Intersectionality is in effect a form of a human utopia movement, with the idea being that all of the justice movements can team up together to achieve basic rights. But this far-left movement never accepted animal rights as part of its struggle. Moreover, a human utopia movement is by definition a human-first movement. It places humans ahead of animals, as well as making animal rights conditional on the success of the utopia movement. Lastly, when the far-left utopia movement takes a hit, animal rights will inevitably also take a hit alongside it. Our path to political victory should be to build-up enough support for animal rights within the entire political spectrum.
CHARLES HORN: Historically speaking, every modern justice movement obtained rights in stages. There was a major struggle to achieve basic rights, which was then followed by continued work for improvements toward full equality. There was never an all-at-once utopia.
But then intersectionality came along with people making the argument that there is only one correct way forward for all justice movements. If you didn’t toe the line with all the new far left dogma being foisted on you, you were tarred as a bigot doing “white feminism” or “white veganism” and the like.
Intersectionality was in effect a form of human utopia movement, with the idea being that all of the justice movements could team up together, overthrow the system, and achieve their goals once and for all. While that movement never accepted animal rights as part of its struggle (in fact, many intersectional activists routinely used their far left dogma in a way to argue for anti-vegan positions), all justice movements, including vegan ones, were expected to fall in line or else be tarred as racist, sexist, and every other bigot word in the book…
From an animal rights perspective, there was also another obvious flaw — namely, that basic rights is clearly always going to be achieved way before utopia. So a human utopia movement is by definition a human-first movement placing human utopia ahead of even basic rights for animals.
Sure, there were animal rights groups that rejected far left dogma from the start, but they were immediately dismissed as far right, fascists, and Nazis for taking such a position. The far left dogma held sway because it positioned itself as having the one true moral authority…
Because animal rights became so associated with the far left, animal rights is inevitably going to take a hit alongside the far left. To what degree, I don’t think anyone knows yet, but because animal rights is not an already established justice movement, it’s clearly going to get hit more than established movements that have already progressed beyond the political left and right.
It’s even possible that we may have seen this cost in action already in the Sonoma County legal case that Wayne Hsiung recently lost. Wayne recently wrote about the possible reasons why he was found guilty even though previous cases returned a not guilty verdict. I submit there’s a possible explanation he missed — namely that after October 7th, many jurors are no longer willing to cut activists as much slack, as they now associate the far left with dangerous and violent psychotic terrorist supporters.
In terms of our day to day, the cost we will likely see is that as long as animal rights continues to be associated with the far left, animal rights arguments will often be reflexively dismissed without having to examine them further…
Animal rights desperately needs the power of justice words to make its case, but good luck trying to use these words with their full legitimate power for animal rights when the far left has illegitimately systematically devalued them into near impotence…
It was always a very bad idea to make basic animal rights conditional on the success of a human utopia movement. The effort should always have been to grow animal rights within the entire political spectrum, from the left, to the center, to the right, even while individuals disagree amongst themselves on many other issues. Past human rights movements never tried to wall themselves in by trying to force everyone to believe a whole set of other things, some good, and some absolute rubbish.
Our path to political victory is not to work towards the far left becoming the majority of the voting population. It’s to build up enough support for animal rights within the entire political spectrum. SOURCE…
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