A conversation with Williams College’s Darel E. Paul (Part 1 of 2)

Editorial note: this essay originally appeared at The Giving Review.

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As the Willmott Family Third Century Professor of Political Science at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., Darel E. Paul‘s academic research generally focuses on elite ideologies in Western countries and their manifestation in public policies. Paul has authored three books, and he writes popular commentary and analysis, including regularly for Compact and First Things, among other outlets.

Two incisive Compact pieces of Paul’s in particular have caught our Giving Review eye. Earlier this month, in “The End of ‘Minnesota Nice,’” he writes that the massive welfare-fraud scandal engulfing the state “highlights the central role that private nonprofits play in delivering public goods and services in America. The inability of the state government to prevent the fraud highlights the power that the NGO sector exercises in the contemporary Democratic Party.” The scandal “was made possible by a system of interlocking government agencies and non-governmental organizations sometimes dubbed the ‘NGO-industrial complex.’”

And in 2024, in “Why NGOs Run Your World,” Paul writes, “In today’s liberal societies, the dividing line between government and nongovernment is a thin one.” He notes that “[n]onprofits are legally required to act in a nonpartisan manner. But the relationship between the state and NGOs is inherently political” and that “[i]n the United States, the Democratic Party has found voter education, registration, and mobilization nonprofits particularly useful.

“Right-wing parties are well aware of the significant contributions NGOs make in carrying out left-wing policies. They seem to have little ability in either stopping them or in fostering their own NGOs, however,” according to Paul in the piece, and “[t]he professional class is peculiarly suited to the nonprofit sector, because it is unusually dependent on nonmarket and state-mandated market forms of revenue.”

Paul was, well, nice enough to join me for a recorded conversation last week. The less than 13-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. During the first part, we talk about the role of nonprofits in the Minnesota scandal, in the Democratic Party, and in other states and Washington, D.C.

“[N]onprofits play the central role in the fraud scandal” in Minnesota, Paul tells me. There are “NGOs all across Minnesota that have been involved in this,” he continues, citing details about what’s happened there.

But I think there’s something that goes a little bit beyond that, and I think that is the political status of NGOs or nonprofits—I consider those to be equivalent. NGOs tend to be on the left of the political spectrum. The Democratic Party is well-integrated with NGOs. Some people, even in the Democratic Party, are worried about the role that NGOs play and how powerful they are. So I think when Republicans and people on the right think about the problems of this fraud scandal, they don’t just see it as a one-off and unfortunate set of incidents, but they see it as reflective of the power of NGOs in the Democratic Party and over progressive states ….

Paul says that “since the Democratic Party and NGOs and the state are all so intertwined, I think that’s where a lot of the political valence of NGOs comes from.” Nonprofits “do a lot more work of the state, of the government, in left-leaning states than in right-leaning ones.” He says his “sense is that in D.C., the nonprofits have a lot bigger policy influence, whereas in the states, I think they are instruments of state policy. They’re instruments of the delivery of goods and services that the state wants to deliver.”

In D.C., “I think when it comes to policymaking rather than just kind of the delivery of policies that already exist, NGOs are amazingly powerful.” Either way, he notes, “I think overall, the sector definitely leans to the left.”

In the conversation’s second part, Paul discusses the professional class in the nonprofit sector and what the right should consider doing in response to its activities and their effects.