Progressive Vision Needs to Be Re-Examined

To the Editor:

In a recent article I wrote for The Nation, I argued that progressive foundations should learn from their conservative counterparts and increasingly support groups that work on multiple issues and break new intellectual ground, through multi-year grants for general support. In his March 12 column in The Chronicle (“The Left Doesn’t Have It Right on Grant Making”), Pablo Eisenberg responds by attacking me for views I never took.

Mr. Eisenberg argues that a worthy “progressive vision” must include grassroots organizing and then criticizes me for failing to “take care to make a distinction between those think tanks that, by their practices, share [this] vision and those that do not.” Yet I actually agreed with him: “And if we want [intellectual] work to be relevant, it must be carried on alongside, and together with, grassroots organizing.”

Mr. Eisenberg supports policy shops “connected to the grassroots” but suggests that mine, the Institute for Policy Studies, is “elitist, with ideas emanating from the top down.” He seems not to have noticed that in his own backyard of Washington, D.C., I.P.S. holds activist-training classes that reach 2,000 grassroots organizers each year, plus 1,000 more nationally.

“Perhaps Mr. Shuman and other critics on the left,” Mr. Eisenberg scolds, “have forgotten that the Community Reinvestment Act . . . was the direct product of a national grassroots campaign.” But it’s Mr. Eisenberg who seems unaware that I’ve written for the past two decades about the virtues of community organizing. (My most recent book, Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, specifically touts the virtues of the Community Reinvestment Act.)

I never argued, as Mr. Eisenberg suggests, that grassroots organizations should receive less philanthropic money — only that “major foundations with a national focus that wish to support organizing should insist that grantees be connected with larger national debates, movements, and institutions.” I’m skeptical about national foundations tossing symbolic dollops of money to a handful of community organizations — in a country with 36,000 communities. I believe that once a grassroots group receives more than a tiny portion of its budget from out of town, it loses its grassroots character.

A better way to strengthen local groups, I believe, is to help them develop a strong community base of financial support from local residents, churches, businesses, and foundations. This is how success truly can be replicated.

Mr. Eisenberg rushes to the defense of the Public Welfare Foundation, but he never explains to readers that I didn’t accuse it of unusually problematic philanthropy. I simply listed its top grants to show what a typical funding portfolio on the left looks like, and contrasted a similar-sized foundation on the right, the Bradley Foundation. The comparison revealed that Bradley’s grants were more consistently multi-year and multi-issue, and that they targeted more money for general support and intellectual work.

“In the end,” Mr. Eisenberg writes, “the achievement of the progressive vision will depend more on the success of [grassroots] organizations than on whether a think tank can generate more ideas, research, books, and conferences.” He ignores that the actual concern I expressed in The Nation, that progressives’ current “vision” doesn’t stand a chance of winning the hearts and minds of most Americans.

“What exactly are we organizing for?” I wrote. “Many of our pat ‘answers’ are obsolete. State socialism lies in ruins, and Great Society liberalism is increasingly outmoded. One unanswered question looming large, for example, is how to provide decent work to everyone without destroying our ecological base. Can anyone say, with confidence, what our economic program is?”

Mr. Eisenberg ends with this: “Some progressive non-profit organizations have taken money from philanthropic sources and criticized them without having caused irreparable damage to their institutions — which is more than I can say for many so-called progressive think tanks.” Leave aside the arrogance of the term “so-called.” Is Mr. Eisenberg saying that if grantees like me raise hard questions, we’ll be damaged irreparably? I certainly expected better from someone who founded the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy to encourage an honest dialogue.

Michael H. Shuman
Fellow
Institute for Policy Studies
Washington