The Giving Review: A conversation with Aaron Renn (Part 1 of 2)

This interview first appeared in the Giving Review.

Aaron Renn is a prolific writer and cogent cultural and policy analyst based in Carmel, Ind. He is a senior fellow at American Reformer, a former senior fellow in urban policy at the Manhattan Institute, and a former managing director at Accenture. He authored 2024’s influential Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture.

In his wide-ranging Substack newsletter, Renn recently has published two thoughtful articles of particular Giving Review interest—“The Public Intellectuals America Needs” and “Institutions of the American Transition.”

In his piece on public intellectuals, he argues that as trust has shifted from institutions to individuals, certain public intellectuals increasingly function as informal “trustees” of the public conversation. Almost inspiringly, he identifies personal standards for these individual trustees that can substitute for the institutional safeguards that have eroded.

In his piece on American transition’s institutions, Renn contends that the many new think tanks and publications across the ideological spectrum that have either been created “or de facto rebooted via a rebrand” during the past dozen years are part of a broader transition. The previously existing or “un-rebooted” institutions were unable or unwilling to accommodate new approaches to emerging problems, prompting thinkers and entrepreneurs to build anew.

Both the legacy and the transition institutions, of course, are almost all philanthropically supported nonprofits.

He was nice enough to join me for a recorded conversation earlier this month. The just less than 20-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here.

During the first part, Renn talks about America’s transition from one institutional order to another, philanthropy’s changing role in that transition, the emergence of new institutions focused on “acceleration” and “formation,” and a generational divide between the donors supporting legacy and newer organizations.

“A lot of people today have this idea that America is in decline, trust in institutions is going downhill, our politics are getting crazier, more polarized,” and there are problems in “broad swaths of middle- and working-class American life,” Renn tells me. “General perceptions of malaise in our country” are “not often warranted, but when people feel that way,” it should cause us to wonder why.

“I always say of populism, it’s like the check-engine light in your car. The actual complaints of populism, whether it be Trumpian populism or Zohran Mamdani populism, are things indicating a need to ask, he continues, “What’s going on here? We need to look into this.

“[W]hat’s really happening is we are in a time of transition,” according to Renn, and we’re “seeing a lot of discomfort because we are transitioning from one era in America to another. If you think about the people who lived through the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th Century, we went from this rural, agrarian America to this very large-scale, urban development, with “large corporations, the development of mass media, the rise of big government …. It was profoundly dislocating to people, and it came with a lot of negatives, to be honest.”

But “all of these things that we did to create a modern society in America … left us ultimately in a better place,” he says. In recent decades, “We’ve been living in a country that has been very dominated by an era that was defined by the Cold War and American ‘unipolarity.’” It was based around big institutions, mass media, and a “very fixed demographic” makeup.

There was “a consensus around many things,” as Renn describes it.

Now, we sort of see that is in a little bit of decline in America. The future is going to be a very different place. It’s going to be a very different place in terms of generations, in terms of demographics, in terms of its media ecology, in terms of technology … in terms of our politics—and we don’t know what that’s going to look like yet. But I would like to think that when we are on the other side of this transition, we’re going to be in a place that everyone says, Wow, it’s a lot better than it was before. …

It might be that we have to build something new for the future. And I want to focus on building the new for the future, the new things that we need.

Philanthropy’s role

As it has with previous American transitions, philanthropy will unavoidably be very much part of the new one, in Renn’s telling. The older philanthropic model—community foundations, pooled giving, support for established civic and cultural institutions, and partnerships among business, government, and philanthropy—has steadily been losing its authority.

Newer donors increasingly want direct control over their giving. “People go to their community foundation to establish a donor-advised fund,” for example, Renn notes. “They’re not looking to just throw money into the general pot.”

Some traditional philanthropic institutions have become more ideological and managerial and consequently less able, in his view, to attract and keep broad community legitimacy. And in struggling cities where the business establishment has weakened, philanthropy has acquired a leadership role for which it was not necessarily designed. “What happens when philanthropy is supposed to be the leader? That’s a very different environment.”

According to Renn, “Philanthropy is going to play a role in the future. The question is, what is that role?” And he has another question: “These institutions were created in particular moments for particular purposes, and if they want to stay relevant, don’t they need to continually keep up with the times?”

Post-Boomer donor bases

Overviewing his taxonomy of newly created institutions of the new transition, Renn categorizes them ideologically on an axis from left and right—but interestingly also along another, “acceleration”-versus- “formation” axis. Acceleration institutions concentrate on techno-industrial progress—housing, manufacturing, economic growth, artificial intelligence, and related questions. Formation institutions, on the other hand, concentrate on the human and social prerequisites of flourishing—character, family, friendship, education, and institutional health.

He holds that the two kinds of institutions are interdependent. “If we’re all focused on how do we build our AI future, but we don’t bring our people along with us, then we have a lot of the disruptions that we have right now,” he fears.

The proliferation of new think tanks, journals, and advocacy organizations is itself evidence of Renn’s overall thesis. He points to institutions such as the American Institute for Boys and Men, the Institute for Family Studies, American Compass, the Institute for Progress, and others. He wonders why their founders felt compelled to create something new, rather than house their work within, say, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, or another established outfit.

He does not think the older institutions should necessarily be considered failures. Rather, he sees them substantially defined by the previous order and, in some cases, by resistance to populism and other challenges to it.

“Many of these newer organizations are being funded entirely by post-Boomer donor bases,” as well, Renn says.

They’ve attracted very little Boomer money. The sort of Boomer philanthropists are still very wedded to the existing organizations and legacy paradigms, and the Boomers have the money. For right now, that is very good with those organizations, but Boomers are not going to be with us forever and many organizations that have been overly reliant on Boomer money are going to really struggle. So, we see that there is a generational divide in philanthropy in terms of some of the kinds of organizations and priorities that are being funded.

In the conversation’s second part, Renn discusses the shift of trust from institutions to individuals and what it demands of public intellectuals, whether the new institutions of the American transition can or should aspire to the neutrality of the old, and why philanthropy tends to prefer established institutions and newly favors technological “acceleration” over the harder work of human and social “formation.”