Oh No! Woke Culture Is Making It Hard for Progressive Political Organizations to Function Properly and Undermine American Civilization!

Side-related, from Twitchy:

Ryan Grim -- the hackiest Democrat gray drone alive, routinely mocked by, for example, Jimmy Dore for being nothing but a badly-toupeed (allegedly) paid water-carrier for the corporate wing of the Democrat Party -- is forced to write an article gently -- so gently -- telling his fellow progressive lunatics that they have to stop blowing up the progressive movement if the Democrat Party is going to succeed in its mission of destroying America.

In multiple sections of this article, somehow "Fox News" and "right-wing trolls" are presented as The Real Problem. I suppose the coward Grim has to do that in order to keep his lunatic audience invested in the article.

Here are some good parts. It begins by talking about the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, and how, after the George Floyd "murder" (as Grim insists on repeatedly calling it) a campaign by woke activists inside of it began making a series of woke demands of the abortion group, including that it "do something tangible for Black employees in other divisions."

That the 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, as Politico reported in August 2021:

Following a botched diversity meeting, a highly critical employee survey and the resignations of two top diversity and inclusion officials, the 600,000-member National Audubon Society is confronting allegations that it maintains a culture of retaliation, fear and antagonism toward women and people of color, according to interviews with 13 current and former staff members.

Twitter, as the saying goes, may not be real life, but in a world of remote work, Slack very much is. And Twitter, Slack, Zoom, and the office space, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former executive directors of advocacy organizations, are now mixing in a way that is no longer able to be ignored by a progressive movement that wants organizations to be able to function. The executive directors largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.

"To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years," one concluded. "This is so big. And it's like abuse in the family -- it's the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And you have to be super sensitive about who the messengers are."

Meaning, you can't have white guys like Ryan Grim talking about this.

I'd prefer if it were someone else myself.

Again returning to the idea that the "murder of George Floyd" was a huge opportunity for grifting and propaganda for the left:

...

And then, 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 bullshit 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."

This is, of course, a caricature of the left: that socialists and communists spend more time in meetings and fighting with each other than changing the world. But in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential election, and then Joe Biden's, it has become nearly all-consuming for some organizations, spreading beyond subcultures of the left and into major liberal institutions. "My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops," the former executive director said. He added that the same portion of his deputies' time was similarly spent on internal reckonings.

"Most people thought that their worst critics were their competitors, and they're finding out that their worst critics are on their own payroll," said Loretta Ross, an author and activist who has been prominent in the movement for decades, having founded the reproductive justice collective SisterSong.

<"We're dealing with a workforce that's becoming younger, more female, more people of color, more politically woke -- I hate to use that term in a way it shouldn't be used -- and less loyal in the traditional way to a job, because the whole economic rationale for keeping a job or having a job has changed." That lack of loyalty is not the fault of employees, Ross said, but was foisted on them by a precarious economy that broke the professional-social contract. That has left workers with less patience for inequities in the workplace.

Or maybe leftwing workers just have less patience for actually working.

...

The silence stems partly, one senior leader in an organization said, from a fear of feeding right-wing trolls who are working to undermine the left. Adopting their language and framing feels like surrendering to malign forces, but ignoring it has only allowed the issues to fester. "The right has labeled it 'cancel culture' or 'callout culture,'" he said, "so when we talk about our own movement, it's hard because we're using the frame of the right. It's very hard because there's all these associations and analysis that we disagree with, when we're using their frame. So it's like, 'How do we talk about it?'"

For years, recruiting young people into the movement felt like a win-win, he said: new energy for the movement and the chance to give a person a lease on a newly liberated life, dedicated to the pursuit of justice. But that's no longer the case. "I got to a point like three years ago where I had a crisis of faith, like, I don't even know, most of these spaces on the left are just not -- they're not healthy. Like all these people are just not -- they're not doing well," he said. "The dynamic, the toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it -- callout culture, cancel culture, whatever -- is creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one's able to talk about it, no one's able to say how bad it is."

This is a good quote:

The environment has pushed expectations far beyond what workplaces previously offered to employees. "A lot of staff that work for me, they expect the organization to be all the things: a movement, OK, get out the vote, OK, healing, OK, take care of you when you're sick, OK. It's all the things," said one executive director. "Can you get your love and healing at home, please? But I can't say that, they would crucify me."

That's... exactly what progressives demand of the government, for the government to care for them as if it were their parents. Why should they not also demand that of the agitprop organizations attempting to turn the government into Mommy and Daddy, too?

...

Things get very ugly, she noted, and the overlapping crises of Trump, Covid, and looming climate collapse have produced extreme anxiety. Under siege, many leaders cling more tightly to their hold on power, she said, "taking shelter in professional nonprofit spaces because they think clinging to a sinking ship and hanging on as long and strongly as possible is the best bet they can make for their own personal survival."

Sounds like NeverTrump.

Meanwhile: Activist organizations have a new rule.

Never hire activists.

...

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. (One executive director noted that their group's high-profile association with a figure considered in social justice spaces to be problematic had gone from a burden to a boon, as the man now serves as an accidental screen, filtering out activists who'd be most likely to focus their energy on internal fights rather than the organization's mission.)

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."

During the 2020 presidential campaign, as entry-level staffers for Sanders repeatedly agitated over internal dynamics, despite having already formed a staff union, the senator issued a directive to his campaign leadership: "Stop hiring activists." Instead, Sanders implored, according to multiple campaign sources, the campaign should focus on bringing on people interested first and foremost in doing the job they're hired to do.

And of course no one can fire the incompetently woke without being accused of being racist. Including black managers:

Being Black has by no means shielded executive directors or their deputies from charges of facilitating white supremacy culture. "It's hard to have a conversation about performance," said the manager. "I'm as woke as they come, but they'll say, 'He's Black, but he's anti-Black because he fired these Black people.'"

This is key: The incompetent start these furors in order to create a climate of chaos because companies do not prioritize competency during periods of chaos. They prioritize survival.

The incompetent have figured out that if they keep the companies they work at in a constant state of turmoil, the companies can never get around to evaluating their employees' performance and firing the poor performers:

...

Inner turmoil can often begin, the managers said, with performance-based disputes that spiral into moral questions. "I also see a pattern of ... people who are not competent in their orgs getting ahead of the game by declaring that others have engaged in some kind of -ism, thereby triggering a process that protects them in that job while there's an investigation or turmoil over it," the foundation official added. Such disputes then trigger broader cultural conversations, with battle lines being drawn on each side.

posted by Ace at 05:11 PM

| Access Comments