Don’t whine about federal budget cuts, lefties — put your money where your mouths are

Before politics overwhelmed the word, the primary meaning of “liberal” was “generous.” 

President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress have given political liberals a chance to take that meaning back — by opening their wallets to show just how much they value NPR, PBS and other programs defunded by the GOP.

There’s no shortage of funds on the left. 

Laurene Powell Jobs, the mega-rich backer of The Atlantic, has a net worth estimated at above $11 billion a year ago and believed to be even higher today.

George Soros, at 94, has a fortune in the vicinity of $7 billion, with billions more in his Open Society Foundation.

Bill Gates has about $115 billion, his ex-wife Melinda around $30 billion.

Any one of these left-leaning billionaires could single-handedly make up the $535 million that NPR, PBS and local stations were getting annually from taxpayers before Congress zeroed out the subsidies.

If half a billion a year is too much for one zillionaire, a half-dozen of them — or more — could share the burden without feeling a pinch.

But are wealthy liberals willing to put their money where their mouths are?

Citing Michal Heiplik, president of the public-media analytics organization Contributor Development Partnership, The New York Times reports PBS and NPR have reaped a windfall from small-dollar donors in recent months, with 120,000 new supporters stepping up to give some $20 million.

Overall, donations are running $70 million above last year. 

And what works for PBS and NPR will work for humanitarian programs formerly funded as part of USAID as well, though the cuts to be made up there are bigger: Congress has eliminated about $8 billion in funding for USAID and other foreign-aid efforts, according to the Cato Institute.

That’s a lot of money — but not a dime of it has disappeared.

After all, where does government get its money in the first place?

Washington could only give to foreign aid or nonprofit broadcasting what it took — or borrowed — from the American people in the first place.

When government doesn’t spend money, society doesn’t lose any of its resources: They just stay with the taxpayers, and the middlemen in government don’t get their cut.

That, for liberals, is a big part of the problem.

The Democratic Party depends on shunting everyone’s tax (or debt) dollars into the hands of bureaucrats, one of the party’s most loyal constituencies.

It’s not just NPR and PBS that have been publicly financed — it’s also liberalism as a movement.

Bureaucrats in government, in government-supported nonprofits and other less-than-fully-private parts of the “private sector” may work for organizations that are officially nonpartisan, but their campaign-giving heavily favors Democrats.

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Their employers may be nonpartisan in theory, but the employees have a strong partisan tilt, and personnel is policy: Any organization is only a collection of people.

USAID and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were both born in the Kennedy-Johnson years, at mid-century liberalism’s zenith.

Liberalism had been dominant for so long — starting with the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration — that liberal intellectuals and policymakers came to think of themselves as more than just one side of American politics.

They claimed to speak for everyone, as if a single party could define what it meant to be nonpartisan.

But even then, the conservative movement was taking off while the Democrats were being dragged to the left by young radicals who wanted “acid, amnesty and abortion.”

The agencies and programs the Republican Congress has defunded were never as neutral as they claimed to be.

And as liberals, under the influence of the left, adopted a more adversarial attitude toward America’s past and present, it only became more obvious that the agencies and public-private partnerships they ran represented only one side of any argument.

But this doesn’t mean liberals can’t continue to fund everything they funded before.

Now they just have to do it with their own money.

Some centrist liberals rightly see that as an opportunity, not an imposition: 

When I told a friend at a government-supported think tank I was sorry for the professional upheaval he was going though, he noted that his institution had in fact been coasting by ever since the end of the Cold War.

He said it needed a renewed sense of mission, and having to raise private funds would give it the impetus it had been lacking for decades.

Republicans aren’t worried NPR or PBS will move further left if they court progressive billionaires, considering what little presence conservatives had on those networks already.

But if they’re smart, the broadcasters will see the loss of government funding as a spur to court a wider spectrum of support — and to put to the test what it means to be nonpartisan.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.