What’s Your 2055 Vision?
Lessons in Long-Term Power Building
I remember, early in my career, reading an Alliance for Justice (AFJ) report that laid bare the efforts of conservative donors to craft a powerful political and intellectual infrastructure designed to reshape our country.
The report, published in the early 2000s, was a response to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the shock of the 1994 midterms, which, at the time, were dubbed the “Republican Revolution” because they consolidated conservative control over Congress for the first time in decades.
AFJ outlined, in forensic detail, how a handful of strategic funders—names like Olin, Scaif, and Bradley—were working in concert. Their goal wasn’t a single election win but permanent influence over states, Congress, the White House, universities, media, think tanks, and the courts.
Ambitious, right?
The Conservative Blueprint
At the time, nerds like me read the AFJ report as a warning. We nodded sagely. And then, largely, we returned to our siloed work while that conservative blueprint built our reality.
Today, the Heritage Foundation isn’t just a think tank; it’s drafting a devastating presidential agenda. The Federalist Society isn’t just a law club; it’s the SCOTUS conveyor belt. ALEC isn’t an obscure group with a few wins here and there; it’s the legislative engine behind racist voter ID laws and environmental protections rollbacks from Florida to Wyoming and beyond.
They had a 30-year vision, created a 30-year game plan, and then coordinated and funded—brick by brick—the future they wanted.
The question that haunts me is not about their success (although the impacts are terrifying) but about our absence. Where did progressive forces, with the resources, numbers, and passion we have, drop the ball over the last three decades?
The answer is, at least in part, in the mirror. While the right funded a long-term vision, we perfected fragmented, short-term reactions. They built institutions; we funded projects. They made 10-year bets on ideas and talent; we obsessed over restrictive metrics and overhead ratios. They consolidated power; we democratized our dissent into a thousand tiny underfunded fragments.
As your resident spend down advocate, one longtime conservative funder I want to point out was the John M. Olin Foundation, which committed to spend down its entire endowment within a generation, strategically pumping $370 million into entities like the Federalist Society. An Olin trustee later called the Federalist Society “one of the best investments the foundation ever made.”
That’s the power of focused, time-bound, monumental capital.
Of course, there were attempts to counter these efforts along the way. Donors came together to form the Democracy Alliance, ProPublica, and the Center for American Progress, but those projects haven’t coalesced into the formidable, interlocking progressive infrastructure that’s needed.
So now, here we are. Conservatives are running roughshod. They control many aspects of society, from politics to media, and eventually culture. And yet, there’s hope in this story.
Because one of the insights from all this is that their vision wasn’t superior; it was just that their method was. They looked at the world and asked, “How do we remake it in our image in 30 years?” Then they funded at the scale and speed required to answer that question.
A Better Horizon
Which leads me to the question I can’t quit: What is our vision for the world we want to live in 30 years from now?
On the short-term horizon, of course, we need to win this redistricting battle and get back the House in the midterm elections. We also need to keep as many of our neighbors safe, housed, and fed as possible amid inhumane cuts to social programs and expanding criminalization.
And yes, in the next five, ten, twenty years, we’ve got to regain control of states, governorships, and the White House. We’ve got to replace outgoing Supreme Court justices with ones who will hold the line for humanity and our planet.
But we won’t realize those goals without a clear view of the world we actually want to live in—a future with a just and equitable definition of freedom instead of one that is extractive.
Creating a vision for 2055, and the ecosystem to win it, is bigger than philanthropy, but since that’s the sector where I currently reside, here’s what I’m asking: Where are opportunities for funders to move from reactive to visionary, siloed to coordinated, transactional to transformational?
Reactive to Visionary: Beyond responding to a far-right agenda, where can we be funding a people- and planet-first agenda?
Siloed to Coordinated: Where can we sunset fragmented approaches in favor of pooling resources and strategy around a shared long-term horizon?
Transactional to Transformational: Where can we replace restrictive project grants with long-term, trust-based investments in institution-building?
Importantly, are we willing to fund a people’s vision of 2055 at the scale needed to make it real, even if that means choosing our own organization’s end date in service of a better future?
Our 30-year horizon starts now. Let’s do this.
With hope,
Glen
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The sad truth is that many of us saw this coming, saw the Olin et al playbook, and spent our careers shouting into the wind of well intentioned logic models and incremental impact metrics. Now that we face the loss of the American democracy, or rather, see it veer to autocratic like so many societies before it, it’s too little, too late from the philanthro-industrial complex. And while I love your question, it’s the wrong one. Funders like you now urgently need to turn to funding the resistance, a government in exile, and the dissident tech, legal, and support infrastructure that will see us through the dark times.