The Reckoning Our Sector’s Narrators Don’t Want to See Coming

Jun 22, 2025

In the past few weeks, I’ve read a number of pieces from those trying to make sense of this moment for the rest of us. Honestly, I’m not so sure they’re writing for others as much as for themselves. The narrators of our collective experience are still clinging to the idea that the institutions they helped build, the careers they enjoyed, and the frameworks they long championed can be salvaged. They’re not grappling with the possibility that the system has failed. They’re bargaining with it—imagining just enough change to maintain control, but not so much that everything has to be rebuilt from the ground up.

What I’m not sure our narrators fully grasp is just how predictable this moment really is and how disorienting the next one is likely to be. They’re fixated on the crisis as they see it. Yet the Trump era will end. Of that we can be certain. But business as usual won’t get us any further than where we are now. The real question is what comes after and how many of us are ready to admit we’re already living through a reckoning that many of our sector’s chief storytellers either can’t see or don’t want to.

This isn’t the first time a market-driven society has begun to unravel. Karl Polanyi warned that any society fully subordinated to market logic would eventually provoke a backlash. His concept of the “double movement” describes a recurring pattern: first, a wave of dis-embedding when economic forces are lifted out of social obligation; then, a countermovement when people push back demanding protection, stability, and moral restraint. This isn’t a story of progress and decline; it’s an enduring tension between market autonomy and social embeddedness, between efficiency and accountability, between freedom and solidarity.

For the past half-century, we’ve lived through the first half of that pattern — what we refer to as the neoliberal era. Market logic seeped into nearly every corner of life. Social protections were dismantled in the name of efficiency. Public goods were privatized, outsourced, or starved off. Our causes became commodities, donors became consumers, and our funding models began to mimic marketing plans. Nonprofits were told to measure everything, optimize relentlessly, and think like startups. None of this was neutral; it was market fundamentalism, dressed up as innovation, enforced through metrics, and disguised as common sense. Work once rooted in place, ritual, and relationship was subordinated to scale, data, and incentives.

Now, the second half of Polanyi’s double movement is emerging—not as a reset (there’s no going back), but as a reckoning. People are no longer convinced by the promise of the market. They want to belong. They want meaning that isn’t manufactured or sold back to them. As economist J. Bradford DeLong explains, long before Trump’s election in 2016, waves of political and cultural anger were already building—citizens frustrated, in different ways, that the systems they once trusted no longer worked for them. The Polanyian view insists we are owed more than what the market provides—not just access, but community, stability, and dignity. The harder those are to find, the stronger the resistance and the clearer the turn toward a more socially embedded society.

Trumpism Signals Collapse

Trumpism wasn’t a glitch in the system. It was the system’s most coherent emotional outcome. When Polanyi described a countermovement against market overreach, he wasn’t forecasting a tidy rebalancing of civil society. He was describing how people stripped of stability, dislocated from meaning, and tired of being told everything was fine would eventually reach for anything that promised to make them matter again. Trump didn’t create that longing. He exploited it.

For millions of Americans, especially those outside the metro-professional class, the world was getting colder and more precarious while elites insisted it was getting better. Churches emptied. Unions collapsed. Local papers vanished. Community institutions that once held dignity and difference together were gutted by policy and then blamed for their own decay. When philanthropy or politics showed up, it was often with metrics and messaging rather than presence or solidarity. The civic fabric frayed, and into that vacuum came Trump’s performance of belonging—his theater of grievance, loyalty, and remembered greatness.

This is not an endorsement of Trumpism. It’s a reckoning with what made it work. Trump didn’t succeed because he offered coherent policy. He succeeded because he shattered the elite consensus on expertise, on globalization, on institutional virtue, and gave voice to a rage that the status quo had long ignored. He proved that people no longer believed in the institutions designed to “serve” them. The point isn’t that Trump will fix anything. It’s that he revealed how many believe nothing else will.

Neoliberalism’s Approach to Social Change

If Trumpism revealed the collapse, neoliberalism explains how we got here. Since the Reagan-Clinton years, it’s operated through a tidy, three-part formula: government subsidies without asking questions, market logic to justify every decision, and expert control to keep it all sounding credible. In nonprofit life, that’s how we ended up with foundation execs deciding what matters, direct response firms defining participation, and software companies measuring the outcomes. We didn’t build civic life. We built a managed system: top-down, tech-forward, mistaking control for connection and outputs for impact.

The flaw wasn’t hidden. It was baked into the very tools we praised. The state pulled back, handing its obligations to nonprofits and then tying that support to deliverables. Philanthropy insulated itself from the public by trading deliberation for governance-by-boardroom. Market logic justified it all: underpaid labor, elite control, donor deference, the myth that scale equals justice. And, when things broke down, the experts doubled down. If trust was waning, it was because people didn’t understand the model, not because the model had nothing left to offer.

This is what made the system brittle. It had no room for memory, no tolerance for dissent, and no patience for the messy work of actual belonging. It replaced relationships with transactions, community with compliance. The dominant institutions of social change became legible to funders and policymakers but alien to the people they were meant to serve. So, when the disruption came, it wasn’t sabotage. It was the natural consequence of a system that mistook efficiency for durability. And, now, we’re left with the sobering realization: the very architecture we relied on to solve social problems is what made them so hard to address in the first place.

Michael Lind’s Managerial Overclass

The era of technocratic social change didn’t just happen. It was carefully constructed and fiercely defended by a class of people who, for the most part, still believe they’re the good guys. Michael Lind calls them the managerial overclass. I’ve called them the nice guys of soft authoritarianism. They don’t bark orders or swing hammers. They issue guidelines, set funding priorities, and design processes that look participatory but keep control firmly in their hands. Even now, as cracks widen and legitimacy erodes, they cannot imagine stepping aside. They still see themselves at the front of the room—still believe that funders and their appointed experts are the ones best qualified to decide what gets saved and on what terms.

You’ve met them. They’re on every panel, every “reimagining” task force, every nonprofit webinar series on how to make systems more inclusive while keeping the architecture intact. Their résumés are nearly interchangeable: elite degrees; stints in philanthropy; years consulting on strategy, scale, and impact. They’ve built entire careers translating community work into funder-friendly language, and they’ve done it with a smile. That’s what makes the control so hard to name. It doesn’t come with threats. It comes with toolkits.

Lind’s point is that this class governs through process, not politics. And process is where legitimacy goes to hide. Instead of ideology, they offer “best practices.” Instead of public debate, they offer stakeholder feedback loops. But behind the polite performance is a structure that preserves their status, rewards their fluency, and shields them from real accountability. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: many of us are complicit. We didn’t create the system, but we learned how to work within it. We knew how to sound like we cared without risking our place at the table. And, now, as that table wobbles, we can’t pretend surprise. The old system wasn’t sabotaged. It expired.

Reformers vs. Rebuilders

At this point, nearly everyone sees the cracks. The question is what they think those cracks mean. And that’s where the split becomes clear. Two camps are now narrating this moment in very different terms. The first believes the system can still be rescued, which is why they get better airtime. The second has already moved on. There’s a certainty the former still claims, and an uncertainty the latter is learning to live with.

The first group, let’s call them the reformers, are the same folks we’ve already met: the ones working hardest to narrate this moment for the rest of us, the nice guys of soft authoritarianism, the managerial overclass still holding the mic at every conference. They see this moment as a deviation, not a collapse. If we just humanize our strategies, update our metrics, and hire the right consultants, things can get back on track. Their impulse is toward preservation: preserve the institutions, preserve the process, preserve their own relevance. They’re not unserious people. Many of them mean well. But they’re still speaking the language of systems management in a moment that requires systems departure.

The other group, the rebuilders, are reading the terrain very differently. They’re not trying to patch up the old order. They’re trying to replace it. They don’t believe that the institutions built during the neoliberal era can deliver what’s now required — not because they’re angry or reckless, but because they’ve been burned too many times. They’re watching their communities get priced out, their staff burn out, and their funders check out. So they’ll build something else: forms of civic life that are smaller, slower, more place-rooted and people-driven. They won’t be polished, and they won’t ask permission. But they’ll do the work of stitching something back together—something the experts once told us we wouldn’t need anymore: each other.

The Next Civic Life Begins from the Bottom Up

If the old civic order was built on abstraction — on plans, platforms, and professionalized care — what’s coming next will be built on something far more elemental: contact. Not just the warm-and-fuzzy kind, but the hard-won proximity that holds across difference, across exhaustion, across years. The rebuilders won’t ask for your buy-in. They’ll move forward, not because they’ll have perfect clarity but because they’ll know that waiting for clarity is how systems stall.

The old order made for great careers, profitable enterprises, and comfortable office spaces. What it didn’t make for was the kind of social change adequate to meet the scale of the crisis. It rewarded fluency over fidelity, optics over outcomes, and legibility over lived experience. But here’s the evolution many of my colleagues still don’t see coming: social change from the bottom up, not managed, funded, and evaluated from above, but carried by people in place, grounded in relationship, and accountable to the realities they live every day.

What’s shifting isn’t just method; it’s underlying structure. For too long, we’ve operated as if economic life could be dis-embedded from social life, as if care could be professionalized, and as if generosity could be abstracted into systems of grant cycles and KPIs. The reformers don’t grasp what’s been lost because they still believe the system can be improved. But what so many are grasping for is re-embeddedness: a return to contact, to mutuality, to reciprocity that’s rooted in place.

The rebuilders won’t gather around whiteboards. They’ll gather around grief, around shared childcare, around whatever’s left when the budget disappears and the headlines move on. They won’t be interested in branding a new future. They’ll be busy salvaging what still works and stubbornly rebuilding what might.

This won’t be a movement you can fund from a distance. It won’t be legible to dashboards or pitch decks. But it’ll show up in the refusal to let go, in the courage to begin again. The next civic life won’t be scaled. It’ll be stitched thread by thread, place by place, person by person. And, if we want to be part of it, we’ll have to stop managing from above and start showing up from below.

Jason Lewis

, Founder, Responsive Fundraising