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Tribalism – an Existential Threat to our Republic

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According to a recent report in the WSJ, Google has employee groups for just about every conceivable cause. A few examples:

  • Activists at Google – That’s easy. Anti-Trump.
  • Militia at Google – A group pushing for the ability to carry guns in the office.
  • Conservatives at Google –Google discriminates against right-leaning job candidates is it’s claim.
  • Sex Positive at Google –Wants explicit content to stay on Google Drive file-sharing software.

Google has cultivated a college atmosphere in the workplace, “in the sense that its workplace has fractured into competing identity groups,” writes John Davidson in The Federalist. “When everything becomes political, everyone becomes tribal.”

The article opens with an incident that took place in January, when Ingrid Newkirk, the co-founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, was slated to give a presentation at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters as part of the “Talks at Google” series.

The subject of her talk, which was organized by the “Googlers for Animals” employee group, was how animals can be subject to discrimination and bias just like people are. But another employee group, the “Black Googler Network,” understandably found the premise of the talk offensive and protested it. The talk was canceled at the last minute, as Newkirk was waiting in a parking lot outside Google.

Welcome to Google today – a microcosm of 2018 America.

Like nearly every facet of American life these days, Google’s workplace has become politicized, which means the company must now constantly adjudicate every offense that arises from an ever-growing roll call of the aggrieved.

It’s easy for conservatives—or really, anyone who hasn’t gone all-in for identity politics—to laugh at this stuff. But what it portends for the country at large is deeply troubling. Even the conservative Google groups clamoring about bias are part of a larger dynamic. A completely politicized workplace turns the office into a political scrum, just as a completely politicized culture turns civil society into a bunch of warring tribes.

Mr. Davidson makes the case that political tribalism and populism, on both the left and right, aren’t just annoying or disagreeable trends in American life. “They are an existential threat to our republic, and if we don’t figure out a way to reverse course, we’re going to turn the country into a massive, fractious, ungovernable Google office.”

Read more here.

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Debbie Young

Debbie, editor-in-chief of Richardcyoung.com, has been associate editor of Dick Young’s investment strategy reports for over three decades. When not in Key West, Debbie spends her free time researching and writing in and about Paris and Burgundy, France, cooking on her AGA Cooker, driving her Porsche Boxter S through Vermont and Maine, and practicing yoga.