Democratic elites are clueless, part infinity; Left-wing workplaces are toxic and dysfunctional. Here's how to fix it
The New York Times had an article last week mostly about Democratic elites (donors, elected officials, activists, union leaders, party officials) feeling uneasy about Biden running again in 2024. Some of the concerns had to do with his age, which is legitimate. Everything else was either unfounded or irrelevant. The problems Biden is facing would be the same for any Democrat running in 2024. Democrats are the party in the White House and when you are the party in the White House you own everything. It does not matter whether it is your fault.
Although the article is about some people’s thoughts on whether Biden should run again, it gives a good window into how politically clueless many Democratic elites are. When asked who should run if Biden does not, the names mentioned were all candidates who ran unsuccessfully in 2020. There are Democratic elites who actually want to see Elizabeth Warren or Beto O’Rourke run again. That anyone would think that is a good idea is a massive indictment of their political acumen. Both are posterchildren for how not to run a campaign. The idea that Bernie Sanders would run again, at 83, is so laughable that anyone who believes that needs to be institutionalized.
The most immediate problem Democrats have is inflation and particularly food and gas prices, but the more chronic problem they have is so many of their elites are completely disconnected from everyone else. The latter is problematic not in and of itself, but because candidates cater to that crowd and organizations wind up becoming a part of it and forget about the people they are trying to help while elevating bad and unpopular ideas. As an example of that, here is the AFL-CIO advocating for cancelling student debt. This is from an organization that is supposed to be representing workers, a vast majority of whom probably did not go to college. How is cancelling student debt relevant to them? The answer is it is not, but it is something their DC staffers care about and, like so many other left-leaning groups, they are allowing their staffers to dictate their agenda. The result has been a toxic workplace and paralysis, which has kept many of those groups from doing anything productive.
If Biden is unpopular in 2024, he will struggle. If he remains unpopular and does not run, whoever does run in his place will be saddled with his unpopularity. If there were problems unique to Biden, having him not run again would be reasonable, but that is not the case. I am concerned about his age, but only because I just do not like the idea of having so many geriatrics in charge. No disrespect to elders, but they are way overrepresented in DC. The top three Democrats in the House are over 80. Biden will be 82 in 2024. Mitch McConnell is 80. I do not favor term limits, but I do favor age limits. Nobody older than 80 should be running for any office and nobody older than 70 should be running for president.
That said, Biden should run in 2024 absent health issues. If he does not run, it is not apparent who would be the nominee and I am not going to waste any time speculating on that. What I will say is Kamala Harris will not be given a glide path to the nomination. I wish it was otherwise, but she really does not seem up to the task. She is a career prosecutor and could easily emphasize that, which would come in handy for distancing herself from the activist left. She could also occasionally speak out against the lunacy in her hometown. For whatever reason, she is not interested in doing that and has opted to cater to the activist left or stay silent, just like she did in her atrocious 2020 campaign.
One big worry I have is if there is a wide-open field, it would give the left another bite at the apple. Many Democratic candidates, especially those with presidential ambitions, have still not grasped that their own voters are not leftists. They still do not understand that those who are the most vocal are not the most representative. Their own voters keep telling them that, but they keep ignoring them. We are seeing that right now with Democratic elected officials demanding that Biden cancel student debt, never mind the fact that it is very regressive and irrelevant to most everyone.
Even if a left-wing candidate did not win the primary, I worry that whoever did would damage themselves by trying to cater to that crowd. That happened to many candidates in 2020. Democratic voters sent clear signals about what they wanted and did not want, but candidates today are still not listening. Democrats were lucky that Biden largely defied the left in the primary, but may be out of luck in 2024 if every candidate kowtows to them. I worry that if Biden is seen as a failure, the left will say that it vindicates them and Democrats will move even further leftward and sabotage themselves.
Maybe that just has to happen to get rid of the virus, but I hope not. It has been a while since Democrats saw real defeat nationally. The last time that happened was 2000-2004. Democrats then were seen as out of touch on many issues and disconnected from regular people. They moderated some and recruited good candidates to run for Congress in 2006 and, with the help of Bush’s unpopularity, came roaring back into power. They repeated that again in 2008. But that was a while ago and most Democrats today, even those very much of age at the time, do not remember it. Even though they lost in 2016, Democrats still won the popular vote so that gave them some excuse to dismiss it as a fluke or something less than a defeat.
If Democrats do lose the White House in 2024, they will have to go through the same pains again that they went through nearly 20 years ago. It may take a while for them to shape up, but they will. Losing is the best teacher of them all. Left-wing activists do not care about winning right now, but if Democrats lose the White House, especially twice in a row as they did in 2000-2004, they will change their tune or find themselves sidelined. Democrats changed their tune after 2004 and Republicans did the same after 2012, just not in the way the party establishment envisioned.
A serious problem with left-wing workplaces
The issue of left-wing organizations becoming toxic workplaces is, unfortunately, not uncommon. Even at places that are not explicitly left-wing, when left-wingers, especially young, college educated city-dwellers are in charge wind up going down that same path. It is apparently considered acceptable in such circles to air issues with coworkers or management publicly on social media.
One recent example is an embarrassing episode at The Washington Post (The Post). While not an explicitly left-wing group, most of the people who work there, especially on the opinion side and non-reporting side, are left-wingers. It is going to sound too stupid to be true, but I promise this episode really happened. It all started when one reporter tweeted a joke that was genuinely sexist and insensitive and made some of his coworkers mad. He deleted it and apologized, but was still suspended. That should have been the end of it, but it was just the beginning.
Another reporter at The Post, rather than discussing her problems with the reporter himself or superiors, decided to go public about it and posted literally hundreds of tweets discussing the matter. This was done over the course of several days. When a colleague of hers called her out for her behavior, she declared war on him. She began attacking him on Twitter and demanded management punish him. All this over one stupid tweet.
After several days, she was fired. She had been told by management to stop attacking her colleagues and did so anyway. Management cited her refusal to follow their rules as the reason for her termination. It is good that she was fired and embarrassing that it took so long and became public. There is a line after all. She has said she will sue The Post and has sued them in the past so the saga may not be over. But at least she will not be working there anymore and hopefully that sends a message to everyone else there that they need to grow up and deal with their problems like adults. The Post is a newspaper, not a day care center. Their job is to report the news, not to make the news. Anyone who does not get that should not be employed there or at any reputable news organization.
The fired reporter is obviously a bad actor, but weak management is the real villain. Far too often, management in such organizations allows the staff to dictate things and run the show. I suspect, though it is just a guess, that a reason for that is management tends to be made of older people, many of whom are not used to social media. When confronted with younger people who only know life with social media and are used to posting their every thought, they do not know what to do. The same is possibly true on college campuses where administrators are not used to being attacked by social media mobs or by students who have never encountered anything less than perfect and they are paralyzed. I can understand the shock, but it is no excuse.
Management is supposed to be in charge. Staffers are labor. They have important jobs, but they do not run the show. No organization that is remotely functional operates differently. In no organization with any reputation is it okay to trash management or coworkers on social media.
My hope is that this is just a fad that will go away with time because it is not tenable for any organization to be run like that. The reporter at The Post being fired is a good first step as is the recent move by Netflix to tell its employees that if they do not like a project they are assigned to (most certainly in reference to Dave Chappelle) they can work somewhere else. The message should be sent loud and clear to staffers at every kind of organization that they are not in charge and if they are not happy there they can go somewhere else. It is not okay to take grievances public and while everyone should be treated with respect and dignity, there are limits to how much accommodation will be given. There are also standards of behavior that everyone should have to adhere to and cannot be violated no matter how aggrieved someone feels.
Left-wing organizations really need to take that to heart. Many of them fight for good and important causes. Right now, they are being hindered by internal fights over things having nothing to do with their mission. Every such organization should make it clear to their staff that the organization is dedicated to fighting for certain causes and that is their priority. The staff are valued, but the organization is not a support group for them. If some of what the organization does is uncomfortable for them, they do not have to work there. Working there is a privilege, not a right.
To use a concrete example, the ACLU, an organization I once liked and admired, has decided they will no longer defend hate speech. They have long since abandoned any pretense of being a civil liberties organization and their young, woke staff is almost certainly the biggest reason behind that. The ACLU, when they cared about civil liberties, defended many awful people, most notably in Skokie, Illinois in 1977. Defending the rights of Nazis is not for the faint of heart, but someone had to do it and I am glad it was them. It made many people uncomfortable and cost them support, but that is part of what defending civil liberties entails. There is no chance in hell the ACLU would do that today. If anything, they would work to suppress it.
The ACLU today has allowed wokeness to take over and is effectively being run by its young, left-wing staffers. Management is either in sync with them or, at best, too feckless to push back. They have prioritized the feelings of their staff over their mission. Many of the ACLU’s former leaders and supporters who actually care about civil liberties are very unhappy about where things have gone. The ACLU has now decided, since Charlottesville in 2017, that they will not defend speech that upsets “marginalized groups,” which is the antithesis of what they did in Skokie. Some ACLU staffers have tweeted vicious things about other people, including elected officials, or have expressed views that are plainly hostile towards civil liberties. Within the organization, there is a fear among those who still care about civil liberties about saying anything of the sort because they worry about retaliation from woke colleagues.
It would be nice if management there would remember why the ACLU was created in the first place. Defending civil liberties means defending civil liberties for all and that includes free speech, regardless of content. That also includes defending the rights of those who are the lowest forms of life. Nazis are the worst of the worst, but they still have rights. Someone has to stand up for that. For the staffers who do not wish to do that, they can work somewhere else. Fighting for civil liberties inevitably means fighting for the rights of bad people. Nobody is required to do that. Those who go into the business of defending civil liberties should know what they are getting into.
That same blueprint should be used by every organization, but especially left-wing ones where toxic workplaces seem to be the norm. Causes such as abortion rights, free speech, civil rights and the like are important and deserve to have champions. The left-wing advocacy world is neglecting that right now. That needs to stop. Organizations exist to further the causes they were created to fight for. They are not group therapy sessions and are not safe spaces for young woke warriors.
It is important for organizations to make sure their staff are happy and morale is high. But if the mission of an organization conflicts with the feelings of their staff, the former should take precedence 100% of the time. If that causes a mass exodus of staffers, so be it. I have no doubt there are others out there who are mature and care about the missions those groups are fighting for who would happily take their place.
It would also be nice for all of those organizations to get off Twitter. That platform has likely done more to elevate wokeness and has contributed to toxic workplaces more than anything else. No left-wing advocacy organization should allow its management or staff to use it. If those groups are going to have any social media accounts, they should only allow one person to post things and to make sure they only post the most bland, predictable stuff. An organization’s social media account should never make the news.
Newspapers should not allow employees, unless they are opinion writers, to be on it either. In the case of reporters, there is no benefit to it and potentially large costs, such as when reporters tweet about things that are irrelevant to their job or clearly opinionated. As an example of the harm tweeting can cause, a year ago, the lead health care reporter, not an opinion writer, for The New York Times tweeted that the lab leak theory of the pandemic’s origin is racist. That is clearly an opinion, not a fact, and gives credence to critics of The New York Times that it is left-wing propaganda. The tweet was quickly deleted, but the damage was done. I like The New York Times very much and greatly admire the work they produce every day. All that is undermined when one of their reporters spouts off like that.
Despite their recent drama, I like The Post, too, and am a reader of theirs. A vast majority of their reporters, like those at The New York Times, do their jobs, produce good work and do not make a scene. The few who do get all the attention and give everyone there a bad name. That should not be tolerated and keeping reporters off Twitter and all social media for that matter is one way to rein in that behavior.
On a final note, if anyone reading this cares about civil liberties and is looking for a group to give money to, check out the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They have been around for 20 years, but have focused on college campuses. Now, they are broadening their mission to include civil liberties in other settings. They have been consistent in defending civil liberties on college campuses and are now going to do what the ACLU used to. They are a good group and I hope they succeed. Anyone working at the ACLU who still cares about civil liberties should inquire about working there. Civil liberties are 100% worth fighting for and since the ACLU no longer does it, I am glad the FIRE is.