Editors’ Note: In this post, Inderjeet Parmar summarizes a journal article he wrote on the Hewlett Foundation, as part of a special section on “The Pathologies of Philanthropy,” edited by Arun Kumar, Sally Brooks, and Jessie Sklair, published in Economy and Society in June 2026. As Parmar notes: “Evidence presented in the main article underscores a damning reality: liberal philanthropy’s ‘resistance’ is performative and bounded, easily subordinated to class and hegemonic imperatives.”

In this sharply critical article, published by Economy and Society this year, I show that the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (HF) is a paradigmatic “liberal crisis machine” – an elite institution that diagnoses threats to U.S. democracy and hegemony but, in practice, moderates radical change, co-opts dissent, and ultimately shores up the corporate-liberal order that fuels the very crises it claims to combat. Drawing on concepts from Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) of organic crisis, hegemony, passive revolution, and organic intellectuals, I use HF archives, grant records, trustees’ corporate profiles and political funding records, and programme documents to portray the foundation as a sophisticated operator within U.S. elite networks. Its performative progressivism – made clear in numerous documents that adopt language seemingly (though only superficially) in line with Gramsci, of fostering a new post-neoliberal “commonsense” – masks a deeper commitment to preserving power distributions rooted in the existing corporate-dominated political economy, rendering it structurally unreliable in confrontations with the far right. Not least, the paper shows that the liberal-progressive Hewlett Foundation funded—rather than challenged—right-wing groups that helped author the Heritage Foundation’s Project2025 template for U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration.

Conventional Views vs. Gramscian Critique

I contrast mainstream scholarship— which casts foundations as independent “third sector” actors promoting pluralism, innovation, and public goods (e.g., Reich, Karl & Katz) – with a Gramscian lens. In the latter, the HF operates as part of a historic bloc sustaining U.S. hegemony. Amid “polycrisis” (interlocking crises of polarisation, disinformation, economic dislocation, climate disruption, and geopolitical and geoeconomic rivalry with China, among others), the foundation deploys technocratic language of renewal while confining solutions to elite-led reforms that avoid challenging core capitalist structures.

The HF, now among the largest U.S. foundations with billions in its endowment, accelerated its crisis response under Larry Kramer’s leadership (2012-23). The published article broadly covers the period of Kramer’s leadership but goes beyond it into early 2025. Concerns about democratic dysfunction predated Trump but intensified dramatically after his election to the presidency in 2016, COVID-19, George Floyd protests, and the January 6, 2021 Trump coup and insurrection attempt. Hewlett’s programmes spanned constitutional norms, disinformation, economic paradigm shifts (“post-neoliberalism”), and geopolitical and economic statecraft strategies. Yet I demonstrate in the paper how these efforts prioritised procedural tweaks and bipartisan elite consensus over dismantling the inequalities and corporate influences that breed authoritarian backlash.

Deep Corporate Embeddedness and Elite Narrowness

One key empirical section of the article exposes the HF’s profound integration into corporate America. Trustees and affiliated entities maintain extensive ties to firms like NVIDIA, Starwood, Booz Allen Hamilton, Agilent, Levi Strauss, and PwC. These and other such entities have donated substantially to Republican and Trumpist causes, including 2020 election deniers and anti-LGBTQ initiatives. The Foundation’s own portfolio, with heavy private equity exposure, aligns with investors who backed Trump and the GOP. Auditors and corporate partners have similarly funded post-January 6 election sceptics.

I suggest that this is no incidental overlap: it reflects a structural dependency. Revenues and worldviews derive from the globalised corporate economy the HF seeks only modestly to adjust. Consequently, its “pro-democracy” work coexists with funding for pro-Trump networks, including American Compass (which shaped key labour and economic sections of the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian Project 2025). Even as the Foundation rhetorically opposed Trump-era threats, it maintained pragmatic bridges to the right and fell notably silent on many undemocratic actions after the 2024 election victory and subsequent flood executive orders and presidential overreach.

I argue that this funding and networking pattern reveals the liberal establishment’s profound unreliability in any genuine struggle against the far right. Wedded to the same corporate political economy that generates inequality, party political strategies promoting racial and cultural resentment, and political dysfunction, institutions like the HF cannot consistently oppose forces that, while destabilising, ultimately defend core property relations and elite privileges. Their “bipartisan” outreach and selective silences function as accommodation rather than confrontation. They prioritise systemic stability over democratic defence when the latter risks broader disruption. Evidence presented in the main article underscores a damning reality: liberal philanthropy’s “resistance” is performative and bounded, easily subordinated to class and hegemonic imperatives.

Flagship Programmes: Elite Management, Not Transformation

Here is a brief run through of the Foundation’s main programmes in relation to the focus of the article in Economy and Society:

• Madison Initiative/Democracy Programme: Invoking James Madison’s elitist fears of “faction” and “mob rule,” the HF poured tens of millions into procedural fixes for congressional gridlock and polarisation. It also convened and mobilised up to twenty other major foundations in its efforts. It favoured elite deliberation by “the wisest” over empowering marginalised voices or tackling structural drivers like economic precarity. Grassroots movements were consciously sidelined in favour of top-down consensus-building.
• Disinformation Efforts: These initiatives externalised blame (to foreign actors or platforms) while soft-pedalling domestic corporate media incentives and right-wing organising rooted in neoliberal failures.
• Economy and Society / Post-Neoliberal Turn: The Foundation’s most ambitious project, advanced by figures like Jennifer Harris (with deep national security links and networks), promoted a state-directed industrial policy (echoing Biden’s CHIPS and IRA initiatives) framed as transcending neoliberalism. In reality, it renovates the system for geopolitical competition by strengthening supply chains, “de-risking” from China, and rebuilding domestic capacity, while preserving corporate leadership and private capital dominance. This “new common sense” links economic nationalism to renewed U.S. hegemony but offers only marginal relief on inequality.

Across initiatives, the HF deploys “performative radicalism”—rhetoric on systemic racism and inequality principally to co-opt critics and channel energies into safe, network-based channels. It builds elite consensus through convening power while actively disorganising or ignoring mass mobilisations that would demand more fundamental change.

Theoretical Payoff and Political Implications

I read these HF activities as classic passive revolution: elites absorb crises through limited reforms that neutralise threats to the dominant historic bloc without upending it. The HF acts as organic intellectual—diagnostic, prescriptive, catalytic—managing organic crisis symptoms while foreclosing transformative alternatives. Its liberalism, rooted in scepticism of popular agency and attachment to private property, in the neoliberal era, means it appears unable to see radical reform to empower grassroots movements and curb corporate power as viable. This makes it a crisis manager rather than resolver. It is the crisis manager of an entire liberal machinery and architecture that is practically defined by its relationship with crisis – as generator and moderator: a liberal crisis machine.

The implications are stark. By embedding itself in corporate structures and extending dollar laden olive branches to Trump-aligned forces, the HF exemplifies why liberal establishments repeatedly falter against far-right challenges. Their strategies sustain the underlying conditions (inequality, corporate dominance, hollowed-out democracy) that empower authoritarian populism, even as they fund “resistance.” Post-2024 silence and continued elite networking suggest accommodation to power realities over principled defence. Outcomes include tactical policy wins (e.g., industrial policy elements) but persistent polarisation, eroded trust, and vulnerability to greater authoritarianism. In a multipolar or multiplex world, this approach gears the U.S. for great-power competition but leaves domestic fissures unhealed.

Contribution to Philanthropy Studies

This article extends my previous work on the Big Three foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie; see Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations and the Rise of American Power (Columbia University Press, 2012)) into the contemporary polycrisis era, delivering the first detailed online archive-driven critique of the HF’s Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump role. For HistPhil readers, the article models how philanthropy history intersects with political economy, statecraft, and hegemony. It challenges both celebratory narratives and modest reformism, insisting that foundations like Hewlett must be analysed as power players whose class location limits their democratic potential. The piece invites parallel studies of other funders and scrutiny of whether “polycrisis philanthropy” can ever transcend such significant contradictions.

Ultimately, I conclude that the HF’s brand of liberalism functions as crisis machinery—adaptive yet constrained, radical in rhetoric but conservative in effect. Its failures highlight a broader truth: elite liberal institutions, anchored in corporate political economy, offer unreliable bulwarks against far-right threats they help incubate. Serious democratic renewal would require moving beyond such technocratic machinery or seriously realigning it with major input from genuine grassroots movements for radical change.

-Inderjeet Parmar

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics and Associate Dean of Research, City St George’s, University of London; fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a columnist at The Wire, and author of several books including Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power. He is currently completing books on Ten Years That Shook the World: Trump and the World, 2016–2026, based on his columns for The Wire; and another entitled The Wilsonian Roots of Trumpism: A History of the US Foreign Policy Establishment, from 1917 to the present.