It seems high profile leftist groups are running out of other people’s money. A story published today by HuffPost says Justice Democrats, the group which helped elect the Squad, just laid off about half its staff.

From 2018 to 2020, the activist left experienced something of an electoral renaissance. It started, of course, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then an obscure primary challenger, ousted Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House Democratic Caucus…

Just over six years since its founding, however, Justice Democrats’ opposition is more organized while its mission is more muddled and its coffers depleted. Faced with a shortage of funds, the group laid off nine of its 20 staff members in mid-July, a move that took many prominent progressives by surprise…

“We have huge champions like Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, who are able to be successful political fundraisers,” the second aide said. “But movement-wise, we’re not in a great place right now.”

HuffPost reports there is disagreement on the left about what led to this failure. Is it a general downturn in support for leftist groups among small dollar donors or had the big money donors turned against Justice Democrats because they were primarying Democratic incumbents? Put another way, is this a temporary bump in the road or is the left in general in decline.

In support of the idea that this downturn is not limited to Justice Democrats, the article cites other recent layoff announcements, like this one from May:

Union officials representing Planned Parenthood employees say they have been told to expect layoffs affecting 10 to 20% of the national workforce, or at least 80 people.

In a joint statement from unions representing employees in New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., union officials expressed dismay at the news, saying that Planned Parenthood leaders are “pushing out some of our movement’s brightest minds. This comes at a time where reproductive freedom is in jeopardy and when our members are struggling under difficult economic conditions.”

And that followed this announcement in April:

The Sierra Club on Friday announced an organizational overhaul that will include layoffs as well as new hires as the group aims to cut costs and expand its efforts in red states.

The environmental group’s board voted Thursday night to approve a 2023 budget that “will require creating new positions, eliminating some old positions, and re-imagining other positions,” the organization’s Deputy Executive Director Ana Yáñez Correa told staff in an internal email Friday.

“Without these changes, our budget would have ballooned to a deficit as high as $40 million,” Correa said.

The Sunrise Movement also announced layoffs last year:

Since February, we’ve been undertaking a process to reduce our staff size from ~100 to ~65 by 2023. This entire process has been undertaken in consultation and collaboration with the Sunrise Staff Union (CWA). In March, 29 Sunrise Staff members opted to take “Buy-Outs” (i.e. voluntary layoffs) and currently, we are in a process of making decisions about additional staff layoffs to ensure that we are spending sustainably and have people to fill roles in our new staff structure.

There’s definitely a trend. Getting back to Justice Democrats, one argument for its decline is that big money donors have abandoned them, essentially because they are too far left for Democratic billionaires.

…progressive insiders maintain that wealthy donors are often inherently less radical due to their material interests and social worlds. They might also be less willing to embrace third-rail issues like U.S.-Israel policy, where the gap between the Democratic establishment and the grassroots left is generally widest.

“It’s much harder to question American empire than it is to question American inequality,” the second progressive House aide said.

The alternative theory is that groups like Justice Democrats have been abandoned by the big money donors because they don’t really accomplish much of anything. That’s a view shared by group co-founder Cenk Uygur.

Uygur blamed Justice Democrats for failing to foster a cohesive group of lawmakers capable of holding up high-priority bills, such as the American Rescue Plan Act, in order to extract progressive policy concessions from Biden and other Democratic leaders. If the organization with which he was previously affiliated had created a truly independent left-wing bloc in Congress, Uygur argued, there would be no shortage of grassroots generosity for the organization.

“Them having financial trouble is not the problem,” Uygur said. “It is a consequence of the core problem: Since you didn’t fight for anything, there’s no hope.”

A related criticism is that even the Squad doesn’t seem quite as eager to inhabit the fringe of leftist politics as they once did. As Freddie deBoer put it recently, AOC almost seems like a regular Democrat now. She just endorsed Joe Biden for reelection which can’t possibly be what she really wants. Clearly she’s learning to pick her battles.

Finally, I can’t help but wonder if this decline isn’t somehow connected to the internal fighting at many of these same groups which Ryan Grim reported on last year. In fact, the groups experiencing layoffs lately are some of the same ones Grim wrote were having woke eruptions last year:

That the [Guttmacher] 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.

This is just my speculation but maybe word has gotten around to donors large and small that these groups are barely able to function anymore and that’s why money isn’t rolling in anymore. Who wants to fund the left’s internal civil war over wokeness?

If there’s any connection it puts the left in a difficult situation because it suggests that getting these groups funded won’t necessarily get them working again. It’s treating the symptoms not the cause. On the other hand, actually getting them back to work might mean setting aside some of the focus on identity politics that has dominate the left for the past 8-9 years. I guess we’ll see if that’s still possible.