The Social Origins of the Intersectional Menace

In youthful intersectionalist militancy, the aging vanguard has seen the continuation of its own lost revolution.

EDITORS NOTE: Today we are proud to feature an excerpted chapter—with minor edits for online reading—from Jack Ross’s book The Strange Death of American Exceptionalism. 

Jack and I first met at an event for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, the anti-identity politics non-profit I helped launch and spent years working at. Jack is an editor at Sublation Media, a proudly socialist and anti-capitalist outlet, and I am an anarcho-capitalist right-libertarian. On paper we might appear to be opposites, yet we’ve bonded over our shared understanding of the danger of identity politics (or what Jack calls “Intersectionalism”) as well as our mutual frustration with the establishment leading both the Left and Right sides of American politics.

Jack’s deep understanding of intellectual history is unparalleled in its rigor and depth, and this coalesces in his book into the most thorough and insightful account of how America arrived at its current political moment that I’ve yet read. The exc…