I don’t know why I was ignorant of Wesley Yang and his work, but I was and now I’m not. Recently, I started reading his X (Twitter) threads and decided to look him up. He’s an essayist and political commentator currently serving as a columnist for Tablet Magazine and a contributing editor at Esquire. He hosts a Substack blog and podcast named Year Zero.
According to biographical information, Yang rose to prominence in 2008 when he authored an article for n+1 focusing on Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter who murdered 32 people and injured 17 others. (I am sure I read Yang then but never committed the name to memory.) What brings me to make a blog note about Yang is his concept of “successor ideology,” which he introduced in 2019. Yang coined the term to delineate an emerging ideology associated with (what I regard as a faux) left-wing movement in the United States rooted in identity politics. Yang stands in opposition to this ideology, asserting that it threatens to replace traditional liberal values. (Go here for a discussion of the concept.)
Yang’s term captures what I have been blogging about for several years now: an ideological framework prevalent in corporatist and progressive politics currently dominating the United States. This ideology revolves around principles of anti-racism, identity politics, intersectionality, and social justice—what is often referred to as “woke.” As I have been doing in those blog essays, Yang also warns that this ideology is supplanting traditional liberal values such as color blindness, freedom of speech, free inquiry, and pluralism. We see the ideology at work in cancel culture and in diversity, equity, and inclusion programming (see The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI; The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What you Think).
Ed West, writing for the UnHerd, has quoted Yang aptly characterizing successor ideology as an “authoritarian Utopianism that masquerades as liberal humanism while undermining it from within.” This attitude is why successor ideology is functional for corporate state governance, i.e., the New Fascism: it incorporates into the structure of power those who might otherwise resist neoliberalism arrangements. By appealing to the desire of progressives to signal virtue, while exploiting the deep alienation they experience in the context of late capitalism, an estrangement unpinning a profound false consciousness, corporate state elites transform potential enemies into defenders.
In a June 2020 essay in the Intelligencer, in the context of the Black Lives Matter riots, Andrew Sullivan characterizes successor ideology as a new orthodoxy rooted in what fellow journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” Sullivan writes, “Lowery told Times media columnist Ben Smith that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be).” This position conflates objectivity with neutrality and thus becomes a rationalization for propaganda. “And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity?” Sullivan rhetorically wonders. “That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start, that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, ‘the justice system—in fact, the entire American experiment—was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.’”
As I have been showing for many years now, the claim that America is systemically racist, that it’s a white supremacist project with a justice system designed to perpetuate racial inequality, is historically inaccurate. It is a revision of history made to validate tenets of critical race theory (see Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project), a fallacious teaching in legal theory in which individuals are rendered as personifications of abstract racial categories (fallacy of misplaced concreteness), and the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and of chattel slavery, the dismantling of de jure segregation, and the criminalization of institutional discrimination is theorized to function to push white supremacy so deeply into the warp and woof of western society that a species of postmodernist critical theory became necessary to detect it.
(See also The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones; Committing the Crime it Condemns; Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards; What Critical Race Theory Is and Isn’t. Spoiler Alert: It’s Racist and Not Marxist; Not All White People Are Racist.)
freedom and reason 