Political Philosophy and Philanthropy's Overhaul

Contributed by Jason D. Morganbesser

The political donation market is rapidly expanding and democratizing. The majority of political donors are now small-dollar donors (meaning they donate less than $200), as has been the case in every election since 2016.¹ In terms of total contributions, small donors have gone from contributing a paltry 5% of political donations in 2014 to around 40% in 2020.² Concomitantly, political campaigns have become extremely expensive. During the 2020 election cycle, a record $14 billion was spent on political campaigns;³ that record was broken when $16.7 billion was spent during the 2022 elections.⁴ 

If this rise in political spending was occurring in a vacuum, or if these donations came at the expense of something like luxury consumption, there would be no apparent problem with this shift. As individual political donations have become smaller, however, they have quickly become for donors an alternative to charitable contributions. Studies have long shown, however, that an increase in political contributions is heavily correlated with a decline in charitable giving.⁵ Confirming this, a recent poll of charitable donors also showed a decrease in nonprofit giving during election years.⁶ This substitution away from charity in favor of political giving will likely only become more significant in the coming years, as voters under 45 are even more likely than their older counterparts to donate to political rather than charitable causes.⁷ Political campaigns are quickly replacing charities in the minds of donors; traditional philanthropy is being replaced by political action.

These shifts have caused charitable giving to collapse. For two years in a row, starting in 2022, American charitable giving declined significantly, dropping in 2023 to its lowest point in decades.⁸ Among small donors, who have been most rapidly replacing charitable giving with political donations, charitable donations declined even faster, dropping 17% between 2021 and 2022.⁹ While that decline can partially be attributed to the nationwide economic downturn, it is still likely that the substitution of charitable giving with political donations has been a significant factor. The redirection of spending toward campaigns could not possibly be helpful for charities during this period of unusual parsimony. Indeed, nonprofits, facing rising inflation and a decline in giving, are increasingly being forced to shut down.¹⁰ With electoral campaigns only becoming more expensive, this crisis is set to become even more severe in the coming years.

This massive reallocation of money to political donations might be justifiable if it led to significant shifts in public opinion or policy. Yet, while political donations remain the best predictor of individual candidates’ success,¹¹ they make little difference on a broader level. In a country basically split equally between two political parties, small donors (who are, after all, just a somewhat random subset of voters) will not massively change the political calculus. Indeed, in not one presidential¹² or midterm¹³ election (outside of an anomalous 2020 cycle when two billionaires, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, self-funded a combined $1.3 billion on personal vanity projects that went nowhere), the discrepancy between Democrat and Republican donations has never reached above 20%; not including 2008, it has never even reached 10%. 

It is highly unlikely that such political donations so evenly matched between the left and right will substantially reshape America’s electoral dynamics. Indeed, it is hard to see how political donations could be distributed otherwise—pessimism remains the most effective method of political motivation (nearly 70% of ads in 2018, for instance, included an attack on the other candidate).¹⁴ As such, the fear of losing financial ground to the other side acts as an extremely compelling political motivation—just consider all the fundraising emails that read some version of ‘my opponent just raised $5 million—can you help us keep up.’ The political response to Trump’s conviction in May exemplifies this point. After Trump experienced his best fundraising day ever in response to the verdict, Biden’s campaign, highlighting Trump’s “massive cash haul,” scored its own record, making it Biden’s best fundraising day in history.¹⁵ We should hence expect current trends to continue—in most cases, donations on one political side will simply inspire roughly equal and opposite donations on the other. Thus, we can see that rising political donations are not a donor-led overthrow of the old political order but rather a financial arms race.

An easy answer to these growing problems would be to make heavy-handed restrictions on political donations. After all, if people cannot make large political donations or if candidates can only raise a small amount of money, charities would no longer have to compete with political campaigns. This ignores the fact, however, that many charities themselves engage in political action. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for instance, gives money to political candidates who favor its views;¹⁶ the same is true of Planned Parenthood.¹⁷ If we placed restrictions on political donations, donors would simply redirect their money to politically aligned charities. Thus, heavy-handed restrictions would mostly fail to aid apolitical nonprofits. It is also hard to imagine how we could restrict the political action of charities without creating onerous, even authoritarian, infringements on civil society. Clearly, America’s crisis of charity calls for a subtler and more nuanced response than lawmaking.

To redirect donor money back to nonprofits, we must first try to understand why donors have moved toward politics in the first place. After all, it is difficult at first to understand why donors are replacing effective charitable donations with political contributions that are very unlikely to move the needle. One notable fact that can help us understand the new crop of political donors is their uniquely impressive educational background. Political donations are heavily correlated with educational attainment, with 29% of political donors in 2017 having received a postgraduate education,¹⁸ compared to 14% of the general population.¹⁹ Furthermore, this year, the primary fundraising sources for presidential candidate Kamala Harris have been the technology industry and academia—donors tend to be not just college-educated but also in industries with other people from similar educational backgrounds.²⁰ It seems likely that part of the growing preference for political donations can be attributed to educationally instilled values.

The most significant shift in values in this regard is a reinterpretation of the meaning of justice. Within the academy, which is a significant, if not the primary, source of many future donors’ values, a peculiar definition of justice has come to predominate. This definition prioritizes theoretical perfection over practical possibility. This is a view called “ideal theory” and is characterized by philosophers such as John Rawls and Jerry Cohen.²¹ According to ideal theorists, what is just can be determined by imagining a perfected society and then “approximating” that perfect society.²² Indeed, some philosophers such as Cohen have argued that justice can include some policies that are extremely improbable—perhaps even impossible—but that we should nevertheless seek to realize that incredibly improbable just society.²³

As the philosopher Gerald Gaus has argued, this sort of view leads one to disregard less significant but more probable improvements in favor of attempting to construct an improbable, ideal world.²⁴ He has termed this “the choice” between, on the one hand, “obvious increases in justice” that are inconsistent with an idealized society and, on the other, the “seek[ing] out of an ideal.”²⁵ The choice of the ideal theorist to favor the ideal over the probable is an answer consistent with choosing political over nonprofit donations. After all, a political donation may seem to move society towards a perfected society, whereas a nonprofit donation will only help the small subset of people whom it serves, with no intention, let alone possibility, of restructuring society. Ideal theory, built, as Gaus argues, upon a significant underestimation of the complexity and difficulty of actually changing society, can therefore justify the seemingly absurd rise in political donations.²⁶

Ideal theory has become dominant in how the concept of justice is taught to college students. Take, for instance, Harvard’s political philosophical syllabuses. In Michael Sandel’s famous class GENED 1200 Justice, a popular course that serves as the primary interaction that many Harvard students will have with the differing conceptions of justice, the class is structured around a small number of philosophical views, primarily those of Rawls and the utilitarians, which favor ideal theory rather than more pragmatic conceptions. Within the other two applied political philosophy courses taught in the 2024 academic year, PHIL 176 Contemporary Political Philosophy and PHIL 178Z Inequality. These courses are almost entirely focused on Rawls and Cohen (outside of light discussion in PHIL 178Z of Robert Nozick, a libertarian ideal theorist), with the rest of the content devoted to applying these theories to wildly improbable political ends, such as the abolition of prisons and the complete end to restrictions on immigration. Of course, considering that ideal theory is the majority view among contemporary political philosophers, it makes sense that these classes should teach some ideal theory. Nonetheless, the level to which ideal theory is favored in these classes is unreasonable—indeed, none of these classes give any non-ideal alternative whatsoever (whereas non-ideal views make up a significant minority of modern political philosophy, including in the works of Jeremy Waldron and Harvard’s own Amartya Sen). 

The bias toward ideal theory in higher education has been part and parcel of the unquestioning idealism of American donors. No longer do donors think of donations as an attempt to marginally aid one’s community in the short term. Instead, donations are conceptualized as an attempt to marginally increase the likelihood of massive social and political change. As the ideology taught in our schools has shifted toward ideal theory, our donors have started to prefer political causes, causes with a low probability of making a large impact, instead of charity, which, while certainly helpful, will always have a limited, defined impact. This shift has had a tragic effect—one characterized by crumbling charitable organizations and pointlessly expensive political campaigns. Increasing the realism of our political education will be a necessary step in returning to an America with a vibrant civil society.

With America’s crisis of charity growing, immediate action is necessary. Over 5% of Americans rely on charity in some form—if we fail to save our nonprofits, we threaten these people’s livelihoods.²⁷ Yet, ill-considered reactionary policies such as restricting political donations will not fix this complex crisis. Instead, what we need is to respond to the roots of the crisis, the reasons why donors are shifting away from nonprofits in the first place. As an educational institution, that means focusing more on realism in our conception of justice—on what is actually possible—rather than imaginary ideals. Only through nuanced policies such as these can we hope to save our charitable institutions and, with them, American civil life.

MAIMONIDES

A version of this article originally appeared in Help Wanted, the October 2024 print issue of the Salient.

1. Laurent Bouton, Julia Cagé, Edgard Dewitte, Vincent Pons. Small Campaign Donors. 2021.

2. Ibid.

3. Evers-Hillstrom, Karl. “Most Expensive Ever: 2020 Election Cost $14.4 Billion.” OpenSecrets News, 11 Feb. 2021.

4. Quist, Taylor Giorno and Pete. “Total Cost of 2022 State and Federal Elections Projected to Exceed $16.7 Billion.” OpenSecrets News, 21 Nov. 2022.

5. Yildirim, Pinar, et al. “Are political and charitable giving substitutes? evidence from the United States.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Jan. 2020.

6. Maddocks, Chris. “Nonprofit Fundraising in an Election Year Is Especially Tough. What Can Fundraisers Do? .” Candid Insights, 13 Aug. 2024.

7. Ibid.

8. Childress, Rasheeda. “Giving Continues Its Decline, down 2.1% in 2023. Can Fundraisers Turn the Tide in 2024?” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 25 June 2024.

9. Lindsay, Drew. “2022’s ‘Collapse’ in Small Gifts Threatens Nonprofits as Recession Looms, Report Says.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 17 Oct. 2022.

10. Herschander, Sara. “Even as Economy Shows Positive Signs, Nonprofits Aren’t Letting Their Guard down.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 28 Feb. 2023.

11. “Fundraising Remains Predictive of Success in Congressional Elections.” The Economist, 1 Sept. 2022.

12. Evers-Hillstrom, Karl. “Most Expensive Ever: 2020 Election Cost $14.4 Billion.” OpenSecrets News, 11 Feb. 2021.

13. Quist, Taylor Giorno and Pete. “Total Cost of 2022 State and Federal Elections Projected to Exceed $16.7 Billion.” OpenSecrets News, 21 Nov. 2022.

14. Wesleyan Media Project. 61% Increase in Volume of Negative ADS, 7 Oct. 2022, mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/103018/.

15. Piper, Jessica. “Biden’s Biggest Online Fundraising Day on Actblue Was after Trump Was Convicted.” Politico, 26 June 2024, www.politico.com/news/2024/06/26/biden-online-fundraising-trump-verdict-00165183.

16. Kennedy, Craig. “Politics and Charity in 2024: Why It’s Time to Draw a Hard Line.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 18 Jan. 2024.

17. Weissert, Will. “Planned Parenthood to Spend $40 Million Ahead of November on Democrats Supporting Abortion Rights.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 24 June 2024.

18. Hughes, Adam. “5 Facts about U.S. Political Donations.” Pew Research Center, 17 May 2017.

19. U.S. Census Bureau. (2022, February 24). Census Bureau Releases New Educational Attainment Data [Press Release].

20. Allen, Catherine. “Among California Tech Donors, ‘Hesitancy’ Fades with Kamala Harris Takeover.” Politico, 25 Aug. 2024.

21. Gaus, Gerald F. The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society. Princeton University Press, 2019, Ch. 1.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., Ch 2.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27.  O’Leary, Amy Silver, and Tim Delaney. “It’s Real: Charitable Giving Plummeted Last Year.” National Council of Nonprofits, 21 June 2023.