Hissy Fits

Last week I wrote about Ryan Grim's Intercept article which described the toxic atmosphere that prevails at so many progressive workplaces.

More recently Josh Barro focused specifically on the Washington Post where the atmosphere apparently has reporters at each other's throats.

Barro begins his piece with a discussion of the problem in general:

You may have noticed a bizarre trend at organizations whose staffs are full of younger liberals: Internal disputes aren’t kept internal anymore but are aired in public, on social media or in the press, with rampantly insubordinate staff attacking their colleagues or decrying managerial decisions in full public view — and those actions apparently tolerated from the top.

In the most extreme cases, you get meltdowns like the one at the Dianne Morales campaign for mayor of New York, where staff went on strike to demand, among other things, that the campaign divert part of its budget away from campaigning into “community grocery giveaways.”

But it’s especially a problem in the media, where so many employees have large social media followings they can use to put their employers on blast — and where those employers have (unwisely) cultivated a freewheeling social media culture where it’s common for reporters to comment on all sorts of matters unrelated to their coverage.

Barro then follows with a blow-by-blow description of the infighting at the Post which sounds like nothing so much as a bunch of middle school mean girls throwing tantrums because they don't get their way. You'll have to read the details at the link.

Meanwhile he closes with this interesting remark:

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.

Fixing this sort of culture isn’t just necessary for making these organizations less miserable places; it’s necessary for building an effective political movement. That’s why, if you’re a liberal, you should care about toxic, anarchic work cultures, even if you don’t personally work at an organization with one.

Perhaps conservatives are on average more mature, better adjusted and less self-absorbed, I don't know, but NRO's Jim Geraghty weighs in with this observation:

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.

It makes one wonder how "collectivist" these people are, how much they actually care about the masses, when their behavior suggests that what they really think is that everything is "all about me."