Can we imagine a world in which some kind of philanthropic investment or intervention helps prevent an attempt on a U.S. president’s life — or helps stave off any act of political violence, for that matter? Can we imagine philanthropy-backed work shepherding at least some people off the path of polarization?
Sure. Nevertheless, this is an area where philanthropy needs to temper its expectations.
The July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump hammered home a fact that’s long been apparent: Political violence is on the upswing in America, driven in part by intense ideological polarization at a level unprecedented for many decades, maybe even in living memory. While the motive of the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooter remains unclear, it’s hard not to see the event as a harbinger of more violence and darker times to come.
Plenty of philanthropic funders feel the same way. Immediately following the assassination attempt, funders of varying ideological stripes decried “toxic polarization” and called for a return to that much-talked-about supposed benefit of philanthropy-backed civil society: pluralism.
Those are noble sentiments, to be sure, and some funders have gone even further in recent years, directly backing attempts to “bridge” ideological divides and lower the political temperature. There’s the New Pluralists, for instance, a funder collaborative launched in early 2021 that includes philanthropies like the Einhorn Collaborative, the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute and Charles Koch’s Stand Together Trust. The progressive Rockefeller Brothers Fund has also backed the collaborative, as well as MacKenzie Scott.
When I wrote about the New Pluralists two years ago, the collaborative was just rolling out its inaugural “Healing Starts Here” grant opportunity, which ended up supporting 32 projects with over $10 million in total. Those grantees are doing worthy work. But the fact remains that they, along with many bridge-building initiatives that philanthropic funders support, mostly operate on a very local basis and will only affect small numbers of people. The risk here is that any modest progress these efforts make will be eclipsed by larger macro-trends working against them.
In this case, perhaps the biggest one is the possibility that an ascendent GOP, equal parts emboldened and enraged, will double down on the divisive rhetoric it’s become known for under Trump, further pulling the country apart. There’s not a whole lot that liberal philanthropy can do to “build bridges” with that, and, some argue, not a lot it should do.
Other structural factors loom large as well: corporate and social media with a profit interest in highlighting drama and division, rampant mis- and disinformation, and growing numbers of isolated, afflicted young people — especially young men and boys, who are more likely to perpetrate violent acts.
Against all of this, philanthropy-backed projects to put a few people with differing views in a room together (or worse, pay consultants to extensively study the idea of doing so) are weak tea. Sure, they can be effective on a person-by-person basis, but person by person won’t cut it when larger structural forces are making it easy for toxic polarization to take hold across vast swathes of the American populace.
So what can philanthropy do? First off, I’m not arguing funders should abandon bridge-building work. A local grantmaker, for example, might find great value in fostering civic engagement in its home community via direct approaches. But for larger funders with a regional or national focus, the better course might be to home in on the structural factors fueling division, perhaps by amping up advocacy for regulating tech and pulling apart corporate monopolies, or by joining the growing philanthropic push to fund local nonprofit news, or by diving into work on opioid addiction or youth mental health.
Funders can aim to prioritize what political science professor and Niskanen Center Fellow Steve Teles called issues of “enormous importance, low polarization and relatively low agenda status.” The ones above could certainly qualify, and in a 2022 interview with IP on curbing polarization, Teles also discussed things like land use and zoning reform, occupational licensing reform, changing state franchising laws and more.
Those particular examples are rather technical, but that’s partly the point: They’re areas where left-right animus hasn’t built up, and they can be funded outside a culture war context. The same can also be true for classic, down-home destinations for civic support — parks, libraries, houses of worship, community colleges, arts centers, youth sports and other community programming — basically, anything that gets people out from behind their screens.
In the end, though, while they might help, all of these funding avenues won’t actually solve the problem of hyperpolarization and escalating political violence in the U.S. Even the richest foundations and megadonors need to be realistic about how much they can do to “fix” an ideologically polarized America in a politically volatile age, and ask themselves whether the fixes they do deploy aren’t just Band-Aids over a deeper wound.
