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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   30621 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Is everything trump spends money on part of the Republican Patronage Network?

Not yet. To the extent that there exists a Republic Patronage network it's still largely inchoate and not integrated with supposedly non-partisan government spending the way that the Democratic Patronage network is. That may change: I think that the American right is wising up to how the game is played.

To state the thesis:

There has been a massive effort in pretty much every Anglosphere country to funnel money away from politicians and nominally neutral civil service towards autonomous, usually left-wing organisations that are not under political control. The usual strategy is to fund large grant-makers, who fund grants for small grant-makers, who pass money between each other and do everything possible to hide it before spending it on left-wing causes that would not normally be acceptable as a use of public money. In short, left-wing (Democrat) grant-making (patronage) networks. These networks feed back into government policy via lobbying and providing 'expert' guidance, sometimes called 'policy laundering'. In effect, you have government money going to supposedly uncontroversial groups like the World Bank to produce results and policy that government officially disavows.

In Ireland for example:

Senator Regina Doherty said the Women’s Council was failing to represent a wide range of views and, critically, noted that the organisation is almost entirely state-funded. And she is right: the NWCI’s latest annual report shows that it received over €800,000 in funding from various government bodies in 2020 versus less than €40,000 raised from its own members.

This is a typical arrangement in a country that has around 33,000 NGOs. The state funds them to the tune of around €5 billion every year, comprising 8% of the national budget. For context, the Irish health service, its largest single item of expenditure, got €21 billion in the last budget.

The organisations funded are almost exclusively socially progressive. The National Council of Women has historically been a relatively neutral organisation, but in recent years it has adopted increasingly progressive positions, such as signing a letter asking the Government to no-platform gender critical voices.

In the UK, we have quasi-non-governmental-organisations (QUANGO)s and a similar set of NGOs. There's a good article about exactly how complex the funding network can get (one local initiative can be funded by a dozen NGOs, which are each funded by a dozen NGOs, which are all ultimately funded by one or two grant-making institutions) but I'm afraid I can't find it now. As an example, Stonewall's (the LGBT organisation turned trans advocacy group) largest source of funding in 2021 was the UK Foreign Office, the Coronavirus Jobs Retention Scheme, and the Welsh Government. This also gives you a flavour:

Let us consider an example: the Scottish Trans Alliance. This is a project funded by the Scottish Government Equality Unit and delivered by the Equality Network, which is largely funded by the Scottish government as well as by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (funded by UK government).

The project delivers research, advisory, and training, including to government-funded bodies, who in turn repeat the ideas received via reports, training and consultancy back toward policymakers. Thus, a nested series of public sector grants has enabled government to conjure into existence a body that shapes public sector policy. Meanwhile, the pronouncements and statistics produced by this arms-length government body are treated by the (government funded) BBC as though emanating from independent civil society voices.

The whole cycle amounts to a process of laundering, by semi-independent bodies, a series of policies the government already wanted to adopt so they look as though they come spontaneously from the society upon which they will in due course be visited.

The result looks like a thriving voice for civil society in the national debate. But in reality it is more like the government having a conversation with itself, via a series of proxies. Meanwhile, that part of civil society without insider status sits scratching its head trying to work out which form to fill in to get a seat at the table.

(I know I have ignored the US. Others like @jeroboam can provide sources.)

The whole point of the scheme is to launder partisan patronage into harmless-sounding forms, so without digging into vast networks of funding I cannot prove it, but the 100bn to the World Bank is almost certainly going to be spent in this way, as is the green energy funding. Ukraine, I don't know. I think that they probably get more of the actual money without it being siphoned off, but I can't be sure. In the absence of transparency, suspicion flourishes.

This cannot yet be done in reverse because (1) the NGO sector is left-wing for demographic and historical reasons, (2) their supposedly non-partisan funders in the government are left-wing and not easy to replace, and (3) right-wing causes are often officially proscribed and subject to a level of scrutiny that the left is not (yet).

Yeah I understand what a patronage network is, and that the progressives have built one – but for the point under discussion, funding for ukraine, the term is not applicable. That’s the way I interpret @Chrisprattalpharaptr ‘lol’. That the term was rendered meaningless and reduced to a boo-light for ‘democrat spends money on something’ . Though it’s possible he was calling into question the existence of a democratic patronage network, idk.

funding for ukraine

USAID spent $5 billion up to 2014 funding NGO and 'civil society' in the Ukraine.

It sounds like a patronage network to me.

Yeah I understand what a patronage network is, and that the progressives have built one

I wasn't sure, and I felt like effort-posting.

Second, Biden pushed as much money out the door to the Democratic Patronage Network as he possibly could. I mean look at these headlines. $4 billion for World Bank, $100 billion for clean energy grants, $5.9 billion for Ukraine, as well as "forgiving" $4.7 billion in loans to Ukraine. Since after the election they've emptied the coffers as quickly as they could.

lol, Democratic Patronage Network. If nothing else, I admire your rabid partisanship.

I read the comment as denying the existentance of a meaningful patronage network, but even if not, I disagree that describing the above spending as patronage is obviously 'rabid' partisanship.

The lion's share was 'clean energy' funding (100bn), then a fraction of that for ukraine (8bn) and the world bank (4bn). I am comfortable saying that money spend on 'clean energy' and the world bank (and its development funds) will go in large part to the patronage networks, though I agreed with you that ukraine may or may not be patronage funding depending on how the money was spent, and probably mostly isn't.

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