In defence of The Omnicause

“The Omnicause” is a popular term of derision in right-wing newspapers. Josh Glancy explains:

Modern progressivism often makes the mistake of wrapping everything up into a single omnicause: trans rights are climate rights are Palestinian rights are human rights. It’s a narrow and reductive way of seeing the world that often detracts from the individual causes.

Glancy once wrote that “what looks like ‘apartheid’ keeps Israel secure”. So I doubt he cares about Palestinian rights. But I believe him when he says he wants these to stay as “individual causes.” Divided people are easier to dominate.

What the right mockingly label “The Omnicause”, the left simply call solidarity. Solidarity has achieved amazing things: from gay liberation to the defeat of South African apartheid.

So, why do the right mock the joined-up thinking of the left? One reason is that many of them sincerely see the world this way. They aren’t class conscious and they don’t think in terms of systems and outcomes. Because of this, they fail to see that different identity groups frequently share common interests.

Let's compare solidarity on the left with the limited, transactional allyship of the right. Here’s anti-racist organiser Eric Ward:

What I learned when trying to understand White nationalists and their ideas, was that antisemitism was the lynchpin of the White nationalist belief system. That within this ideological matrix, Jews—despite and indeed because of the fact that they often read as White—are a different, unassimilable, enemy race that must be exposed, defeated, and ultimately eliminated. Antisemitism, I discovered, is a particular and potent form of racism so central to White supremacy that Black people would not win our freedom without tearing it down.

And here’s right-wing activist Michelle Rosenberg expressing her disappointment over the lack of black support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza:

Jews went to prison for participating in Freedom Rides. Jews helped establish the NAACP. Jews marched with Black Lives Matter. We will remember the silence from the black community. We won’t forget.

Ward understands that oppressions overlap. He seeks safety through solidarity. Rosenberg, on the other hand, views allyship as a transaction. She’s accumulated goodwill, and now she’s cashing it in. Her argument, echoed by other pro-Israel campaigners, was memorably mocked by comedian Matt Lieb:

We marched with you against Jim Crow. We marched with you against police brutality. And we marched with you against mass incarceration. All we ask in return is for you to let Israel do Jim Crow, police brutality and mass incarceration to Palestinians.

Right-wingers also push “The Omnicause” attack line to divide their opponents. They are not shy about this. The Conservatives stir up racial tensions between Hindus and Muslims to win Hindu votes. They also regularly commission internal polling on trans rights. Their stated aim is to turn working class people against trans folks in Labour constituencies.

To see how right-wing opposition to joined-up thinking works, let’s look at Josh Glancy again. He scolded Labour MP Clive Lewis for pointing out a link between “the daily inhumanity being meted out to Palestinians and rising Islamophobia in the UK”. Here’s Glancy:

Lewis’s argument, I think, is that the brutality of Israel’s war is cheapening our sense of Muslim life, thus making it easier to imagine burning a migrant hotel or stoning a mosque. Is there any truth in this? It feels like an almighty stretch to me.

Glancy is wrong. It’s common sense that seeing Israel treat Muslims poorly with no consequences fuels bigotry in our country. But we needn’t rely on mere socio-psychological inference. Anti-Palestinian prejudice is directly linked to last summer’s race riots.

After the inciting attack, misinformation spread quickly. It falsely claimed that the killer was a Palestinian immigrant. This claim reached 2.4 million people on Twitter alone. This was far from the only connection between the rioters and pro-Israel campaigners.

These connections didn’t stop Glancy. He suggested that Lewis argument could “easily become antisemitic” and, strangely, compared him to Jack the Ripper. Glancy wasn’t alone in monstering Lewis. The right’s thinking may be disjointed but, thanks to social media echo chambers and private group chats, their smear campaigns aren’t.

Glancy argues that Palestinian rights aren’t connected to trans rights. He then undermines his own argument by taking a swipe at “someone who could have male chromosomes winning a boxing gold medal by punching a bunch of women”. He wants to drive us apart but, whenever he opens his mouth, he demonstrates that we share an enemy.

The bottom line is that bigotries do overlap and reinforce one another. Recognising that doesn’t “detract from the individual causes” as Glancy would have you believe. It helps us build coalitions to overcome them.

Here’s another example: right-wingers say that “any parallel between immigrant issues and the black civil rights movement is weak.” But today's laws that attack immigrants grew out of the Fugitive Slave Acts. The right also decry the “dangers of mass immigration for women.” But immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than natives. And the real emerging threat is men impersonating ICE agents in order to kidnap women. Migrant rights, it turns out, are civil rights, and are women’s rights.

As well as fostering solidarity, “omni-causal” thinking also encourages critical thought. It draws out connections, and places events in their wider historical context. Let’s look at how the podcast Blowback uses an omni-causal lens to contextualise a news story: the U.S. sending a fleet of helicopters to Ukraine.

40 years ago the US sent billions of dollars of weapons to Islamic warriors fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. It now sends Russian made helicopters that it purchased to kill Islamic warriors fighting Americans in Afghanistan to kill Russians in a proxy war in Ukraine.

The Cold War is connected to The War on Terror, which is connected to the Russo-Ukrainian War. It’s textbook omnicause. And, unlike most reporting on these conflicts, it makes a compelling case for restraint. By contrast, today’s warmongers explicitly warn against the evils of contextualization.

Right wingers will poke fun at you for it, but omni-causal thinking is how we overcome overlapping oppressions, defeat the politics of division and fear, and learn from history.