The Giving Review

mindingthecampus.org/2026/03/20/ric… Nathaniel Urban, “The Rich and Higher Education,” @NASorg’s Minding the Campus

thegivingreview.com/a-conversation… In 1st part of 2-part conversation, @NorthwesternLaw professor and Why Democracy Needs the Rich author @joldmcginn talks to @GivingReview’s @mhartmannke about the “clerisy” and how to think about the relationship of the wealthy and their philanthropy to it … The book presents a “variety of arguments about what the rich do for democracy, why they’re a positive effect on democracy, unlike what many people think,” according to McGinnis. “One that’s important is that they serve as a counterweight to other people with more influence. A premise of my book is that not everyone has equal influence in democracy, in a representative democracy,” and it’s “impossible to make sure that they have equal influence. “The real question is, Do we have a pluralism of views and perspectives?” he asks. “The rich do have that pluralism, and they are one of the few groups—because of their independence and resources—that can counter what I call professional influencers ,who obviously have a lot more influence, because that’s what they do for a living. They include the media, they include academics, they include entertainers, and they include the bureaucracy. And all of those groups, unlike the rich, lean in one political direction: all to the left, and sometimes very dramatically so.” This “clerisy,” McGinnis says, “does not begin with support from the rich. That term comes from Samuel Coleridge, so it’s a term that comes from a long time ago.” Coleridge and others thought that “with the decline of the nobility and the clergy, there will be some group that would be shaping society and that’s the name he gave to it.” 1/2

The Trump-inspired realignment of the conservative think tank world dlvr.it/TRfWBw

The super-rich are turning their backs on the philanthropic promise backed by Gates and Buffett. That’s good news, writes Tyler Cowen. thefp.com/p/giving-up-on…

thegivingreview.com/a-conversation… In 1st part of 2-part conversation, @BrandeisU professor and Partisan Policy Networks author Zachary Albert talks to @GivingReview’s @mhartmannmke about how so many think tanks have become partisan political organizations, including the role of their funding in the process … The changed nature of think tanks is “part of the broader, I think, decline in this early technocratic vision of what policy research should be, which came out of the Progressive movement in the early 20th Century,” according to Albert. “Of course, these groups were involved in political debates, but they were kind of anti-politics. They were opposed to the horse-trading and compromises and party bossism that dominated the period,” and they “believed that you could use objective research to come up with the best solution to policy problems and advocate that in a very technocratic way. “That started to diminish, that view, especially in the 1970s,” he continues. “Conservatives, I think to some degree correctly, saw that technocratic vision as being a big part of the New Deal, as being a big part of liberal policy, and they started creating their own organizations”—reflecting their founders’, and their funders’, “perspective as being a virtuous corrective to what was going on.” Then, “there’s a liberal reaction in the early 2000s during the Bush Administration, as well.” 1/2

“One of the things I look at are the funders of the seed money that helps found these groups,” @BrandeisU professor and Partisan Policy Networks author Zachary Albert tells @GivingReview’s @mhartmannmke. “The money is given in expectation of some form of politics, some particular viewpoint, and so that has a little bit of a path-dependent effect,” Albert says. “But then I also look at ongoing fundraising,” he continues. “How do these think tanks keep the lights on, sustain their operations? The big difference that I find between more of the academic model and the more-political model is that the academic groups rely much more on institutional money, even if that money has a viewpoint, has a perspective.” Institutional donors don’t want research they fund “to be seen as totally biased and disregarded by decision-makers, and so they care about the processes and quality of the research a bit more than a lot of individual donors,” often solicited by and responsive to direct-mail appeals or their now more technologized equivalents. Regarding nonprofit tax law’s distinction between § 501(c)(3) organizations that cannot engage in partisan politics and § 501(c)(4) ones that can do so in a limited way and the demonstrably increased number of affiliate relationships between the two types of groups, “the people I talked to that worked at these places said, effectively, that that makes no difference, they work hand in glove, they’re one organization with a common goal,” according to Albert. “There’s almost no firewall between the activities of the two. It’s purely a technical and legal distinction.” Might that thus present a potential avenue for reform? Well, “most folks know next to nothing about think tanks and care even less about them, although that’s probably not true of your readers,” he answers, so it’s difficult to interest policymakers in addressing the subject. And if and when “the enforcement agencies are required to make a subjective decision about whether that constitutes political activity that violates the law, it’s easy to dismiss their decisions either way as politicized themselves, right?” 2/2

@emiliemunson thegivingreview.com/a-selection-of…

INVESTIGATION: we found hundreds of NY nonprofits that are banned from engaging in elections have made donations to candidates in the last decade. timesunion.com/capitol/articl…

But Liberalism (as manifest in 2000s/2010s) can't "stay still". It has to keep moving forward (progressing as it where) because it views emancipation from all forms of obligations (natural, past, inherited, etc) as the telos of mankind -- and so, along with a non-profit sector that needed to justify it's existence -- it had to keep expanding the definition of oppression, creating new classes of injustices.

civitasoutlook.com/research/the-w… @Hillsdale’s Paul Moreno reviews @davidtbeito’s FDR: A New Political Life in @UT_Civitas’s @CivitasOutlook …

thegivingreview.com/amidst-histori… Amidst warnings about what may be future aggressive treatment of conservative foundations and nonprofit groups, and relying on great @davidtbeito book from @IndependentInst, @GivingReview co-editor @mhartmannmke looks at some historical precedents ...

jerryzmuller.substack.com/p/democracy-in… “Tocqueville thought that self-interest properly understood creates virtuous habits; not great virtues, but important minor ones,” @jerryzmuller writes on Substack. “It also leads Americans to associate,” according to Muller. “In a famous chapter called ‘How Americans combat individualism with the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood,’ Tocqueville describes how self-interest rightly understood leads people to learn to combine with others for their own advantage. And that experience leads to a balance between private and public interest, by demonstrating to people how concern for the interests of others in the long run serves one’s own interest.”

thegivingreview.com/what-kind-of-p… @GivingReview co-editor @WilliamSchambra argues that we have turned out to be exactly the sort of people the Founders intended us to be—and aimed at producing through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution ... “[T]he Founders’ vision for America was a combination of two things: the large commercial republic preferred by the Federalists, plus a great variety of smaller communities embodying strong moral and religious principles, of the sort envisioned by the Anti-Federalists. People engaged in commerce primarily, but also engaged in community-building, on a local scale,” according to Schambra. “Now, let’s acknowledge there’s a tension here. It’s difficult to maintain strong moral communities in the face of the allurements of commerce, as every failed utopian commune in our history attests. But it’s not impossible,” he continues. “[T]hroughout our nation’s history, zealous left-wing crusades have gradually but invariably lost ground not because conservatives won arguments, but because, sooner or later, the practical and immediate demands of commerce reasserted themselves in the face of abstract utopian promises. It does take time, and that’s frustrating, but it does happen.”

“[D]onors, alumni, and parents need to be organized to express their concerns at every opportunity and to vote with their dollars and feet if they don’t see annual progress made in the data and in the rankings,” Brian T. Fitzpatrick writes in @LawLiberty.

SCOOP: An influencer network boosting Democrats in upcoming elections is facing a broadening investigation in Congress by House Oversight for 'dark money' ties and payments that Chair James Comer alleges must be disclosed to regulators ...more in @TheFP thefp.com/p/exclusive-in…

thegivingreview.com/a-conversation… In 2nd part of 2-part conversation, Connective Tissue’s Sam Pressler and @civic_lex’s @rbryoung talk to @GivingReview’s @mhartmannmke about the relationship between active citizens and philanthropic funders—as well as the opportunities presented to, and the responsibilities of, each … The primary audience of the letter, according to Young, was “fellow practitioners, to be like, ‘Hey, we see you. We know the work that you’re doing in your community, and if you haven’t started doing that work yet, you should just do it. You don’t have to wait for permission, … for a grant. You don’t have to wait for a program officer to give you their blessing. You don’t have to wait for any of that. You can just do your work, and we are here to support you, and we want to learn from you, and we want you to learn from us, and we’re working towards the thing.’” Every day, Pressler says, “I get inbound from people who” say “‘I want to do this thing in my community. where should I begin?’ There’s a renewed energy around this, because it feels like” the local “places where people live are the places where you can have a sense of agency over a world that feels like there’s a lot of distant forces acting upon you. I think we’re trying to hopefully be like, ‘Hey, we’ve been doing this, we see you. … If you’re just getting started, join us. If you’ve been doing this, you’re a part of something. And let’s go forward together.’” The language of the letter specifically addressed to those in philanthropy isn’t “to say, like, ‘Hey, national funders, you know, screw off,’” Pressler continues. Rather, it’s to say “‘There’s a different way of you being in relation to local places, and if you believe in the vision were proposing, … this is what it would look like to be more relational, this is what it would look like to be more participatory, this is what it would look like to actually support folks who are embedded in place.’” Young says “[c]ivic life works because it is a unique thing in a unique place that has very unique people that are doing a very specific unique thing that can’t be reproduced in another community because it’s all different people involved. It’s all a different context.”