Seeing Through the Left’s False Lament

As a new report from the indefatigable National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy plainly demonstrates, the left wing of the philanthropic world continues to insist that it is being outgunned by its politically active counterparts on the right — despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

According to the report, a network of right-wing think tanks stands poised to increase its “strength and impact in the new millennium.” The 20 groups studied — which include the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and my former home, the Hudson Institute — spent a total of $158-million in 1996, $20-million more than the Republican Party devoted that year to “soft money” contributions in behalf of its candidates, the report says. Over the entire decade, the report estimates, those think tanks will have put $1-billion into efforts to influence public policy.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the millions effectively spent by conservative think tanks have enabled them virtually to dictate the issues and terms of national political debates,” said the watchdog group’s president, now president emeritus, Robert Bothwell.

That will undoubtedly come as quite a surprise to those organizations. With the Clinton Administration’s approval ratings soaring, Newt Gingrich in forced retirement from politics, and the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor George W. Bush, styling himself a “compassionate conservative,” the political landscape at the end of the 1990s looks tilted more to the left than it did at the beginning. Moreover, for at least the first half of the decade, the amount spent by conservative think tanks (and kindred groups) was dwarfed by what liberal non-profit organizations devoted to their favored causes.

That finding clearly emerges from the second (and latest) edition of The Left Guide. Published earlier this year by Economics America, a for-profit consulting company in Ann Arbor, Mich., the guide — and its companion, The Right Guide, which is now in its third edition — ought to be an essential reference work for anyone seriously interested in the activities of politically oriented non-profit groups. The Left Guide provides detailed information on more than 1,300 groups, from the well-known and well-financed to the obscure and struggling.

The political leanings of each group are determined as objectively as possible, using standards such as how an organization’s views on policy correspond with the standards used to rate members of Congress by the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action. (For The Right Guide, Economics America uses the standards of the American Conservative Union.) The groups included in each guide have a chance to challenge how they are classified, but most do not do so.

Using data from informational tax returns, the new edition of The Left Guide concludes that politically active groups on the left had revenue of nearly $4-billion in 1996, compared with less than $900-million for their competitors on the right. What’s more, the guide found, left-wing non-profit organizations — both charities and advocacy groups — outspent their conservative counterparts on lobbying by a ratio of two to one. (The gap would have been even greater if the National Rifle Association, which accounted for 60 per cent of right-wing lobbying expenditures, were excluded.) Left-wing groups that received government grants and contracts — more than $500-million worth was awarded in 1996, with half going to the Legal Services Corporation — were more than five times as likely to lobby as were conservative recipients of public funds, whose share totaled only $19-million.

The disparity in foundation backing of left and right was almost as large. After excluding grant makers that awarded only a small percentage of their grants to politically active groups, The Left Guide calculated that the assets of left-wing foundations were 17 times greater than those of right-wing ones. To be sure, many of the foundations whose assets were included in those figures devote large portions of their resources to non-political projects, and most corporate philanthropies are left out of that tally. Still, left-wing non-profit groups in 1996 could turn for assistance to foundations with more than $42-billion in assets, while groups on the right had a potential foundation support base worth just $2.5-billion.

In terms of growth, the mid-1990s clearly were not kind to liberal groups. According to The Left Guide, the revenue of those groups declined in 1995 and 1996 by 1 per cent per year, after adjusting for inflation. Nonetheless, many areas of concern — including civil liberties, economic policy, community organizing, gay rights, homelessness, and monitoring the activities of right-wing groups — saw substantial growth rates. And while the income of conservative groups rose at an average annual rate of 7 per cent in 1995 and 1996, the level at which right-wing support started was so much lower than left-wing support that the growth-rate advantage would need to be maintained until 2019 for the two types of support to become equal.

Despite receiving smaller amounts of money, right-wing groups make better use of it, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s report further contends. Perhaps so, but even the most sophisticated strategy would be hard-pressed to offset fully the sheer size and scope of non-profit political activity on the left. In addition, liberal observers such as the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy typically exaggerate the degree to which non-profit think tanks and other political groups on the right share a common agenda; have long-term, predictable sources of support; and effectively get their views across to the public. At the same time, those observers conveniently overlook the kinds of liberal groups that do.

To be sure, conservative causes — such as cutting taxes or deregulating the economy — also benefit from the political contributions and activities of for-profit groups. Hence, some have argued, any comparison of left and right in the philanthropic world would be incomplete without taking into account corporate expenditures, especially on election campaigns.

Yet, apart from the fact that labor unions and other liberal groups also can — and do — take part in electioneering, business money most often follows its interests, rather than ideological principles.

Consequently, corporate lobbying and other kinds of political action at best only partly (and unreliably) offset spending by liberal non-profit groups. And because non-profit groups can claim to represent widespread interests rather than selfish ones, they sometimes may even have the upper hand, at least symbolically.

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s report does have a point: Conservative ideas about public policy are more influential today than they were in the not-so-distant past. But one place where they have seemingly had little influence is the non-profit world. Why that should be so is itself worth pondering. Meanwhile, those people concerned about the narrowing of “national political debates” might do better to consider that the problem may lie more on the left than on the right.

Leslie Lenkowsky is professor of philanthropic studies and public policy at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, in Indianapolis, and a regular contributor to these pages. His e-mail address is llenkows@iupui.edu.