But now it has gotten out of control, and blacks and other minorities have started to realize the extent to which they were being used as a tool of somebody else’s self-validation. So white “liberals” who thought the system was rigged to make them look like the good guys are now finding themselves cast on the wrong side in an ever-intensifying struggle over who gets to control the fount of moral authority that is racial politics.

Andrew Sullivan notices this and writes an interesting dissection of “intersectionality.” This is the new mechanism for putting white lefties in their place and subordinating them to the proper victim groups. Sullivan sums it up as “a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity—such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc.—but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power.” In other words, it’s the Victimhood Olympics, in which the big prize of supreme moral authority goes to the person who belongs to the greatest number of intersecting victim groups.

Sullivan points out the most disturbing part about this religion: it has no paradise, no end point it is striving to reach. It is a worldview with no eschaton to immanentize. “The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death. It’s Marx without the final total liberation.”

For the “intersectional” left, racial conflict is not a means to some greater end. It is the end.