The Prisoner of Intersectionality
3rd December 2019
Joel Kotkin follows the news.
When she first announced her run for the White House, Elizabeth Warren seemed a breath of fresh air — a brainy and relentless campaigner for the middle class, willing to take on tech and other oligarchs. As an old colleague who met with her told me, she seemed very much “an old-fashioned New Deal Democrat” focused primarily on addressing the massive inequalities that hurt our society and families.
But rather than focus on basic issues that appeal to a wide number of Americans, Warren’s campaign has morphed into something of an intersectional nightmare. The notion of intersectionality holds that progressives must embrace the demands of any of the various strains within the progressive Democratic Party. You cannot just be an economic progressive but must also endorse every demand of militant greens, the Bernie Bro socialists, the professional race hustlers or the extreme feminists.