While attending college and graduate school, I met some genuine liberals. Since then, they have all died. That was more than thirty years ago.
Liberalism is not an ideology. It’s not a philosophy. Liberalism is a kind of hope that if we are open to vision from all voices in the community, we can advance the best ideas for a greater good. Liberalism in its purest form is a heart for listening and a constant search for truth. In the words of John Stewart Mill, “The silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.” Liberalism never silences discussion. It believes within its heart that if freedom of expression is completely liberated, the optimum best good will surface naturally. Liberalism in the classical sense is an open forum, a transparent motive, and an invitation for all to be given a voice. The liberalism I know is dead.
The genuine liberal of my college youth has been co-opted by a progressive agenda that marginalizes divergent and outlier voices from within minority populations. It advocates for every minority view to be given a greater voice within a larger majority. Compare this to having a difference of opinion in either a minority or a majority body. Take a moment to piece these together words together. Swallow them, let them digest.
Let’s break it down a bit more. The progressive left pushes for every minority to have a voice above that of the majority. In other words, if you are a transgendered black Jew in a Mormon community, your voice should be given greater attention because you are the minority in a majority. According to the progressive thinking of the day, we are more liberal if we give more voice to every 1% minority. Only the 1% minority has all the answers and we are not diverse unless we let a super small minority intersect with the majority.
There is a problem with this. It assumes every minority voice is true to themselves or their culture. We know from sad experience that human beings go along to get along. Most of us fall in line with power and authority. We call this self-protectionism. In countries around the world, people fall in line with the power structure. Even if all the people from the 1% minority populations are perfectly intersected and represented in a larger majority, we cannot assume they are genuine. They could hold the same ideas as the majority. This is not diversity.
I remember being interviewed for a position as a tenured college professor. In three separate interviews I was asked, “Who is your favorite female author?” I said “Ayn Rand,” an outlier voice within an established majority. If I mentioned a female author from a minority perspective, I could have been hired. I was too much of a divergent independent. The price I have paid to maintain an independent voice has cost me a lot.
The modern progressive does not value genuine diversity from independent minds? Instead, today’s progressive values the most extreme minority within a larger population. Their logic works like this: if we include the voice from an extreme minority, we will have better ideas in healthcare, education, commerce, the environment, farming, communications, science and so forth.
They call this intersectionality. It teaches that our identities intersect in ways that impact how we are viewed, understood, and treated. A black women is both black and a woman, but because she is a black women, it is said she endures specific forms of discrimination that a black man, or a white woman, might not. Therefore we should give this women greater voice. And because a majority discriminates a minority, intersectionality puts personal identity first and not the unique voice that each person has.
Let me say what I need to say. To see government, education, healthcare, the environment, and all life issues through the lens of intersectionality categorizes people into micro tiny boxes, corners, and narrow corridors. The result is hair-splitting tribalism, the opposite of community.
Intersectionality is another published injustice and not a way to bring people together. It has no mechanics. It is not a system or a process. It is not a means to make something better. It’ simply another fault in humanity. And over time, like all faults, a fault becomes polluted by those who seek vengeance for wrongs and not a better policy, principle, or practice.
I read Kimberle Crenshaw’s paper “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” It was the first publication that defined intersectionality outside of legal terminology. You can read her paper yourself here. She focused on the multiple-burdened black women as a single axis point of greater discrimination and sited several legal cases to prove her argument. Although a very thick academic read, she did prove that race and sex have a greater risk of discrimination when combined than alone. And when race and sex are derived from a smaller minority, the discrimination is can be greater. That viable argument she published has morphed considerably over the years to include identify politics. No longer are you discriminated because of race or sex, but because of racial, religious, ethnic, sexual, cultural and other identities. In other words, with more and more ways to self-identify, we have an even greater amount of discrimination. The victim class has grown exponentially to such a degree that the only solution to solve for the injustice is radical action.
Non-violent protest has now turned into violent action. Liberalism is now lost to leftism and all the statist solutions it promotes.
The logic of intersectionality is that discrimination is getting worse and will continue to grow worse. Even though Kimberle Crenshaw attempted to demolish racial hierarchies altogether, the progressive left has increased hierarchies by demanding more micro minority identities to be given more if not equal voice.
Crenshaw said herself that intersectionality isn’t “an effort to create the world in an inverted image of what it is now.” Rather, she said, the point of intersectionality is to make room “for more advocacy and remedial practices” to create a more egalitarian system.
How does this work in a democracy? We can understand what advocacy means, but what defines a remedial practice? And will this remedial practice to create more egalitarian systems include white men with divergent views in a conservative culture? Will it include the dissenting mind in both minority and majority bodies?
The concern is that we focus too much on race, sex, sexual orientation and various identity issues and not on genuine divergence and dissent for all. You can be a person from many burdened minority corners, but do you have value to add?
Intersectionality and identity politics are used not to bring people together but to give greater voice to hyper-minority issues. This is neither egalitarian nor diverse. It assumes that no person from the majority can have a great idea.
The classical liberal approach to include all voices from all corners of the community is dying. It is dying because progressive minds have polluted the liberal spirit of free expression for all. They do not trust in freedom because they believe we are born not equal.
I have found that the longer you hold on to this believe that we are born not equal, the more you adopt the lower belief that we are born selfish. There is no escape after this point. Your view of humanity becomes very dark and you lose all hope. You will eventually seek after a solution with more central control, which explains why the modern progressive left is socialistic in their solutions.
Compared to common consent, central control is the only solution promoted by the progressive left. It is very sad indeed. Creating more central control destroys freedom, and when we attack freedom we give up the ghost of classical liberalism.
I hope some of us can keep classical liberalism alive long enough before the coming authoritarianism. If we can make it through the darkness that awaits, we will find a renaissance on the other side.
