A defining dogma of woke ideology is intersectionality, the notion that all forms of oppression are related, so that the different groups being oppressed should be allies of each other.
In practice, this means that someone who is politically progressive feels obliged to support all progressive causes, no matter what. This is why feminists and LGBTQ activists are able to support radical Islamic jihadists, despite their subjugation of women and their practice of executing gays. Brown-skinned Palestinians are victims of racism and colonialism, so therefore all progressives of good will should support their cause.
Ironically, we are also seeing a sort of intersectionality on the right. Many conservatives think they have to support everything labeled conservative. If white nationalists are conservative, then we had better not criticize them. If Nazis were conservatives (which they were not), then they must not have been so bad.
A slogan used by radicals ever since the French Revolution is “no enemies to the left.” That is another way of saying “intersectionality,” which thus has a long pedigree in radical circles. No leftwing faction should criticize any other leftwing faction. Rather, liberals, democratic socialists, and communists should work together to defeat their conservative enemies. Afterwards, they can sort out their own differences. (Which the Jacobins did in guillotining each other during their Reign of Terror.)
But now the other side is saying “no enemies to the right.” Some believe that the big tent of conservatism should shelter racists, anti-semites, national socialists, militia cultists, and other members of the fringe extremes.
But issues are complicated as are most people’s beliefs. No one needs to buy the entire progressive or conservative bill of goods. And efforts to make them do so are not only wrong, they are counter-productive.
Consider what happened to the Sierra Club. Founded in 1892 by naturalist John Muir, the Sierra Club worked to conserve natural environments and to protect wildlife. It became the largest and most influential conservation organization, with some 4 million members and significant accomplishments, from establishing national parks to protecting endangered species.
But in 2022, stirred by the George Floyd protests, the Sierra Club went intersectional. Social Justice became its new cause, eclipsing its previous sharp focus on wilderness conservation. Andrew Follett, drawing on a story from the New York Times [behind a paywall], quotes Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune:
“As the climate crisis continues to disproportionately harm Black communities, it is up to us to build an intersectional climate justice movement that ensures a habitable planet for all people,” Brune said in a press statement. “And we cannot create that movement without demanding reparations for Black people — a community that is burdened with deep trauma stemming from a legacy of colonialism, genocide, land theft, enslavement, racial terror, racial capitalism, structural discrimination, and exclusion.”
So the club took on all of those issues, including issuing statements calling for the defunding of the police and planning the organization’s own reparations to black and native people.
According to the New York Times, “We have two F.T.E.s [Full Time Equivalents] devoted to Trump’s war on the Arctic refuge, and we have 108 going to D.E.I. [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.]” And what those DEI employees generated was, frankly, left-wing speech-policing wholly unrelated to environmental stewardship.
It went to such an extreme that the Sierra Club cancelled its own founder, John Muir, for some of his allegedly racist language.
Since 2022, the Sierra Club has lost 60% of its members. Why? Says the New York Times, as reported by Follett, “it offended members and volunteers who had ‘loved the club’s single-minded defense of the environment, by asking them to fully embrace its pivot to the left. Some even felt they were investigated by the club for failing to go along.’”As donations fell, a similar organization, the Nature Conservancy, which kept its focus on conservation rather than politics, pulled in nine times as much money.
The fact is, lots of conservatives love nature too. And they joined the Sierra Club, until its embrace of intersectionality obscured its mission and drove them away.
Not too long ago, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. The political parties were mainly regional and class-based. The Democrats represented the working class, both in the south (where the party was mostly conservative) and the industrial northeast (where union members were mostly liberal). The Republicans represented business interests, though the “old money” back east was mostly liberal while the “new money” of midwestern small towns was mostly conservative.
Both worker-oriented Democrats and business-oriented Republicans had a common interest in a thriving American economy, which would produce both jobs (for the Democrats) and profits (for the Republicans). But the parties balanced each other, so that neither side could have a monopoly of power. The workers could not impose socialism and the business owners could not impose plutocracy. And both sides loved America and could agree on defending the nation against all of its enemies.
Politics was a matter of coalition building. As was governing, which mainly was carried out by the legislatures, required compromising, favor-trading, and cobbling together majorities issue by issue.
There used to be pro-life liberals. That included all of the Catholic politicians and a good many black Protestants (like Jesse Jackson), mainline Protestants (like Hubert Humphrey), and evangelical Southerns (like Al Gore).
But then came feminism and early intersectionality. Abortion became a shibboleth for the Democratic Party. And one by one, shamefully, Democratic politicians lined up to bow the knee to legalized abortion.
American democracy had been based on individuals working out their self-interests, personal convictions, and policy preferences in a corporate Constitutional order, with its checks and balances and mediating processes. The founders warned against the “Party Spirit,” in which political parties would impose their will on legislators, as in the parliamentary democracies of Europe. In the United States of America, different factions could freely exist, but they had to work together by means of trade-offs and compromises in order to win a majority.
Conservatism, observes Yuval Levin, is properly a faction, not a party. The same could be said of liberalism. But Americans don’t need to belong to any of the factions. They can vote as they please, without having to be consistent and without following a party line.
Photo by Fred Murphy Photography via Yale Environment Review, CC BY-ND-NC 1.0
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