When I was a college student, I attended a lecture by political science prof, Ted Lowi, who explained why interest group politics would prevail in the future. While people have diverse views in individual political issues, both across the board and internally, most of us have one issue that dominates our political decision making. Maybe it’s climate change. Maybe it’s gun control. Maybe it’s abortion. Maybe it’s the economy, stupid.

A candidate for office who aligns with our position on our most important issue gets our vote. And if enough people agree with us about our position on our most important issue, it could prove sufficient to get that candidate elected. It may be that we agree with the candidate on other issues or not. Nobody’s perfect.

But as voters coalesced around their dominant issue, even if it meant accepting that an elected official would be less than great on other, less important, issues, they created an interest group that could win elections and thus see their goal achieved, even if it meant letting lesser goals fall to the wayside.

As Zaid Jilani explains, that’s no longer true.

Recently, Sunrise DC, the Washington, D.C.-based affiliate of the youth-led environmentalist organization, found itself in the middle of a controversy few would have imagined just a few years prior.

The activists at the organization decided to pull out of a rally advocating for voting rights legislation because of the presence of what it called “Zionist organizations,” pointing to three Jewish American groups whose views on the Israel-Palestine conflict didn’t align with those of the young progressives who run Sunrise DC.

The move set off a political fracas that ended with Sunrise DC apologizing for singling out the Jewish organizations for their position on Israel, admitting that other organizations also taking part in the rally had similar positions on the Middle East. But they reaffirmed their belief that Zionism is an “ideology that has led to Palestinians being violently pushed out of their homes since 1948,” writing that “we stand with Palestine and those who join in solidarity.”

In other words, your foremost concern may be climate change, which should, in a semi-rational world, cause you to embrace others for whom climate change is also their dominant concern and agree with your cause. Strength in numbers. But Sunrise DC would rather shun groups that were fully aligned with their environmental position not because they weren’t hard and fast allies on climate change, but because they simultaneously didn’t support Palestinians.

Palestinians? What, you may wonder, does supporting Palestinians (at the expense of Israel and possibly Jewish people according to what lies they tell themselves) have to do with “climate justice”?

Over the past few years, mainstream progressive activist organizations have increasingly adopted worldviews that insist on assuming a link between seemingly distant social and political issues. In this mindset, you can’t stand for just one issue, you have to embrace them all.

If you’re reasonably adept at making tenuous connections based on inferential leaps and sophist gymnastics, it’s possible to convince yourself there is a connection between environmentalism and Palestinians.

It’s not as if this hasn’t been happening for a while. Remember the Chicago Dyke March, where marchers with a Jewish star on their rainbow flags were kicked out? It’s not that they weren’t sufficiently supportive of lesbians, but that the Jewish star offended those who were against Zionism. Can Jews not be dykes? Does Zionism have anything to do with sexual orientation? Of course not, and yet out they went, because it wasn’t good enough for supporters of LGBTQ+ to be supporters of gay rights. They had to be supporters of Palestinian rights as well, irony aside.

This turns Ted Lowi’s theory of single interest groups dictating politics on its head.

But the problem with a political organization adopting the intersectional, whole-hog progressive approach is that it could undermine the organization’s primary goals. The controversy with Sunrise DC is an example. The organization is dedicated to saving the planet, but found itself in a days-long dispute over the Middle East that likely divided its membership—the national organization distanced itself from the local group—and did nothing to battle climate change.

While it might make the progressive operatives who run these organizations feel good to say they’re on the cutting-edge of every single issue, it also raises the barrier to entry to potential allies. Someone who wants to get involved with Sunrise has to be comfortable not just with advocating for renewable energies, but also for a very specific, hard-left position on the Middle East conflict. That’s a litmus test that will only narrow the potential constituency for an organization, not widen it, as the intersectional activists had hoped.

When a group dedicated to “saving the planet” would rather let the planet boil than accept support from groups that aren’t pro-Palestinian, an entirely unrelated issue, they not only squander their resources, time and focus, but deliberately dilute their power on their primary issue for the sake of wholly unrelated collateral issues, for which their supporters may not have any devotion. And, indeed, their supporters may very much disagree.

For a while now, the coterie of progressive causes has focused on its own issue, one of creating an intersectional bundle of positions that are grounded in good and evil that must be achieved by whatever means necessary, principle be damned. You can’t be a participant in gay rights if you aren’t in favor of Palestinian rights as well, not to mention being a Kendian anti-racist, pin your pronouns to your name and share the shower with a trans person. No matter how many Hispanic people abhor the new word their white saviors bestowed upon them against their will, you must call them Latinx to prove your worthiness to care about the environment.

If we view this progressive orthodoxy as a single cause of intersectional interests, then perhaps Ted Lowi’s point remains correct, that this is just the mission creep of interest group politics. But this ideological bundle, what Jilani calls “whole hog,” rejects the notion that we each have a discrete concern that dominates our political views, and reflects instead the willingness of a certain cohort of the polity to subjugate their primary interest to the broad array of positions with which they aren’t really concerned or don’t necessarily agree to be allowed into the club. The option is accept the bundle or be exiled from the tribe. Ted Lowi, may he rest in peace, was wrong.