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War of the classes | page 1, 2, 3
Another exception can result from the shakedown of large corporations by political activists, an opportunity that is almost exclusively a province of the left. Under attack from radical Greens, for example, major companies like ARCO have become large subsidizers of the environmental movement. Through similar extortionist efforts, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/Push coalition has received more corporate underwriting than any dozen conservative groups put together. But the norm for corporate interests remains the removal of themselves and their assets from any ideological politics, which can only damage them in the long run. The same applies to free-wheeling individuals who are serious financial players. I have had very conservative billionaires tell me that whatever their personal views, they cannot afford to be political (in my sense) at all.
David Horowitz David Horowitz's column appears on the News site every other Monday.
A consequence of this stand-off is that most of the contributions available to ideological activists of the left or right are either small individual donations solicited through direct mail campaigns or large institutional donations from tax-exempt foundations. In this area, too, the fevered imaginations of the left have created a wildly distorted picture in which well-funded goliaths of the right, the Olin, Scaife and Bradley foundations, overwhelm the penurious Davids of the left. Edward Said, for example, used the platform of the once-distinguished Reith lectures to attack Peter Collier and me over the "Second Thoughts" movement we had launched as a critique of the left: "In a matter of months during the late 1980s, Second Thoughts aspired to become a movement, alarmingly well funded by right-wing Maecenases like the Bradley and Olin Foundations." Some years later, a liberal report appeared on "The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations," documenting the annual disbursements of what it deemed to be the key conservative grant-giving institutions. The annual sum of the subsidies from 12 foundations was calculated at $70 million. This may seem a large sum until one looks at the Ford Foundation, which dispenses more than $900 million per year, or more than 10 times as much, mainly to liberal and left-wing causes. Ford is the principal funder, for example, of the hard left Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF), which lacks any visible root in the Mexican-American community but has been the principal promoter of illegal immigration and the driving force behind the failed multibillion-dollar bilingual education programs. Ford created MALDEF and has provided it with more than $25 million over the years. Ford has also been the leading funder of left-wing feminism and black separatism on American campuses, and of the radical effort to balkanize the national identity through multicultural curricula throughout the university system. In these agendas, Ford is typical rather than exceptional. In fact, the biggest and most prestigious foundations, bearing the most venerable names of the captains of American capitalism -- Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie and Pew -- all skew left, as do many newer but also well-endowed institutions like the MacArthur, Markle and Schumann foundations. MacArthur alone is three times the size of all "big three" conservative foundations -- Olin, Bradley and Scaife -- combined. Moreover, these foundations do not even represent the most important support the corporate "ruling class" and its social elites provide to the left. That laurel goes to the private and public universities that have traditionally been the preserve of the American aristocracy and now -- as Richard Rorty has happily pointed out -- are the "political base of the left."
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