contrary to our traditions,” declared President Obama. As we shall see, it is in fact not so contrary; the IRS harbors a distinguished tradition of targeting. Nevertheless, Obama’s public commitment to the norm of viewpoint neutrality was commendable. And yet one can detect in it as well a desire to inscribe one’s evenhandedness on the historical record. An acknowledgement that “both sides have done it,” a uniformly distributed alarm at how the norms have been violated, can become a sign of one’s fidelity to the norm, and not to mere partisan sectarianism.
But as former IRS lawyer Phil Hackney and others (including Treasury’s inspector general) have demonstrated, there is little evidence that the IRS targeted right-leaning organizations specifically in this case, or of direct pressure from the White House for it to do so. Facing declining budgets and burgeoning numbers of applications, between 2004 and 2013 the IRS gave extra scrutiny to a wide range of terms, including those associated with the left (like ‘Occupy’ and ‘Progressive’). Which is not to say it did nothing wrong; only that it was, in Hackney’s phrasing, “equal-opportunity mismanagement” (though there is some indication that 2013 groups associated with conservative terms faced longer delays). Most significantly, the controversy did not involve a public disavowal of the norms of viewpoint neutral regulation.
What does it mean, then, that the 2013 IRS controversy has such a fixed place in contemporary avowals of prudential pluralism, and thus, in the defense of civil society? Does prudential pluralism insist on the presumption of parity? Brian Hooks seems to assert as much when discussing the parallels between the Trump administration’s attacks on nonprofits and the earlier IRS controversy. “Whether these are equivalent in magnitude to the threats we see today is not the point,” he writes. “They are different degrees of the same destructive approach: political actors who seek to regulate, exclude, or intimidate in order to shape the actions of civil society in line with their own preferences.”
It’s possible that such an insistence on parity might be a strong basis for bipartisan reforms clarifying the regulations surrounding tax-exemption. But it is also important to insist that differences in magnitude matter. With such a denial at its premise, prudential pluralism threatens to become less a model of historical inquiry than a perversion of it, since historical perspective allows one not merely to see symmetries and equivalences but also distinctions and discontinuities. Tethered to the presumption of parity, prudential pluralism risks licensing the warping of the historical record to suit the prerogatives of partisan and ideological grievance. That can lead in very ugly directions.
IV.
Besides the 2013 IRS controversy, the other historical precedent most frequently invoked in efforts to make sense of the current administration’s attacks on civil society involves the malfeasance of Richard Nixon. “From utilizing tax data to trace immigrants without legal status to threatening Harvard University’s tax exemption, President Trump has been trying to use the IRS for his own political purposes, in ways that may seem unprecedented,” NPR reported in May 2025. “But they’re not. Former President Richard Nixon laid the groundwork more than four decades ago, when he tried to use the tax collector to punish his enemies and assist his friends.” A Washington Post columnist made a similar point, arguing that “President Donald Trump appears to be taking a lesson out of Nixon’s playbook.”
The parallels are striking. As Nixon legal counsel John Dean wrote in an infamous August 1971 memo, the president’s inner circle was committed to determining “how to use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” This led not only to an “Enemies List” of disfavored individuals, but to Nixon’s pushing the IRS to go after “ideological organizations,” especially those on the left, through the creation of a “Special Service Staff.” By 1972, the IRS’s Exempt Organization Branch was sending all cases that involved “ideological, militant, subversive or radical” elements to the SSS for audit, with a clear focus on black and anti-war organizations.
The parallels are also convenient. This is the case not only because it was in response to the Nixon administration’s abuse of power that Congress began to establish bipartisan safeguards protecting nonprofits (and individuals) against such misconduct, reining in executive branch access to tax returns, culminating two decades later in the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998. More than this, Nixonian malfeasance and the reaction to it has come to play an important role in the narrative surrounding the development of the norms and legal protections bolstering an independent civil society. In this sense, the figure of Nixon can sometimes seem to resist the presumption of parity; an insistence on the exceptionality of his administration’s abuses of power and the corrective action taken in response can function as a means of affirming the ultimate vigor of the norms he violated.
And yet it’s worth recalling that Nixon was merely embellishing a pre-existing White House practice of using the IRS to target ideological opponents through their nonprofit institutions. In fact, when forced to defend the practice, Nixon’s henchmen argued that what previous Democratic administrations had done was much worse; they framed their weaponization of the IRS as purely corrective. “Democrat Administrations have discreetly used IRS most effectively,” White House counsel John Dean wrote in a memo which came to light during the Watergate hearings. “We have been unable.”[2]
JFK, for instance, was greatly concerned with the rise of the Right, and not long after entering the White House, asked his Treasury Secretary C. Doulgas Dillon to push the IRS to investigate conservative foundations. As Victor and Walter Reuther explained in a December 1961 memo, one way to check the growth of the Right was to choke off the flow of money to right-wing organizations by challenging their tax-exempt status. “Prompt revocation in a few cases might scare off a substantial part of the big money now flowing into these tax exempt organizations,” they wrote. This idea sat at the kernel of the secret Ideological Organizations Project, initiated in late 1961, which involved the IRS auditing 22 “alleged extremist groups,” not for any demonstrated tax violations but for their ideologies and political activities. By late 1963, the campaign had expanded to some 10,000 organizations, with some two dozen targeted for audits. Though the IRS sought to preserve the veneer of non-partisanship by substituting in internal documents “political action organizations” for “right-wing organizations,” it was indisputably the case that, as the program expanded, and extended into the Johnson administration, the vast majority of organizations investigated were conservative, anti-Communist, or aligned with the radical right. Ultimately, in 1964, the project led to the revocation of tax exemption from two of those organizations for impermissible political action, HL Hunt’s Life Line Foundation and Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade.
When the news of the IRS actions broke, it caused an uproar. “The trouble with policing tax-exempt organizations,” wrote William F Buckley, “is that it simply cannot be done with justice.” With such a move, it “was never more clear that the ‘power to tax is the power to destroy.’” Hargis announced that “Freedom of speech is on trial. Only under an absolute dictatorship are opposing opinions prohibited…Will the ‘Great Society’ now become the ‘Great Stick’ to crush those who may disagree with the Administration in power?” It didn’t matter “whether you are liberal, conservative, Republican or Democrat,” Hargis insisted. The question was whether ministers would be allowed freedom of speech, regardless of their viewpoint. In remarks to the New York Times, he made what is now a familiar argument: “If the Administration can close down an opposing voice, doesn’t this set a precedent? Couldn’t a conservative administration close down an opposing voice?”[3]
Conceiving the Nixon administration’s compilation of an Enemies List and use of the IRS’s Special Service Staff to go after its ideological opponents as continuous with programs in the Kennedy and Johnson administration does not necessarily mean they all should be regarded as equally nefarious and damaging to norms of viewpoint neutrality. Again, differences in magnitude (and in brazenness) matter. The Nixon administration’s sustained harassment of left-wing organizations went well beyond the tactics adopted by the previous Democratic administrations (though not beyond the tactics of McCarthyite persecution or the Red Scare); we know of no order from Kennedy or Johnson or par with Nixon’s instructions to break into Brookings.
Yet viewing these campaigns as part of a single historical tradition, as each in a sense unexceptional, points to one potential response to the presumption of parity, one that locates a shared vulnerability among all nonprofits and an endemic temptation built into the structures of political authority in the U.S, but that still maintains fidelity to the historical record. For the history of past IRS abuse insists upon an essential point, one that post-Watergate legislation has sought to mitigate but cannot entirely expunge, and that paeans to an “independent sector” obscure but cannot entirely banish: that the flip-side of the immense privileges and state advantages granted to voluntary organizations in the United States, which both distinguishes US civil society and defines and demarcates an intelligible nonprofit sector, also represents a deep-seated vulnerability. If the state giveth, the state can taketh.
This, of course, is a corollary proposition to Chief Justice John Marshall’s famous dictum in McCulloch v. Maryland: “The power to tax involves the power to destroy,” invoked by Buckley in the quote above. (It also supplies the title of the book I’ve relied on for the history of the IRS’s investigations of nonprofits in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, John Andrew’s Power to Destroy). The potential to withhold taxation endows government with enormous power over the nonprofit sector and incorporates into civil society an inherent precariousness that demands vigilance from those of all parties and persuasions. A history that underscores this common condition can provide a firm foundation for prudential pluralism.
V.
The appreciation of state power as a fact of contemporary political life extending beyond any particular regime can counsel restraint from those who happen to hold power in the moment. But not necessarily. In fact, one of the problems with a reliance on prudential pluralism for the defense of civil society is its inherent volatility. A grasp of the history of state power that fosters the belief that your partisan antagonist will always face the temptation to restrict your side’s associational life can also license pre-emptive action. Alexis de Tocqueville, meet Dr. Strangelove.
There are in fact moments when we can witness the understanding of recent history that informs prudential pluralism collapse in on itself, as the accusation that a partisan antagonist restricted civil society in the past becomes the activating rational to restrict civil society in the present. This was, for instance, the dominant line of thinking on display at the hearing on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government last December.
The SPLC was founded in 1971 as a civil right organization, and its early work fighting segregation, racism, and white supremacy, including successful campaigns against the KKK, is widely celebrated. But in recent decades, as it has targeted right-wing extremism more generally, it has itself become a target of conservative ire. This dynamic was on display at the hearing, where Republicans on the subcommittee, and their invited witnesses, raised alarms about the ways the SPLC’s designation of certain nonprofits (and specifically right-wing organizations) as “hate groups” narrowed the boundaries of acceptable speech and quashed political dissent. SPLC’s Hate Map, according to subcommittee chair Rep. Chip Roy, was “a political weapon masquerading as a public interest watchdog.” Conservatives were particularly incensed by the close relationship between the SPLC and the Biden administration. Republican subcommittee members and witnesses pointed out that the Biden White House hosted the SLPC at least 18 times; that the Department of Defense and other government agencies have used SPLC materials in trainings and threat assessments; and that the SPLC shared embargoed reports with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and briefed prosecutors.
“How did we allow a private organization with no objective standards and no accountability and a long history of internal corruption and bias to become embedded in federal civil rights enforcement?,” asked Roy. “Determining whose speech gets chilled, whose religious exercise is punished, whose organizations are suddenly surveilled, debanked, deplatformed, or targeted because a multi-million dollar activist nonprofit decided they were politically inconvenient….This is a broader ideological campaign designed to narrow the boundaries of acceptable speech…to shift the federal civil rights apparatus from its original purpose of protecting equal treatment under law toward policing political dissent.” This critique is tied to a broader counter-history advanced by the Right of Democrats wielding state power to target right-wing organizations, and of the Democratic party’s and its nonprofit allies’, in the words of one of the witnesses at the hearing, “manipulat[ion of] federal law enforcement to terrify its critics into silence.”[4]
Democrats on the committee (and their witness), on the other hand, presented SPLC as an exemplary civil rights organization and portrayed the hearing itself as “part of a broader strategy by the Trump administration and its congressional allies to silence and intimidate civil society,” as subcommittee ranking member Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon explained. They portrayed the SPLC Hate Map as a form of protected speech that could be critiqued with other speech but should not be repressed by the power of the state. As Scanlon quipped, “our colleagues’ idea of limited government only applies to the people and parts of our society that they agree with.”
What followed was a congressional version of the meme of the gaggle of Spider Men, all pointing at each other, or perhaps of the playground gripe, “He pushed me first!” A Republican on the subcommittee responded to a Democratic colleague’s pushback—he paraphrased it as “this is an attempt to intimidate and chill SPLC’s speech”—with the rejoinder, “Well, that’s an interesting perspective considering the fact that the SPLC’s stock and trade is to intimidate and chill the speech of anyone they disagree with.” Another Republican announced, in the midst of a hearing targeting one particular organization, “There are few organizations that engage in the chilling of civil society more than the Southern Poverty Law Center.” They complained about how the SPLC facilitated the deplatforming of conservative groups, without any transparency or recourse—even as the imminent indictment of SPLC would lead to its deplatforming from some of the largest DAF sponsors.
It was a pas de deux of partisan grievance, one that threatened to eat away at the integrity of prudential pluralism. Given my sense of how much the defense of civil society relied on such a belief, I found the hearing particularly disturbing. In that moment, it seemed the best antidote to that corrosion was a mutual commitment to take the protests of one’s antagonists seriously. So I made a deliberate effort to consider the counter-history the conservatives on the subcommittee were steeped in. And I remember thinking, if I could push my way past the partisan sniping, I could see some legitimate concerns surrounding the non-transparent, unaccountable power invested in the SPLC to determine what constituted a hate group, especially to the extent that the state partnered with them, using its authority to constrict civil society.
But here too I ran up against false equivalences of the sort that seem to be a particular pitfall of prudential pluralism. Because while the Republicans did cite the points of partnership between the Biden administration and the SPLC, there was much less evidence presented that such a partnership resulted in actual persecution of right-leaning organizations. The harms done to those organizations alluded to in the hearing more often came from private actors, from instantiations of “cancel culture,” from voluntary campaigns to expel certain groups from the bounds of civil civil society, and even, in one case, from violent vigilante action—and not through federal criminal prosecutions or executive orders. Eliding the distinction between private power and state power directed against disfavored groups obscures the massive differentials in power between them. This, in turn, can serve to discount the dangers of state-based targeting. Being shunned by one’s professional colleagues after being the target of a “smear campaign” from the SPLC, as a former academic witness at a subsequent House Judiciary Committee hearing in May framed it, can then be equated with the attempt to strip an organization’s tax-exempt status by an act of Congress, as Rep. Roy has sought to the SPLC. Or, for that matter, to send FBI agents to search the offices of a voting rights organization. That equation seemed particularly problematic given how easy it was to understand the recent federal indictment of the SPLC as the product of a retaliatory campaign in response to right-wing allegations that “they did it first!”
So the question lingered well after the hearing ended: was it possible to incorporate some of the concerns raised during it about the past use of government power to restrict civil society into a theory of prudential pluralism that didn’t ultimately facilitate or authorize that restriction? The future health of civil society might very well depend on the answer to that question.
VI.
On May 14, the Cato Institute hosted an event on “The Freedom to Give: Philanthropy, Civil Society, and the Limits of State Power.” It featured three speakers. Cato Senior Fellow Walter Olson provided some broad legal framing. John Palfrey, the president of the MacArthur Foundation, and one of the three foundation heads leading the Unite in Advance coalition, has been at the forefront of progressive philanthropy’s resistance to the Trump Administration’s attacks on civil society. And then there was Lawson Bader.
The Cato event embodied both the promise of the broad-based coalition coalescing in defense of civil society as well as some of the awkwardness when you have, as Bader described it, “strange bedfellows institutionally trying to come together to defend philanthropic freedom.” Bader rooted his affirmation of the freedom to give in a historically-minded embrace of prudential pluralism: “If we are cheering what fundamentally appears to be a weaponization of government power against philanthropy from the current administration, it’s only going to come back to haunt us in the next administration, the way, frankly, it has come in previous administrations….The precedents cut both ways. It’s just that simple.”
In his remarks and responses to questions, Bader invoked Lois Lerner and the IRS controversy; a case of “weaponized disclosure” in which a co-founder of a software company had information about his charitable donations leaked, and then resigned in the face of protests over a $1000 contribution he had made to a California initiative that banned same-sex marriage; and the “envy” that leads politicians to target those with significant fortunes, based on the assumption that private wealth was the government’s to begin with. There was, in other words, plenty of space between Bader and Palfrey, the stalwart of progressive philanthropy sitting next to him.
But then there were Bader’s first words during the event, responding to Palfrey’s own opening remarks, noting the broadly-shared belief in the importance of “private, voluntary efforts to improve our communities” as well as the broadly-shared agreement, “regardless of our ideological perspectives,” that there was a real danger in striking at the roots of that tradition: “Ditto.” And there were the three panelists (along with the moderator, Cato’s Maria Santos Bier), at the event’s conclusion, standing side-by-side, smiling for the camera. They seemed, at least for a moment, a sturdy bulwark.
-Benjamin Soskis
Benjamin Soskis is co-editor of HistPhil.
[1] Hooks was also one of six philanthropic leaders, from across the ideological spectrum, who co-wrote a controversial 2023 op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy in defense of philanthropic pluralism. “Philanthropy as a whole makes its greatest contribution to democracy when all foundations and donors engage in the unfettered pursuit of their own mission, interests, and prerogatives,” they wrote. Heather Templeton Dill, Kathleen Enright, Sam Gill, Brian Hooks, Darren Walker, and Elise Westhoff, “We Disagree on Many Things, but We Speak with One Voice in Support of Philanthropic Pluralism,” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, April 13, 2023.
[2] John A. Andrew III, Power to Destroy: The Political Use of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 206.
[3] Andrew, Power to Destroy, 49, 50, 53; New York Times, November 17, 1964.
[4] Tyler O’Neil, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government (New York: Bombardier Books, 2025), 197.
HistPhil 