I have spent decades inside the machinery of social action movements. I have convened rival cancer organizations under a single coalition, mobilized over a thousand corporations to withdraw from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine (earning a #6 ranking on Vladimir Putin’s “Enemies of the Russian Federation” list), and activated hundreds of top business leaders to address urgent governance reforms after the scandals of 2001.
In such causes and others, I watched the risk of the same pathology unfold: a critical cause, staffed by genuinely dedicated people and organizations, slowly strangled by the proliferation of groups claiming to serve it. The weeds did not kill the garden. The flowers did.
The United States alone has roughly 180 overlapping voting rights advocacy groups, 5,000 cancer control organizations, 17,145 civil rights and social justice organizations, roughly 30,000 organizations addressing global hunger, and 33,000 environmental activist organizations.
Last week, I met with a bipartisan coalition of retired Federal judges, who expressed concern about presidential interference in the fast-approaching 2026 midterm elections. Later that day, a major business group asked me which of the myriad pro-democracy groups soliciting their support actually deserve it. The following evening, three legislators complained to me that several of these groups were actively undermining one another.
From 1997 through 2002, I facilitated the National Dialogue on Cancer—later known as C-Change—co-chaired by President George H.W. Bush and Senator Dianne Feinstein. This consortium unified 50 rival cancer-fighting organizations that risked confusing legislators by battling over the primacy of competing priorities: prevention, early detection, environmental causes, equitable treatment access, and basic research.
Profiteers often flood a cause, adopting lookalike titles and chasing the same revenue sources. These opportunists drown out the core mission, creating a cacophony of competing voices that confuses donors, crowd the inboxes of CEOs and members of Congress with colliding petitions, and paralyzes meaningful action by draining critical funding and attention away from the truly effective groups. Instead of having a thousand flowers bloom, a thousand weeds end up strangling them.
Mission hijacking in the nonprofit space
In our own preliminary count, we identified at least 387 organizations operating at the national level, with more than 1,200 additional groups operating at the state level. Some coalitions have become massive bureaucratic behemoths, with certain coalitions claiming over 700 member groups. At least a 100 of these organizations contain the same three words—Democracy, Vote, or Justice—in their titles. And over half of all these groups are less than a decade old.
But the recent surge of new groups has confused CEOs, donors, and other key constituencies by pursuing often wildly divergent messages and contradictory agendas, inadvertently establishing circular firing squads, undermining unity, and siphoning resources from credible expert voices. With over half of all these groups newly established, it is not hard to understand why their key constituencies feel overwhelmed and confused.
They cannot help but ask: Where is everyone else? Where are the clergy who once locked arms and marched for progress? Where are the trade union leaders, the professional associations, the employee advocacy groups, the campus voices, the pension funds, and the institutional investors, the true owners of these CEOs’ companies who control 80% of public equity?
The primary question is whether this crowded field of new entrants is actually accomplishing anything, or whether its members are simply tripping over one another with deleterious impact. The answer, for too many of them, is the latter. The imperative is clear: these groups must join forces and operate in concert rather than at cross purposes. A movement that cannot discipline itself cannot expect to discipline those it seeks to hold accountable.
A disciplined path
Paid state directors of these groups and their staff teams are often deployed by Americans for Prosperity, which centrally produces radio and television advertisements, sponsors bus tours, convenes rallies, launches public forums, and blasts mass mailers alongside legislative outreach.
This dynamic is particularly dangerous when the stakes are as high as they are today. The threat to upcoming midterm elections is genuine and not invented. Nor is it paranoia. Voting rights advocates from California to Ohio and Georgia to Alabama are under assault, as absentee ballots are threatened to be refused by the US Post Office and paper documentation such as passports and birth certificates are being used to screen out eligible voters.
The Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) complained about the excessive caution of the NAACP, while Lyndon LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees waged war on virtually every other activist group in sight, reserving its most vicious attacks, delivered with vitriol and violence, for the fellow travelers on the new left.
Self-aggrandizing proliferation among advocates does not always translate into fortification of the intended cause. While proliferation at a hyper-local level ought to be celebrated—driven as it is by community-rooted campaigns—repetition and redundancy at the national level can produce inadvertently damaging results.
The remedy is neither silence nor surrender, but strategic discipline. What is needed now is a deliberate consolidation of overlapping groups into effective coalitions, accompanied by rigorous tracking of donors and their commitments. As the Japanese poet Ryūnosuke Satoro once advised: “Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.”
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