The Left’s Fragile Foundations

This article appears in the August 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

The great social justice movements of the mid-20th century were all built on self-funding and direct organizing, often at heroic personal risk. Their tactics were not constrained by the need to keep the confidence of foundation program officers, or navigate the vagaries of the Internal Revenue Service. They were able to blend organizing with electoral politics by working to elect allies, without pretending to be nonpartisan out of concerns for their tax status.

The industrial labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s was self-funded by union dues. The CIO invented the first political action committee, CIO-PAC, which raised extra money from members and organized massive door-knocking efforts to help elect progressive Democrats. There was no pretense that building unions and electing sympathetic Democrats were unrelated.

The civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s was also built on direct action and was largely self-financed by Black churches with some help from unions and individual donors. Modest foundation grants came later. The self-funding was all the more remarkable because civil rights activists were mostly working-class or poor.

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By contrast, today’s progressive infrastructure is heavily dependent on foundations. No major movement groups are self-funded, with the exception of unions, which are much weaker than in their heyday. Think tanks, advocacy groups, and grassroots organizations all rely on grants. (And the Prospect, as a nonprofit, relies partly on readers and partly on grants.)

Progressive electoral machinery, meanwhile, has become reliant on a model that uses two categories of tax-exempt nonprofits—501(c)(3) and closely connected 501(c)(4) groups—to target, register, and mobilize voters. Foundations as well as individual donors have stepped up to provide a lot of financing.

In one sense, this shift is providential. Grassroots mobilization fills a long-standing gap in election strategy that was previously dominated by Democratic Party organs and presidential campaigns, which sucked out resources and energy, overly concentrated on election cycles, and failed to build for the long term.

But using tax-exempt political organizations is also risky, because the IRS has never clarified just what (c)(3) and (c)(4) groups, which are supposed to be charities, may legally do in politics. That makes the model a potential sitting duck for a Trumpified, weaponized IRS, which in turn could intimidate foundation funding for progressive groups generally.

THE NEW GEORGIA PROJECT, founded by Stacey Abrams in 2013, has become a national template. It conducts year-round issue organizing and voter registration through its (c)(3). Then, in election years, it mobilizes likely Democratic voters through its (c)(4), the New Georgia Project Action Fund.

Over the years, the project has trained and deployed some 3,000 organizers. In its first year, New Georgia and its affiliates registered 69,000 voters. In 2020, they registered a quarter of a million. They also knocked on two million doors, made seven million phone calls, and sent four million texts. These heroic efforts produced a margin just sufficient to enable Joe Biden to carry Georgia, send two Democratic senators to Washington, and give Biden a Democratic Senate.

The tax code defines a (c)(3) as a “social welfare group” organized for charitable, educational, religious, or scientific purposes. A (c)(3) may not do electoral politics at all, although nonpartisan voter registration and education is allowed. Donors get a tax deduction for grants or gifts to a (c)(3).

A 501(c)(4) is similarly defined by the tax code as a social welfare organization. The key difference is that a (c)(4) can do some politics. According to the most recent IRS regulation from 1959 (!), a (c)(4) may engage in politics as long as that is not its primary purpose. Lawyers advising (c)(4) groups have generally defined that to mean 49.9 percent, though the IRS has never made that explicit. Traditionally, major issue groups such as the Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association have been organized as (c)(4)s, which are also exempt from paying taxes. Unlike a (c)(3), their donors don’t get a tax deduction.

In the past decade, it’s become common for the same organization to set up closely coordinated (c)(3)s and (c)(4)s, on the model of the New Georgia Project. To take one other example, Forward Montana has a (c)(3), which raises money for targeted voter registration, and an affiliated (c)(4), which is more explicitly partisan. The (c)(3) sells its list of likely Democratic voters to the (c)(4).

People’s House, a national group working to turn the House Democratic, recommends donations to several state groups, including Forward Montana. The People’s House website says: “Republican Ryan Zinke won this district [MT-1] by just 3 points in 2022 … To win in MT-1, People’s House recommends that donors support Forward Montana," adding, "To turn out young voters in MT-1 this fall, helping both defeat Zinke and re-elect Senator John Tester, Forward Montana plans repeated contact with tens of thousands of young Montanans through canvassing, events, phone, mail, and social media.”

This sure sounds explicitly partisan—and is exactly what Democrats need to be doing—except that Forward Montana is a (c)(4), which is supposed to limit its electoral work to less than 50 percent of its activities. Yet this (c)(3)/(c)(4) gambit has become the standard playbook for Democrats in state after state.

At the national level, groups such as the closely affiliated Voter Participation Center, a (c)(3), and the Center for Voter Information, a (c)(4), raise and move hundreds of millions of dollars. They share the same CEO, Tom Lopach. Nationally and at the state level, there are “tables” of (c)(3) and (c)(4) groups that meet regularly and compare strategies, as well as tables of their funders.

These creative efforts to mobilize potential Democratic voters partly compensate for the overwhelming Republican money advantage, as well as Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression. In that sense, they are a godsend. But a politicized IRS under Trump could demand internal documents and conduct harassing audits. The IRS could work hand in glove with a Republican Ways and Means Committee to conduct fishing expeditions, demonstrating that the supposed separation of (c)(3)s and (c)(4)s is a sham. The ultimate target would be the foundations that fund these groups.

I’m not giving the right any ideas it hasn’t thought of already. The Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee has already begun a broad investigation of (c)(3) and (c)(4) groups, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been on a crusade to harass liberal nonprofits. And legislation introduced in the Senate this April by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) would eliminate tax-exempt status from so-called “terrorist supporting nonprofits,” which is obviously in reference to Israel’s war on Gaza and could be wielded at the will of a future IRS to punish even mild criticism.

A MAJOR CATALYST FOR THIS SET of political tactics was the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Citizens United was a conservative (c)(4). Among other projects, it sponsored and promoted a film attacking Hillary Clinton, planned for wide distribution before the 2008 Democratic primaries. The Federal Election Commission directed Citizens United to desist, on the grounds that this was explicit electoral activity too close to an election. But the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, held that groups like Citizens United had First Amendment rights to spend unlimited sums, as long as they were “independent expenditures” not directly affiliated with a campaign. That distinction often proved to be fake, but collusion was hard to document.

Citizens United opened the floodgates to oceans of unlimited campaign spending by corporations and individuals, blowing away a century of regulation (upheld by previous Supreme Court rulings) trying to limit the influence of big money in politics. A less remarked-upon effect of Citizens United was that the Court seemed to be saying that despite the plain language of the tax code and earlier IRS regulations, a (c)(4) could operate as a mostly electoral operation.

This can be understood as a bad news/good news/bad news story. The first bad news is the unleashing of PAC and super PAC money, much of it dark money. The good news is that after decades of being rather timid about funding activities that might be construed as partisan, the big center-left foundations saw the opening, grasped the stakes, and began taking more risks.

But the other bad news, as noted, is that the IRS has never clarified what coordinated activities between a (c)(3) and a closely affiliated (c)(4) are permissible. Some progressive groups have been sloppy about strictly segregating their (c)(3) and (c)(4) operations. Others have been scrupulously careful about following what are understood as the current IRS rules and norms. But those rules are imprecise and could be changed. All this is ready-made for selective persecution.

Progressive electoral machinery has become reliant on a model that is a potential sitting duck for a Trumpified, weaponized IRS.

Planned Parenthood is high on the list of groups that the right would like to shut down. It is the leading provider of birth control and abortion, as well as an effective advocate for keeping abortion legal. As defense of reproductive rights has become central to Democratic electoral fortunes, Planned Parenthood is more essential than ever. Through its large network of supporters and clients, Planned Parenthood also raises vast sums to benefit Democratic candidates.

Planned Parenthood is technically four affiliated organizations. Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its state chapters, which provides reproductive services through its clinics, is a (c)(3); Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which lobbies, does public education, and helps elect allies, is a (c)(4). Both have the same president, Alexis McGill Johnson. The group also has a PAC and a super PAC. All of this has doubtlessly been carefully lawyered, and Planned Parenthood is evidently in compliance with the tax rules as currently defined and enforced. But what if those rules were changed?

A fishing expedition against progressive nonprofits, of course, would represent an extreme double standard, since the right plays these same games. The NRA is both a membership organization and a gun lobby, and effectively part of the MAGA machine. It operates a (c)(4) and several (c)(3)s, including the NRA Foundation, the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund, and the NRA Freedom Action Foundation, which litigate and engage to get out the gun-owner vote, invariably to help Republicans. Evangelical churches are tax-exempt nonprofits, whose pastors are often partisan. But Trump epitomizes the use of double standards.

When Republicans controlled Congress during the Obama administration in 2013, in fact, they attacked career IRS officials for failing to grant 501(c)(3) status to some Republican-affiliated groups. The IRS had incautiously compiled a list of words and phrases that should be red flags for political activity. One such phrase was “Tea Party.” A Republican congressional committee investigated and hounded the director of the nonprofit division, Lois Lerner, out of office. In an effort to quell the uproar, President Obama fired the acting IRS commissioner, a career official named Steven Miller.

But ironically, the only group that actually lost its tax status in the IRS crackdown was a Democratic one. Emerge America was created to help train Democratic women to run for office and had been granted 501(c)(4) status in 2006. The IRS in 2013 revoked its tax status on the grounds that the group was too flagrantly partisan. Ever since then, the division that supervises nonprofits has been notably quiescent. But this case suggests that the IRS, in the absence of precise regulations, has a fair amount of discretion in deciding when a group crosses a badly defined line. And in a Trump second term, they would be likely to use it.

THERE IS PRECEDENT FOR an all-out war on progressive funding mechanisms. During the Reagan years, several reports by conservative groups found that about one-third of the income of progressive public-interest groups came directly or indirectly from government. Conservatives were incensed that government underwrote progressive legal services litigation, while right-wing legal groups were on their own. What remained of the War on Poverty heavily subsidized on-the-ground progressive organizing. The conservative movement wanted to do something about this, and embarked on a project to “defund the left.”

They had some wins. Under the Carter administration, left community organizing was heavily subsidized by the use of VISTA volunteers. One of the most effective such groups, Mass Fair Share, went out of business after the Reagan administration cut off all VISTA funding in 1981.

But the project did not reach its goals. A detailed postmortem report on the “defund the left” project written toward the end of the Reagan administration and published in the conservative journal National Affairs bemoaned the fact that government grant funding to progressive nonprofits, via the NIH, NSF, EPA, and several other agencies, continued and even increased under Reagan. “Government funding of advocacy groups had become too deeply engrained in the structure of American government,” the report lamented.

These vulnerabilities remain in place today. It has long galled the right that Planned Parenthood is a major recipient of government funds; of its budget of over $2 billion, about $700 million comes from government health service reimbursements and grants. While the Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funding of abortion, 17 states allow Medicaid funding of abortion through their state contributions to the mixed federal-state program. In addition, Planned Parenthood is a major recipient of federal Title X family-planning support of its clinics. As right-wing groups keep complaining, money is fungible and federal family-planning funds free other money to pay for abortions. Under Trump, the government did bar Planned Parenthood from the Title X program in 2019, but this was restored by Biden in 2021.

The battle to defund the left would be far more sophisticated under a second Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation’s detailed blueprint, Project 2025, systematically targets the entire range of agencies, and one of its tactics is to undermine agencies that help progressive organizations such as the NLRB and numerous others. With a second Trump presidency, the right’s war against Planned Parenthood will only intensify.

BIG FOUNDATIONS AND LEFT SOCIAL movements are far from natural allies.

Funders often ask grant applicants for their “theory of change.” The theory of change of the industrial labor movement was straightforward: class struggle. Use the raw power of mobilized workers to bring production to a halt, and compel the company to recognize and bargain with the union.

The civil rights struggle also had a theory of change. It sought radical transformation by confronting, nonviolently, the racist power structure of the South, often relying on civil disobedience against unjust police authority, and using the power of shame to win over broader public opinion.

Both movements looked to government for help. Labor got the Wagner Act and FDR’s enforcement during World War II of the requirement that military contractors recognize their unions. The civil rights movement used its alliance with Lyndon Johnson to get three landmark laws passed. Both movements also relied on friendly courts and were fortunate to be operating during a rare era of a progressive federal judiciary.

The groups depended on their own organizing and were largely self-funded. That also describes the movements for gay rights (later LGBTQ rights) that began in the 1960s, second-wave feminism, disability rights, and early environmentalism. It describes the consumer movement of Ralph Nader, which soon became a more general movement to reform the excesses of capitalism.

Big foundations and left social movements are far from natural allies.

During these early movement struggles, major foundations were mostly absent. A few small family foundations such as the Taconic, Field, Stern Family, and New World Foundations did support Dr. King and voter registration. One very small left-wing foundation called the Garland Fund bankrolled the NAACP’s civil rights litigation under Thurgood Marshall, beginning in the 1930s. But the big philanthropic foundations like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and their community counterparts were mainly funding the arts, education, public broadcasting, research, public health, and a range of benign civic ventures.

Liberals and conservatives both became increasingly critical of foundations, for different reasons. Many private foundations were being used not as legitimate philanthropies but to stash family wealth. By putting stock in a family-controlled company into a foundation, the owners could avoid taxes but keep control. Some progressives, such as Sen. Albert Gore Sr. (D-TN), wanted to require all foundations to spend down their assets and go out of business after 25 years.

Eventually, some foundations became more venturesome in underwriting progressive activism. In 1967, the Ford Foundation incensed conservatives by funding targeted voter registration in Cleveland, clearly intended to help elect Carl Stokes as the city’s first Black mayor. Ford also invited controversy by supporting the movement for community control of schools in New York, which pitted militant Black neighborhood leaders against the heavily Jewish teachers union.

All of this came to a head in 1969 after Ford’s patrician president McGeorge Bundy bestowed fellowships on several staffers to Robert F. Kennedy, who had abruptly lost their jobs as well as their leader when he was assassinated in June 1968. Bundy, formerly JFK’s national security adviser, was a longtime ally of the Kennedy family.

After hearings before the Senate Finance Committee, where an unrepentant Bundy served as a punching bag, Congress enacted the 1969 Tax Reform Act. It closed the family control loophole for private foundations, required all foundations to pay out at least 6 percent of their endowment in grants, and imposed a 4 percent tax on their earnings. This shot across the bow of organized philanthropy caused foundations to pull back from underwriting social activism.

After the fervor of the 1960s, organized labor was steadily weakened by Republican presidents, increased resistance from industry, outsourcing, and its own bureaucratic passivity under then-AFL-CIO president George Meany. The civil rights movement had won its major legislative goals and was working to implement them. Both became somewhat less militant and more institutionalized. For the left to stay relevant, a new model of social change would have to emerge.

ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO, I was invited to the annual conference of the association of conservative funders, the Philanthropy Roundtable, to debate Bill Kristol, then the editor of The Weekly Standard. We were to be the after-dinner entertainment.

I agreed to do it on condition that they let me arrive in time for the afternoon program. The afternoon panel was made up of the presidents of four of the most influential right-wing think tanks: the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage, Cato, and the Manhattan Institute. The audience was their funders, the heads of the leading right-wing foundations.

Each think-tank president thanked the foundation presidents in the audience for their long-term financing, with commitments of 10 and even 20 years. Ed Crane, president of Cato, pointed out that change takes time. Cato had been investing in the Federalist Society for many years before it became powerful enough to pick federal judges. Chris DeMuth, president of AEI, gave the example of the right’s long-term investment in the case for school vouchers, which took decades to become mainstream. As the panelists pointed out, conservative funders gave long-term support to right-wing intellectuals such as Charles Murray and Robert Bork for many years before their work became influential on public debate and policy.

As an influential paper written in 1997 by Sally Covington on “the strategic philanthropy of conservative foundations” explains, these strategies began in the 1970s. Right-wing funders like the Coors, Scaife, Olin, and Bradley families connected ideology to institutions to politics to policy. They invested in public intellectuals and in media. They saw their common project as movement-building, and they provided long-term funding.

Center-left funders did none of this. Their philanthropy was project-based, scattershot, and faddish. Priorities and grantees changed with new presidents. The idea that they were engaged in a long-term ideological struggle made them uncomfortable. “The resulting imbalance has had profound consequences for policy debates and legislative decisions,” Covington wrote. “It has also had serious implications for how well American democracy functions …” In addition, the quest for foundation support tended to intensify the left’s chronic tendency to fragmentation and rivalry, as applicants for grants sought to differentiate their group from other natural allies.

In 2003, a former Clinton official named Rob Stein reduced these arguments to a PowerPoint presentation, which he shopped around to center-left donors and activists. The result was the creation of the Democracy Alliance, intended to bring more strategic coherence to center-left funding. The DA was dominated by its largest funders, who had outsized influence on which groups were selected as priority grantees.

As Micah Sifry wrote in a withering appraisal, written just after the little-remarked passing of Rob Stein in May 2022, “Unfortunately, instead of building the kind of institutions and investing in the kind of leaders who could genuinely counter the New Right, the Democracy Alliance’s donors prioritized institutions that were meant to strengthen the existing Democratic party, not replace it with something more ideologically coherent or less beholden to corporate power.”

A perfect example was the DA’s major underwriting of a new think tank called the Center for American Progress, founded in 2003. It was widely considered the Clinton administration in exile. Its founding president was longtime Clinton strategist John Podesta. CAP was political, but utterly safe ideologically, and far from a movement organization.

The DA replaced the anarchic incoherence of center-left funding with a small group of power brokers who decided which progressive organizations were worth funding. More insurgent groups had a hard time getting on the DA’s preferred list. And the bias toward short-term funding persisted. Interviews with heads of progressive groups suggest that one-, two-, and three-year grants are still the norm. One leader cited the acronym MYGOD, which stands for Multi-Year General Operating Dollars, a heaven-sent imperative that the right understands far better than the liberal left.

PROGRESSIVE FUNDERS ARE ESPECIALLY uneasy about financing challenges to the excesses of capitalism. It took decades for EPI, a labor-oriented think tank and advocacy group (on whose board I serve), to get more than a few million dollars a year from foundations. Meanwhile, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which researches issues of poverty but has far less to say about the abuses of concentrated wealth, raises upwards of $80 million a year, and no less than Robert Rubin has been a regular speaker at its fundraising events.

In 2010, the details of what became the Dodd-Frank Act to reform Wall Street were being debated, setting up a classic David-and-Goliath battle between the small progressive lobby pushing for stronger remedies, a coalition called Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), and the concentrated lobbying power of Wall Street. AFR was having a terrible time raising foundation money. I was enlisted as half of a delegation of two to seek support from George Soros, whom I knew slightly.

My partner in this effort was a longtime senior employee and confidant of Soros. For 45 minutes, we pitched our hearts out. Soros listened. Finally, he responded. “As you know,” he said, “I am conflicted,” referring to the fact that his multibillion-dollar fortune came from his speculations as a hedge fund operator. “But I will tell you one thing,” he continued. “If anyone is going to criticize Wall Street with my money, it’s going to be me.”

Needless to say, Americans for Financial Reform did not get any money from Soros, nor did Soros testify in favor of Dodd-Frank. However, he did underwrite reform of capitalism at one careful remove by bankrolling a new global think tank called the Institute for New Economic Thinking. INET in turn supports dissenting academic research that challenges the orthodox neoliberal model. However, in another example of the risks of dependence on capricious philanthropy, when Soros retired and the next generation took over his various projects, the promised long-term support for INET was downgraded.

Center-left philanthropy is project-based, scattershot, and faddish.

The hopeful news on this front is that foundations have begun serious funding in one area that does address predatory capitalism: the abuses of economic concentration. Two key players who resurrected the lost cause of antitrust are Lina Khan, now the FTC chair, and the leader of the organization where she used to work, Barry Lynn.

Lynn’s anti-monopoly group, the Open Markets Program, had been housed at the New America Foundation, which was partly funded by Google’s foundation. When Lynn criticized Google, New America fired him in August 2017. Lynn went independent to create the freestanding Open Markets Institute. Along the way, he because a successful missionary for the idea that foundations should be underwriting research and advocacy on antitrust. A second group that combats the excesses of economic concentration, the American Economic Liberties Project, has also succeeded in raising foundation money. (The Prospect has partnered with both groups.)

A cynic might say that holding capitalism accountable to its own first principle of free competition is a slightly easier sell with foundations than championing rights of workers and unions, or going after Wall Street financial abuses. The two main groups working on financial regulation, Americans for Financial Reform and Better Markets, still have difficulty raising foundation money.

A related problem is the significant increase in philanthropies associated with Silicon Valley. These include some genuinely progressive funders such as the Omidyar Network and a made-over Hewlett Foundation that has invested heavily in grants to counter neoliberalism. But the more typical Silicon Valley funder has a net conservatizing effect.

Silicon Valley funders are typically self-made billionaires, and they tend to be libertarian. That explains the support of many tech foundations, such as Gates and Lumina, for charter schools. They also come out of a culture where you make several bets, one pays off big, and you dump the others. Applied to philanthropy, this is the antithesis of long-term funding.

Billionaire entrepreneurs, who tend to remain active in the foundations they create, also tend to have great faith in their own genius. Some of their philanthropic forays turned out to be embarrassing blunders, such as the $200 million investment by Mark Zuckerberg in Newark’s public schools. Silicon Valley foundations, especially newly created ones where the benefactor plays a controlling role, epitomize what Anand Giridharadas termed “the elite charade of changing the world.” The theory is that there is no conflict between doing well and doing good, and that technical win-win solutions are better than struggles. “The world may be cruel and unfair, but if you sprinkle seeds of technology on it, shoots of equality will sprout,” Giridharadas writes in his 2018 book Winners Take All.

Even apart from the particular style of Silicon Valley funders, who do include some liberals, the overall impact of progressive reliance on foundations on balance has been conservatizing. Activist program officers tend to be more progressive than presidents, who are looking over their shoulders at even more conservative boards. The anomaly of very rich people underwriting social change has no counterpart on the right, where self-interest, ideology, and political investments operate in lockstep.

SO IS THERE ANY SOLUTION to the twin problems of overreliance on foundations that are still too short-term and faddish in their strategies and the risk of a general assault on tax-exempt groups generally? You might think that one protection is the logic of mutually assured destruction. Right-wing foundations and nonprofits would presumably resist a crackdown on (c)(3) and (c)(4) status, just as much as progressive ones.

The problem with that is twofold. Trump is nothing if not the epitome of double standards, and a weaponized IRS could do real damage to progressive organizations while leaving conservative ones alone. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has demonstrated this by launching harassing investigations of at least two dozen Texas groups advancing progressive causes such as immigrant rights, while cozying up to far-right Texas nonprofits that are at least as political, such as the Texas Public Policy Foundation. In 2018, Paxton intervened in a TPPF-led lawsuit against Austin’s short-term rental ordinance. In 2019, Paxton gave the keynote at TPPF’s policy orientation meeting. In 2021, he appointed TPPF lawyers to lead an attack on the EPA’s Clean Air Act.

The more fundamental problem is that the liberal left, for all of its frustrations with philanthropists, is today more reliant on foundation support than the right. Fifty years of foundation funding of right-wing think tanks has been invested in programs to enlist individual donors. Heritage now boasts some 200,000 small donors, and many hundreds of large ones. They are motivated by ideology and movement-building. There is nothing comparable among liberal think tanks. If a Trump IRS did serious damage to foundations and their progressive grantees, right-wing donors would go right on financing right-wing infrastructure, with or without the (c)(3)s and the tax breaks.

And the right simply has more money. The Kochs and kindred right-wing billionaires give some of their money via several family foundations, but they also just write checks, and could live without the tax advantages. Individual wealthy donors on the left are a partial cure, but they can be even more imperious and impulsive than foundations.

Liberal billionaires are ambiguously liberal. Conservative billionaires are rock-solid conservative. What else would you expect from capitalism?

Another supposed breakwater is the law that Congress passed in the aftermath of Nixon’s flagrant attempt to use the IRS to get information and punish political enemies. That law made it a felony for the president or any member of the executive office of the president to meddle with the IRS. All tax policy questions have to go through the Treasury. But a Trump IRS commissioner would know the game plan with nary a word from Trump. And even if Trump did try to get involved, risking criminal liability, the Supreme Court has just given him a blanket pass.

THE ONLY EFFECTIVE DEFENSE is for progressives to go back to our roots. Political scientist Theda Skocpol, in her 2003 book Diminished Democracy, famously calculated that a century ago, there were 58 large groups with dues-paying members equal to at least 1 percent of the adult population, organized democratically into local and state chapters, which in turn sent delegates to make national policies. Some of them were civic, others were more political. None relied on foundation grants. Over time, they were succeeded by what Skocpol termed “organizations without members,” run by professionals, speaking for oppressed people and groups, but with no base membership. The right, meanwhile, did have some genuine membership organizations, such as the NRA and evangelical churches, and some astroturf ones, like the Tea Parties.

The hopeful news is that there has been something of a return to genuine mass membership groups, promoted by a new wave of on-the-ground organizing. Even without foundation support, the New Georgia Project is a very impressive feat, and it will survive even if foundations pull out. We’ve seen a model for that in the recent past, in fact.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was a working-class membership organization established in 1970. At its peak, ACORN had some 500,000 dues-paying members in more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 30 states, and a total budget of over $100 million. Members doubled as door-knockers in political campaigns, which gave the group substantial leverage to pressure candidates and incumbents on policies in exchange for endorsements.

The combination of a conservative doctored video and an embezzlement scandal among its leadership sent ACORN into bankruptcy. But its organizing model is thriving, through both successor organizations such as the Center for Popular Democracy and scores of local groups that have active dues-paying members. The Working Families Party is at the center of this model. Interestingly, many foundations have grasped the importance of these efforts, but the groups, importantly, have an authentic life independent of their foundation backing and foundations do not dictate their agendas.

There has been a return to genuine mass membership groups, promoted by a new wave of on-the-ground organizing.

An emblematic example is Make the Road New York, a grassroots membership group founded in 1997 that connects immigrant rights issues and practical immigrant help with a struggle for better working conditions and is very engaged in electoral politics. MRNY is closely affiliated with both the Center for Popular Democracy and the New York Working Families Party. It has some 23,000 dues-paying members, and also gets support from trade unions including SEIU, Teamsters, Steelworkers, and RWDSU, as well as several major foundations, such as Ford, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Surdna, Mertz Gilmore, and others.

MRNY also gets around a third of its total budget from local and state government contracts, to help members get access to health benefits and vaccines, and to assert tenants’ and labor rights. In addition to supplementing its budget, “it helps people see the direct connection between organizing, policy, and direct benefits,” says Steve Kest, a leader of the Center for Popular Democracy.

Think of this strategy as a virtuous circle of progressive activists helping to elect public officials, who in turn support programs that help underwrite base groups—a progressive version of Tammany. Needless to say, a right-wing national government, in the spirit of defunding the left, would try to shut this down, but blue states and cities can keep it alive, as they did during Trump’s first (and one hopes, only) administration.

One leader who personally connects the new wave of grassroots organizing with foundation support is Deepak Bhargava. In his perceptive 2023 book written with Stephanie Luce, Practical Radicals, Bhargava and Luce write about the renaissance of grassroots groups that have actual members and assess the efficacy of different organizing strategies. They insist that the only long-term counterweight in a democracy to organized big money is organized people. “When people come together in mass organizations, they have the power of numbers and solidarity to win concessions.”

Bhargava is now in a position to practice what he preaches. In early 2024, he became president of the $3 billion JPB Foundation, one of the nation’s largest, and has made clear that the foundation’s new priority will be underwriting base-building. Other foundations have shifted in this direction, recognizing that their support needs to complement on-the-ground organizing and activated dues-paying members.

If Trump does become the next president, we are in survival mode, on all fronts. The least we can do is to tithe ourselves to keep alive movements that work to keep democracy alive. If our grandparents, far less affluent than we are, could self-finance a radical labor movement and a militant civil rights movement, why can’t we do as much?