The Giving Review: A conversation with Aaron Renn – Part 2

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 last month. In the first part of our discussion, which is here, 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.

The just more than 17-minute video below is the second part, during which we discuss 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.”

“If you think about it, in the past, trust was sort of conveyed by institutions, and the institutions were the places that we looked to hire validate, promote, platform people,” Renn tells me.

Think about someone like Walter Cronkite and CBS Evening News. Yes, Walter Cronkite was a very-trusted individual. But the trust that people had in him was heavily bound up with his role at CBS Evening News that he was the face of—this major, highly trusted institution. So, pastors of churches, teachers and principals, major political leaders, columnist at a newspaper—they occupied boxes and the credibility that they had as individuals was heavily bound up with the institutions that they were affiliated with.

Now, “what we have seen is that people today turn to individual influencers,” he continues. “They curate the people that they trust as individuals, and this is where the media ecology really has changed. In a pre-Internet era, it would have been very difficult for people to look to an independent influencer because there weren’t channels to reach” them. The influencer would need access to distribution through a major platform. “That’s not the case today. …

“The individual is the locus of trust. It’s no longer the institution in many cases,” according to Renn, “and even when someone is affiliated with an institution, you trust them because of who they are, not because of the institution that they work for. In fact, you might even trust them despite the institution that they work for.”

In considering what it means to behave in ways worthy of that trust, his is piece on the “public intellectuals America needs” looks specifically at figures including Ross Douthat, Richard Reeves, Julius Krein, and Tanner Greer. In particular, Renn identifies being: courageously truth-seeking; constructive; morally serious, but non-moralizing; also courageously, willing to challenge one’s tribe and audience; generous toward opponents; positive rather than reactive; and temperamentally disciplined.

Renn cites Greer’s sharply critical review of Palantir chief executive officer Alex Karp’s book as an example of courage because, for an independent intellectual like Greer, Silicon Valley represents a plausible source of financial support. “To criticize people who are your potential … funder base, that takes some courage,” Renn says.

Newness and neutrality, formation and firepower, and a small “c”

Returning to his description of the new institutions of the American transition, which we talk about in Part 1, Renn expresses skepticism that the new institutions can simply recreate the ostensibly neutral institutions of the previous era. Those older institutions, he notes, were built for a mass-industrial economy, mass media, and a more stable and less-politicized environment. Those aren’t the conditions in which new institutions will have to operate. “An old-school idea of a completely neutral institution” may no longer be realistic, he says.

And returning to his typological categorization of the new institutions on an axis between acceleration and formation, Renn agrees there is an asymmetry. Acceleration—technology, growth, AI, industrial policy, and the like—often overlaps with donors’ business interests, he says, meaning “there’s a sort of ROI for them in working on that issue.” Formation—families, churches, local leadership, social institutions, character—is harder, longer-term, and attracts fewer resources.

“There’s less firepower being thrown at it than there is on the acceleration side”—though he cautions against an either/or proposition. We can’t “form our way out of these problems.”

Renn also offers an observation that might be another caution. “Philanthropy flows to the established institutions and ways of doing things. So philanthropy is very small-c conservative in almost every case,” he says, even progressive philanthropy. Grantmaking money tends to flow through established organizations, established leadership structures, and established ways of addressing problems.

Finally, he closes by returning to philanthropy’s generational transition. Silicon Valley and other sources of new wealth simply “don’t give like previous generations gave.” He uses opera as a concrete example, saying he sees relatively few technology figures among its donors, board members, and corporate sponsors. For legacy cultural institutions, the problem is obvious. “That’s a huge problem when they’ve got all the money.”