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 excerpt below stands alone, but if you find Jack’s analysis as fascinating as I do, I highly encourage you to grab a copy of his book.

– Joseph (Jake) Klein

Among the occasions of deepest alarm for the future of American liberalism as the past decade progressed was the “Women’s March” on January 21, 2017 to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump. It was one of the largest rallies ever in the nation’s capital, with the media amplifying the notion that the organizers and speakers represented half the nation and all right-thinking people. 

The only note of concern in mainstream coverage was when the aging popstar Madonna, in a speech laden with obscenities, spoke of dynamiting the White House. Some controversy surrounded one organizer, Muslim activist Linda Sarsour, a dour enforcer of politically correct pieties about Islam who revealed in an interview that she began wearing a hijab “so I wouldn’t be just another white girl.” But the greatest and least noted outrage was the prominence among the speakers of Angela Davis, an unrepentant former leading personality of the American Communist Party who had frequently been an honored visiting propaganda object in the Eastern Bloc. Those promoting the delusion that “white nationalists” had just come to power had no qualms at all about honoring an actual totalitarian. 

Two weeks before the march, the New York Times reported that many local organizers had grown alienated to the point of withdrawing. In an immediate response to the Times and at the march itself, the unbowed Women’s March leadership wore their insistence on ideological enforcement as a badge of honor. (They also rudely excluded at least one anti-abortion women’s group that wanted to participate). Their demand for conformity was distilled in the stern upbraid of one young black organizer: “You should be reading our books and understanding the roots of racism and white supremacy. Listening to our speeches. You should be drowning yourselves in our poetry.” In the words of the Times, “This brand of feminism – frequently referred to as ‘intersectionality’ – asks white women to acknowledge that they have had it easier. It speaks candidly about the history of racism, even within the feminist movement itself.”

The Women’s March soon took its place on the long list of massive post-Vietnam Washington demonstrations consigned to the memory hole, from Louis Farrakhan’s “Million Man March” in 1995 to the labor movement’s “Solidarity Day” rally against the Reagan agenda in 1981. And of course, it goes without saying that the vast majority of protesters at the Women’s March were no more doctrinaire intersectionalists than most of the hundreds of thousands who attended antiwar rallies against Vietnam and Iraq were committed followers of the Socialist Workers and Workers World parties respectively. Nevertheless, the wide association of the tone and substance of the Women’s March leadership with the mainstream of the Democratic Party was an ominous development that went to the heart of the deformation of the blue tribe value system.

The word “intersectionality” was coined in a 1989 law review article by Kimberle Crenshaw arguing for the creation of a separate category in anti-discrimination law for black women by virtue of being both black and female – that is, at the “intersection” of the two existing categories. Within the last decade, it has become associated with a comprehensive, systematic, and dogmatic school of thought that surely merits a proper name such as intersectionalism. Numerous other labels have emerged as the phenomenon spread further into the mainstream. Some, ranging from “left-modernism” to “postmodern neo-Marxism,” rely on premises as dubious as their jargon is clunky, but more common are varying derivatives of either “social justice” or simply “woke” – the ideology’s analogous religious status to being “saved.” 

The writer Wesley Yang has come to simply call it “the successor ideology” – the successor to Enlightenment liberalism in Western civilization – in large part out of deference to its remaining contradictions and uncertainties. Yet the remarkable uniformity in both the theory and practice of this successor ideology, since it attained broad national visibility in the middle of the last decade, has been far more striking than the ways it continues to evolve. Thus we can confidently stick to the term “intersectionalism”: if nothing else, the consistent core of the successor ideology is the doctrine of intersectionality, proclaiming a system of unity of all struggles against oppression in contemporary society – of women, racial minorities, sexual minorities, and the disabled.

The hierarchy of victim status and therefore of privilege within this system is more or less consistently fixed: female over male, darkest to lightest in complexion, the broad and vague category “queer” over “heteronormative,” and transgendered over “cisgendered” – the latter two to the point that even ordinary gay and lesbian identity has come to be looked down on. Hence, intersectionalist proclamations often include an obligatory evocation of their especial significance for “trans women of color” or “black trans lives,” going so far as to widely promote a demonstrably false historical narrative of the 1969 Stonewall Riots to serve this veneration.

There is a definite cosmology of sin and repentance – to be made “woke” is an extremely limited salvation in that upon sufficient indoctrination into awareness of one’s “privilege,” the highest attainable state is of an honorable yet servile “ally” in the struggle against oppression of those further up the hierarchy. The works by which the new faith is proved usually take the form of various “workshops” or “task forces” in which one is indoctrinated in the ways and means to “check their privilege,” and participation in performative mass confrontations with said privilege – that is, what of late is most commonly meant by “protesting.”  

As a practical matter, the doctrine of intersectionality serves not only to deny and delegitimize any complicating sociological factors in the unity of the oppressed, such as why the non-white working class might be less than enthusiastic about giving pride of place to the causes of gay and transgender rights. But it further serves to deny and delegitimize the inevitable conflicting values of all societies, such as, to take a leading example from the American Creed, between freedom and equality. Yet there is no lofty aim or ideal in whose service the doctrine is ever invoked, such as a Christian or socialist conviction in the brotherhood (and yes, sisterhood) of all humanity – intersectionality is only a dogmatic end unto itself.

Alarmed observers of intersectionalist rituals, whether of the mass action variety or in more intimate bureaucratic settings, have typically compared them to the “struggle sessions” and fanatical mass demonstrations of the devastating Cultural Revolution in 1960s China. Yet there is also a very distinct Puritan inheritance in this latest eruption of the missionary impulse of the blue tribe’s distant ancestors. Comparing his theory of creedal passion to comparable phenomena in other civilizations, Samuel Huntington draws an arresting parallel:

The purpose of the Cultural Revolution was not to replace existing authority but to purify it, and the ideology of the revolution hence may have more in common with restoration or revitalization movements than with rebellion. . . . “Protestant fundamentalism,” here used to describe a phenomenon in the Chinese tradition, could not be a more apt phrase for American creedal passion periods. During the Cultural Revolution, too, the effort was made to move forward in practice by turning backward in theory, to cleanse existing practice and rectify evils by a reassertion of “traditional” (that is, Maoist or revolutionary) values.

Over the last decade, the intersectionalist paradigm and its illiberal rituals would conquer the dying institutions most emblematic of the religious and cultural roots of American civilization: mainline Protestant churches and seminaries and liberal arts colleges. Even before beginning its march on the American establishment, this alone gave the rise of intersectionalism singular importance to the demise of American exceptionalism. 

Intersectionalism has widely been viewed as the return of “political correctness” or “PC,” meaning the first wave of illiberal identity discourse mostly limited to the college and university setting in the 1980s before peaking early in the 1990s. It has further been associated with the “postmodernist” and “deconstructionist” schools of academic philosophy associated with Michel Foucault. But while some of Foucault’s concepts and vocabulary linger on in intersectionalism, his body of work is too subversive by nature for any dogma. The origin is also frequently identified more accurately with Herbert Marcuse, the German Communist exile whose 1960s critique of liberalism in the doctrine of “repressive tolerance” was highly influential with the late New Left. The unfortunate label “cultural Marxism” was originally a specific allusion to Marcuse, but most of his earlier collaborators in the so-called “Frankfurt School,” such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, were appalled by Marcuse and the New Left and vigorously defended liberalism and the Western inheritance as foundational to Marxism. 

The least appreciated aspect of the genealogy of intersectionalism is the origin of the anti-racist struggle session industry serving campus, corporate, and religious settings. Though most commonly associated with the author Robin DiAngelo, the phenomenon was spawned by the therapy cult of Harvey Jackins, a longtime Communist Party member who in the 1950s simultaneously dabbled in the beginnings of the Church of Scientology. The corporate “anti-racism” racket of Jackins’ disciples took off with phenomenal early success sometime around 2000, noted with alarm at the time by none other than Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, daughter of Christopher Lasch. It was largely through this channel that the intersectionalist paradigm quickly devoured the Protestant mainline, through the void left after the Bush-era antiwar movement passed the scene, with its fellow travelers no less spared – as early as 2006, they were able to advance through the churches to capture the National Association of Independent Schools. Even liberal Judaism very largely fell into its thrall, while historically Quaker colleges such as Swarthmore and Oberlin had been in the “politically correct” vanguard for decades.

The roots of intersectionalism can most distinctly be found in the internal dynamics of the two movements that ultimately merged to form it. Those two movements were, in fact, respectively responding to the exhaustion of the two most active schools of academic radicalism from the late 1970s through the 1980s. What we might call “first wave political correctness” was for the most part narrowly feminist, though welcoming the adoption of its concepts and tactics by racial minorities and the gay rights movement. The leading ideologue was Catherine MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor who gained national notoriety for her radical feminist case against the First Amendment. Her arguments emphasizing speech as violence remain the template for intersectionalist hostility to free speech and liberalism; they shaped the “ACT-UP” movement that left such a stamp on the founding ideologists of critical race theory. 

MacKinnon’s reputation imploded in 1992 after a feminist filmmaker hosted an exhibition on sex workers on the Ann Arbot campus, to promote the world’s oldest profession as a form of female empowerment. This was anathema to MacKinnon and the radical wing of “second wave feminism,” quite consistent with the Yankee piety of the 19^th century “first wave” typified by the temperance movement – indeed, also responding violently to transgenderism and its claim to feminist solidarity. MacKinnon failed in her legal action to block the exhibitor, employing her crackpot theories against the First Amendment. So began the transformation of official feminism to hold diametrically opposite views on sex work and gender identity, a change that would develop into a true religious inquisition; acclaimed “gender theorist” Judith Butler eventually ascended to the throne from which the heresiarch Catherine MacKinnon ignominiously fell. MacKinnon spawned the first of the two intellectual movements that merged to become intersectionalism; the second being David Roediger’s “whiteness studies.” 

The background to Roediger’s invention of “whiteness” was disenchantment following the academic left’s infatuation with the 1930s Popular Front. The exhaustion of that school of thought closely tracked the fading away of political possibility from the rise of Reagan to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Theodore Draper, the dean of historians of the American Communist Party, wrote an exhaustive dismantling of this academic movement for the New York Review of Books in 1985. To read it is to be struck by the rote self-repetition of these erstwhile scholars; their central rallying cry was that whatever the party’s relationship to the Soviet Union, it was still unquestionably “an authentic expression of American radicalism.” Exactly what that even meant is hazy at best, but it revealed a core motivation of these former New Leftists. Traumatized by the backlash to 1960s radicalism, they sincerely wanted to atone for burning the flag and spitting on returning veterans – in short, however deeply misguided in the historical object of their desire, they wanted to bring back a patriotic left.   

Roediger led the way in leaving all that behind. Yet the spread of “whiteness studies” like a cancer across the humanities owes a major debt to the methods pioneered by the “new labor history.” Draper captured it well in his essay:

“Social history” is in; “political” and “institutional” history is out. The best thing that the new historians can think of saying about themselves is that they are “social historians”; the worst thing they can say about others is that they are political or institutional historians. The cult of social history is not limited to these new historians, but it has rarely been practiced so crudely and made to serve such tendentious political purposes. . . . Social history is not at issue; it has established itself as one of the major fields of the historical discipline. It is a protean form, not easily pressed into a single formula. Much depends on where, when, and why. What makes the new historians’ exploitation of it reprehensible is that they seek to use it as a weapon against other types of history . . . . They have such a marked “party line” – of the partyless – that they are far from being independent in their research; the same themes in almost the same words appear again and again in their work; they cite one another in the same kinds of footnotes. Their “line” is distinguished by a certain bravado . . . . At times they exhibit an extraordinary combination of arrogance and ignorance.

In his concluding thesis statement on his subjects, Draper hit on what would become a core attribute of intersectionalism: “They have invented a radicalism of nostalgia. . . . No one has to do anything about this radicalism except to teach it to others.” To put it another way, the object was not political change but to spread and bear witness to the faith. If the doctrinal content of intersectionalism came mainly from first wave PC, the cult of social history bequeathed the essential outline of a performative religious movement, though it would be a generation before the new faith emerged from the cloister of classroom and seminar. The outspoken black scholar John McWhorter gives the most elucidating analysis of what the nation first saw on the eve of the rise of Donald Trump, and then in full insurrectionary force across America less than five years later, a movement at once absurd and menacing taking hold of the leaders of tomorrow:

The term “crazy” fails us here. It refers to behavior that contrasts to a norm, whereas sadly this form of protest has become a norm itself in progressive circles of the college town orbit. Clinical insanity is not subject to faddism and copycatting. Equally off-target is the “snowflake” catcall, implying that these protesters just think they’re extra-special and must have things exactly their way. We are dealing with nothing plausibly classifiable as whining. The gloweringly indignant sarcasm, the screaming and profanity, the physical threats – people hurled an unearthed stop sign complete with its concrete base at a car – this is not pouting; it is fury and menace. The only way this thuggery in the name of enlightenment does make logical sense is if we realize that these people are protesting in quotation marks. The chasing people off of campuses, seemingly so unreasoning, is a physical enactment of the mental process of disagreement, manifesting itself physically as ejection. The assertion that controversial ideas must not even be given an airing performs the sentiment that an idea is noxious . . . . We must see these protesters not as seeking a safe space, but “seeking a safe space,” warning us not of fascists but of “fascists,” “fostering oppression” and threatening “impending resegregation.” Oddly, the kayfabe concept in professional wrestling is the appropriate analogy, a tacit contract under which fans pretend something staged is real. In wrestling the payoff is entertainment; with the new protest movement the payoff is that we all demonstrate our heightened political awareness – our faith, as it were. These episodes are religious services of a sort, which is part of why they now occur so regularly. I do not mean to imply something so simplistic as that these protesters are willfully faking. They are sincere, within their bounds. But the bounds are important – the religious comparison is useful in that the religious person seals off a certain region of their reasoning from the ABCs of pure logic, for what they perceive as a higher purpose. However, we must understand that the protesters are proceeding from just such a cordoned-off area of consciousness, in order to comprehend their refusal to heed calls to observe Enlightenment-style convictions regarding the nature of discussion and the complexities of society.

This manner of “protesting” first began to make its impact felt almost exactly at the broader turning point that began our long cultural nightmare – the year 2013, the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term. But the phenomenon truly gained national attention in what remains the most emblematic episode, at Yale in November 2015. 

The triggering circumstances would have been beyond belief only months before. The Yale administration issued a memo to the student body advising them on what Halloween costumes they should avoid for fear of offending other students. Erica Christakis, a dean in the school of education and residential advisor, sent an email to her students at large questioning the memo, mildly suggesting that this was not the business of the administration and wondering when in life one can be transgressive if not in their college years on Halloween. The response was the gathering of an enraged mob of students demanding her public apology and resignation. Her husband and colleague, Nicholas Christakis, foolishly spent several hours attempting to reason with the mob, only to be greeted with torrential verbal abuse accompanied by repeated rounds of the mob snapping its fingers in unison. The most revealing moment was when the mob’s main interlocutor shrieked, “This is not an intellectual space!!!” Within two weeks, Nicholas Christakis apologized to the mob for having “failed them.” Both husband and wife left Yale at the end of the academic year, and in 2017, two leading organizers of the mob received special citations at their commencement for improving race relations on campus. 

What made this Yale mob a quintessential intersectionalist mass action is the specific deadly sin of intersectionalism at the center of the episode: cultural appropriation. This is the proposition that possessors of “white privilege” should not be permitted to partake of any food, dress, make-up, music and dance, or other practices of any non-white culture. Further, they especially must never portray even vaguely non-white persons or settings through any artistic medium whatsoever, be it stage, screen, written word, or visual arts; this principle also forbidding any “heteronormative” person to portray a “queer” or transgendered person, nor even an able-bodied person to portray a disabled person. It is important to note that the administration email that set the Yale events in motion did not refer narrowly to such things as the blackface minstrelsy of a far gone time and place, something that was belied by the mob itself. The most widely circulated broadside against “appropriative” Halloween costumes did not read “my race is not a costume,” it specifically read “my culture is not a costume.”

All culture is to one degree or another “appropriated” – the exchange of goods, ideas, and art forms is the very essence of civilization and of the dialogue of civilizations. Obviously it is true that in much of human history this exchange has not occurred on equal terms, indeed, often through imperial conquest and plunder. But it offends both common sense and the most basic humanist values not only to suggest, but demand through militant political agitation, that the world is better off without the endless produce and progress from many centuries of cultural exchange and appropriation. Once can hardly improve on the indictment given by the novelist Lionel Shriver at an Australian literary festival in the fall of 2016. She wore a sombrero throughout her speech, prefacing it with a story of college students prosecuted by their student government for a Mexican-themed fraternity party:

The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats. In the latest ethos, which has spun well beyond college campuses in short order, any tradition, any experience, any costume, any way of doing and saying things, that is associated with a minority or disadvantaged group is ring-fenced; look-but-don’t-touch. Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability – are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other people’s attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft. . . . However are we fiction writers to seek “permission” to use a character from another race or culture, or to employ the vernacular of a group to which we don’t belong? Do we set up a stand on the corner and approach passers-by with a clipboard, to grant limited rights to employ an Indonesian character in Chapter 12, the way political volunteers get a candidate on the ballot?

Not so long ago, Shriver’s speech would have been widely celebrated as a fine statement of the importance of freedom for the writer and artist, rather than fiercely controversial.

Within days of the events at Yale, kindred mob actions erupted at campuses as disparate as Claremont McKenna and the University of Missouri. The exhaustive demands of all these demonstrations were uniform and entirely consistent with lesser-known incidents of the prior two years: a) massive funding and staffing increases to the diversity bureaucracy and aligned cultural studies departments, or to create entirely new departments where necessary, and b) requiring course credits in the relevant departments and indoctrination by the diversity bureaucracy as conditions of enrollment and graduation. More recently, emboldened by the events of 2020, a new set of equally uniform manifestos went so far as to demand veto power over the rudiments of academic freedom, hiring, and tenure.

Facing the budget ax in the higher education austerity that followed the 2008 financial crisis, and again more recently with the future of the university system itself thrown into question by the coronavirus pandemic, the threatened intersectionalist ideological complex has been on the offensive, effectively demanding its elevation to the role in the university system that historically belonged to the clergy. Like the initial emergence of the Puritans within the Church of England, the successor ideology came from below, but it came with a vengeance. 

For a holiday like Halloween to be the cause of so notable an eruption was another telltale sign of the phenomenon’s deep Puritan roots; only a generation ago such sanctimony over celebrating Halloween would have been instantly associated with the Christian right. Indeed this genealogy is powerfully confirmed by where intersectionalism has and has not taken root beyond the United States. In Canada, Great Britain, and Australia, it has if anything reached greater extremes, and may also have a modest following throughout Scandinavia. Yet in the historically Catholic nations of Western Europe, even where the Church has fallen into deep disfavor and, for example, where gay marriage has swiftly advanced most often by referendum vote, the dogmas and behaviors associated with intersectionalism have been rare.

It was long commonplace for both mainstream progressives and more traditionally left-wing ideologues to dismiss the whole phenomenon as meaningless campus politics and youthful indiscretion, when they did not angrily oppose any suggestion that it bore some responsibility for the rise of Donald Trump. But the rapid and unprecedented mainstreaming of intersectionalist ideology is precisely the point. In his masterwork The Decadent Society, published just weeks before the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, Ross Douthat struck a similar dismissive note, arguing that “it’s been almost forty years since postmodernism was actually radical and new,” of a piece with what he very aptly describes as “the strange experience of political radicalism under decadence. Step inside the matrix of online political debate, and it feels like all of history is coming back. . . . Step outside . . . . all the tonic effects of living in the 1930s, but with a much lower body count.” Yet we have already noted this very quality of intersectionalism, from what Theodore Draper labeled “a radicalism of nostalgia” to the imperative John McWhorter identifies to “pretend something staged is real.”

The rise of intersectionalism was truly a perfect storm. The consolidation of its synthesis atop the pyramid of academic radical vogue – of “whiteness studies” with the radical feminist vanguard – occurred at the precise moment when widespread disappointment in the Obama presidency collided with the arrival of the first generation of political and media elites whose higher education was principally formed by the New Left’s long march through the institutions. This in turn, not unlike the fateful collision of the Protestant Reformation with the invention of the printing press, occurred at the precise moment when Silicon Valley venture capital began to substantially enter the media business, as ever placing its trust in the almighty algorithm. As Wesley Yang summarized the ramifications of a particularly dramatic set of bankruptcies in the spring of 2019:

Every venture capitalist-funded online publication became a woke clickbait mill for a simple reason: the metrics told them this was the best performing type of content. It also doesn’t require investment in reporting or expertise. A 23-year old intern being paid a pittance is the best qualified person to write this type of content, and they don’t have to do any reporting. What is of interest is how what began as a cynical metrics and cost-driven expedient became a set of genuine ideological commitments through an online radicalization process driven by cycles of trolling and performative victimhood. . . . The election of Donald Trump meant the transposition of online drama and beef culture on to the actual world of American politics. To understand these dynamics for what they are and to see serious journalists and presidential contenders in the U.S. Senate enacting them in deadly earnest is extraordinarily macabre and funny at once.

By the time Trump was elected, there was no aspect of intersectionalist doctrine or practice in the college and university setting that was not amplified through highly visible platforms of popular culture. No campus broadside against cultural appropriation, “whiteness,” or such deadly sins as “tone policing,” “man/white/straight-splaining,” or any number of “phobias” did not also appear in leading fashion magazines or the trendiest internet news sites. These channels were also responsible for the deep corruption of the English language. The word “place,” inferring distinctive character and some degree of attachment, if not permanence, was increasingly replaced by “space,” which is arbitrary and temporary, taking on the belligerent suggestion of conquest when attached to an ascriptive identity category such as “white,” “black,” or “queer” – not to mention its most Orwellian and perhaps best known usage, “safe space.” 

In combination with reference to people and individuals as “lives” or “bodies,” this reveals the heart of intersectionalism to be a utopian/dystopian yearning for the abolition of what it is to be human. This is yet another revealing mark of its New England folkway patrimony, as most fully realized in the current transgender movement. When reality TV personality and former Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner appeared post-op as Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair in the summer of 2015, unquestioning veneration was the rule of all right-thinking people at the same moment in time Ta-Nehisi Coates was being celebrated for the release of Between the World and Me. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, the intersectional feminist inquisition on behalf of the movement was asserting itself with sweeping force throughout American law and medicine. 

Yet this cruel war against one of the first scientific facts we learn as children is not as unprecedented in human history as it might seem. Gender difference as a manifestation of the inherent evil of physical existence was a key feature to the Gnostic cults of early Christianity, and very similar ideas reappeared in the 19^th century utopian movements of Greater New England that peaked during the Second Awakening. Most famous were the Shakers, well remembered for requiring celibacy of all adherents, basing this practice on a complex theology of gender derived from the belief that their founder was the female manifestation of Christ and Jesus of Nazareth merely the male manifestation. Jemima Wilkinson, a rival sect leader in the “burned-over district” of western New York, preached that she had died in an accident in her youth and resurrected as “The Public Universal Friend” who was neither male nor female. The Oneida community, the most scandalous sect in its sexual practices, had a highly advanced ritual practice of collectively organized self-criticism anticipating the Cultural Revolution and intersectionalism.

Following the watershed summer of 2015, intersectionalism scaled the summit of popular culture in the following Super Bowl halftime performance by Beyonce, a massive choreographed homage to the Black Panther Party. The controversy this aroused was portrayed in a Saturday Night Live sketch as white-bread suburbanites reacting in the manner of a 1950s horror trailer at the discovery that “Beyonce was black.” The obtuseness was breathtaking – Saturday Night Live, a central institution of American middlebrow taste, was positively giddy that perhaps the biggest popular music star composed and produced such a love letter to a violent nationalist sect responsible for a score of gruesome crimes while professing fealty to Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer in human history.

This, indeed, is the cultural impact of intersectionalism most directly exposing its corrosion of liberal and democratic values – the transformation of American comedy. At root, it is the old story of an outstanding success inspiring a host of dreary imitators, the former in this case being The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In his Bush-era heyday, Jon Stewart inspired the generation of youth sandwiched between first wave PC and high intersectionalism to believe the pen could yet be mightier than the sword against the Iraq War and the whole post-9/11 parade of horrors. He made no secret of his own politics but his foremost target was always the craven media, appearing to be at once the last great standard bearer of postwar Jewish liberalism and postwar Jewish comedy. 

The tone of the show was already changing with the times leading up to his retirement in August 2015. The stable of Daily Show alumni who carried the art form forward such as John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and Trevor Noah completed its transformation into the crass progressive mirror image of the right-wing talk radio kings Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, radicalized ever further by the new generation of staff writers freshly indoctrinated in high intersectionalism at elite campuses. Yet it was not immediately obvious that Stewart’s greatest protégé, Stephen Colbert, unambiguously took the plunge as successor to David Letterman at The Late Show. One always sensed of Colbert’s earlier satirical character that his own raging egomania lurked just beneath the surface, unchained by irresistible roaring applause from the sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome. 

By the time of the pandemic and the winding down of the Trump show, Colbert and many of his rivals had declined into nothing more than risible humorless scolds, with Colbert even relishing to act as a commissar against his own ostensible art form. The entry-level opinion leaders who formed the intersectionalist vanguard of pop culture curation set their sights on a towering pillar of American comedy and art, The Simpsons, through a sanctimonious campaign demanding a “conversation” over “the problem with Apu.” This character at the forefront of mainstreaming the Indian immigrant experience in American culture, a beloved friend and pillar of the community with exceptional depth among the show’s supporting characters, became a hate object to a cohort of intersectionalist-indoctrinated young Indian-Americans seeking cachet in the booming milieu of comedy as banal political preaching. After an episode of The Simpsons acknowledged them with the contempt they deserved, Hank Azaria, the voice actor who portrayed Apu, appeared on Colbert’s show and, prompted by the host, recited a prepared statement full of intersectionalist cant denouncing the episode.

This scene was precisely what the Congress for Cultural Freedom was formed in an earlier generation to oppose and confront – an artist compelled to renounce one of his most beloved creations, a character he had grown with over 30 years, before a censorious ideological inquisitor. There have, of course, been many more such Soviet-style outrages in the culture and entertainment industries since the intersectionalist ascendancy began. The most violent, interestingly, have been in the world of young adult fiction publishing. The Disney streaming service has placed overbearing content warnings on many of their historic animated features, including some from the 1990s. Lin Manuel Miranda would even make a direct and abject apology for his first Broadway hit In the Heights upon the release of its adaptation for the screen. All these episodes have been based on the severe application of the anathema on cultural appropriation, with popular outrage finally becoming visible when that same anathema led to the actual suppression of several works by Dr. Seuss. 

But the case of Apu remains quintessential, with Hank Azaria’s degradation and the announcement in the case of Dr. Seuss notably both occurring on their respective birthdays. At its core, the campaign against Apu was an assault on indeed, in the original Bolshevik sense, a politically incorrect representation of the immigrant experience – the experience of becoming, and aspiring to become, an American, the very idea of which is abhorrent to a deeply indoctrinated elite cohort of second-generation Americans. 

On the eve of the rise of Trump, several comedians collaborated with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to produce a documentary entitled Can We Take a Joke? to sound the alarm against the cultural impact of the mainstreaming of intersectionalism. The contributors to the film spoke frankly about how such sanctimonious attitudes toward comedy and satire were a critical warning sign for the health of democracy and freedom of speech. But like the rest of America, they did not anticipate the rise of Trump, and they were left unprepared and listless as the illiberal reaction Trump provoked turned their art form against their cherished values. 

In the concluding words of the Ken Burns miniseries Prohibition, the great Brooklyn writer Pete Hamill gave a simple and elegant summary of what caused the failure of Prohibition: “It’s one of those things where the average American is saying, ‘Who the hell are you to tell me how to live?!’ If we cease being that country, if we become a country in which we all say, ‘Please tell me how to live!’, we’re doomed.” It is commonly observed that Prohibition marked the only time an amendment to the Constitution was passed to restrict, rather than expand, the political or individual freedom of American citizens. It is no exaggeration that the mainstreaming of intersectionalism, perhaps most evident in the censorious transformation of American comedy, represents the first time since the Progressive Era triumph of Prohibition that a major political and cultural force has done lasting damage to the very idea of freedom in American life, this time aiming right at the heart of the First Amendment. 

By the time he published The Story of American Freedom in 1999, Eric Foner had served as president of the Organization of American Historians and was about to serve a term as president of the American Historical Association. Coming from a devout Communist family (his uncle was the party’s official historian), Foner was closely aligned with the “new labor history” but more traditionally Marxist and more interested in the 19^th century, his best known and acclaimed works covering the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Story of American Freedom is his only work since the 1970s venturing beyond that specialization, intended as a comprehensive survey. The closest thing it provides to a concrete definition of “freedom” is based not on political liberty but on identity status.

This core theme at every turn equates the plight of African-Americans with that of women, and by its final section beginning with the 1960s is little more than banal Democratic partisanship. In short, Foner’s narrative more or less became the mainstream progressive view of American history, with a succession of identity-based movements as the central paradigm. Of course, most of those movements were plainly seeking the rights of citizenship that their constituents lacked, but the substance of that citizenship is generally obscured in the narrative by what Christopher Lasch called “the democratization of self-esteem,” a phenomenon of which Brendan O’Neill has shrewdly observed:

As Christopher Lasch argued in his 1985 book, The Minimal Self, “the victim has come to enjoy a certain moral superiority in our society” . . . . And this creates a situation where they increasingly “appeal not to the universal rights of citizenship but to a special experience of persecution,” Lasch argued. In short, where a society organized around democratic ideals . . . . naturally encouraged people to appeal to the ideal of citizenship – to demonstrate their capacity for citizenship – a society organized around the victim, around the sanctification of having experienced suffering, naturally invites people to disavow their capacity for citizenship.

Critically elevated as the central framing device of Barack Obama’s second inaugural address, the Foner narrative was nearly codified to a disturbing degree in the proposals of his administration’s final year to redesign the nation’s currency. As Theodore Draper reviewed Foner in his last contribution before his death to the New York Review of Books:

The section on American communism shows Foner at his most tendentious. The problem is not that he favors the American Communists but that he does so unhistorically. From his account, it would be hard to understand why so many millions of immigrants should have come to the United States for more freedom and why more than a few of them saw their children or grandchildren rise to such jobs as university professors with guarantees of academic freedom. In much of The Story of American Freedom, Foner is so zealous a partisan of radical sects and opinions that he touches only a portion of American life. It is true that he devotes pages to the Supreme Court decisions granting enlarged freedom of expression as well as protecting the right to privacy and women’s freedom to have an abortion; but these seem little more than approving summaries of familiar cases without any analytical treatment of their argument. Most of his book might better be described as the story of American unfreedom. This theme certainly has its place in American history, but there is no use in pretending it is an adequate story of American freedom.

Particularly illuminating is Foner’s characterization of the Communist Party and Popular Front in The Story of American Freedom: a “cultural front” encompassing everyone from the whole CIO to allies in the arts and sciences and “liberal anti-fascists,” that constituted a “broad democratic upsurge” that was somehow by the Cold War “tiny” and “hardly posed a threat to American security.” 

The ideology of intersectionalism has been on a clear path to fulfill all the dystopian prophecies of the anticommunist literary canon, the works of proud democratic socialists all. It begins, of course, with George Orwell, who bequeathed both 1984 and Politics and the English Language; their relevance to both intersectionalism and neoconservatism should hardly need mentioning and yet demands a whole book. Orwell’s most simple and elegant testimony to the primacy and preciousness of liberty of conscience was undoubtedly in “Literature and Totalitarianism,” a 1941 radio broadcast as Britain was just emerging from the darkest hour:

It is when one considers the difficulty of writing honest, unbiased criticism in a time like ours that one begins to grasp the nature of the threat that hangs over the whole of literature in the coming age. We live in an age in which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist – or perhaps one ought to say, in which the individual is ceasing to have the illusion of being autonomous. Now, in all that we say about literature, and above all in all that we say about criticism, we instinctively take the autonomous individual for granted. The whole of modern European literature – I am speaking of the literature of the past four hundred years – is built on the concept of intellectual honesty, or, if you like to put it that way, on Shakespeare’s maxim, “to thine own self be true.” . . . Modern literature is essentially an individual thing. It is either the truthful expression of what one man thinks and feels, or it is nothing. As I say, we take this notion for granted, and yet as soon as one puts it into words one realizes how literature is menaced.

There are few more ominous indicators of the eclipse of liberalism in general, and of progressive amnesia of the Bush era in particular, than the embrace of the latter’s habits of newspeak. Most obviously, Orwell’s warning in Politics and the English Language that “fascism” means little more than “something not desirable” has been completely and recklessly discarded in connection to the rise of Trump and only all the more so to whatever awaits to succeed him. Such asinine neocon fixations as with uttering the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” or some variation thereof are doubled down on in the intersectionalist preoccupation with words over action, with protest over politics. One marvels at elite fellow travelers of intersectionalism who betray an utter lack of self-awareness promoting 1984 as a parable on their adversaries, yet Orwell foresaw this moment all too clearly in his damning response to the attacks of pro-Soviet elite opinion on the publication of Animal Farm:

I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. . . . It is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect.

Beyond conceiving until becoming all too clear the day before yesterday is the path leading to Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopia of brutally enforced absolute equality, Harrison Bergeron: from the ramifications for everyday life of anathematizing cultural appropriation, to applying the same severe premises not only toward inverted gender and sexuality orthodoxies but to a “disability rights” movement and to the depiction of women in media and advertising. The key role of the pleasure principle and sexual liberation in ensuring broad public consent to the eclipse of liberalism was ominously foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, its prophecies realized to an incredible extent in the lifestyle pursuits of a Silicon Valley elite exalting diversity dogma and the fulfillment of personal desire at the conscious expense of freedom of speech and freedom of religion both at home and abroad. Indeed, this literature even anticipated that seemingly new phenomenon often called “woke capitalism.” For half a century before Orwell, Huxley, and Vonnegut, Jack London foresaw in The Iron Heel that it would all be brought about not by the armed Leninist party but by the capitalist class.

How did this all happen? A narrow glimpse of the answer was given by Ross Douthat in his 2015 column on the Yale mob and the larger crisis of the American university it revealed:

The protesters at Yale and Missouri and a longer list of schools stand accused of being spoiled, silly, self-dramatizing – and many of them are. But they’re also dealing with a university system that’s genuinely corrupt, and that’s long relied on rote appeals to the activists’ own left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose. And within this system, the contemporary college student is actually a strange blend of the pampered and the exploited. This is true of the college football recruit who’s a god on campus but also an unpaid cog in a lucrative football franchise that has a public college vestigially attached. It’s true of the liberal arts student who’s saddled with absurd debts to pay for an education that doesn’t even try to pass along any version of Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said,” and often just induces mental breakdowns in the pursuit of worldly success. It’s true of the working class or minority student who’s expected to lend a patina of diversity to a campus organized to deliver good times to rich kids whose parents pay full freight. And then it’s true of the rich girl who discovers that the same university that promised her a carefree Rumspringa (justified on high feminist principle, of course) doesn’t want to hear a word about what happened to her at that frat party over the weekend. The protesters may be obnoxious enemies of free debate, in other words, but they aren’t wrong to smell the rot around them. And they’re vindicated every time they push and an administrator caves: It’s proof that they have a monopoly on moral spine, and that any small-l liberal alternative is simply hollow. Or as the great Walter Sobchak might have put it: “Say what you want about the tenets of political correctness, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” Which might turn out to be the only epitaph for the modern university anybody needs to write.

What Douthat so vividly illustrates here is an unacceptable gap between the ideals of American society and the practices of American institutions. But we are clearly not dealing with the historic ideals of the American Creed, indeed with a fearsome menace to those ideals. In short, the rise of intersectionalism and the broader cultural nightmare it unleashed is the rising of an entirely new value system that emerged from the Vietnam War’s discrediting of the positive values of anticommunism.

We have noted the importance of the collapse of soaring hopefulness around the election of Barack Obama to setting the stage for the intersectionalist ascendancy. The sudden shift between the early and late Obama years in the memory of “black power,” from faded anachronism to fashionable and essential paradigm of some continuing struggle, is easily explained by Samuel Huntington’s comparison of the Cultural Revolution to creedal passion quoted in the beginning of this chapter – “to move forward in practice by turning backward in theory, to cleanse existing practice and rectify evils by a reassertion of ‘traditional’ (that is, Maoist or revolutionary) values.” Indeed, this dynamic is at the core of intersectionalist militancy, which, in addition to the obvious, has in common with the Cultural Revolution that it clearly seeks “not to replace existing authority but to purify it,” having “more in common with restoration or revitalization movements than with rebellion.” 

But nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the politics of feminism in the Obama-Trump era. In his column on Trump-era sexual politics, Douthat explains the historical background:

In the late 1990s, when evangelical Christianity seemed to be growing and Republican power with it, feminists who had once railed against sexual harassment suddenly found reasons to make peace with the piggery – sorry, European cultural sophistication – of a liberal president, and to dismiss even credible rape allegations as a neo-Puritanism that needed to be defeated at all costs. It wasn’t that those feminists had ceased to believe in the principle that powerful men shouldn’t prey on weaker women. It was that they felt compelled to shelve that principle, temporarily, because they feared its application by Republicans would allow conservative-Christian moralism rather than their own to dominate the culture. Now we’re living through a similar period of tactical compromise with libertinism, but this time it’s religious conservatives who are compromising. Fearful of secularization and feeling culturally besieged, they have thrown in with a president who embodies that old early-1980s debauch.

The temperance movement grew in the last decades of the 19^th century because alcohol was a readily available panacea for such taboo social ills as spousal abuse and sexual violence. The dramatic reassertion of feminist moralism is thus deeply rooted in America’s history. It is no accident that before her defeat in 2016, it had so perfect a political embodiment in a righteous feminist of Illinois Methodist heritage named Hillary Rodham Clinton, hailing from what was both the geographic and denominational epicenter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Yet the general repudiation of the Clintons in the years since that defeat, following the revelations against Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, is a vivid illustration of creedal passion in practice – the purifying of institutions through the reassertion of ideals. 

Indeed, the relationship of intersectionalism to “first wave PC” in the 1980s is strikingly analogous to the course of the temperance movement as it reached critical mass in the final decades of the 19^th century, then lay dormant for a generation while quietly consolidating political power before seizing its moment to enact Prohibition. And as we noted earlier of the doctrinaire transformation of American comedy and its menace to free speech, the rise and fall of Prohibition is especially relevant to understanding intersectionalism as the anomaly of a creedal passion phenomenon aiming to restrict rather than expand freedom. 

Here, then, we must address the most significant flaws in the narrative Samuel Huntington originally published. The Port Huron Statement of 1962, which marked the arrival of the New Left, was very much a statement of the historic values of the American Creed. But the organization that issued the Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society, was instantly radicalized by the start of the Vietnam War into adopting an odd blend of black nationalist and Vietcong partisanship that by decade’s end gave way to the more fearsome totalitarianism of the terrorist Weather Underground and assorted above-ground doctrinaire Maoists. This was not more than a microcosm of the larger story, but it was nevertheless the paradigm of the nation. In other words, Huntington did not reckon with how fully the domestic consequences of Vietnam would shape the whole political epoch to come – most fundamentally, that in discrediting anticommunism, the Vietnam War further discredited the positive values of anticommunism, ultimately meaning the American Creed itself. 

From the vantage point of the end of the 1970s, the threats to the health of the American Creed that lay in wait would have been far from obvious to an observer like Samuel Huntington. The creedal passion of the 1960s was fundamentally inward-looking precisely in response to the domestic conditions of the height of the Cold War. The antiwar masses moved on once they succeeded in abolishing the draft, even as the lasting damage to the American Creed continued to fester. But the revolutionary zeal of the ideologues of the New Left, warped twice-over as the 1960s unfolded and then their aftermath wore on, was left devastatingly unfulfilled.

The memory of the civil rights movement became their central paradigm because it ended in such triumph and hope, but that transformation into the universal template of what we now call identity politics would destroy the conditions in which it thrived – its religious dimension and ironclad commitment to the American Creed. The radical turn of 1965, as the Vietnam War was just beginning, was in great measure reacting against the high hopes the early New Left invested in Lyndon Johnson’s campaign and victory, bound up as it was in securing the success of the civil rights movement. A powerful echo could be heard at the other end of their long march through the institutions, as the same crescendo of messianic hope and inevitable disappointment in the first black president made way for the rise of intersectionalism. 

This was the moral or creedal dimension of the chasm that slowly and steadily divided the blue and red tribes. If the domestic consequences of Vietnam formed the creedal dimension of the passing half-century epoch, it relied on two other dimensions, emerging from their own independent dynamics but with which it was destined to become inseparable: the political dimension in the realignment of 1968 and the social and economic dimension in the rise of the New Class. These political, racial, and economic transformations would have been challenging for the nation under any circumstances, but it was the Vietnam War and the loss of the positive values of anticommunism that robbed America of the common creedal language through which those challenges might have been overcome. 

Still, the character of the red and blue tribes, and of the divide between them, remained complex and ambiguous even after their existence was first revealed in the 2000 election. But by the 2016 election it was clear what that divide had settled into – not a culture war, but a class war. A white working class transformed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the subsequent collapse of evangelicalism, and the death of manufacturing, fell victim to the blue tribe’s explicitly racialized version of the old distinction of Victorian England between the deserving and undeserving poor. Never before in the history of modern democratic government had a broad national elite organized and engaged itself politically as a class, in the most indubitably Marxian sense, as on behalf of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

And yet the creedal passion phenomenon of intersectionalism has been largely contained within that class. The epochal drama begun by the 2016 election, in short, has been the explosive collision of that tribally limited creedal passion with a broad national crisis of social and economic inequality – no less in the proletarianization of professional labor that powered the rise of Bernie Sanders than in the rising of the broad white underclass behind Donald Trump, and no less in the more dynamic stage of realignment following them both.

Here, at last, lies the answer to the most vexing question about the intersectionalist ascendancy – why, over several years, not a single college administrator ever directly stood up to the mob in defense of the values of a free society, until finally their elders in prestige media, most dramatically at the New York Times, capitulated just as breathlessly during and after the May-June Days of 2020. We must mention here the common origin of the New Left and neoconservatism. The nationally-inward focus of the creedal passion surrounding the 1960s antiwar movement strongly suggests that, with the First World War the exception proving the rule, war as fulfillment of creedal passion comes to pass not abroad but at home.

Whereas the neoconservatives were committed to foreign war as the path to fulfilling creedal passion at home, the larger cohort formed by 1968 would define political success as nothing less than an irrevocable verdict of history against their domestic enemies. This is perhaps best revealed in the wide displacement of the label “liberal” in favor of “progressive” for the American center-left, a preference proclaimed by Hillary Clinton no less enthusiastically than by radicals seeking to tear down her and her husband’s legacy in the Democratic Party. Historically, more often than not, progressives and liberals shared a belief in the basic liberal and libertarian values of the American Creed. But progressives add a specific moral vision of the future – be it the social gospel of a far gone era, the humanitarian universalism epitomized by the John Lennon song “Imagine,” or the oppressive re-education project of intersectionalism. 

From the corollary to the progressive idea that such vision does not deserve merely to prevail in the fullness of time, but is bound to prevail according to the “arc of history,” militant illiberalism is only logical. In youthful intersectionalist militancy, the aging vanguard has seen the continuation of its own lost revolution, and can only naturally kowtow. This outcome may have been most ominously anticipated by John Judis in his post-mortem on the 2016 election, recalling SDS on the eve of its infamous implosion:

I got my first inkling of identity politics when Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin visited our SDS chapter in Northern California in January 1969. The revolution was nigh, Hayden explained, because “we already have the students, the women, the blacks, and the browns.” We repeated a version of that argument in our opening editorial in January 1970 for Socialist Revolution, a journal I worked on. We called it the “invisible majority.” There was not a lot of difference between what we were talking about then and the concept of a “rising American electorate” or “new majority.”