“It was traumatizing,” said Juniper, age 19. “It was sort of a personal attack, or at least it felt that way.”
“It really is their 9/11,” said Laila, 26. “Not that I’m attempting in any way to equate the loss of so many precious lives to an individual that was elected to office.”
Angry and anguished over Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, the Zillennials — leftist millennial and Generation Z activists — continue to fuel the anti-Trump resistance.
And they just might get him re-elected in 2020.
That’s because their ideology of intersectionality, and its full-frontal attack on moderation and compromise in American politics, “is a gift to Trump and those who continue to support him,” writes Robby Soave in “Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump” (All Points Books), out Tuesday.
Soave spoke to dozens of young activists to paint a sprawling portrait of the political unrest that Trump’s presidential campaign set ablaze. Intersectionality, he found, is at the heart of leftist movements from antifa to #MeToo to Black Lives Matter.
Intersectionalism holds that all types of oppression in American society are linked to one another and that they “stack”: that is, they are exponentially worse for those who experience more categories of discrimination. As Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza tells Soave, “I’m uniquely discriminated against. I uniquely experience oppression based on standing at the intersection of race and gender.”
Because all types of discrimination — from racism to transphobia, from economic inequality to “ableism” — are linked, an intersectional activist is expected to combat them with equal fervor.
“I’m not necessarily criticizing the idea of intersectionalism. In a sense it’s kind of true,” Soave told The Post. But in practice, “it makes it hard to get people on board to advance a cause when you say, ‘We don’t want you unless you agree to fight all the oppressions.” Someone might agree about the need to fight racism but not be ready for all of the things the activist left demands, like boycotting Israel or accepting their ideas on transgender identity.”
“The way they demand everyone to want all of them immediately is a very self-defeating framework,” Soave said.
That inflexibility causes rifts that weaken potential alliances within the coalition — as in this month’s DC Dyke March in Washington, when organizers ordered Jewish lesbians not to carry pro-Israel symbols as a signal of solidarity with the parade’s much more oppressed Palestinian participants.
“It’s a tyranny of the most victimized,” Soave said. “The more categories of oppression you can claim, the more authority you have.”
It also spells trouble for every one of the Democrats’ 24 declared candidates, because the very qualities that could allow them to appeal to a broad swath of voters in the general election make a politician anathema to the intersectional left.
“Take former Vice President Joe Biden. He’s kind of a regular, traditional Democrat, well-liked in ‘real America,’ ” Soave said. “But he is absolutely hated by the very woke, the young intersectional progressives. For them, he is a failure on virtually every level.”
Biden’s flailing flip-flop on federal funding for abortion two weeks ago was an attempt to ingratiate himself with several victim groups, including feminists and the poor. It won’t be the last ideological somersault he’ll have to perform to please intersectional activists, insiders said.
And the rest of the field will have to do the same.
‘In most of the country, the party is dominated by moderate Democrats who are not on board with that Democratic Socialist agenda’
“Already, young Democrats’ support is split along intersectional lines,” Soave said.
“Zillennial activists who are most concerned about economic inequality are supporting Bernie Sanders and to some extent Elizabeth Warren, the fourth-wave feminists are split up among the female candidates and so on.”
The effort to connect with Zillennials is driving some White House hopefuls to parrot the language of the young and woke. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) posted a tweet last December — “Our future is: Female / Intersectional” — that drew relentless mockery online. This month, she perplexed an audience of Iowans at her Fox News town hall with a lecture on the topic.
“So, intersectionality is the same thing about inclusivity,” Gillibrand said. “Please understand that our strength is in our diversity.”
“These candidates are trying to speak the language of intersectionality in a way that’s not going to fool any young person,” Soave said. “It’s embarrassing — so forced, so awkward and inauthentic.”
Their messaging attempts are in stark contrast to the slang-filled, emoji-laden tweets and stream-of-consciousness livestreams of actual Zillennials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx/Queens).
“The fun of the 2020 campaign will be watching these people make their desperate, doomed efforts to appear to speak the language of intersectionality to be in step with what the young activists care about right now,” Soave said.
None of the current crop of candidates has shown signs of being the Democrats’ next Barack Obama — a politician bold enough to inspire young people but moderate-sounding enough to capture the mainstream.
“That’s a hard line to walk,” Soave said. “But in fairness, he didn’t have intersectionality to deal with.”
Soave described the fight for gay marriage as “the last movement before intersectionality took over the left.”
“In that case, liberals were trying to bring conservative America on board and convince them of this one issue, that it was about equality,” Soave said. “The argument was tailored to bring in the maximum amount of people. And it completely worked.”
To today’s intersectional activists, that kind of pragmatism would be traitorous.
A willingness to tolerate those with differing views, once seen as a positive good in all corners of American society, is condemned by the Zillennial left. Many of the activists Soave interviewed believe that speech that offends them should be — or already is — illegal.
“Free speech is allowing people to express themselves in a way that doesn’t put other people down,” said Rose, 17, a demonstrator Soave spoke to at a Washington, DC, rally in 2017. “It doesn’t oppress people and damage our society.”
“Our country’s free-speech amendment says, ‘free speech except for hate speech,’ ” agreed Jessica, a fellow student protester — a blithe rewrite of the First Amendment, which makes no such exception.
“Reflexive opposition to speech is perhaps the most noticeable quirk of the new left,” Soave writes — a potentially ominous sign for the health of America’s civil liberties.
Large numbers of young Americans see free expression as merely a means to an end, not as a positive good in and of itself, and something that authorities can and should regulate. A 2016 Knight Foundation survey found that 69 percent of college students favored bans of “intentionally offensive” language on campus. According to a 2017 Cato Institute study, 60 percent of Americans under age 30 believe that hate speech constitutes violence.
The real-world ramifications of those beliefs are obvious on college campuses. “I think that this activism has become an intimidation, a tactic of terror . . . that leaves administrators very frightened,” defense attorney Andrew Miltenberg tells Soave.
‘These candidates are trying to speak the language of intersectionality in a way that’s not going to fool any young person’
What began in 2011 as a crackdown on campus rape, driven by the Obama administration’s reinterpretation of the education nondiscrimination law known as Title IX, was quickly seized as a weapon by activists intent on shutting down ideas they found offensive.
In one such case, Northwestern University students filed a formal Title IX complaint against a professor for publishing an essay that criticized Title IX — a Kafkaesque charge that contributed to a chilling effect throughout academia.
“If activists can file a speech complaint because a professor is talking about uncomfortable subjects, professors start avoiding these conversations altogether,” Soave said. “We’re at the point where we have law professors refusing to teach sexual-assault law for fear that students will say they have been triggered. That is going backwards on all our progress.”
And there’s evidence that millennials are not leaving those lessons behind once they graduate.
“Their attitude is, ‘we will not change, the world will change to fit us,’ ” Soave said. “So those values are getting taken off the campus and into the workplace. And it only takes a few to radicalize the policies of the institution.”
But despite their widening influence, Zillennial activists are not a majority within the millennial and Gen Z cohorts.
“In fact, it’s striking how few they are but how large the effect they are having on our cultural and political dialogue,” Soave said. “They are very good at making it seem like they speak for everyone; very good at representing their demands as universal.
“They are a radical fringe, but they’re getting their way with their ability to control the conversation.”
But shouting down conservatives on campus and dominating Twitter discourse may not translate into a White House win in 2020. Many of the most vocal Zillennial activists reserve their harshest criticism for the Democratic Party’s neoliberals — mainstream Dems like Hillary Clinton who think capitalism should be regulated, not destroyed. Feeling “almost vindicated by Hillary’s defeat,” Soave writes, their goal during this primary season is to push their party as far left as they possibly can.
But while that strategy has paid off for the activists in deep-blue districts like AOC’s, party leaders doubt the same could work in the purple and red states that are needed to win the White House.
“In most of the country, the party is dominated by moderate Democrats who are not on board with that Democratic Socialist agenda,” Soave said.
And if Zillennials can’t get the candidate they want? They may not turn out to vote at all. “Biden and other moderate Dems’ … lack of progressive bona fides make them just another sad symptom of everything that’s wrong with the world,” Soave said. “Most Democratic candidates are seen as “not so much better than Trump that it’s worth the effort.”
In other words, Zillennials would rather risk a second Trump term than compromise the intersectional principles they hold so dear.
World War Z
Why the Dems are having so much trouble winning Zillennial support
Joe Biden
Biden holds a forbidding lead in the early polling, but nominating him will be a deal-breaker for Zillennial activists, despise his bipartisan hopes. “He’s playing patty-cake with Republicans, and they are punching him in the face,” complained Ana Kasparian, from left-wing news commentary program The Young Turks, last week.
Bernie Sanders
While he retains many rabid Zillennial fans, Sanders has refused to join the intersectional bandwagon. “Woke activists more animated by sex and race issues find his monomaniacal focus on class to be off-putting,” Soave says.
Elizabeth Warren
Warren’s race- and gender-focused rhetoric has boosted her progressive support recently. “If she captures the nomination, it will be a good sign that the new left is winning the war for the Democratic Party’s soul,” Soave says. But her tin ear for youth speak (“Hold on a sec, I’m gonna get me a beer.”) has made some Zillennial voters cringe.
Pete Buttigieg
The party’s rising star is fluent in the language of intersectionality: His college-professor father helped develop its underlying theory. But that’s not enough for the “wokest of the woke,” who believe that being gay is no longer a category of oppression for white males. “They feel he isn’t radical or transgressive enough to deserve their support,” says Soave.
Kamala Harris
As a woman of color and the daughter of immigrants, Harris ticks off multiple identity boxes, which should make her a Zillennial favorite. But her past as a tough-on-crime prosecutor horrifies progressives, who have made criminal-justice reform a top priority.