The Brave New World at Work: From the MeToo Movement to Donald Trump, Political Litmus Tests Transform the Workplace

Abstract

Tactics of mobbing have a long history in both politics and the workplace, and the intersection of the two is nothing new. What is new is how swift, brutal, and public the shaming and shunning of coworkers and colleagues has become in recent years as social media transforms a difference in views into cause for social eradication. With the rise of authoritarian and exclusionary sentiments expressed by Donald Trump on the right, and ideological purity tests that drift into the realm of the goofy on the left, success in the workplace increasingly demands allegiance to a tribalism that will ultimately turn the workplace into a zone of silent surveillance controlled not by one's employer, but one's peers.