Sometimes even before being formulated, any criticism of the intersectional ideology is discredited by various imputations: the author would be from the extreme right, the café du commerce, BFMTV, Current values, even a fantasized fascism are evoked on the spot, even though these insulting criticisms often target personalities classified on the left like Sylviane Agacinski or Nathalie Heinich. This acrimonious tumult sometimes makes an impression in a university environment which claims to be predominantly left-wing and, by an effect of intimidation, ensures the resigned or complacent silence of the academic authorities.
How, however, would the intersectional ideology be “left”? A feminism that admits prostitution by claiming to be “pro-sex”, a secularism so “open” that it supports Brotherhood networks in their fight against so-called Islamophobia, in fact reverses the values of the left, as has been shown Stephanie Roza in The left against the Enlightenment.
The intersectional ideology is based on an explicit hierarchy of sexes and races, built on the pretext of infinite discriminations. While democracy presupposes equal rights for citizens, the right to vote in the first place, the apparent egalitarianism of intersectional demands is based on a purely discriminatory and unequal notion of society. They advocate the reversal, in fact the inversion, of a growing host of discriminations; so-called positive discrimination is a clear example of this: it is opposed to “meritocracy” as well as to democracy, because a democracy does not recognize any minority or majority other than the opinion expressed by the vote.
Government support
Opposing Tocqueville, who after Plato feared the dictatorship of the majority in a democracy, Raymond Aron feared even more a dictatorship of minorities. Moreover, in a democracy, the electoral majority in no way corresponds to a specific identity.
We know that Fascism and Nazism undermined democracy from within through their identity politics. More deeply, their ideologues knew that democracy is a way, probably the only way, to fight the politics of identities. Now, this leads to the fight of all against all, as we see on the networks.
This “politics” or rather controversy also threatens democracy in another way, not from outside but from within our societies, because it results both from policies of economic deregulation, of intellectual deregulation by irrationality, and ethical deregulation through the cult of transgression. And in fact, the institutions are variously delegitimized, even attacked, whether legislative or judicial: thus, slogans such as “justice ignores us, we ignore justice”, flout any presumption of innocence and limit the investigation to retweets.
The intersectional ideology thus underlies the “cancel culture” which considers democratic freedoms of speech and creation to be void. For example, various assaults and intimidations led in a few weeks to the cancellation of many conferences and debates, following the publication of the book The making of the transgender child, by Céline Masson and Caroline Eliacheff (2022).
This new obscurantism is distinguished by its ability to penetrate institutions. If it is too early to speak of a compassionate dictatorship, the violation of the rights of the majority in the name of the protection of minorities breaks out in the resigned or complicit laissez-faire that accompanies the high deeds of “cancel culture”.
As we have seen recently with the cases of Dilcrah, Family Planning and the Council of Secular Elders, government support for intersectional ideology is all the more surprising in that it is coupled with political blindness, since it can only reinforce an already expanding extreme right.
Providential foil for authoritarian regimes
Moreover, at the international level, democracy tends to be limited to a vague inclusion: to recognize the Afghan Taliban regime, Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian asked them to be “inclusive”, his Chinese counterpart called for a “open and inclusive political system”. Their spokesman, Suhail Shaheen, promised “an Islamic government based on inclusion”.
Qatar, which housed the Taliban representation, and where homosexuality is criminalized, adopts for its part the Brotherhood strategy of seduction of intersectional circles: its media Al Jazeera more (AJ+), for international youth, not only embraces inclusive writing, but echoes gender ideology as it relates to exposing “Islamophobia” .
At the international level, the intersectional ideology opposes the populist movements of the far left and the far right; but by its excesses which touch on major anthropological questions such as filiation and alliance, it has only reinforced the latter.
The false left thus offers an unexpected resource for the extreme right: it saves it from formulating a social and economic program, it makes people accept the principles of a “cancel culture” which we see in the United States the republican states seizing in turn and for their own equally demagogic objectives.
Democracies seem to be in retreat internationally, but why have progressive movements weakened? The factors are many, but if democratic rights are gradually limited to LGBT+ rights, if activists obstruct other rights, such as freedom of expression undermined by the “cancel culture”, if left-wing parties, undermined by internal conflicts opened by intersectional activists, promote such actions of censorship, the progressive electorate turns away from demands in which it cannot identify and resigns itself, at best, to abstention.
The intersectional ideology thus takes on a geopolitical scope, because anti-democratic and anti-Western propaganda makes it a providential foil, whether in Iran, Pakistan, China and of course in Russia – where people hastened to put online parody sketches of the genre crazy cage once made by Zelensky; and a few days after the defeat in Kherson, the Russian Duma passed a particularly repressive anti-LGBT law.
Finally, thus opposing democratic openness, wouldn’t the totalizing project of inclusion aim for a form of closure? We know that the strength of mythical thought is due in particular to its closure: myths are characterized by constant cross-references between all the semantic domains which make it possible to enclose thought in a totalization that is as seductive as it is illusory. Thus, the intersectional ideology draws its strength from the indefinite references of sex to gender, race and religion. It can then adapt to changing situations: when religion or race are no longer a recipe, sex and gender offer a popular recourse, as we see today. It thus deploys various variants of the same myth which stems from a political theology perfectly compatible with racial or sexual superstitions.
* François Rastier is Research Director, CNRS (Paris) and Laboratory for the Analysis of Contemporary Ideologies (LAIC).