The Decline of the Republic–and Philanthropy’s Role in It

What Tocqueville warned us about, and why it matters now (2,120 words / 9-minute read).

King Andrew [Jackson] rejects republican values. Cartoon from anonymous artist circa 1832. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is the second of a two-part series on the mounting challenges facing republican government in the United States and how they intersect with civil society. In the first installment, I contended that the protesters and constitutional observers of Minneapolis, in standing up to and rebuffing the Trump Administration’s heavy-handed attempt to domineer their city, exemplified the public-spirited citizenship and defense of political freedom that a republic requires. That was the good news.

This post turns to the bad news. I focus on the growing inability of our national governing institutions to make and administer laws in ways that serve the public interest, reflect and sustain enduring majorities, and respect individual rights.

As we will see, there is plenty of blame to go around for this set of developments. My focus here, however, is to pull the camera back and consider how many philanthropic funders—and the advocates and activists they support—have compounded the problems of republican self-government that we face.

If these civil society actors truly care more about the health of democracy in America than advancing their particular policy preferences, as most would claim they do, they can always change course. I conclude by proposing several course corrections that would benefit our republic if they made them.

Tocqueville on Republican Government at Its Best

Before assessing our system as it currently operates, it is worth recalling how the national governing institutions of our republican system are meant to work when functioning well. Alexis de Tocqueville provides an illuminating reference point in the first volume of Democracy in America, published in 1835. It is valuable for two reasons.

First, while contemporary invocations of Tocqueville by civil society leaders tend to emphasize his reflections on the importance of civil associations and democratic mores, or “habits of the heart,” in Volume II, those insights rest on the earlier account of republican institutions and self-government that he set the stage with in Volume I. We cannot isolate Tocqueville’s praise of civil society from his understanding of how republican government is supposed to operate.

Second, Tocqueville offered what we might call today, in the parlance of the social sector, a formative evaluation of democracy in America, one he completed roughly two generations into the experiment. He sought to understand how the system was meant to work in theory, how it actually functioned in practice, where it was performing well, and where it exhibited troubling tendencies in need of correction. Thus we can still learn from his assessment.

At its best, Tocqueville observed:

“What one understands by republic in the United States is the slow and tranquil action of society on itself. It is a regular state really founded on the enlightened will of the public. It is a conciliating government, in which resolutions ripen for a long time, are discussed slowly, and executed only when mature.”

Conciliation and moderation were essential given the diversity of opinions, interests, and convictions the young republic encompassed. The longstanding and prevailing view at the time of the Founding, reprised by the Anti-Federalists in their opposition to the proposed Constitution, held that only small and homogeneous republics could survive. A large and diverse republic, they argued, was an oxymoron.

Tocqueville, following James Madison, disagreed. He saw the large American republic as viable—provided the governing majority and the national government it animated recognized that they were not, “all-powerful. Above it in the moral world are humanity, justice, and reason; in the political world, acquired rights.” Should the majority not recognize these limits, Tocqueville warned, it would jeopardize republican government.

From Deliberation to Instability

After outlining republicanism in its ideal form, Tocqueville turned to the realities he witnessed during his travels in America in 1831–32. He anticipated that if republican government were to falter in the United States, it would do so through instability in the nation’s laws.

Tocqueville identified two forms of instability. The first, frequent shifts in policy as political majorities changed, was perhaps inevitable in a democracy and to some extent tolerable. It was certainly evident during his visit to America, as President Andrew Jackson and his allies were busy dismantling longstanding policies associated with prior administrations. Prominent examples included their attack on the National Bank, retrenchment of federal support for internal improvements, and introduction of the spoils system.

More troubling was instability at the constitutional level, and the possibility that repeated policy whiplashing of the sort the Jacksonians were putting the country through could undermine confidence in the regime itself. Tocqueville worried that surface-level instability, if sufficiently chronic and severe, could drive citizens to question the value of republican self-government altogether. In that event, he speculated, Americans would likely turn to the elective despotism of an all-powerful president.

Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 reflected the populist energy unleashed in a rapidly democratizing America, one in which the vast majority of white men were now enfranchised and mobilized by parties. In such a country, Tocqueville reasoned, the president—the sole elected representative of the nation as a whole—would come to “represent the passions of the multitude immediately and depend entirely on its will.”

Tocqueville detected this danger already at work. He regarded Jackson as a demagogue willing to build his personal following at the expense of the office he held and the legitimacy of the regime. Tocqueville concluded that, for all his bravado, “General Jackson is the slave of the majority: he follows its wishes, its desires, its half-uncovered instincts, or rather he divines it and runs to place himself at its head.”

From Warning to Reality

Nearly two centuries later, Tocqueville’s warning appears prophetic. The United States has become an executive-centric polity marked by chronic instability in major federal policies. The presidency now dominates our political attention, generating constant agitation through all phases of the permanent campaign and unilateral executive actions. Congress, despite being the first branch of our constitutional system and the one meant to make its laws, now rarely serves as the institution in which policies are debated, reconciled, enacted, and legitimated through enduring majorities.

President Trump with his daughter, beneath the portrait of President Andrew Jackson he had installed in the Oval Office upon his election to the presidency. Bill Ingalls, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Instead, national policy is increasingly set and reset by presidents claiming popular mandates across hotly contested policy domains, from immigration, education, and health care to climate, trade, and national security. In a polarized country, sweeping executive actions exacerbate rather than resolve political divisions. Rather than being reconciled through durable legislative settlements, profound disagreements are brushed aside, only to resurface with a vengeance via an inevitable electoral backlash.

The instability in federal immigration policy, which led directly to the recent upheaval in Minnesota, offers a stark illustration of this pattern. Consider the past 12 years. After initially acknowledging constitutional limits on his authority to do so, President Obama nonetheless acted unilaterally in a bid to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. Then President Trump, after making illegal immigration the central issue of his winning 2016 campaign, shoved federal immigration policy in the opposite direction with his “Build the Wall!,” zero-tolerance, family separation, and remain-in-Mexico policies.

During the 2020 Democratic primaries, in response to Trump’s approach to immigration, Joe Biden joined nearly every Democratic candidate in supporting the decriminalization of illegal border crossings. Once in office, his administration pursued just such a permissive approach and, not surprisingly, sparked a massive wave of new migrants seeking a better life in this country. The political backlash to Biden’s de facto decriminalization of illegal immigration helped propel Trump’s return to office in 2024—and with it, even more draconian immigration enforcement.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

This cycle, one that has been replicated in several other policy domains, corrodes trust, deepens polarization, and weakens the idea of federal policy as something that settles disputes and binds the republic across time, administrations, and congresses.

With hindsight, we can see that the Founders, for all of their collective wisdom, failed to anticipate that the president, not Congress, would be the branch “drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.” Even so, the parties and officeholders who have controlled these branches in recent decades must shoulder their ample share of responsibility for the erosion of the separation of powers and the instability of federal policy.

Nor can we citizens let ourselves off the hook. As James Madison observed during the ratification debates, in response to critics who charged that the checks and balances in the proposed Constitution were insufficient,

“I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.”

All this said, we must also consider the extent to which prominent institutions and actors in civil society have contributed to the faltering of republican governance.

How Philanthropy Compounds the Breakdown

Philanthropic funders across the ideological spectrum play a critical role in underwriting nonprofits that seek to shape public policy. In doing so, many reinforce the problematic dynamics outlined above—sometimes inadvertently, sometimes quite intentionally.

These dynamics are most pronounced among large-scale national funders underwriting federal policy advocacy and more rapid-response, politics-adjacent activities (and not so much among community-based or direct service-oriented philanthropies whose work operates on a different register over longer time horizons).

The funders I am talking about here routinely support high-octane advocates pressing for maximalist policy outcomes far removed from the views of the median voter. These groups are adept at mobilizing polarized bases and attracting attention and funding as conflict entrepreneurs. But they also intensify backlash and make durable policy settlements harder to achieve. Compromise is framed as capitulation, and potential governing coalitions give way to rigid factionalism.

These same networks have come to favor independent executive action over the coalition-building in civil society necessary to sustain broad legislative majorities. When aligned parties hold power in Washington, so-called “policy wins” via executive action appear faster, cleaner, and more decisive than the slow work of persuasion, negotiation, and accommodation across differing worldviews. Yet such victories are inherently fragile and easily reversed by the next administration, further intensifying polarization.

Underlying these patterns is a deeper blind spot. As I have noted elsewhere, many funders pursue their policy preferences in an unfettered fashion while taking the health of the constitutional system and the civic culture that sustains it for granted. The costs of polarization, instability, and chronic executive overreach are externalized—borne by the polity rather than by the philanthropic actors whose funding decisions accelerate them.

To be clear, this is not an argument against either policy advocacy or philanthropy’s engagement with contested public questions. A pluralistic democracy requires robust disagreement. Nor does it deny that Congress is profoundly dysfunctional, or that decisive executive action is at times necessary.

Instead, it is an argument about the difference between winning and governing—and about philanthropy bearing a modicum of responsibility for the health of the constitutional system within which it seeks to win. When reliance on unchecked executive power becomes a default strategy, even well-intentioned efforts can weaken the habits and expectations on which republican self-government depends.

Responsible Pluralism and Republican Governance

If philanthropy is inadvertently helping to weaken republican governance, it can use the same degrees of freedom it enjoys to help strengthen it. Doing so does not require abandoning substantive commitments. It does depend on a deeper appreciation of pluralism as a governing condition in a republic—and a commitment, first and foremost, to do no harm.

Responsible pluralism begins with recognizing that democratic stability is not self-sustaining. It depends on habits of restraint, institutional forbearance, and a willingness to accept partial victories. When philanthropists fund advocacy that treats the preferences of most voters as an afterthought at best, they contribute, however unintentionally, to the erosion of those habits.

Responsible pluralism also means resisting ideological monocultures, welcoming dissent, and engaging skeptics as potential allies rather than adversaries. It requires not overestimating what can be achieved in one or two years, nor underestimating what can be accomplished over one or two decades, albeit via messier, incremental progress. Muddling through is rarely pretty, but it beats the alternative.

Finally, responsible pluralism demands a different posture toward institutional power. Relying on unilateral executive action may be tempting, especially in moments of moral indignation, but it leads to fleeting gains, long-term instability, and deeper polarization. Durable majorities are harder to assemble precisely because they reconcile real differences. But policies grounded in such coalitions are more likely to command legitimacy, survive political transitions, and sustain the “slow and tranquil action of society on itself” that Tocqueville recognized as the hallmark of republican government in the United States.

The test before us is not whether we can win the next political battle, but whether we can recover the habits of restraint and conciliation that allow the citizens of a large and diverse republic to govern themselves over time.