Grant Makers Are Among the Forces Hastening Erosion of Civil Society

The passage of health-care legislation this spring marked a milestone, and not just because the new law makes big strides that will improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans. What’s as important is that for the first time in many years, the public interest triumphed over the manipulations of pundits, demagogues, and lobbyists.

But it is not clear that the common good will be victorious the next time contentious issues come up for consideration on Capitol Hill such as Social Security or public education.

One reason is that civil society in America—the places where different views are negotiated to produce a consensus on the big issues of the day—has been systematically weakened and distorted over the past 50 years, a process that the nation’s foundations and wealthy donors may have hastened.

This may sound a surprising statement given the success of President Obama’s election campaign in mobilizing large numbers of volunteers and small contributions, or the rise of the Tea Party movement, but civil society is much more than people writing checks and attending rallies for their favorite leaders. It is ordinary people in large numbers engaging with one another across the lines of difference to build constituencies for change that are strong enough to break the logjam of the formal political system, whichever party is in power.

Perhaps this is romantic, but it worked pretty well for about 25 years after World War II until neoliberal economics and the culture wars arrived.

Sometimes civil society worked through alliances between national, mass-membership associations that pushed the federal government to pass the GI Bill of 1944 and other landmark laws, involving very different groups like parent-teacher associations, labor unions, and the Elks. At other times it worked through social movements for civil and women’s rights that were strongly rooted in particular identities but had tremendous social reach.

But in both those cases, and unlike the heavily fractured and professionalized civil society of today, different parts of the American public interacted with one another and saw themselves as part of a larger common project, notwithstanding their different political and religious views. The sharp edges of their differences could be softened over time as all sides got to know one another.

With its call for “reason and civility in public affairs; a government accountable to the people; liberty and justice for all,” the nascent Coffee Party movement heralds a return to this tradition, but who else will stand up for civil society in America?

Big business is uninterested in empowering anyone but clients and consumers, and the commercial media have eviscerated the public sphere. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have the same rights to political speech as citizens, and partisans see people as simple fodder for their projects.

The Obama administration’s civil-society policy has become lost in technocracy, perfectly illustrated by the Social Innovation Fund, a new $50-million federal effort that will channel money to intermediaries that get scared to death by the large-scale mobilizations of ordinary people.

So what about philanthropy, supposedly civil society’s closest ally?

Unfortunately the signs are not encouraging. Most foundations have retreated into an elitist, technocratic top-down bubble, financing their own special projects instead of expanding the capacities of citizens for independent action.

“Philanthrocapitalism”—the latest fashion to trot down the philanthropic runway—has reduced civil society to a subset of the market, its contributions quantified according to “rates of return on investment” and evaluated by the pseudoscience of “randomized trials and experiments.” Welcome to “civil-society-lite.”

And that’s the fundamental problem—everyone uses civil society as an instrument to achieve his or her own objectives, but no one wants to pay for the intrinsic value it creates. The empowerment of ordinary people has no predetermined ends, and that makes civil society messy, unpredictable, and uncontrollable—and sometimes dangerously subversive, a characteristic that few foundations are brave enough to support. So what should we do?

“Philanthrocapitalism” sees civil society as a machine, in which the grant makers can pull levers and throw switches to achieve the desired objective. But when it is healthy and successful, civil society acts more like an ecosystem that evolves organically over time.

In the machine view of the world, the logical thing to do is to finance projects that compete with others to see which is “best.”

In the ecosystem view, the key is to create an environment in which people can pursue their own work in lots of different but mutually supportive ways, and that’s what government and foundations should be doing—providing the security that people need to be active participants in shaping their society, generating more opportunities for engagement in the public sphere, and then getting out of the way.

Attacks on civil society have become common over the past 40 years, but casual neglect and manipulation are just as insidious. As the singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell laments, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

For civil society in America, let’s hope the warning doesn’t come too late.