Over the past week, nonprofit groups that work to bridge partisan divides and lower America’s political temperature have swung into high gear. I mentioned a few of these groups last week, including Braver Angels, Living Room Conversations, and Convergence. But there are plenty of others, all part of a larger landscape of nonprofits searching for an exit from our era of toxic polarization.
I’ve been tracking what philanthropy is doing in this space for a decade, including the Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative and the New Pluralists funder collaborative, which launched in 2021.
For nearly as long, I’ve often scratched my head, trying to identify a coherent theory of change behind much of this funding.
What depolarization efforts can and can’t do
The potential impact of some depolarization work is easy to grasp, like reforms to create more competitive legislative districts. Currently, most incumbents are more concerned about being primaried for being too moderate than losing a general election. Ending that dynamic could be a game-changer, and some funders are backing such efforts, including the Democracy Fund. Fusion voting, another way to offer voters more real choices, could also help break what political scientist Lee Drutman has called the “two-party doom loop.”
Where things get fuzzier for me is when philanthropy supports efforts to bring people together for dialogue and related activities, which seems to account for much of the funding in the depolarization space, although hard numbers are elusive. (New Pluralists has made at least $30 million in grants.)
Taken individually, many bridge-building initiatives are compelling. It can only be a good thing when people learn to discuss their differences more constructively, especially in educational settings that shape young minds, or when divided communities find ways to work together to solve common problems.
Unusual political alliances and open channels of communication are especially valuable when political tensions rise. At times like now, we need the most ideologically diverse possible set of voices calling for calm.
Still, it’s hard to imagine bridge-building scaling to the point that it can offset the vast reach of media sites, influencers and politicians who are working 24/7 to turn Americans against each other. How will these efforts actually change the behavior of the extremists who so often drive events these days?
The powerful pull of polarization
Politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene have built their careers by fueling polarization and have found that it works brilliantly. If Greene fears anything, it would not be a network of bridge-builders in Georgia. It would be losing to a primary opponent who outflanks her on the right, or electoral reforms that force her to compete in a truly competitive district for once.
Other kinds of political figures have similar incentives. Charlie Kirk didn’t become MAGA royalty by turning down the volume. Embracing political compromise would have diminished his influence and hurt Turning Point USA’s fundraising.
I get that bridge-building grantmakers are playing the long game, trying to shift civic norms. I’m all for that. What I don’t see, though, is how these efforts are going to change political incentives in the near future.
Since I first published this piece in my newsletter on Saturday, I’ve heard from two practitioners in the bridge-building space, which I appreciated. In a conversation, one of them described their work as an effort to create a wide and diverse network with the resources to support a rapidly growing set of leaders committed to reducing toxic polarization in many different types of faith communities. Another described work in educational institutions. As with other social movements, it’s challenging to predict the timeline over which efforts to create infrastructure to support grassroots bridge-builders might catalyze transformative change, if they do at all. But you can make a case that very rapid change is possible, given the history of movements.
All that said, there are other, more promising ways that philanthropy can push parties and elected leaders toward a less polarized place. Beyond backing electoral reforms that empower moderate voters, funders can work to shift public opinion to make ideologically extreme parties less popular, and at the same time, aim to change patterns of civic participation to help defeat those parties in elections. If a political party loses badly enough for long enough, it’s likely to shift in a more moderate direction.
The best example of this is how Democrats moved to the center in the early 1990s, after losing three presidential elections in a row. In a similar fashion, if Trump had lost last fall’s election — after the losses MAGA presided over in 2018, 2020 and 2022 — this could have opened the door for a resurgence of the GOP’s moderate wing, lowering the temperature of U.S. politics.
Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but at least it’s backed by a plausible theory of change. There’s nothing like losing to get politicians to rethink their views — since, of course, most elected leaders are quite fluid in this department. Getting reelected is almost always their number one priority.
Want to reduce polarization? Block the worst polarizers
Philanthropy has many perfectly legal ways to affect voter perceptions and the electoral landscape, more than most people realize. (I ran through seven of these ways in this article, but there’s even more.)
However, most foundations won’t touch this kind of grantmaking “with a ten-foot pole,” as one executive at a top institution put it to me. And, ironically, the funders most committed to reducing polarization have often been the least likely to support work that might realistically weaken the GOP’s extremist wing. A lot of them believe that philanthropy only deepens divisions when it takes a side in politics.
I just disagree with that judgment. We might be in a far less polarized moment if a critical mass of funders had made different choices over the past few years and invested at scale to block a divisive populist right on the electoral battlefield. There was no shortage of options to move funds at scale to achieve this goal with high confidence of impact, as I’ve written elsewhere. But most foundations took a pass.
So here we are, in the most tense and divided America of our lifetimes.
To be clear, I’m not saying that philanthropy shouldn’t invest in bridge-building. There’s a lot to like in these efforts and, in theory, enough money available to keep scaling this work without the need for either-or choices. Ultimately, though, it’s not enough to slowly amplify the voices of civility. If you want to push extremist leaders out of power, you need to engage in the arenas of power.
