Via Aspen Philanthropy Newsletter:
PROFESSOR SAYS CENTRIST AND LIBERAL FOUNDATIONS ARE FACED WITH 'LOOMING IRRELEVANCE' BECAUSE OF FALSE IDEA THAT PHILANTHROPY CAN BE POLITICALLY NEUTRAL
Although many foundation leaders don't like to admit it, foundation policy interventions are unavoidably political and ideological. That's according to the University of California, Santa Barbara's Alice O'Connor in a paper she delivered at last month's Pocantico conference. O'Connor writes that because many mainstream and progressive foundations, especially, are uncomfortable wielding - or admitting to wielding - political power or acknowledging ideological commitments, they are faced with a "looming irrelevance" in society and an "incapacitation" in challenging the growing power of conservative foundations. It's impossible for liberal philanthropy that acts like it is ideologically neutral to succeed in a political culture that is now more than ever organized along ideological lines, she says.
How can well-bred people work effectively with ignorant, fanatical, mean-spirited brutes set above them in positions of unsurpassed and uncontested power? This is a conundrum that many a liberal cannot well solve. Some "rise above the fray," making laughingstocks of themselves as they are taunted by the brutes now in charge. Others cater to the brutes, splitting differences and triangulating, as appeasers of what they know is wrong. Others fall into embarassed silence. Others retreat into privileged bastions to potter about ameliorating the ills that come down from above in great and ever increasing cascades. I am ashamed to be a liberal, ashamed of the cowardice of those I thought were men and women of conscience.
When bullied, Mr. Minim, hit back - with the wit of the entire Western Canon, and the biggest canon of them all is Jonathan Swift, a deft-handed butcher of brutes, as well as an Anglican Divine. I doubt the liberal foundation players will muss their hair, much less bloody their fingers with a surgeon' scapel. That wet work in an urgent cause for the good of our country will be left to others with less to lose. (Then as good writers trained in Strunk and White, they will triangulate against the activists to find a risk-free middle zone.) I could teach the verbal techniques, and the honorable precedents for confronting bullies, but not the courage, not to grown men and women who are so good with diffidence, triangulation, and evasion. "Willing to wound, but afraid to strike" (Alexander Pope).
A good leading indicator of success for a liberal foundation is an article attacking you by Bill Schambra. I am still wating for a blast against me. Wish he would. Two blowhards would make a good debate. Did Pew ever deck him? Why not? No fight in them? Or too haughty to even acknowledge that he peed all over their best dress shoes? Did they think they could rise above it? Ignore the ruffians - ostracize them - and they will go away? Why would a political operative like Schambra care? His friends and his funders are running the country. Who will ostracise whom? Schambra, a bigshot hitman in all the right circles, is doing Pew a favor even by acknowledging their existence. Hirelings, zealots, fools and knaves - it is all in Swift. Schambra, from an overtly political foundation calls Pew political, as if it were an insult, and Pew can't figure out what to say. Sad.
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