Money makes the ideas go round
The cash behind right-wing populism
I’ve been promising a post about the funding of conservative institutions for a while, and am finally sitting down to the task. Buckle up!
Funding networks are seemingly unsexy but also fundamental to the strength of conservative politics. But wait, you protest! Surely the same can be said for liberal and left politics as well? To a point. I absolutely believe our democracy is slow-cooking itself in a vat of cash, that nothing short of radical campaign finance reform can right the ship, and that Democrats are just as complicit in maintaining a political structure in which running for office requires appeasing the donor class. But the conservative institutions that I’m talking about here are less directly focused on electoral politics and more concerned with 1. the battle of ideas; and 2. the judiciary. This might seem like a strange combination, but only if you forget that this remains an elite effort that—contrary to its “populist” pretension—advances policies that are remarkably unpopular with most Americans. Conquering the judiciary is precisely what is needed when you cannot depend on democratic means to enact your agenda.
Indeed, looking at conservative funding networks reveals the small number of very rich people standing behind various ‘populist’ assaults on our democracy whether we are talking about gun rights, abortion, climate, voting rights—all of which are notably dependent on judicial strategy—or movements like National Conservatism. This is an important point to hammer home, particularly amid attempts to present conservative advocacy efforts as the result of organic agitation from below. For instance, in his book Regime Change, Patrick Deneen points to an “unplanned” and “populist rejection of progressivism” arising “without elite guidance from ‘Conservative Inc.’” I don’t think this claim can survive any real scrutiny.
Let’s look, for example, at Donors Trust, “a principled philanthropic partner for conservative and libertarian donors.” Donors Trust is a donor advised fund (DAF) founded in 1999 that has been called “the dark money ATM of the Conservative Movement.” According to its 2022 public filing, its grantees include the Who’s Who of mainstream and post-liberal conservative politics, including the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Middle East Forum, American Moment, Manhattan Institute, Hillsdale College, Club for Growth, the Hoover Institution at Stanford, publications including National Review and Commentary, and—wild card, because there are still libertarians lurking—a $1.25 million grant to Decriminalize Sex Work.
One thing that’s remarkable about Donors Trust is that nearly all of its grants are given for general operations, i.e. to finance the bread-and-butter expenses of running an organization without requiring them to jump through hoops. This is precisely the sort of support most nonprofits need, and it has become incredibly difficult to get from liberal/progressive funders. As I experienced in my years of raising money for Brooklyn Institute, we had to constantly create new programs to apply for badly-needed grant funding because almost no one would provide us with what we really needed: money for rent, payroll, insurance, etc. My job would have been a lot easier if liberal funders gave money with as few strings attached as their conservative counterparts.
Because donor advised funds have no legal requirement to disclose their contributors, we don’t have a complete list of who gives via Donors Trust, but key figures are reported to include the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and Peter Thiel, who contributed $4.25 to the trust in 2021. The IRS does require DAFs to disclose the total number of funds they manage, however. Donors Trust’s 2022 filing reveals that they maintain just 464 accounts with a total asset value of $1.186 billion, with nearly $241 million distributed to grantees that year alone. Those 464 accounts represent people/families whose identities remain shielded by the legal structure of the DAF, and yet exercise outsized influence over US politics via the funding of conservative think tanks, legal foundations, and grassroots organization like Students for Life.
Though there has been some excellent reporting done about Donors Trust—including its funding of hate groups, attempts to dismantle gun laws, and $100 million+ poured into climate deniers—it’s hardly a household name. I only learned about it last summer as I was looking into funders of the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF), which organizes the National Conservatism conference series in cities worldwide. Crucially, DAFs provide anonymity to donors who channel their giving through the fund - allowing one, for example, to gift $1.5 million to the white nationalist group VDARE without having to explain yourself on the golf course.
The Edmund Burke Foundation received $250,000 in 2021 and $300,000 in 2022 in individual grants from Donors Trust (i.e. the grant came from a single account, not multiple gifts/accounts) — representing roughly 20% of its total operating budget for those years. It also received $100,000 in 2021 and $400,000 in 2022 from the Common Sense Society, a transatlantic public affairs institute founded in 2009 whose list of trustees includes NatCon faves Douglas Murray and Niall Ferguson, and whose former chairman is a Hungarian-born billionaire. Another donor-advised fund, the National Christian Foundation, gave EBF $200,000 in both 2021 and 2022.
According to public filings, EBF’s total expenditure for 2022 was $1.56 million (with revenue of $1.359 million). You read that right, all that damage for the price of a two-bedroom condo in Manhattan. Beyond marveling at how much influence the NatCon movement has managed to yield despite its relatively modest operating budget—its last conference featured seven sitting Republican senators—it’s noteworthy that grants from Donors Trust, Common Sense Society, and the National Christian Foundation represented two-thirds of its total revenue in 2022. NatCon may position itself as aligned with popular feeling, but its funding structure reveals just how few people are required to create and sustain a right-wing “populist” movement.
Donors Trust is also a particularly important funding instrument for the conservative legal movement. In 2022, it made two grants (for $4.262 million and $25,000) to the Federalist Society, and likewise supported organizations including Judicial Watch, Judicial Education Institute, Pacific Legal Foundation, and Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation. For those interested in the US-Israel conservative circuitry, in 2022 Donors Trust also issued a $300,000 grant to the Tikvah Fund earmarked for the Law and Liberty Project, which (as I wrote about for Dissent) was one of several key organizations behind Israel’s controversial judicial reform bill.
Perhaps most noteworthy are the seemingly intimate ties between Donors Trust and the 85 Fund (formerly known as the Judicial Education Project). The 85 Fund is a judicial institute affiliated with Leonard Leo, the longtime Federalist Society leader and key architect of the conservative legal movement. Whether you consider the present makeup of the Supreme Court or examine the strategic assault on Roe v. Wade, you will find Leo’s fingerprints all over the American judiciary. In 2022, the 85 Fund spent nearly $139 million “educat[ing] the public and support[ing] activities that highlight the relationship between structural limits on government power and the protection of our dignity and our freedoms.” Having worked for over a decade in public education, I can attest to the fact that $139 million is a whole lot of cash to spend on such purposes particularly when your organization neither has students nor even a functional website.
In 2021 Donors Trust issued a grant for $17.1 million to The 85 Fund, but the same year the 85 Fund issued a $71 million grant back to Donors Trust. Similarly, Donors Trust was the single-largest grantee of the 85 Fund in 2022 — receiving a whopping $92 million. I do not know how to account for this trading of money in circles and can’t comment on its legality. It’s far easier to explain why the 85 Fund paid CRC Advisors—the lobbying firm founded and chaired by Leonard Leo—$21.4 million in fees in 2022 alone. Nice work if you can get it!
Finally, I should note that donor advised funds are also popular among liberals, though I haven’t found anything that matches Donors Trust in sheer heft. The Tides Foundation, for example, reportedly manages 373 funds and distributes over $100 million each year to progressive causes. Many people likewise choose to manage their giving through vehicles like Fidelity Charitable that are not ideologically aligned with anything beyond the gods of capital. Though it remains a distant hope at this point, creating a genuinely responsive democracy will requires far more stringent regulatory and disclosure requirements for DAFs across the board.
For now, our country remains one in which the savvy use of institutions by a few hundred people is enough to determine the horizons of conservative social and political thought. It’s an organizational wonder to behold; just don’t call it populism.