Rebalancing Democracy’s Leadership Pipeline
Why funders should invest less in moralistic advocates and more in leaders who organize communities and govern in the public interest (2,620 words / 10-minute read).
As the midterms approach, philanthropic funders are again being asked to accelerate their giving to support voters and safeguard elections. This pattern has become familiar. Every election cycle brings a surge of funding aimed at strengthening democracy from the bottom up.
Yet democracy also depends on leadership that operates from the top down. Funders seeking greater impact should pay closer attention to the caliber of the leaders who organize communities, shape public understanding, and govern between elections. How might philanthropy help strengthen this dimension of democratic life?
America certainly has an extraordinary number of political leaders. We elect more than half a million officials: 537 federally, about 19,000 at the state level, and roughly 500,000 locally. Many more lead from outside government through advocacy, activist, and community groups. Though unelected, they also exercise important forms of political leadership.
The argument developed here is that philanthropy is uniquely positioned to improve the quality of political leadership in the United States. Funders may not need to spend more. They will, however, need to rebalance their grantmaking portfolios to foster the forms of leadership we increasingly lack.
Three Offices Democracy Depends On
To begin answering these questions, I want to introduce a useful framework for classifying and evaluating different types of political leaders. It comes from Andrew Sabl, a political theorist at the University of Toronto. He develops the framework in his book Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics.
Following Cicero, Sabl focuses not on formal positions but on types of offices. He defines a political office as one in which those holding it seek “to influence others on matters that require common decision.” Sabl goes on to note that “to talk of office is to stress the moral character of political action. Each office, even when there are no written rules governing it, involves obligations and licenses different from those of ordinary citizens.”
Sabl identifies three broad types of political offices in the U.S. He shorthands them as “Senator,” “Moral Activist,” and “Organizer.” Each plays a distinct role:
A “Senator” is an elected representative responsible for making policy alongside peers. These types of office holders could be city councilors, county commissioners, state legislators, and members of Congress. They all must respect, respond to, and represent the preferences of their constituents. It is their job to enact wise and effective public policies, with all the deliberation, negotiation, and compromises that entails. To do it well, they must be driven by honorable rather than base or cynical ambitions. Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senator from Illinois who teamed with Lyndon Johnson to enact landmark civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, is Sabl’s exemplar of this type.
A “Moral Activist” works from the outside-in, bringing broad moral considerations to bear in reshaping our public life. Initially, they must command moral authority as civic “ministers” within their communities. Eventually, they must also serve as “tribunes” who rally the broader public based on appeals to shared values and principles. Sabl considers this office to be the hardest to discharge. It requires a complex discernment of the right issue to focus on, the right time to proceed, the most relevant national principles and values to appeal to, and how best to invoke them. Most importantly, moral activists need to hold and use the creative tension between the minister and tribune roles. Sabl regards Martin Luther King, Jr. as the model here.
An “Organizer” helps draw out and galvanize communities to solve collective action problems. They operate closest to the people and must remain especially attentive to local needs. Their work rests on deeply relational connections and associations with members of the communities they are organizing. They are at their best when they ensure the agenda for action emerges from their communities rather than being imposed on them, and when they activate others in a distributed network of community-based leadership. Sabl sees Ella Baker, who worked behind the scenes to help organize the civil rights movement, as an exemplar of this type. So is Saul Alinsky, who organized the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago during the 1940s.
Those holding these different types of offices thus each have something essential and distinct to contribute to democracy—and a different balancing act to pull off.
What Democratic Leadership Requires
Despite their differences, a common thread runs across these offices. Sabl terms it “democratic constancy.” Its core premise is that democracy is a two-way street. Political leaders in all three offices need to discern and advance the enduring values and long term interests of the people they lead. When necessary, political leaders must be able to persuade their followers of what these values and interests are and how best to pursue them. At the same time, democratic constancy calls upon all three types of officeholders to adjust their own prior assumptions and intuitions when they are out of sync with their constituents and communities.
Democratic constancy rests on three attributes. The first is a disposition to stay in touch with and relate to the everyday Americans they lead. The second is recognizing that in a democracy, one ultimately needs a majority to govern, and thus needs to build and work through coalitions. The third is the ability to take a long term point of view on goals—and to stay with them over time, even in the face of temporary setbacks and frustrations.
Sabl’s framework for political leadership is especially illuminating because it differentiates and enables us to judge the behavior of different types of officeholders. But it is by no means idiosyncratic in its dynamic, two-way view of political leadership and its willingness to include leaders outside of government in the analysis.
Ronald Heifetz of Harvard’s Kennedy School has developed a similar model, which he calls “adaptive leadership.” The goal of an adaptive leader is to close the gap between the aspirations and values of the people they represent, on the one hand, and the reality they all are facing, on the other. A pluralistic and teeming society has many such gaps. Leaders and followers thus have to consider and weigh the relevant options and the tradeoffs. They must also work to clarify their values, and to reconcile and integrate competing values, in order to close the gaps.
Like Sabl, Heifetz describes the critical role played by “leaders without authority” in democracy. These leaders are not elected by the system to govern it, but they can nonetheless play a substantial role in reshaping it. For Heifetz, too, the national moral activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as grassroots organizers in the civil rights movement are compelling examples of outside-in political leadership.
Where, why and how have philanthropic funders directed their resources across these three forms of leadership? The answers suggest a clear need for rebalancing in many grantmaking portfolios.
Why Philanthropy Overfunds Moral Activists
Philanthropists, be they wealthy individual donors or foundation program staff, focus the vast majority of their grantmaking in support of political leaders on backing moral activists. This allows self-described strategic or outcomes-focused grantmakers to fund leaders and organizations that clearly share their goals and policy objectives and advocate for them in a various issue domains, e.g., from immigration and climate/energy to abortion and even democracy itself. For their part, the leaders of these advocacy nonprofits are naturally focused on securing funding to support their work. They can always fine tune what they do and how they describe it to ensure the requisite “alignment” with funders.
However, given the incentives at play on both sides of this reverb loop (which I have written more about here), it leads inexorably to a shriller and less effective form of moral activism. It overemphasizes the “ministry” aspects of the role in rallying and speaking for like-minded believers within the community. It underemphasizes the “tribune” role that is capable of speaking in a compelling way to the nation as a whole.
On both the left and right, such one-dimensional and moralistic advocates and the philanthropists who support them increasingly operate as “shadow partisans.” They polarize the polity but make little progress and at times even set their goals back as a result of their unwillingness and inability to appeal to a critical mass of the public. But if this over-zealous form of moral activism gets too much philanthropy, those holding the two other types of offices are not getting enough.
Grassroots Organizing Still Struggles for Support
Strategic philanthropy has more difficulty funding bona fide organizers who are embedded in and responsive to the communities they serve. In contrast to their support for outspoken moral activists, philanthropic funders cannot meaningfully predict in advance what particular issue(s) grassroots organizers and their communities will prioritize. That will be context and community dependent and emerge from the process of organizing the institutions and people involved.
The contingent nature of community organizing thus makes it harder for outcomes-focused funders to support it. Never mind that such forms of community organizing may be the most democratic of the three offices, or that it builds social trust and empowers marginalized citizens. Its unpredictability complicates funder control.
Many progressive funders say they support community organizing. In my experience over a decade of working alongside them, what they are really doing is funding national issue organizing. They underwrite activists to mobilize local constituencies to advance the policies and goals that the funders are focused on, rather than those the community itself might have surfaced through an organic organizing process.
Don’t just take my word for it. Loren MacArthur is an experienced organizer who has made a compelling case along similar lines to what I am arguing here in a post entitled, “To Save Democracy, Fund Organizing.” Unfortunately, as MacArthur notes, philanthropic support for this modality of political leadership tends to be “constricted and limiting.” He goes on to note why:
“Most donors take a transactional approach to community organizing, viewing it as a tactic for advancing policy or political objectives. They fail to adequately value organizing’s role in fostering democratic norms and practices and strengthening social trust—important preconditions of a functional and equitable multiracial democracy.”
Mike Gecan has been a long-time organizer and leader with the Industrial Areas Foundation. He has also been my tutor in understanding the nature of community organizing at its best. When we spoke about these dynamics three years ago, he shared the following vignette:
“Just last week, I was talking to a major foundation here in New York about a new effort in the South Bronx. I wanted to raise money to bring organizers in to rebuild our effort and institutional base there. The foundation said we want to know your outcomes on housing and on school safety. I said, look, we don’t have an organization yet. I’m asking for money to build an organization that will inevitably get involved in those areas over time. They said, just give us some outcomes and we can proceed. I said, I can’t give you outcomes!
This is a classic tension we have with foundations. They want programs before power. And they want to fund programs, but they either don’t understand or don’t believe that you first need a power base to get the kind of programmatic or issue impact they want at scale.”
The good news is that there have been some better counter-examples for philanthropists who want to take a more productive tack in supporting organizers. Gecan went on to note that,
“MacKenzie Scott reached out to us through her consulting firm and made a major donation to our work. That came out of nowhere. The Walton Family Foundation has also been a supporter. What resonates with them is our commitment to institutions and our not being easily pigeon-holed in one ideological camp. But those are exceptions. Most foundations don’t appreciate our relational power building.”
Foundations and individual donors that can come to appreciate this form of leadership and support it through truly trust-based, unrestricted philanthropy will be making a disproportionate contribution to democracy in America, even if they are not directly advancing long-held policy goals.
The Holy Grail: Politicians Who Are Leading to Govern
This is the form of political leadership that gets the least philanthropic investment. There are a couple of reasons for this pattern. One is that foundations and individual donors are proscribed by law from supporting or opposing parties or candidates with their philanthropic giving. That said, it is perfectly legitimate for philanthropic funders to fund nonpartisan research, analysis, training, and educational activities that help public officials discharge the responsibilities of their offices. As we will see below, there is a wide range of constructive work being done by 501(c)3 nonprofits on this basis. Still, funders with overly cautious lawyers may still be inclined to shy away from backing the many legitimate forms of support grantees can give to public officials.
The main reason that philanthropic funders do not underwrite these allowable forms of support for elected representatives is that, like community organizers, their actions are harder for funders to predict and control. Elected officials are accountable to their constituents, not philanthropic funders who indirectly support their work. Moreover, as representatives hammer out policies alongside peers representing other constituents (who often see things differently), they inevitably have to negotiate and compromise to get things done. Hence nonpartisan programs that enable these officials to do the public’s business better are an imperfect fit with the strategies of philanthropists focused on realizing carefully specified and often partisan policy goals.
The tragedy of this situation is that, if elected officials want to rise through the ranks as ideologues and polarizers, countless party and media organizations stand ready to help. In contrast, if they seek to solve problems in the public interest and are prepared to work with peers in the other party to do so, they are largely on their own.
Despite these headwinds, a growing network of 501(c)3 nonprofits has emerged to support elected officials. In effect, they are building the infrastructure that helps pragmatic and solutions-oriented politicians in both parties get better at their jobs and join forces with like-minded colleagues across the political spectrum. Especially at the state and local levels, where 99.9-percent of our elected officials serve, there are ample opportunities for funders and nonprofits to support politicians animated by honorable ambitions.
Indeed, I recently curated a symposium on “Revitalizing Political Leadership” for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. It includes essays from leaders of a half-dozen nonprofits about how they are equipping and enabling rising cohorts of elected officials of the sort we need more of. These organizations are helping leaders with an instinct to serve others consider whether, why, and how they might run for office; identifying the most effective lawmakers in all 50 statehouses (and what makes them so); providing training, tools, and templates to state and federal legislators overseeing the implementation and refinement of policies; and building up supportive networks, cohorts, and caucuses of like-minded elected officials—on the center-left, the center-right, and spanning both—who are leading to govern.
Rebalancing philanthropy’s role
There is thus no shortage of opportunities for philanthropy to support the kind of political leaders we need more of. To realize them, philanthropy will need to invest less in one-dimensional moral activism and more in community organizers and problem-solvers in politics. This entails building up the capacity of American democracy rather than the single-minded pursuit of a specific policy agenda.
A democracy ultimately reflects the quality of the leaders it produces. Philanthropy can help shape that quality—if it chooses to invest accordingly.
What an important piece of writing. Thank you.
Interesting take and well written piece. I would argue that there is a whole group that requires this investment - clerks, elections admins, and front line election workers. Serious pipeline building opportunity.