Internal tensions have plagued the pro-abortion Guttmacher institute, Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, Netflix, the Washington Post, New York Times and many other organizations which have seen "wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years."
Grim describes them as having been embroiled 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."
In fact, he claims, "it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult."
Here are some excerpts from his essay that'll help readers get an appreciation for the problem he discusses:
The executive directors [of several organizations] largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.Grim cites one explanation for this dysfunction:
“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.”
“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.”
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.”
A looming sense of powerlessness on the left nudged the focus away from structural or wide-reaching change, which felt out of reach, and replaced it with an internal target that was more achievable. “Maybe I can’t end racism by myself, but I can get my manager fired, or I can get so and so removed, or I can hold somebody accountable,” one former executive director said.When employees trash their employers it evidently makes them feel empowered. This must be especially appealing to people who yearn for power and have so little.
“People found power where they could, and often that’s where you work, sometimes where you live, or where you study, but someplace close to home.”
Too much hype about what was possible electorally also played a role, said another leader. “Unrealistic expectations about what could be achieved through the electoral and legislative process has led us to give up on persuasion and believe convenient myths that we can change everything by ‘mobilizing’ a mythological ‘base,’” he said.The process of seeking to destroy one's ideological siblings is not new, apparently:
“This has led to navel-gazing and constant rehashing of internal culture debates, because the progressive movement is no longer convinced it can have an impact on the external world.”
The 1970s were a brutal period in activist spaces, documented most famously in a 1976 Ms. Magazine article and a subsequent book by feminist Jo Freeman, both called “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood.” “What is ‘trashing,’” she asks, “this colloquial term that expresses so much, yet explains so little?”I'll close with this passage:
It is not disagreement; it is not conflict; it is not opposition. These are perfectly ordinary phenomena which, when engaged in mutually, honestly, and not excessively, are necessary to keep an organism or organization healthy and active.
Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination which amounts to psychological rape. It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all.
But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy.
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.There's much more in Grim's column. Grim himself is a man of the left and is presumably not happy with the dirty laundry that he's reporting on.
(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.)
Conservatives, on the other hand, will doubtless feel a certain schadenfreude at the collapse of organizations whose mission and whose wokeness are both inimical, often, to the best long-term interests of the country.