A Challenge for Liberal Foundations

As the Democratic presidential debate heats up this fall, the backdrop is startling: America’s political center of gravity has moved sharply to the right.

Need proof? No serious Democratic contender is offering a health plan today that would cover as great a percentage of the uninsured as did the plan offered by President George H.W. Bush in 1992 (which would have covered 30 million of the 35 million Americans who lacked insurance). Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats debate when and how to eliminate the estate tax, the bulk of whose burden falls on heirs in 3,000 families.

Those warped priorities come at a time when it’s become accepted wisdom that economic growth alone can solve social ills — a claim that is demonstrably false. In the last decade, our economy has grown by 40 percent, yet the problems of the uninsured, the working poor, and urban schools have gotten worse, and serious talk of dealing with them has all but vanished.

What happened to America’s political will to solve the problems facing ordinary people? The short answer is simple. Since 1994, when the Clinton health-care plan imploded in a fiasco that cost Democrats control of the Congress, Democrats have been too scared to think big again. Republicans, emboldened by this Democratic timidity, have chosen to push harder on their traditional priorities of cutting taxes and regulations.

But beyond this, as many have noted, the boundaries of debate have also been shaped by a long-range strategic effort by conservative foundations and institutions. What has not been satisfactorily explained is why the more progressive foundations — which have the independence to take the long view and the resources to make a difference — have not worked strategically to shape public debate in ways that the Heritage Foundation and its brethren have done with great success. Interviews with leaders of liberal foundations, and many observers, offer some insights:

We don’t have their mission. “There are not liberal or progressive foundations that are symmetrical with the conservative foundations,” said Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. “The conservative foundations really did have a mission for changing discourse.”

We do social science. Many traditional center-left foundations (Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller, Carnegie) feel the main way they should shape public policy is by supporting social science. Experts study problems, discern the answers, and publish them, and enlightened policy makers put the fixes in place. That approach grew out of the progressive tradition in the early 20th century, and has delivered historic achievements in public health and social services. But such a grant-making strategy cannot suffice to move public debate in today’s political and media culture.

Our side is incoherent. The conservative message — less taxes, less government, less regulation — is easy to agree on and sell. By contrast, foundation leaders told me, liberal thought is a mess. It’s pluralistic and complex. One respected liberal nonprofit chief put it in less flattering terms. “You know the classic critique of the left being a parochial set of special interests with no broader cooperative agenda?” he said. “Well, it’s true.”

We went “bottom-up.” Disillusionment on the left bred by Vietnam and Watergate led many philanthropies to focus on grass-roots movements, community empowerment, and other local efforts that, however worthy, came in an era when public-policy debates were becoming increasingly national and media-driven.

We haven’t valued ideas. “Washington is still basically a one-industry town,” Edwin J. Feulner, the president of the Heritage Foundation, told me. “The one industry is government, the government has one product, and the one product is laws, and laws have basically one input and the input is ideas.” So where do you get the ideas? That’s where a Heritage Foundation or any other nonprofit group can step in.

“It may be that the progressive or liberal foundations have focused much too much on projects and less on thought,” Mr. Brest acknowledged. “We work on school reform, we work on population programs, but not primarily trying to change people’s views about population, but trying to reduce population in overpopulated countries. You don’t change ideas like that. Maybe you actually change the world in other ways. My bet is that you’re so far upstream when you’re trying to change ideas that the leverage is much greater.”

We haven’t valued marketing. Conservative think tanks have been extremely savvy when it comes to marketing ideas in today’s political culture. Mr. Feulner says “the business plan can’t be hiring nine academics for the summer to do the definitive work on this or that. It has to be ‘what’s your Web site going to look like, how are you going to get the right message out to the right editorial writers and the person who is doing the booking on Fox News, CNN, or Jim Lehrer?’”

We’re short-term. “The center-left mainstream foundations are very focused on ‘what are we going to see for our money sooner rather than later,’ with sooner meaning within a year or two or three,” said David Callahan, author of $1 Billion for Ideas, an examination of the conservative foundations’ policy successes published by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. The right has taken a much longer view. “It takes at least 10 years for a radical new idea to emerge from obscurity,” Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, has said. “We see this as kind of like making fine wine,” Michael Joyce, former president of the Bradley Foundation, once said about building a cadre of conservative public intellectuals.

We just want to be loved. The big center-left foundations often have establishment business executives on their boards who are uncomfortable with aggressive advocacy. They’re happy to support projects that help poor children, for example, but shrink from dealing with larger questions of tax and spending policy that would affect such causes on a national scale.

“They’re not prepared for the kind of criticism and warfare that can occur when you try and play any kind of role in these supercharged issues,” said Drew Altman, president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. “They still think in the end that they’re funders supporting good works and they should be loved for that. Well, you’re not going to deal with health reform and be loved.”

One way this timidity manifests itself is in misplaced caution over legal limits on foundation-supported advocacy. After speaking at a recent conference on this subject, Douglas Varley, a leading lawyer on advocacy issues, marveled at “the number of folks at big foundations who should know better who were saying, ‘My God, I didn’t know we could fund any of that kind of stuff. I thought where policy was involved it was prohibited.’” That’s simply wrong, Mr. Varley said. After all, the conservative foundations have moved national debate while operating within the same legal framework for years.

Those factors have conspired to produce a vacuum among foundations that should be freest to lead. Yet it’s not as if center-left foundations have no successes to build on when it comes to the war of ideas; a generation ago those foundations helped change public discourse in areas from the environment to civil rights. Now, in this crucial decade before the boomers retire, they have a responsibility to step up and engage in the debates on political economy that will set the course of social justice for the next generation. If they don’t lead, who will?

What American politics urgently needs — and what enlightened foundation leadership is in a special position to promote — is not a new left, but a new center. Domestic debate needs to be re-centered around a handful of fundamental goals on which all of us can agree, whether we call ourselves Republicans, Democrats, or independents. People will always fight over details. But if we first ask, what does equal opportunity and a decent life in America mean, can’t we agree that anyone who works full time should be able to provide for his or her family? That every citizen should have basic health coverage? That special efforts should be made to make sure that poor children have good schools? And that average citizens should have some way to make their voices heard amid the din of big political money?

Bringing those common-sense ideas back to the mainstream will require foundations to cooperate in new ways, and to emphasize macro questions of taxation and spending in ways that haven’t been their focus. In most cases it’s not new research that is required; prestigious think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute regularly produce reams of analyses that are relevant. The problem is that most of it doesn’t get packaged into a form that can move public debate. What’s needed is the strategic, politically minded marketing of ideas that the right has perfected and which the center-left has generally (and fatally) neglected.

The new paradigm we need is simple. Support a clinic for the uninsured, and you’ve done a wonderful thing. Change the debate about government’s role in assuring basic health coverage for everyone, and you’ve solved the underlying problem.

The leverage is in ideas. The right knows this. The clock is ticking. What are other foundations waiting for?

Matthew Miller is author of The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love, published this month by PublicAffairs. He advises businesses, nonprofit groups, and governments on strategy, policy, and communication issues and is senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, in Washington.