Autophagy in Woke/CRT/Social Justice organizations - when ideological incoherence leads to enterprise self-destruction

I don't think this is true, but would like it to be so.  From Elephant in the Zoom by Ryan Grim.  The subheading is Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History.

I don't dispute the events being reported such as:

Behind Boonstra’s and the staff’s responses to the killing was a fundamentally different understanding of the moment. For Boonstra and others of her generation, the focus should have been on the work of the nonprofit: What could Guttmacher, with an annual budget of nearly $30 million, do now to make the world a better place? For her staff, that question had to be answered at home first: What could they do to make Guttmacher a better place? Too often, they believed, managers exploited the moral commitment staff felt toward their mission, allowing workplace abuses to go unchecked.

The belief was widespread. In the eyes of group leaders dealing with similar moments, staff were ignoring the mission and focusing only on themselves, using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice. Often, as was the case at Guttmacher, they played into the very dynamics they were fighting against, directing their complaints at leaders of color. Guttmacher was run at the time, and still is today, by an Afro Latina woman, Dr. Herminia Palacio. “The most zealous ones at my organization when it comes to race are white,” said one Black executive director at a different organization, asking for anonymity so as not to provoke a response from that staff.

I am concerned that progressive advocacy groups have not been brought to a standstill.  Their obliteration is a goal profoundly to be wished for in order to improve the nation's and people's futures.  Grim does provide some evidence that there might be some systemic reverses.

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.

Grim does make a reasonable case that the internal dissent within advocacy groups did help forestall even worse outcomes than those already inflicted on the nation by the Administration.

For progressive movement organizations, 2021 promised to be the year they turned power into policy, with a Democratic trifecta and the Biden administration broadcasting a bold vision of “transformational change.” Out of the gate, Democrats pushed ahead with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, funding everything from expanded health care to a new monthly child tax credit. Republican efforts to slow-walk the process with disingenuous counteroffers were simply dismissed.

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 an interesting passage for its disconnects with everyone else's realities.

“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.

The employer-employee social contract was largely shattered in the 1980s.  No jobs for life, defined contributions not defined benefits, contingent employment, etc.  All became standard more than thirty years ago.  

NGOs and Advocacy groups certainly existed back then but not as many and not as large.  Did all those workplace changes pass them by?  Did they not notice because their employee base was ideologically motivated and not commercially motivate?  

Ideologues may be less patient about inequities in the workplace but that must have more to do with the employees themselves than with workplace changes because those changes in the workplace occurred so long ago.

It is hard not to feel like much of the progressive left is made up of people with material mental health issues.  

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.”

It has also been hard not to feel that Trump's election has always been a catalyst for a sharp negative turn in these mental health issues.  Not the policies he pursued, but the mere fact that he won against expectations.  An obsession which continues to this day, long past any point of relevance.  

Sooner or later, each interview for this story landed on the election of Trump in 2016 as a catalyst. Whatever internal tension had been pulling at the seams of organizations in the years prior, Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike. The institutional progressive world based in Washington, D.C., reacted slowly, shell-shocked and unsure of its place, but people outside those institutions raced ahead of them. A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist. Spontaneous women’s marches were called in scores of cities, drawing as many as 5 million people, a shocking display of force. (Their collapse in a heap of identitarian recriminations is its own parable for this moment.)

I have seen the phenomenon below sotto voce in private sector companies.  It is the first time I have seen the sentiment expressed in the context of the non-profit sector.  

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.)

Heh.  The next is a classic restatement of Robert Conquests Third Law.

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

From Grim:

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.”

Well, good.  There is nothing about Bernie Sanders which I would have thought ever sounded like a line-manager in a for-profit organization.  But apparently I would have been wrong.

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.

Grim has another insight:

The reliance of so many organizations on foundation funding rather than member donations is central to the upheavals the groups have seen in recent years, one group leader said, because the groups aren’t accountable to the public for failing to accomplish anything, as long as the foundation flows continue. “Unlike labor unions, church groups, membership organizations, or even business lobbies, large foundations and grant-funded nonprofits aren’t accountable to the people whose interests they claim to represent and have no concrete incentive to win elections or secure policy gains,” they said. “The fundamental disconnect of organizations to the communities they purport to serve has led to endless ‘strategic refreshes’ and ‘organizational resets’ that have even further disconnected movements from the actual goals.”

The whole long piece is a fascinating read by a sympathetic reporter.

One organization is glaring by its omission.  The Southern Poverty Law Center is a half billion dollar organization, internally corrupted by power and financial shenanigans for the past couple of decades leading to a staff insurrection in the past four years.  Would have been interesting for Grim to have included them and it is provocative to see their omission.

If you are not of the Woke, Social Justice, Postmodernist or Critical Race Theory crowd, this piece is like being at a zoo.  

Normal people think Organization => Mission => Strategies => Actions => Execution => Outcomes and then you start all over again depending on whether the outcomes served the mission.  

I often mention that the Woke/SJ/CRT/PM movement is ideologically incoherent and you can see it in this piece.  Young people join the organization.  They are likely poorly managed by inexpert leaders.  But, crucially, those young people are more concerned in their own well-being than the actual mission of the organization.

I am familiar with the type of issues Grim is highlighting.  A close friend worked for a time with a Washington, D.C. based literacy organization whose mission was to get more books into the lives of the children in marginalized populations.  They were led by a grasping, attention-seeking white woman with all the right Democratic party connections.  The ranks of the organization were jerked around on a whim with no clear career paths or measures of success.  

They had dozens of programs with major corporations who could display their logo and gain social brownie points.  But actually getting books into the hands of poor kids nationwide?  Not so good.  They functioned OK in big cities.  They had ready channels to dump books into schools or homes which looked fine as long as you didn't pay attention to whether the books were actually read.

My friend was tasked with vitalizing their southern distribution and in particular the rural poor.  He developed all sorts of relationships and channels that would allow books to flow in a targeted fashion and in a way that you could be confident that they would both be read and might make a general improvement in literacy.

And as one should expect in a southern rural poor black environment, several of these channels involved church or church-affiliated organizations.  It was all going well till the Non-profit CEO paid attention and recoiled in horror that her secular liberal pathologically altruistic organization was working with socially conservative black churches.  

She would rather the kids go without books than be tarnished by such affiliations.

She was ideologically incoherent.  That the staff are incoherent in these enterprises is no surprise when their leadership are incoherent as well.

I would wish that Grim were correct and that all such socially progressive organizations with big budgets were about to implode.  But that didn't happen with SPLC and likely won't happen to enough of the others.  

Grim is right, they are suffering through hard times for self-inflicted reasons (they are badly managed organizations with badly selected personnel).  They will suffer further as the political winds turn against them.  They will suffer still further as the cultural winds also turn against them.  And the cultural winds will turn against them because incoherence leads to bad outcomes and no one likes bad outcomes.

But many will linger on the vine for a long time, continuing to spread their toxicity.  As long as there are rich benefactors who like having their name associated with a nominally "good" cause and as long as the government (federal and local) is willing to fund such organizations, their demise will be delayed.