By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, June
21, 2022
I know this is going to shock you, but it
turns out that young, woke progressives are exceptionally hard to work with,
and they see each other as hard to work with — in fact, they find each other
almost as insufferable and infuriating as we find them. Earlier this
month, the Intercept revealed what many of us have long
suspected, that having a staff full of outspoken
young, woke progressives is making progressive organizations nearly impossible
to manage:
That the
[Guttmacher Institute] has spent the course of the Biden administration
paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned
Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health
organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between
competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along
staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space
across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The
Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the
Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise
Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating
turmoil in the past couple years.
In fact,
it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been
in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon
Society. . . .
Sometime
in the summer, the forward momentum stalled, and many of the progressive gains
lapsed or were reversed. Instead of fueling a groundswell of public support to
reinvigorate the party’s ambitious agenda, most of the foundation-backed
organizations that make up the backbone of the party’s ideological
infrastructure were still spending their time locked in virtual retreats, Slack
wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy,
race, gender, and power.
“So much
energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal bullsh** that it’s
had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver,” said one organization
leader who departed his position. “It’s been huge, particularly over the last
year and a half or so, the ability for groups to focus on their mission,
whether it’s reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change.”
The story is full of spectacular quotes,
but perhaps none better than these:
Executive
directors across the space said they too have tried to organize their hiring
process to filter out the most disruptive potential staff. “I’m now at a point
where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, ‘How likely is this
person to blow up my organization from the inside?’” said one, echoing a
refrain heard repeatedly during interviews for this story. . . .
Another
leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. “I’m
not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing
ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better
right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing
culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic
advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these
organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,” said
another longtime organization head. “Progressive leaders cannot do anything but
fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the
external battles in play. . . . Everyone is scared, and fear creates the
inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular
agenda.”
How spectacularly disruptive and
grievance-obsessed are progressive activists? So bad that even Bernie
Sanders told his presidential campaign to stop hiring them, because
they created more problems than they solved!
I’ll pause for a moment, so you can wipe
away the tears of laughter.
The Intercept article
made only a passing reference to the extraordinarily nasty and public tumult at
the Washington Post that swirled around Dave Weigel and
Felicia Sonmez, and didn’t mention the perpetual drama surrounding Taylor
Lorenz, last seen
lecturing Matt Yglesias about
the alleged horror of joking about his own case of Covid-19. But both cases
seem like good examples of the same phenomenon: employees who put their
never-ending personal grievances and branding ahead of the organization’s
mission, and who are incapable of resolving disputes quickly and quietly behind
closed doors.
My home has one teenager and one
near-teenager, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what kinds of lessons are
important to instill in young people as they approach their first experiences
in the workplace.
It’s a free country; believe whatever you
want to believe. But for heaven’s sake, don’t be the kind of person who
obsesses over anything that could remotely be interpreted as a slight, a
microaggression, a lack of respect, or a violation of some unspoken code. You
go to work to do a job (and try to do it well), collect a paycheck, and get
experience that with luck will lead you to the next job that you like even
better. If you get along with your bosses and co-workers, that’s gravy. But
your boss is not your parent. Don’t be someone who turns every interpersonal
dispute into a grand crusade, someone who can’t let anything go. (I know, I
know, I have my own battles
with “Irish Alzheimer’s,” where you forget everything except a grudge.)
You don’t want to be the kind of person
who is always dwelling on some sort of problem with a co-worker or boss.
Seeking out reasons to be upset and angry makes you a miserable person, and
that often makes everyone else around you miserable as well! How you feel about
the state of your life, your workplace, your community, your state, your
country, and the world will be largely determined by what you look for and
choose to focus on. As a wise warrior once said, “your focus determines your
reality.” (Okay, that was Qui Gon Jinn in Star Wars: The Phantom
Menace, and he was killed shortly after he said it, but that doesn’t
mean he was wrong.)
One of the hard but important truths in
life is that very few people care that much about your feelings. Oh, there’s a
low, decent-society baseline of care — everyone hopes you’re feeling well, not
battling depression, etc. But in the end, your mental health is your
responsibility, not other people’s. There’s a limit to how much others are
willing to bend over backward so that you feel happier. Your mission is to
figure out how to thrive in a world full of people who will not be what you
want them to be. You can’t control what other people do; you can only control
how you react to them.
In Josh Barro’s terrific “your workplace
is not Fleetwood Mac” essay, he observed:
I would
finally note one thing: Organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have
various problems, but they don’t have this one. And this phenomenon extends
well outside the media, to liberal-staffed nonprofit and political
organizations, where leaders are terrified of their employees’ potential
outbursts and are therefore letting them run roughshod over strategic goals —
and especially over prudent decision-making that might help win elections but
do not meet every checkbox of the left-wing keyboard warriors who could cause
so much trouble inside and outside the organization.
Lord knows, conservative organizations,
including the one I work for, have their own share of quirky personalities and
internal disagreements, often passionate ones. But if, as it seems, organizations
primarily staffed by conservatives have employees that are generally better
team players, we have a fascinating inversion of the expected dynamic. In a
workplace full of folks who classify themselves as rugged individualists, those
folks are in fact willing to put aside their personal desires and feelings from
9 to 5 or so, for the sake of participating in a smoothly running, effective
organization. Meanwhile, the workplace full of self-professed collectivists,
who believe the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, is
increasingly debilitated by runaway narcissism, petty infighting, and
self-absorbed grievance-mongering.
Finally, on that last term, I am reminded
of an observation about the psychological state of mass shooters by Willard Gaylin, a preeminent
psychology professor, which I wrote about a few years ago.
Gaylin discusses the dangers of “grievance collecting” in his book Hatred: The
Psychological Descent into Violence:
Grievance
collecting is a step on the journey to a full-blown paranoid psychosis. A
grievance collector will move from the passive assumption of deprivation and
low expectancy common to most paranoid personalities to a more aggressive mode.
He will not endure passively his deprived state; he will occupy himself with
accumulating evidence of his misfortunes and locating the sources. Grievance
collectors are distrustful and provocative, convinced that they are always
taken advantage of and given less than their fair share. . . .
Underlying
this philosophy is an undeviating comparative and competitive view of life.
Everything is part of a zero-sum game. Deprivation can be felt in another
person’s abundance of good fortune.
As I wrote at the time, “At the heart of
the grievance collector’s worldview is that he is not responsible for the
condition of his life; a vast conspiracy of malevolent individuals and forces
is entirely at fault. There is always someone else to blame. . . .”
This isn’t to say that every whiny,
self-absorbed, irresponsible employee will turn into a mass shooter. But there
are healthy ways of dealing with life’s challenges, and unhealthy ones — and
these progressive organizations appear to be filled to the brim with toxic
personalities.
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