The Rise Of The Left's 'Monocause'

Intersectionality Was Never Supposed To Mean This

In 2013, I covered a rally organized by the progressive activist group New York Communities For Change held in support of an airport workers’ strike at JFK Airport. The organizer leading the rally showed up wearing an “End Stop and Frisk” button and used her rally speech to dovetail into that issue. One of the striking workers cut her off during the speech and complained about her switching topics. The organizer tried, unsuccessfully, to explain how the issues were related. The worker shook his head and left the rally with several other strikers. The press pool followed the workers to interview them and the New York Post ran an unflattering story the next day about the rally.

This anecdote came up last week in a discussion with a friend of mine, who worked in the same newsroom as me before being inspired by Occupy Wall Street to leave journalism for activism. She sent me a screenshot of a rally flyer reading “Queers For Palestinian Liberation,” and another connecting the Palestine cause with COVID-19. She prefaced the texts with a simple question:

“Are they serious? LOL”

Then, over the weekend, in response to a Huffington Post article about how some reproductive rights activists are angry with Biden over Gaza, the Abortion Fund of Ohio, a pro-choice group that helps raise funds to pay for abortions and reproductive care tweeted its support for Palestine and called it a “reproductive rights issue.” The statement invoked confusion and laughter among people who followed them, and led to a discussion about the failure of intersectionality and the rise of what is termed the “Monocause”

Intersectionality is a core tenant of the social justice movement. It’s the idea that various causes are related and interact with each other. There is a lot of truth to that. I have always thought that racism is a virus that infects every problem in this country. It is why we have such terrible income inequality – because policies that would reduce it could disproportionality benefit people of color. It is why we have a housing shortage – because communities became insular and did not want to build housing out of fear that it would invite racial minorities. It is why our transportation system sucks; transit is for the poor people and minorities; don’t build it and minorities won’t come. Ask anyone who lived in New York City before 1990 what a “two-fare zone” was. Intersectionality was about recognizing that type of connection and using that understanding to formulate ways to fix those problems.

Progressives today however have taken the concept of Intersectionality and bastardized it into the “Monocause.” Activist groups who focus on specific issues, whether it be the climate, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, pro-labor policies, or immigrant rights, all must come together and support whatever the current “thing” is, even if it’s completely unrelated to or even clashes with what their focus is. There’s some logic to it. You can see how they would think that gathering like-minded groups into a coalition to increase numbers and overwhelm the opposition would make sense. The problem is that people who support one issue may not necessarily support another, like the airport workers in 2013.

The current “Monocause” is the belief that America and its allies in the West are inherently evil because they are wealthy nations full of white people who once colonized the world and uphold a Capitalist economic system. It further states that any part of the world that consists of a population that is black or brown or a threat to American interests is righteous, no matter how regressive their domestic policies are.

This “Monocause” is currently manifesting itself in the progressive response to the Israel-Hamas War. Israel is the proxy for the evil colonialist capitalist West, and Palestinians are the proxy for the collectivist socialist revolutionaries.

What gets lost is that Israel, despite being an ally of the “evil” West, is the only country in the Middle East that has any kind of policies progressives want, both on the social justice side (abortion is legal, as is LGBTQ rights) and economic (Israel has universal healthcare and strong labor protections). Arab countries and Palestine don’t have any of those things nor have an intention of doing them. In the Arab world, only Jordan decriminalized homosexuality, and no Muslim country sanctions same-sex unions. Abortion and women’s rights are highly restricted practically everywhere in the Muslim world. Arab countries have oppressive labor policies and some even still allow slavery.

Israelis are far more progressive on these issues than Palestinians. We should be honest about that regardless of how we feel about the conflict. Progressives demand swift blunt action by the Biden administration to restore abortion rights and other civil rights in red states but seem fine with Arab women having the same rights as or fewer rights than women in Texas. It is because their governing entities are made up of brown people who they perceive as allies in the “Monocause.”

That reproductive rights groups are suddenly concerned about women’s health in Gaza because of the war is as perplexing as it is disingenuous. They didn’t care that every Arab country has stricter abortion laws than 35 American states even post-Dobbs. They didn’t care much about Palestinian reproductive rights before October 7th, when many women in Gaza were being smuggled into Israel for care because abortion was illegal unless the woman’s life was in jeopardy, and only then if her closest male relative and two male doctors agreed. They didn’t care much about women struggling to access reproductive care during the civil war in Syria, after the invasion of Ukraine, or in the refugee camps in China and Myanmar. They don’t give more than a passing mention of the mutilation of women in tribal areas of sub-Saharan Africa or the rape and abuse of migrant workers in the Gulf States. No abortion rights group tweeted “No justice until we free Syria” in 2016, or “no justice until we free Ukraine” in 2022. Why were these issues such low priorities at the time, but right now everything must be about Gaza?

Today, you have progressive organizations marching in support of the Houthis in Yemen, a group that brought back slavery, child sex trafficking, and other repressive policies, simply because they are against Israel. Progressives who call themselves social justice warriors are siding with Iran, a regime that hangs women and gay men from cranes in public squares, simply because they hate Israel, a country that allows women to make their own reproductive choices, has single-payer healthcare and allows LGBTQ people to live openly.

This is not what intersectionality was supposed to mean, but I suppose this is why it was always doomed as a concept. What do you do when two marginalized groups clash? The progressive response seems to be to default against the side they think is closest to “whiteness” or “capitalism.” In this case, it’s Israel.

Much of this is good old-fashioned anti-semitism. For centuries, Jews have been a convenient scapegoat for every radical movement’s failures. However, Progressives today forgive anti-progressive actions by governments outside the West. It doesn’t matter if women or LGBTQ people have rights in Gaza under Hamas, or in any Muslim or African country. The primary problem now is Israel is a “settler-colonial ethnostate” that “serves as an oppressive colonial outpost for the evil corporatist American regime.” Israelis are supposed to sacrifice not only their nation, but the progressive policies their country enacted, to return the land to Arabs and live under the rule of a group that rejects progressive ideals. This is what people like so-called “progressive” Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan openly support.

Progressives worry that focusing on the human rights abuses and anti-progressive policies of black and brown and non-West societies will validate the argument that the West is superior on the issues, and the current “Monocause” doesn't allow for that.

October 7th was such a humiliating event for progressives because a group they feel amity toward – despite them being against what progressives stand for – committed atrocities against a group that believes in more of the same ideals they do, but progressives dislike. Progressives needed to shift the focus away from what Hamas did, so they made Gaza their sole “purpose” in the past four and a half months. It was “all hands on deck” to shift the narrative. Progressives need “the people” to be on their side for them to feel validated. Not to win elections, which they don’t care much about, but just for their sense of self-worth. To do that you must drive home a narrative, hard, and swing public opinion to your side, and the only way you can do that is via the “Monocause.”

Israel made it fairly easy by responding to the attack brutally, but the fact that Israel had to respond at all gives them a benefit of the doubt that they’ll never really be able to lose no matter how many times progressives scream “GENOCIDE!” It’s going to be incredibly difficult for anti-Zionists to reboot the cause again. History will likely write this period off as an extremely sad and tragic chapter in the Middle East that was triggered solely by the actions of Hamas.