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Not by coincidence did a postwar generation of ex-communists, searching for a way to describe their catastrophic disillusionment, call communism “the God that failed.” For many Left activists, intersectionality functions like the Marxist dialectic did for earlier radicals: not only as political prescription but as all-encompassing, all-explaining theory. Like Marxism in its more vulgar forms, intersectionality is highly deterministic, with no allowance for individual human agency; and, like Marxism, intersectionality takes a rather cynical view of society, which it believes is simply a giant web of power relations.
Instead of class consciousness, intersectionality takes racial and sexual/gender identity as its chief conceptual categories. (Social class is technically one of intersectionality’s areas of concern but in six years around college campuses I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard an intersectional leftist raise that rather uncomfortable topic. To do so would require acknowledging the single, unspoken privilege that most campus activists have in common.) Instead of economic inequality, intersectionality’s great, amorphous foe is “structural oppression”; instead of class struggle, intersectionality is concerned with battling “power differentials.”
Like most theories that claim to explain everything, intersectionality quickly turns out to explain almost nothing. The presumption that a person’s politics and worldview are determined by their race or gender or sexuality is both insulting and easily shown to be untrue, which is why leftist activists tend to react with confusion or hostility when they meet a black libertarian or a gay conservative or anyone who doesn’t think of their racial or sexual affiliations as the defining aspect of their humanity.
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