[Here we take up “The intersectional left is a providence for the extreme right”, Express]
Even before sometimes being formulated, any criticism of intersectional ideology is discredited by various imputations: the author is said to be from the extreme right, and the Café du Commerce, BFMTV, Current values are immediately mentioned, even though these insulting criticisms often target left-wing personalities such as Sylviane Agacinski or Nathalie Heinich. This acrimonious uproar sometimes makes an impression in an academic environment that claims to be predominantly left-wing and, through an intimidation effect, ensures the resigned or complacent silence of the academic authorities.
But how would intersectional ideology be "left-wing"? A feminism that admits prostitution while calling itself "pro-sex", a secularism so open that it supports the Muslim Brotherhood networks in their fight against so-called Islamophobia, in fact reverse the values of the left, as Stéphanie Roza showed in The Left Against the Enlightenment.
Intersectional ideology is based on an explicit hierarchy of gender and race, built on the pretext of infinite discrimination. While democracy presupposes the equality of rights of citizens, the right to vote first and foremost, the apparent egalitarianism of intersectional demands is based on a purely discriminatory and unequal notion of society.[1]They advocate the reversal, in fact the inversion, of a growing host of discriminations; so-called positive discrimination is a clear example: it is opposed to "meritocracy".[2] as in democracy, because a democracy recognizes no minority or majority other than the opinion expressed by the vote.
Opposing Tocqueville, who after Plato feared in democracy the dictatorship of the majority, Raymond Aron feared even more a dictatorship of minorities. But in democracy, the electoral majority does not necessarily correspond to an identity – although fascism and Nazism undermined democracy from within by their politics of identities.
More deeply, their ideologues knew that democracy is a way, perhaps the only one, to combat identity politics. Now, this leads to the fight of all against all, as we see on the networks.
This "politics" or rather polemic also threatens democracy in another way, not from the outside but from the inside of our societies, because it results at the same time from policies of economic deregulation, intellectual deregulation through irrationality, and ethical deregulation through the cult of transgression. And in fact, institutions are variously delegitimized, even attacked, whether they are legislative[3], or judicial: thus, slogans like "justice ignores us, we ignore justice" flout any presumption of innocence and limit the investigation to retweets[4].
Intersectional ideology thus underlies the “cancel culture” that holds democratic freedoms of speech and creation to be null and void. For example, various acts of violence and intimidation led to the cancellation of multiple conferences and debates in a matter of weeks, following the publication of the book The making of the transgender child, by Céline Masson and Caroline Éliacheff (2022).
This new obscurantism is distinguished by its ability to penetrate institutions. While it is too early to speak of a compassionate dictatorship, the violation of the rights of the majority in the name of protecting minorities is evident in the resigned or complicit laissez-faire that accompanies the great deeds of “cancel culture.”
LGBT+ ideology plays a prominent role, through its radicalism that borders on transhumanism on the one hand, and on post-truth on the other. Government support for LGBT+ ideology is all the more surprising because it is coupled with political blindness, since it can only strengthen an already expanding far-right.
Moreover, at the international level, democracy tends to be limited to vague inclusion: in order to recognize the Afghan Taliban regime, Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian asked them to be "inclusive", his Chinese counterpart called for an "open and inclusive political regime". Their spokesperson, Suhail Shaheen, promised "an Islamic government based on inclusion".
Qatar, which hosted the Taliban representation, and where homosexuality is criminalized in accordance with Wahhabi principles, is adopting the Brotherhood's strategy of seducing intersectional circles: its media Al Jazeera Plus (AJ+), aimed at international youth, not only adopts inclusive writing, but also echoes gender ideology when it is linked to the denunciation of “Islamophobia”[5].
At the international level, LGBT+ ideology opposes far-left and far-right populist movements; but through its excesses that touch on major anthropological questions such as filiation and alliance, it has only strengthened the latter.
Democracies appear to be in decline internationally, but why have progressive movements weakened? The factors are many, but if democratic rights are increasingly limited to LGBT+ rights, if activists are blocking other rights, such as freedom of expression, which has been undermined by the cancel culture, if "anti-capitalist" parties promote these actions, the progressive electorate turns away from demands in which it cannot recognize itself and resigns itself to abstention.
Intersectional ideology thus takes on a geopolitical scope, because anti-democratic and anti-Western propaganda makes it a providential deterrent, whether in Iran, Pakistan, China and of course Russia – where people were quick to put online parody sketches of the genre Cage of the Mad previously carried out by Zelensky; and a few days after the defeat in Kherson, the Russian Duma voted on a particularly repressive anti-LGBT law.
Wouldn't the totalizing project of inclusion aim at a form of closure? We know that the strength of mythical thought lies in particular in its closure: myths are characterized by constant references between all semantic domains that allow thought to be locked in a totalization that is as seductive as it is illusory. Thus, 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 popular, sex and gender offer a welcome recourse, as we see today. It thus deploys various variants of the same myth that is part of a political theology that is perfectly compatible with sexual superstitions.
But, through its hostility to democracy, it also remains compatible with other political theologies. The figure of C
"Without the left, the right is nothing. It can do nothing by itself, neither in thought nor in being. The right has a will to power but not the strength to accomplish it. It has stolen all its resources from the left while the latter only cared about itself."
„Ohne die Linke ist die Rechte nichts. Otherwise, Kraft vermag sie nichts, weder in Gedanken noch im Sein. Die Rechte ist Wille zur Macht ohne Kraft zur Gestalt. All Ihre Mittel hat sie der Linken gestohlen, während diese mit sich selbst beschäftigt war.“ By Leo, Maximilian Steinbeis, Daniel-Pascal Zorn: Mit Rechten reden. Ein Leitfaden. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2017,
This diagnosis, as severe as it is lucid, comes from three authors associated with the far-right party. alternative for Germany (AfD). The false left is thus an unexpected resource for the extreme right: it prevents it from formulating a social and economic program, it makes the principles of a cancel culture which we see in the USA the Republican states seizing in turn and for their own objectives, just as demagogic.
