by Ben Shapiro
This coalitional strategy would eventually be elevated into a philosophy, termed intersectionality by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw posited, correctly, that a person could be discriminated against differently thanks to membership in multiple historically victimized groups (a black woman, for example, could be discriminated against differently from a black man). But she then extended that rather uncontroversial premise into a far broader argument: that Americans can be broken down into various identity groups, and that members of particular identity groups cannot understand the experiences of those of other identity groups. This granted members of allegedly victimized identity groups unquestionable moral authority.42 Identity lay at the core of all systems of power, Crenshaw argued; the only way for those of victimized identity to gain freedom would be to form coalitions with other victimized groups in order to overthrow the dominant systems of power.
The biggest problem with the intersectional coalition, however, remained practical rather than philosophical: the coalition was itself rift by cross-cutting internal divisions. Black Americans, for example, were no fans of same-sex marriage or illegal immigration—so how could a coalition of black Americans and gay Americans and Latino Americans be held together? And how could that coalition unite with enough white voters to win a majority again?
Obama did so in his very person. Essentially, Obama used his own identity as the wedge point in favor of policies black Americans didn’t especially like—then used his popularity with black Americans in order to glue together the coalition. Every group in the intersectional coalition would receive its goodie bag during the 2012 cycle: in May, gay Americans were thrilled to learn that Obama had flipped on his 2008 position and now supported same-sex marriage;43 the following month, Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, unilaterally vowing not to enforce immigration law despite his own promises not to do so;44 Obama, along with a compliant press, labeled Republican policies a “war on women” and vowed to fight for women’s rights. As for the black community, Obama largely took it for granted that he would earn their support—and, as it turned out, he was right.45
To hold together his intersectional coalition, Obama had to raise the specter of something powerful and dangerous. That “something powerful” couldn’t be the government, since Obama was the head of that government. Instead, Obama would unify the coalition against the past. Obama’s brilliant slogan was the simple mandate, “FORWARD.” Biden suggested to a black audience that opponent Mitt Romney wanted to put black Americans “back in chains.”46 Obama stated that Romney would “turn back the clock 50 years for women, gays and immigrants,” stating that he would instead “move us forward.”47 Attacks on Barack Obama’s political program wasn’t a mere difference of opinion—it was now an attack on the identities of blacks, women, gays, Latinos.
The new Obama coalition successfully squared the circle: it knit together the Utopian Impulse, which put ultimate faith in government, and the Revolutionary Impulse, which saw tearing down the system as the answer. Obama united these two ideas with one simple notion: perpetual revolution from within the government. Democrats would campaign on revolutionary aggression designed to tear down hierarchies of power, both external to government and within the government itself; top-down censorship of all those who would oppose that agenda; and an anti-conventionalism designed to castigate opponents as morally deficient—indeed, as bigots.
And the strategy worked.
The election of 2012 marked the victory of the Obama coalition. Dan Balz of The Washington Post observed that Obama’s campaign relied heavily on demographic change: “against the obstacles in Obama’s path was a belief in Chicago in the glacial power of demographic change. . . . Obama’s advisers were certain that the electorate would have fewer white voters.” Obama received the same level of white support as Michael Dukakis in 1988—but won the election because of changing demographics, since he won 80 percent of nonwhite voters. In fact, as Balz observed, Obama’s team “invested in what it called Operation Vote, which was aimed exclusively at the key constituencies that make up Obama’s coalition: African Americans, Hispanics, young voters and women (particularly those with college degrees).” The campaign communicated directly with these groups, targeting specific gathering places and advertising to niches.48
The Obama coalition strategy was forged. And progressives cheered wildly. As Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin wrote for the Center for American Progress (CAP), “Obama’s strong progressive majority—built on a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition in support of an activist . . . is real and growing and it reflects the face and beliefs of the United States in the early part of the 21st Century. The GOP must face the stark reality that its voter base is declining and its ideology is too rigid to represent the changing face of today’s country.” As CAP noted, the Obama coalition “marks the culmination of a decades-long project to build an electorally viable and ideologically coherent progressive coalition in national politics.”49
Democrats had long hoped for that culmination. All the way back in 2002, Teixeira penned a book with journalist John Judis titled The Emerging Democratic Majority, positing that an increased number of minority Americans could come together to bring forth a permanent progressive utopia.50 In 2016, NPR championed “the browning of America,” suggesting that the country “is at a demographic inflection point,” with Democrats reliant on their intersectional coalition buttressed by a majority of college-educated whites. “The Democratic Party,” NPR concluded, “has adapted to this demographic change, and is more diverse, more urban, and more liberal than at any time in its history.”51
Then came 2016. Trump shocked the world, winning a slim majority in the swing states. This created a choice for Democrats in 2020: either they could rethink the Obama intersectional coalition that Hillary Clinton had been unable to replicate or they could double down on it. They chose to try to remake the Obama coalition. As Politico noted during the Democratic primaries, “The rhetoric has shifted the debate about electability from an ideological plane—where moderates and more progressive Democrats argued for months over policy—to one based more on identity, and which candidate is best positioned to reassemble the Obama coalition of young people, women and nonwhite voters that proved instrumental to Democratic successes in the 2018 midterm elections.”52
Biden successfully mobilized that coalition against Trump, largely by suggesting that Trump presented a unique historic threat to identity groups within the coalition. In his victory speech, Biden name-checked the identity groups in his coalition: “Gay, straight, transgender. White. Latino. Asian. Native American.” He pledged, especially, support for the “African-American community” who “stood up again for me.” “They always have my back,” Biden stated, “and I’ll have yours.”53 In homage of his coalition, Biden then doled out cabinet positions based on intersectional characteristics. This was overt racial pandering. The coalition was back in power. And that coalition had learned the main lesson of the Obama era: uniting the Utopian Impulse of progressivism with the Revolutionary Impulse of identity politics could achieve victory.
USING THE SYSTEM TO TEAR DOWN THE SYSTEM
In July 2020, in the midst of the George Floyd protests alleging widespread and systemic American racism, the National Museum of African American History and Culture—a project of the Smithsonian Museum, a taxpayer-funded entity—put up an online exhibit condemning “whiteness.” The exhibit, titled “Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture in the United States,” explained that Americans had internalized aspects of white culture. What were these terribly white cultural barriers posing challenges to nonwhites? According to the exhibit, “rugged individualism” was a white concept, rooted in nasty ideas like “the individual is the primary unit,” “independence & autonomy highly valued + rewarded,” and “individuals assumed to be in control of their environment.” “Family structure” represented another white concept, with “the nuclear family” condemned as
an aspect of whiteness, along with the notion that children “should be independent.” Other irrevocably white ideas included an “emphasis on scientific method,” complete with “cause and effect relationships”; a focus on history, including “the primacy of Western (Greek, Roman) and Judeo-Christian tradition”; a belief that “hard work is the key to success” and encouragement of “work before play”; monotheism; placing emphasis on “delayed gratification” and following “rigid time schedules”; justice rooted in English common law and intent and private property; “decision-making” and “action orientation”; and, of course, “be[ing] polite.”54
One moment’s thought would betray the fact that assuming that such commonsense pathways to success as delayed gratification, being on time, being polite, and forming stable family structures has nothing to do with racism—and that to call such excellent notions “white” actually degrades nonwhite Americans by assuming them incapable of making decent life decisions. The NMAAHC exhibit was a textbook case of the soft bigotry of low expectations. To find it in a taxpayer-funded exhibit was indeed shocking.
But not all that shocking. The argument put forth by the new intersectional coalition—the argument that any failures within the American system are due to the inherent evils of the system, not to individual failures within that system—now predominates throughout instruments of politics, government, and law. Joe Biden’s unity agenda with Bernie Sanders pledged, “On day one, we are committed to taking anti-racist actions for equity across our institutions, including in the areas of education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and health care, among others.” By anti-racist policy, of course, Biden means policy designed to level all outcomes, no matter the individual decision making at issue. The 2020 Democratic Party platform makes that point even clearer: “Democrats are committed to standing up to racism and bigotry in our laws, in our culture, in our politics, and in our society, and recognize that race-neutral policies are not sufficient to rectify race-based disparities. We will take a comprehensive approach to embed racial justice in every element of our governing agenda.”55
The federal government controversially was, until ordered to cease, inculcating Critical Race Theory inside the executive branch, with training sessions telling participants that “virtually all White people contribute to racism,” and in which employees were required to explain that they “benefit from racism.”56 Companies have been threatened with loss of federal contractor status for failure to abide by woke ideological standards. Anti-discrimination law has been radically extended to include everything from transgender identification to same-sex marriage, clashing dramatically with freedom of association and freedom of religion; it remains an unsettled legal question whether failure to use a proper biological pronoun could be considered a violation of federal anti-discrimination law. Parents now have to fear the predations of state and local governments seizing control of their child rearing; churches fear loss of tax-exempt status; police departments are cudgeled into non-enforcement.
Advocates of this perverse ideology are dedicated to using the revolutionary tools of government created in the 1960s not to fix the system, but to tear it down. The tools of the system will be turned against the system. There is a reason that Ibram X. Kendi, ideological successor to Derrick Bell and Stokely Carmichael, has openly called for a federal Department of Anti-Racism, empowered with the ability to preclear “all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequality, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequality surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas.” The DOA would have the ability to punish “policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”57 This is as pure an expression of fascism as it is possible to imagine.
We’re not there yet. But the battle is under way.
WILL THE AUTHORITARIAN LEFTIST COALITION HOLD?
For progressives, the importance of the Obama coalition lies in its purported ability to cram down policy on a large minority—or even a majority—of Americans. By cobbling together supposedly dispossessed minorities and woke white Americans desperate for psychological dissociation from America’s alleged systemic bigotry, Democrats hope to leave behind the era of broad public appeals and simply renormalize the American political system. Mainstream Democrats hope to cement the Obama coalition through concessions to “anti-racist” philosophy; in return, they demand fealty to a traditional progressive set of policy proposals.
The new governing power in America, so the theory goes, will be the intersectional-progressive coalition. This coalition is authoritarian in orientation: it promotes revolutionary aggression against the system itself, from both within and without; it seeks top-down censorship of those who disagree; and it sets itself up as an unquestionable moral system, superior to its predecessors.
Democrats banked on that strategy in 2020. They claimed that Donald Trump was a unique, shocking, and direct threat to black Americans, to women, to Latino Americans, to gay Americans. Trump represented all that was worst about America, and it was up to the intersectional coalition and their goodhearted allies to strike a blow on behalf of a new, transformed, better America.
Just three weeks after the 2020 election, Professor Sheryll Cashin of Georgetown University called on Democrats to continue to double down on the Obama coalitional strategy. She called on Democrats to ignore Trump voters, silence them, and focus on appeasing all the other members of the intersectional coalition. “A more viable strategy for progressives than trying to win over Trump’s supporters right away would be to continue to win elections powered by energized majorities of Black Americans in critical states, in coalitions with other energized people of color rightfully taking their place in American politics and the critical mass of whites willing to see and resist racism,” Cashin wrote. Progressive priorities could be allied to “anti-racist” priorities in order to solidify a coalition of the woke.58
But, as it turned out, things are not quite that simple.
First, demographics are not destiny. Trump’s gains among various identity groups demonstrate that Americans think for themselves, and will not be relegated over time to the boundaries of racial, ethnic, or sexual orientation–based solidarity.
More pressingly, however, the practical problems of intersectionality remain: not all members of the coalition get along. The more radical members of the coalition are unlikely to sit idly by while the more moderate members shape policy. The tension between the Utopian Impulse and the Revolutionary Impulse has not dissipated. And without Barack Obama to paper over those differences—or, just as important, to wave the wand of race and magically deem friends anti-racist and foes the opposite—the coalition cannot hold. Moderate members are unlikely to watch their jobs disappear because radicals have taken the reins. In the aftermath of Biden’s 2020 victory, moderate Democrats in Congress fretted that they’d nearly lost their House majority, and were unable to gain a Senate majority. Those moderates blamed radicals pushing idiotic positions for the tenuous Democratic grip on power: Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) lit into her radical colleagues for their sloganeering about “defunding the police” and “socialism,” pointing out that Democrats had “lost good members” because of such posturing.59 Meanwhile, radical members of Congress—members such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN)—joined forces to savage Democrats like Spanberger, arguing in an open letter to colleagues, “The lesson to be learned from this election cannot and should not be to lean into racist resentment politics, or back away from the social movements that pushed Democrats to power.”60
Because the Democratic coalition is so fragile, representing at best a large minority or bare majority of Americans, it can be fractured. The most obvious way to fracture the Democratic coalition is through generalized resistance to individual el
ements of the intersectional agenda. And each element of the intersectional agenda is becoming increasingly more radical. During the 2020 election cycle, Democrats, afraid of alienating black Americans, ignored the rioting and looting associated with Black Lives Matter protests; embraced the ideological insanity of CRT; indulged mass protests against police in the middle of a global pandemic; and fudged on whether they were in favor of defunding the police as crime rates spiked. Afraid of alienating LGBT Americans, Democrats embraced the most radical elements of gender theory, including approval of children transitioning sex; they pressured social media companies to punish Americans for “misgendering”; they vowed to crack down on religious practice in the name of supposed LGBT rights. Afraid of alienating Latino Americans, Democrats began treating the term Latino itself as insulting, instead embracing the little-known and little-used academic terminology, Latinx; more broadly, they advocated decriminalizing illegal immigration itself.
As each intersectional demand grows more radical, however, the Democrats’ coalition is threatened. The renormalization of American politics that Democrats seek can only occur in the absence of majoritarian backlash. If, for example, a majority of Americans—including members of the Democratic coalition—said no to the radical transgender agenda, the coalition would have to choose between jettisoning transgender interest groups (perhaps fracturing the coalition) or losing the soft moderates who join their coalition (probably losing its slim majority in the process).
In order to solve these problems, the Left can’t rely on pure renormalization through democratic means. It must stymie its opponents in order to prevent the fracture of its coalition. The Left must increase the size of its coalition by intimidating its opponents into inaction, or by browbeating them into compliance. The Left must engage in institutional capture, and then use the power of those institutions in order to compel the majority of Americans to mirror their chosen political priorities. Without control of the commanding cultural heights, the leftist coalition cannot win. That is why they’ve focused all their energies on taking those commanding heights.
