‘A terrain of struggle’
Back in September, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a memo encouraging the Treasury, the Department of Justice, and the Internal Revenue Service to go after American groups that fund “domestic terrorism.” As a potential target, he named George Soros, the billionaire founder of the Open Society Foundations, which repudiated the charge as the latest in a series of “politically motivated” executive-branch attacks on civil society.
The Open Society Foundations has some US$25 billion in assets. It can afford good lawyers. But smaller nonprofits might not. “There’s enormous fear right now,” the National Council of Nonprofits senior vice-president Sarah Saadian told the Financial Times. “We’re definitely hearing from nonprofits who are really concerned, who are making changes to what they’re saying publicly.”
Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to revoke nonprofits’, including universities’, tax exemptions. The White House has already offered select universities preferential funding in return for signing a “compact” requiring them to fulfil obligations including eliminating “institutional units” that “belittle” or “punish” “conservative ideas.”
And last spring, Trump signed a series of executive orders targeting law firms he said threatened U.S. interests. Soon enough, these firms complied. March 14, for instance, saw an executive order terminating the federal contracts of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and revoking their lawyers’ security clearances. Days later, he rescinded the order after the firm promised to abandon its diversity policies and provide $40 million worth of free legal work in support of White House initiatives.
American civil society is enormous—nonprofits alone employ more people than manufacturing. It includes foundations with global reach, universities with billion-dollar endowments, and law firms with centuries of prestige. And yet its response so far has been scattered and hesitant.
What’s happening?
Dylan Riley is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe. The answer, Riley says, lies in a structural asymmetry. Many civil-society groups—especially those aligned with the Democrats—have large budgets but small, passive memberships. They’re surprisingly weak politically. And Trump, in a sense, isn’t wrong that many supposedly non-political nonprofits have close ties with the Democratic Party. But the administration isn’t out to crush American civil society in its entirety. Vice President J.D. Vance took to right-wing organizer Charlie Kirk’s podcast following his assassination, urging conservatives to “get involved.” And the Republican Party has in some ways a closer connection to civil society than the Democrats, particularly through church-based and local organizations. So this isn’t just civil society versus the executive; it’s at least as much a fight within civil society, where the president’s supporters are pressing their advantage …
Gustav Jönsson: The pattern of conflict here is striking. What’s the administration trying to do with civil-society organizations?
