MacKenzie Scott writes that, with her $2.74 billion worth of grantmaking announced earlier this week, she wants to “de-emphasize privileged voices and cede focus to others” who haven’t traditionally been supported by givers of her magnitude. Among the considerable number of philanthropy-serving or -influencing organizations on the list of 286 grantees are several groups comfortably seated in the front rows of the progressive infrastructure of establishment philanthropy in America, however. None could be considered conservative.
The newly announced Scott grants, for just some examples, include ones to AAPIP, ABFE, the Decolonizing Wealth Project, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, and the Tides Foundation’s Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity and Solidaire Network.
In general, the managerial elite peopling these and allied groups is part of contemporary establishment grantmaking’s oppressively arid, progressive monoculture, we have noted. Its professional philanthro-labor market is basically an insular and distinctive cartel with too narrow an ideological consensus, one which sees benefit in politicizing charity.
Maybe some more focus could have been ceded.
Scott is one of dozens of progressive billionaires today who are equipped to put such humongous amounts of unrestricted money into building the long-term institutional, including philanthropic, capacity of the Left—even while pumping enough into “mainstream” philanthropy-serving organizations to help ensure their receptivity to the progressive worldview. How many conservative givers are either wealthy or wise enough to similarly support the same for conservatism?