Rich Liberals: We Will Go Another Way

07:00 PM Aug 07, 2005

We've been looking for the right kick-start to roll out the DemocracyInAction blog, and it arrived this morning in the form of the Washington Post's coverage [login required] of the Democracy Alliance:

"At least 80 wealthy liberals have pledged to contribute $1 million or more apiece to fund a network of think tanks and advocacy groups to compete with the potent conservative infrastructure built up over the past three decades."

Welcome on the face of it, though this is hardly the first attempt to address the long-obvious infrastructure imbalance. The hue and cry for more liberal money, better deployed, has been out there in many different quarters for years -- see here (1995) and here (1999), for starters, or here if you're writing a graduate thesis on the subject. So it's fair to say that the jury's going to be out on this for a while, and the first test of the donors is whether they can hold the course for even a few years. As a progressive development officer, however, I readily welcome any move towards multi-year, general operating funding in the sector.

There are a couple of immediately interesting aspects about this. First, the plea long sent out to progressive foundations, who sit atop enormous piles of cash and like to style themselves adepts of the big picture and the long view, seems to have at last been at last picked up by individual donors -- a much more fluid group, and one legally unencumbered by foundations' spending restrictions. Those folks are therefore more likely than foundations to demand strategic integration of organizers, activists, think tanks, lobbying entities and political bodies, which is actually anathema to many lefty foundations overcautious of their tax exemption.

Second, the relationship of the Democratic party to what these donors conceive as the progressive agenda writ large will bear watching. Historically, the conservative movement's funding strategies and infrastructure grew out of the objective of popularizing and ruling with its ideology, and doing so by capturing the once-unwilling Republican party as a vehicle. The latter goal has been so stunningly realized that the formerly ubiquitous species known as the Rockefeller Republican teeters at the brink of extinction in the barren archipelagos of New England Calvinism -- a source of intrinsic pleasure to many shock troops of the Right, no doubt, but its extinction was always a tactical means to the primary, ideological objective. So what do we have here? A support operation for the Democratic Party as currently constituted? A takeover bid? A parallel operation? Or something else besides? Is there an intent to make Democrats more responsive to progressives, or vice versa?

Whatever it might hope, it's certainly not possible for the Democracy Alliance to avoid ideological questions inextricably bound up in the goals and strategies embodied where the rubber meets the road and the grant checks hit the mail. Giving money implies choices and commitments, winners and losers. We'll get a sense of what kind of choices are being made as awards are announced in the coming weeks ... and then they'll be blogged furiously in a community that's already seen the nascence of a [potentially competitive] netroots model of big-dollar philanthropy, a dimension Olin and Scaife didn't have to worry about back in the day. Like the rest of us, their work is cut out for them.

So, welcome to the fresh arm in the Show. Now, let's see you throw strikes.

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