I worked at a company that had to institute a similar policy for more or less this reason: The people pushing certain political agendas wanted to force everyone else to pick a side on certain political issues.

When the conversations get to a point where even opting out is perceived as the "wrong answer", things get ugly.

Even on the same side, there's quite a few shouting matches that quickly spirals out when idealists "call out" pragmatists who compromise on a few things.

Not sure how appropriate it would be from a US context, but say Bernie-bros and Clinton / Biden supporters.

That's the biggest thing imo. Twitter is filled right now with this idea that it was probably an ultra conservative person ruffling people's feather and they were tired of the arguments between transphobic and lgbtq people or something.

I don't work at Basecamp, but I find that unlikely: they'd likely have fired the transphobic person (or at least I hope they would have). They didn't say they wouldn't do politics, just that they didn't want politics discussed over company infrastructure.

But even if the room was all on the same side of the political pendulum, things still get pretty ugly.

Basecamp's post specifically called this out as a problem.

Then I think their problem is not “politics” but being unable to deal with individual employees who are being unreasonable and uncivil.

That's easy to say until you see how it actually happens. Basecamp would likely still be in the news, just instead of being about banning politics talks, it would be because they're somehow preventing their employees from supporting some cause or another.

This move is generating even more unrest and publicity for them

Oh for sure. Writing the blog post (at all) and putting that policy in without discussing it within the company was a REAAAAAAALLY bad/tone deaf move. When they announced it originally I assumed it had been implemented for weeks and they had the expected all hands meeting internally and concerns/edge cases worked out.

They clearly didn't. Saying that was dumb would be the understatement of the week.

It would have been instantly leaked by employees, might as well get ahead of things.

It would have, but after the employees had time to raise their concerns internally. Instead many of them felt kind of betrayed, as they learnt the new policy at the same time the rest of us did. Not really cool.

+1 exactly what I was wondering. And if it is, what’s stopping a company from defining the culture as, “It’s ok if you want to talk about this at work, and it’s also ok if you don’t want to.”

Then the activists will say that the company is problematic because they know about the discussion and don't take a stance on the issue.

Because the people who don't want to will then have to eat lunch alone at their desk talking to no one. They're a tiny company.

But yes, there were likely other solutions to try before this one, including but not limited to: not blogging about whatever solution they picked.