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. The full essay can be read here.
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 should encourage 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.
[Part II of this essay will be published later this week. You can read the entire essay here].
-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.
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