Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals Since the 1960s collects an interesting set of scholarly essays about “professional-class liberalism,” and some of that which it has wrought, during the past six decades. Collectively, they well-cover the benefits that the class has brought to liberalism; the writers are mostly in that class, after all, and one can understand them seeing value in both its and their own contributions. For the most part, though, they also admirably address and self-questioningly assess some of the drawbacks of their class, its activities, and the way it’s gone and goes about conducting them, including at the behest of and through philanthropy.
Mastery and Drift’s title derives from Walter Lippmann’s 1914 Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, in which the then-rising progressive public intellectual laments America’s “drift” into inequality, divisiveness, and ineffectual governance—his solution to which would be found in the “mastery” of the also-emerging “professional classes of social scientists and business and government bureaucrats,” as summarized by the co-editors of Mastery and Drift, history professors Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer, in their introduction to the new volume.
Post-New Deal, according to Cebul and Geismer,
the demographic growth of the professional middle class also meant that professional-class liberals’ life experiences, political cultures, and professional outlooks were reflected back to them by an increasingly vocal and well-resources plurality within the Democratic Party’s base and from within institutions of profound social, economic, and political influence, chiefly philanthropy, media, and universities. Professional-class liberals, then, emerged as political and state actors whose training, instincts, and social worlds were increasingly embedded in and defined by the globalized, financial, legalistic, and managerial capitalist systems they imagined themselves reforming.
Though it’s likely that much of the book may have been drafted before the 2024 political re-ascendance of populist conservatism, they write, “With renewed contestations over the meanings of liberalism, the content of its governance, and its relationship with a resurgent Left, the moment is ripe to consider modern liberalism’s historical evolution and enduring impact on contemporary politics and society.”
Mastery and Drift is consistent with—of a piece, really—with many previous, similarly critical assessments, on the left and right. Among others, these include: James Burnham’s of the “New Class;” Daniel Bell’s of the “knowledge class;” and Theda Skocpol’s of the withdrawal of elites from cross-class organizations to those of a nonprofit overclass.
Criticism of the related “managerial elite” seems to have picked up of late, as well. Joel Kotkin recently has written about what is the equivalent of a First Estate “clerisy” of intellectuals. And in the wake of the ’24 election, there have been negative appraisals of the practical and political effects of “The Groups” of usually philanthropically funded entities (here too, on both the left and right) that exercise an inordinate amount of influence over candidates, parties, and elected policymakers. The Groups, these analyses either imply or say, would do better to be more cognizant of and responsive to the wishes of common, non-overclass citizens who have few avenues to effectively express themselves other than electorally.
Associated, and healthy, critiques all—basically, of Lippmann’s solution of expert mastery to the problem of drift he saw in his 1914 diagnosis “of the current unrest.”
First Bolstering, Then Hollowing Out
Some of them properly have included philanthropy in particular within their ambits of criticism, and it belongs there. Cebul and Geismer’s Mastery and Drift wisely begins with an entire chapter on “How Philanthropy Made and Unmade Liberalism,” by Temple University history professor Lila Corwin Berman. It is tough-minded.
After describing a number of specific examples of the vilification of philanthropy in America during the second half of the 2010s, Berman writes, “The vilification of philanthropy might be dismissed as the political fallout of a hyper-polarized era that nonetheless cohered around populist pronouncements, yet it signified a far deeper story about how American liberalism had been made and unmade in the twentieth century.” Lippmann’s mastery may have come full circle, in other words, creating a lot of (again-)current unrest, and philanthropy played a pivotal part.
“Behind the headlines and the exposés” about grantmakers and their various institutional and/or personal wrongdoing “rested a history of philanthropy’s remarkable rise into a form of governance that first bolstered liberalism before hollowing it out,” according to Berman.
“The era from the New Deal through the Great Society gestated philanthropic governance by fostering a quiet but clear relationship between statecraft and philanthropy,” she writes in a short historical overview. “So long as state agents believed they could use philanthropy as a tool to achieve public ends, it appeared a perfect enactment of the liberal ideal and, thus, a worthy recipient of state support through tax exemptions, direct grants, and liberal permissiveness.”
Then, “[p]hilanthropy’s role began to transform in the 1970s as it moved from an incubator for state policy to a stand-in for state power and gradually expanded into a mode of governance that steadily overwhelmed other governing strategies,” her cogent history continues. This transformative expansion was the deliberate result of placing unelected private over public power, including to create, implement, and reform public policy.
“A bevy of anti-regulatory, pro-market, and state-shrinking measures endorsed across party lines from the 1970s through the 1990s smoothed the way for the rise of philanthropic governance,” by Berman’s account.
Together, they directed public funds and plaudits toward private foundations and other philanthropic bodies.
By the final decades of the twentieth century, the logic and structure of philanthropy had permeated every realm of American power, from domestic and foreign policies to corporate practices to grassroots politics. In other words, no domain of American power operated bereft of the capital and logic of philanthropy. This fact served to lash together disparate political actors from the left and the right, who no matter their policy divisions all conceded to—and often lauded—philanthropic governance.
More Expansive, or Maybe a Next, Natural Step
This “philanthropic-governance” criticism of Berman’s is, while consistent with them, more expansive than Burnham’s critique of “the New Class,” Bell’s of “the knowledge class,” Skocpol’s of the nonprofit overclass, or those of the managerial elite and their Groups, and whatever philanthropic components they may each include.
Maybe Berman’s is just the next, natural step of them. After this step, philanthropy is much more—much worse—than merely arrogant, more than too elite, too distant from the larger (and, to it, lower) citizenry, too credentialed, too powerful, too political or even partisan, or too one-sided in worldview. It’s the very “logic and structure” of philanthropy that’s so negatively affecting liberalism—rendering it “unmade”—and America now.
Again risking “in-other-words” oversimplification, in other words, the foundation-funded Groups’ thinking isn’t just influentially expressed from the outside, it’s part and parcel of governance itself. Democracy’s not just been infringed or compromised, it’s been outright supplanted. And your taxes, if you make enough to have to pay and pay them, contribute to the public fisc used to incentivize the displacement.
Berman’s angst about “philanthropic governance” is that it’s private, and continually legally, legislatively, and regulatorily manipulated to be so in a way that conceals its purpose and effects, falsely claiming the moral (and tax) status of serving charity, the common good, and the very democracy that it’s superseded. The position seems to have more than a little populism to it.
Now, according to Berman, “[t]he historical development of philanthropy into a mode of governance cannot be explained through the left-right binary, even as it is irrefutable that certain philanthropic endeavors fueled materially disparate political ideologies.” Perhaps any new proposed solution worthy of consideration to address the current unrest, in the philanthropic context out of which it has arisen, should consciously and actively avoid any binaries and be disparate in ideology.
“In its bid to solve liberalism’s most fundamental tension between private property and the public good, philanthropy made liberalism appear perfectible,” she writes, “but it did so by destroying liberalism’s lifeblood: the vital tension between the private and the public.” If so, one proposed solution here—maybe a set of them, when the policy details are developed and/or refined—could thus be returning philanthropy to its original and properly tenuous place in America’s social contract.
“It is conceivable that philanthropy will weather the changes—or, even, that it is already funding them—but if it continues to serve as a governing strategy,” Berman concludingly warns in her Mastery and Drift essay, “it will almost surely be absent the liberal vision that crowned it king of the last century.”
This article first appeared in the Giving Review on May 12, 2025.
