Why NGOs love Tom Steyer They prefer billionaires to a messy democracy

“Billionaires should not exist,” Sen. Bernie Sanders declared in a laconic tweet back in 2019. Yet last month, Sanders’s own political action committee, Our Revolution, endorsed Tom Steyer for governor of California, explaining in a statement: “We’ve never endorsed a billionaire — but Tom Steyer is using his position to upset the system.” 

Put another way: billionaires are bad — unless they hold the right progressive views.

Our Revolution’s Steyer endorsement is a betrayal of the old labor Left that sought to empower workers relative to employers. The endorsement is not, however, a betrayal of the kind of NGO-friendly technocratic progressivism that sums up Steyer’s campaign and increasingly drives the Democratic Party. Since he’s the sort of billionaire who funds technocratic, single-issue NGOs, his bid for governor amounts to the perfect fusion of progressive capital and what John Judis and Ruy Texeira call the NGO “shadow party” that continues to define how the Democratic Party operates and what it stands for — including a double standard for the progressive rich like Steyer.

Our Revolution isn’t the only progressive NGO to endorse Steyer. The billionaire also enjoys the backing of California Environmental Voters, the Climate Center Action Fund, Third Act, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, and Courage California, among many others. That last group explains: “He aligns with Courage California on multiple issues, including our top legislative priorities: single-payer health care, comprehensive health care for undocumented Californians, abolishing ICE, climate action that centers frontline Black and brown communities, progressive reform of our criminal-justice system, and corporate accountability.”

Why are these supposedly anti-oligarchic groups rallying around — ahem — an oligarch? Steyer amassed his estimated $2.4 billion fortune by founding one progressive nightmare, a hedge fund, Farallon Capital, which invested in other progressive nightmares including coal, oil, gas, and private prisons before reinventing himself as a Green crusader in the 2010s. 

Of course, in the past there have been rich presidents and governors, some of them reformers who were praised or denounced as traitors to their elite class. But the greatest of the rich individuals who made it to the White House or the governor’s mansion — unlike Steyer, or Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, or former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to say nothing of Donald Trump — patiently rose to the highest office by serving in lower offices first. 

President George Washington, one of the wealthiest men at the Founding, served in the Virginia House of Burgesses and was a delegate to the Continental Congress before becoming commander in chief of the Continental Army and presiding over the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Theodore Roosevelt rose through the political ranks as a New York state representative, assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New York, and US vice president. His relative Franklin D. Roosevelt followed a similar cursus honorum, as a New York state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy, and governor of New York, before being elected president. John F. Kennedy was wealthy, as well, but he served his apprenticeship in the House of Representatives and then the US Senate before becoming president. Even Herbert Hoover, a wealthy mining engineer, ran the United States Food Administration during World War I, winning great admiration for his efficient management of postwar aid in Europe, and served as commerce secretary in the 1920s before he became president. 

If you look in the annals of American history for a rich amateur who never served in public office before becoming president and yet became a great and successful president, you won’t find any. For confirmation, you need only look at the unpopular and incompetent billionaire amateur who currently occupies the Oval Office. 

Which brings us back to Steyer’s NGO backers. His amateurism should be a red flag for these groups. But, tellingly, it isn’t.

NGOs involved in politics are donor-funded “astroturf” organizations — fake grassroots outfits. To name one example, Third Act is fiscally sponsored by the Sustainable Markets Foundation, which, in turn, has received grants and donations in the last few years from the center-left Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Sequoia Climate Foundation, and the Aspen Community Foundation — a roll call of nonprofit foundations endowed by billionaires and millionaires. For NGOs like these to denounce the existence of billionaires as a public-policy failure and a flaw in contemporary capitalism is thus to bite the hands that feed them. 

This kind of nonprofit advocacy by donor-funded astroturf groups by its nature is inimical to democracy, which depends upon debate among those who hold different views and compromise among groups with different interests. The technocratic strain of progressivism, which goes back more than a century in the United States, is particularly suspicious of legislatures in which debates and compromises take place.  

The idea that legislatures, controlled by “special interests,” are natural enemies of the “public interest” — as discerned by “experts,” of course — explains the enthusiasm among American progressives for institutions that weaken or circumvent legislative bodies: strong governors and presidents; technocratic city managers ruling on behalf of marginalized mayors and city councils; and ballot initiatives and referenda, which allows citizens to bypass legislatures and make laws directly.

Since the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, technocrats to the Left of center have put their hopes in a succession of elites who, unlike corrupt, deal-making politicians, might be able to generate and administer enlightened public policies in the national and global interest. In the first half of the last century, the ideal was the altruistic career civil servant, guided by the latest teachings of social science. Contrary to conservatives who claim that the New Deal foisted all-powerful democracy on America, the actual New Deal system was based on interest-group corporatism and mass-membership organizations: labor unions, farmers’ associations, employer groups, religious organizations and their volunteering arms, and so on. The New Deal state saw its role as corporatist-style mediation between these groups and the massive social forces they represented.

Progressives and free-market libertarians alike denounced New Deal-style “interest-group liberalism” as the embodiment of squalid corruption. In response, in the 1960s and ’70s, Ralph Nader and his allies modeled a new kind of technocratic progressive champion: the public-interest lawyer. Rather than pursuing legal and regulatory reforms by the democratic means of electing reformers to public office, Naderite progressives sought an end-run around representative democracy and the need to generate voter support. Instead, they directly sued corporations and government agencies. In the realm of civil rights, issues like abortion and LGBT rights were similarly removed from the realm of elected politics and determined by federal courts with the help of legal briefs by contending attorneys.

The affinities between this tradition of technocratic progressivism and autocratic rule are as evident in the 21st century as they were in the twentieth. If public policy should be based on science — social science in the old days, climate science and gender science and woke pandemic science today — then debate is pointless and dissenters are either ignorant or corrupt. “The science is settled,” to use the motto of contemporary progressives.

In a regime based on science — rather than popular superstition or the icky wheeling-and-dealing of elected politicians — public policy should be made by scientifically trained experts. If there is any role for elected legislatures at all in the technocratic progressive utopia, it is merely to delegate sweeping powers to enlightened bureaucrats and to passively ratify the rules and regulations they issue.

And if strong executives are needed to impose top-down progressive reforms, over the objections of lobbyist-ridden legislatures, then what better executive than someone like a self-financed billionaire candidate who has never been corrupted by having held civilian public office before? That’s Tom Steyer.

Indeed, his candidacy was prophesied nearly two decades ago by none other than Nader. In 2009, the green crusader published a utopian fantasy titled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! In the novel, a group of enlightened billionaires and celebrities — including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros, Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Yoko Ono — band together to save America from the greatest threat to top-down progressivism: normal democratic politics. On the assumption that ordinary elected officials of all parties are merely corrupt pawns of corporations, Nader’s fictional billionaires fund — what else? — nonprofit community groups with leaders untainted by electoral experience.

The dream goes back even further. More than a century ago, another leading progressive figure published a similar utopian novel. The Texan political operator Colonel Edward Mandell House (the “Colonel” was a political honorific), an important adviser to Woodrow Wilson, published his own work of fiction titled Philip Dru: Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935. In House’s progressive fantasy, Philip Dru, an idealistic soldier and graduate of West Point, literally goes to war with corrupt capitalists, kills thousands of Americans in a second civil war, and becomes the dictatorial “Administrator of the United States.” Before he resigns, this benevolent American Caesar by executive decree promotes women’s suffrage and labor rights, breaks the power of corporations, and establishes a British-American alliance that rules the world. 

Once you appreciate the influence of the technocratic-progressive fantasy on the American center Left, it is easy to understand the hostility of many in the NGO-industrial complex to Xavier Becerra, who has rapidly risen in the polls to be a rival of Steyer among Democratic candidates for governor. Becerra is the opposite of Tom Steyer: unlike the billionaire, he has worked his way up the ladder of California politics, from the state legislature to the US house to a Cabinet role in the Biden administration. It is precisely because Becerra is a conventional, pragmatic career politician, willing to compromise and eager to avoid doomed symbolic fights, that he is by definition a corrupt member of the establishment, according to the anti-political ideology of technocratic progressives.

Purists on the Left are attacking Becerra for not being zealous enough in advocating the unrealistic policy of single-payer health care at the national or state level; for not engaging in the publicity stunt of suing oil companies for causing climate change; and other litmus tests of the single-issue nonprofit advocacy groups on the Left. Rich amateurs like Steyer, having no record in office at all, have no history of compromises. They are free to share the most extreme positions of the most utopian activists. 

During the first Trump administration in 2017, when congressional Democrats hesitated to impeach the president for fear that the effort would backfire, Steyer founded and funded an outfit entitled “Need To Impeach.” Earlier, in 2013, when many Democratic politicians hesitated to alienate construction unions by blocking the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil from Canadian tar sands to the United States, Steyer campaigned against it, eventually achieving his goal in the Biden years. Far from proving Steyer’s moral purity, stances like these merely demonstrate the ability of an arrogant rich man freed from constraints to strike dramatic poses to please single-issue zealots.

Like Meg Whitman — the former eBay and Hewlett Packard CEO and Republican candidate for governor of California who lost to Jerry Brown in 2010 after spending $144 million of her own money — Tom Steyer may yet go down to defeat. But in Illinois, progressive Democrats for the most part don’t object to Hyatt hotel heir JB Pritzker, who, before becoming governor, had never held public office. On the contrary, Pritzker supports most of the positions favored by the Left, from abortion to outlawing assault weapons and legalizing marijuana, so that the fact that he is not only a billionaire but also a super-rich nepo baby is not held against him. Similarly, when Michael Bloomberg won election as Democratic mayor of New York, the fact that he had never been elected to any office before was not held against him by most New York City Democrats. Indeed, this was an advantage in progressive technocracy’s fundamentally anti-political frame.

The elitist, technocratic variant of American progressivism has gathered strength as labor unions, local politics, and mass-membership groups have declined. Whatever happens in the California governor’s race, its adherents can be counted on to privilege rule by experts over political contestation, and to choose rich activists over the messiness of electoral democracy. And they will continue to hope for salvation by a deus ex machina, even if the untainted savior who descends from above is the kind of plutocrat that traditional labor leaders and social democrats viewed with suspicion and disdain.

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