"Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the earth." For one small creature to move the rest of creation, it would take only a fulcrum and a cosmic lever. Centuries later, stock-market speculators dreamed of parlaying small stakes into great fortunes. That would take only borrowed capital and some brilliant choices: leverage.
Now, in America, small clusters of political adepts sit atop gigantic levers whose tips they've wedged into the national brain.
An extreme case as to the smallness of the interest represented versus the greatness of the lever is the "trans lobby" that has lifted its constituency far above most others in sociopolitical salience. Larger interest groups with at least equally pressing needs for attention have got nothing like the activist network that operates ubiquitously, overbearingly, in service to people who have had a sex change. No lobby has ever succeeded in — or had the undreamt-of effect of — distorting shared reality in so many particulars or at such a fundamental level. It's been only a few years since the cultural Left expanded its standard string of epithets for the oppressors of society from "white male" to "white straight cisgender male"; but soon the radioactivity of the cisgender blighted the male (and female) and even the straight (and gay) in leading-edge public discourse. Then trans orthodoxy slipped its leash and begot non-binary orthodoxy. At this rate, the world in which we all need to function will lapse back, epistemically, into the primordial soup — in honor of a precious few.
A similar case in more condensed form is that of the Palestinian lobby. The activist network itself appears to be smaller and organizationally less substantial (though a study of its funding would be instructive); but it has made the most of its prior standing with the Left, at the same time drawing energy from Israel's recklessness in Gaza, to gain inordinate prominence in US politics. A president of the United States can neither dictate to a determined Israeli government nor abruptly sever ties with it, but American leftists absorbed in the Palestinian cause are nevertheless concentrating their anger on President Biden and other Democrats at the risk of bringing back Donald Trump and his enablers in this year's elections. As usual with activists of the Left, they think more about influence within their own collective than about the benefits of collectively controlling the government. If they prove instrumental in transferring state power to the Right, as they have proved in reviving the ancient scourge of antisemitism, it will be a dramatic consequence of leverage: a modern nation of some 340 million upended by the Palestinian interest.
The greatest case of leverage is the domestic race-based one, the one commonly condensed into the terms DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), CRT (critical race theory), BLM (Black Lives Matter), and anti-racism (meaning remedial neoracism). Here, the interest supposedly represented is larger than in the trans and Palestinian lobbies, though still just a bit over 14% of the adult population. It certainly does not amount to the combined numbers of arguably non-white people, as there is no such interest group either extant or incipient. This lobby, though it may cast its rhetorical net more broadly, is understood to claim representation of black Americans. However, even that claim is extreme. The black Americans envisaged by the small cluster of political adepts atop this lever are the black members of the cluster itself: ideologues who re-imagine the requirements and aspirations of working-class black communities as hankerings to abolish the police, to decriminalize the drug trade, and to normalize academic weakness.
The race lobby gets most of its ideological content from black academics. It gets its strength primarily from white activists and secondarily from a host of everyday white progressives anxious to lend their weight to a social-justice cause. It bestows its benefits on vigilantes, black and white, who gratify themselves by bullying the politically disfavored at DEI sessions, indoctrinating children, shaming students, or laying traps for the unwary wherever people interact. In concept, the work being done is that of "decentering": the truly Archimedean feat of dislodging the biggest part of society from its too-conspicuous position. The requisite fulcrum is the idea of white guilt, compressed into a monolith and held in place by white progressives' earnest team spirit. (In the heyday of #MeToo, progressive men would talk to each other about "taking one for the team" by enduring false accusations of sexual misconduct — which they failed to recognize as indulgent gallantry.)
However, reliance on white progressives' gallant modeling of guilt and repentance is a poor long-term strategy for the race lobby. Not only will it tend to pall on the models themselves, but the greater number of Americans who have been direct or indirect objects of the bullying, indoctrination, shaming, and trapping will lose patience. Unlike the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, which won hearts and minds by assailing unnatural barriers, the race lobby will lose them by unnaturally assailing comity. That other movement was a destined bid for justice. This one is an opportunistic scheme.
The opportunism is not solely a matter of picking up political influence in a seller's market for specious arguments (that nothing has really changed since the Jim Crow era, that white people and all their works are inherently racist, that past discrimination calls for present discrimination). The group at the public center of the race lobby, which might have risen above common special-interest activism, proceeded to sink below it. At first, the words "Black Lives Matter" were readily understood as a statement, a declaration of truth around which all people of goodwill could rally. Opinion surveys showed that a large majority of Americans responded favorably to those words. But by the third year of the "racial reckoning" that began with the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police, that response had faded markedly. In the meantime, the words had hardened into a brand fraught with alienating associations; particularly the news that a flood of donations to the Black Lives Matter organization had benefited insiders even as some local chapters and families of police-violence victims complained of not receiving promised funds. Under the individual control of one remaining BLM founder, Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter Network Foundation spent nearly $6,000,000 on a 6,500-square-foot house, which it called both a campus for (apparently rare) content-production activities and a safehouse for persecuted activists. Cullors nevertheless posted videos of herself making private use of the house: cooking in its kitchen, observing the first anniversary of George Floyd's death — the end of a banner year for fund-raising — with Champagne. She resigned from the organization soon after that anniversary. Her personal acquisition of luxurious properties along the way would perhaps be no one's business but hers if her journey from working-class Marxist to purchaser of mansions made more sense.
Meanwhile, variously-affiliated activists in the Black Lives Matter movement and the greater race lobby have given themselves to the Omnicause (race, climate, Palestine, what-have-you) with the predictable result that they're seen to vanish into the throng of a progressive bazaar rather than stand as a rallying-point for racial justice. Now they must expect trust and support only from people who subscribe to all their causes instead of the larger set who subscribed to their original one. Full trust and steadfast support become unlikely in any case, since a unifying Omnicause implies commerce in some ulterior object or objects — whether socialism or anarchism or habitual activism. Grand though the race lobby is, it will disintegrate because its moral currency is bogus.
But nothing could be more certain to disintegrate than the cloud of casual epiphanies that has accumulated in the sex-and-gender space: that sex is not binary; that there's no such thing as biological sex, anyway; that a declaration of altered gender is sufficient to make it so. Among the people touting this ad hoc successor to fundamental knowledge, there's probably not one who would bet anything of value on its survival beyond the typical lifespan of a sociopolitical fad: about three years. As a challenge to established language and meaning, it's feckless. As a challenge to established science, it's in a class with Lysenkoism. This too shall pass, but not harmlessly.
The whole delirious season of leverage shall pass. And then what? If it has ended with a sigh of exhaustion, America may patiently sort out the visions from the hubris and apply bits of them to its historical work in progress. But what if it has ended with a snap? What if it has culminated in unendurable strain on a majority that knows itself to be wronged? The activist minority that yesterday propagated its will through the mass of the center-left may today find itself alone at the peak of ambition — suddenly unsupported, doomed to tumble into the maw of a reactionary beast. Sitting atop a gigantic political lever is a lot like riding a tiger.
