This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Speaker 1: From the Opinion Pages of the Wall Street Journal. This is Free Expression with Gerry Baker.
Gerard Baker: Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Gerry Baker, from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. We’re delighted you’re listening to this podcast. If you enjoy it, please be sure to subscribe at iTunes, Spotify, and elsewhere. Also, please be kind enough to leave us a favorable review. At the Journal’s Editorial page, we believe strongly in Free Expression and each week on this podcast, we explore in depth and candor issues of topical and broader interest. We speak in depth to people who are leading figures in their field, practitioners, experts, commentators, to give us all a better understanding of the major issues of our times. This week, I’m pleased to say my guess is Wesley Yang, author, essayist, and commentator.
Wesley was born to Korean American parents who were refugees from the Korean War. He’s written extensively about modern American politics and culture and he’s emerged as one of the most articulate and thoughtful critics of the prevailing progressive orthodoxy that dominates much of America’s public discourse in universities, the media, culture, and elsewhere. In 2019, he came up with the term successor ideology to describe this orthodoxy and it’s a phrase that’s caught on widely. It neatly captures I think how the emphasis on the ideals and values of identity politics, social justice, anti-racism, and all the other progressive causes have been widely adopted by thought leaders in our society in such a way that they’ve steadily replaced much of what we knew of as liberalism, classical or modern liberalism, as the dominant political ideology.
Wesley’s also written at length about the experience of Asian Americans in the United States, including a very influential essay about the young man responsible for the mass shooting at Virginia Tech University in 2007 that killed 32 people. This and other essays were included in his book, The Souls of Yellow Folk, which was published in 2018. He writes regularly for The Tablet and other publications. Of course, he has a podcast like all of us and he joins me now. Wesley Yang, thanks very much for joining me.
Wesley Yang: Thanks for having me.
Gerard Baker: So I want to talk about many things with you, but let’s start, as we’ve all been trying to grapple with the political and cultural changes, the broad, wider, top level political and cultural changes that we’ve been seeing in this country and indeed in some extent in much of the West in the last decade or so, and I do think your term successor ideology captures it extraordinarily well, again, these ideals of social justice, anti-racism, identity politics around gender and sexuality, and all of this, the way in which these have become the dominant themes of so much of our political discourse, but also increasingly the source of the political axes in our political life that is a dividing line now. We used to divide along economic and class lines and now we seem to divide on these broader ideological lines.
And the other thing, of course, you identify about this very well and you call it the successor ideology I think because it seems to usurp traditional liberalism, the idea in its most simplistic form the ideas of freedom of speech and freedom of expression and all of the things that we understood to be associated with liberal democracy, and instead we now have this coercive authoritarianism. You’ve described it as an authoritarian utopianism. Can we start off by you just explaining what you mean? I’ve crudely summarized it, but tell us what this successor ideology is and how it manifests itself in our political discourse now.
Wesley Yang: Sure. There’s a sense in which every ideology is a successor ideology in the sense that it is seeking to replace something that comes before it. So Marxism was a successor ideology, which held that the promises of freedom and equality, that liberalism could not be actually fulfilled within the framework of the political economy of the 19th Century. And it held that there needed to be a transformation, an end to the private ownership of the means of production in order for liberalism to actually fulfill itself. What I call the successor ideology today refers to its amorphousness and its diffuseness because it consists of a variety of different discourses that meet and converge around a simple principle, which is that society is a matrix of interlocking oppressions of the male, of the female, of the white over the Black, of the straight over the gay, of the cisgendered over the transgendered.
And that the purpose of those of us who want to fulfill the promises of freedom and equality contained with liberalism will in fact have to engage in a process of transforming the world on a variety of different levels. But most significantly among them, there is an idea that the way in which we arrive at this pervasive domination of these various categories of the white over the Black and the white over the non-white, of the male over the female, and so on is through a remaking of the language and a remaking of the culture. And so this is an idea that emerged within the left academy in the late 1990s and it proceeded from the assumption that we are all involved in a vast socialization, that at a collective and individual level embeds within us a series of biases that account for the fact, ultimately, that we arrive at what we can observe to be group based, that we can measure various group disparities and outcomes, that in themselves prove the fact that we continue to live in white supremacy, we continue to live in patriarchy.
So 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the enormous expansion of the federal government in order to get rid of what remained of the Jim Crow state, fight segregation, engage in many decades of affirmative action on behalf of non-white minorities, the premise is that we remain within white supremacy 50 years after a series of legal reforms that ended what remained of formal patriarchy in America. I mean, there are people who are still alive today, women who needed to have a male relative sign for their credit card, and in many cases women did not have legal rights to own property within a marriage. That was held separately. There was a process of legal reform that lasted a couple of decades domestic violence and the forced requirement in rape rendered it so that in fact, as a formal matter, women were not equal citizens in the United States.
And there was a process that lasted a couple of decades of legal reform that ended what remained of the prior patriarchal regime, the white supremacist regime. But there is this idea that the vast socialization continues and in order for us to escape from the continued ghostly presence of patriarchy and white supremacy, we in fact have to go after the very things that we once held to be constitutive of our equality as liberal citizens. And so we have to actually make incursions upon the freedom of speech, make incursions upon the institution and the practice of due process. Otherwise, we will continue to remain within these interlocking systems of oppression, which are present at the nano level in terms of just the way that we use the language.
So a couple of years ago, the San Francisco Board of Commissioners passed a resolution saying that, “Informal documents discussing people released from prison, they will no longer be referred to as convicts or felons or released inmates. They will be referred to henceforth as returning residents. That’s actually the official language. And this all comes from this idea that our reality is dominated by language and if we transform the language we can transform that reality.
Gerard Baker: This is, as you describe it very well, it’s a Marxist or a Marxian construct, isn’t it? Because it’s the same principle that Marx identified society as being made up of a dialectic of a pressure, one dominant force in a society, one dominant class in a society oppressing another. And, again, in Marxian terms that was economic. That was the capitalist class oppressing the proletariat. And now, since that was I think fundamentally discredited at the end of the Cold War it does seem as though the intellectual construct, the idea, the fundamental critique of liberal society, has continued, but in a different form. Would you agree that it’s become the same idea of oppression that Marxists used to talk about with regard to the oppression of the proletariat, the working class, has now become essentially along these intersectional race and gender lines. So it is basically a form of continuation of Marxism by other words, is it not?
Wesley Yang: Well, I think it shares something in common with Marxism, and that’s why I mention that Marxism was a successor ideology. But what distinguished Marxism was the view, and this is what Marxism was fighting against, against the bourgeois utopians of this time, that it’s actually the core conflict is that between capital and labor. Whereas the successor ideology that we have today that focus upon identitarianism, and so on, has been very easily adopted by those who are at the commanding heights of our capitalist system. And so now we have Angela Davis giving a speech at Goldman Sachs. We have BlackRock and others engaged in the same annual, and it seems to take up an ever larger share of each year’s calendar, of rainbow messaging and signaling of various kinds. And so we see the emergence of a woke capitalism that doesn’t seem to be in any way aimed at undermining or subverting the core capitalist relation.
It just has redefined the utopia they have in mind as one in which there is proportional representation within the ownership class, within the upper reaches of the managerial classes of various identities. And so it shares something very important in common with Marxism, but it also deviates pretty drastically in it. And because of that deviation, we see the easy adoption by the heads of various capitalist entities of the language, of the signaling, and even of some of the policy surrounding it. And so right now we see the ratings agencies starting to score corporations on the basis of various diversity and inclusion measures. So we’re seeing a funny hybrid here that I think is what is sociologically so fascinating about successor ideology.
Prior to the summer of 2020, I think it would’ve surprised a lot of people to have Angela Davis speaking at Goldman Sachs. We are actually at a point where the places that tend to have junior staffers who have gone through the indoctrination mills of our elite universities tend to be the ones where actually Angela Davis is more likely than in any other setting to have a welcome and wrapped audience that management feels that they need to speak to/placate by hosting such an event.
Gerard Baker: How did we get to this situation where, again you describe very well, Angela Davis speaking to investment banks or the extraordinary phenomenon that we see in our universities today. We’ve just seen more examples of it in the last week or two of people essentially being forced out because they don’t conform to the ideology, to the prevailing orthodoxy. There’s always been the intellectual academic battles. It’s always fair to say that in the culture left leaning progressive, not always but for the last generation or so at least, the left has dominated. But it seems to have gone beyond the point of just a pluralism of ideas with maybe progressives dominating in some of the culture institutions, again, what you describe as this authoritarian utopia that we seemed have. How did that come about?
Wesley Yang: Well, I think there was a long march through the institutions and there was an original attempt by the traditional mainstream liberals of the time in the ’60s, the ’70s and the ’80s, academic administrators, many of whom were quite progressive by any typical standard who tried to create a cordon sanitaire within academia around the upsurge of ideas, identititarian and otherwise, that started to manifest within universities movements for various identity studies for gender studies, for disability studies. Right now we’re seeing a new branching off. It’s called fat studies, and very interesting that fat is a word that has to be recuperated and insisted upon rather than euphemized away within this system, because usually they euphemized certain words. But in this case there is a movement of fat acceptance.
Just a little aside on this. If you want to talk about what is successor ideology what is not successor ideology, standard liberal humanism would take the view, which I generally tend to agree with, that when it comes to questions of weight, we shouldn’t be presenting anorexic teenagers as normative in the pages of our fashion magazines and that we should not be valorizing various fad diets that turn out to be very unhealthy. And the culture should not be obsessed with unrealistic standards of beauty concerning being really skinny. But when you cross over and you actually say it’s more damaging psychologically to someone’s self-esteem and thus to their underlying health to insist upon the scientific and medical ideology around the greater risks that you bear for heart and other kinds of diseases, particularly in the age of COVID, if you are overweight.
And successor ideology thus is one where we see that there is a movement within institutions of activist professionals working alongside the class of professional activists who have now institutionalized themselves and through various donor funded non-profit sector are able to create these critiques that are utterly detached from reality, utterly detached from any majoritarian political support, and respond only to the idiosyncratic interests of various cause oriented donors. And what those cause oriented donors have done is create an archipelago of institutions that have a symbiotic relationship with the Democratic Party, that provide its staffers, and that as a whole what these organizations have done, who would otherwise be bickering conjuries of single issue movements is they have articulated this unity of oppression thesis that intersectionalism allows them to do.
And so the idea is this synthetic contrivance of convenience that serves a particular purpose of a particular class, and that class is a class of office seeker of a certain holder of a certain college graduate who is seeking (inaudible), consultancies, various job opportunities within a growing sector of moral entrepreneurialism. So there’s a combination of a couple of things that happened. There was a long march through the institutions where they tried to create a cordon sanitaire terror around identity studies. Instead, what they did was create echo chambers, echo chambers that were not penetrated by any criticism or any outside scrutiny, where explicit activist doctrine was able to credential itself because they were able to create their own journals and create a whole body of pseudo knowledge about how the gender binary was invented by Western colonialists and imposed around the world.
This is something that you can hear highly credentialed academics just stating as a fact, stating it as axiomatic and central to their worldview, claiming that gender fluidity was the foundational state of places like India. And, of course, there’s zero evidence for the fact of greater gender fluidity in places like Polynesia and India and so on before the emergence of British colonialism and Victorian Christianity. There’s not nothing to it but it has now become this counter dogma that we are simply in the process of returning ourselves to an entirely mythological state past the oppression that was once imposed upon us by the existence of distribution of sexual characteristics linked to human biology. So all of this pseudo knowledge was created and then a couple of things happened at the same time.
One, the internet managed to be a vector through which these ideas were spread to young people and they were spread to a particular kind of young person. They were spread to the young people who were most interested in the humanities, liberal arts, political activism, journalism, writing, and so forth. And so the people who were radicalized on Tumblr with these ideas and who came to accept them as axiomatic the idea that we still live in white supremacy 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, and the people who believe that the existence of a gender binary was a form of oppression that our society has to overcome, they developed a class consciousness for themselves and they moved into media and they filled the junior ranks. And they brought with them techniques of activism that they had developed from universities, with activists sensibilities.
And at a certain point, in my view right around 2014, it reached a critical mass. And then, in 2016, of course, there was the Trump election and the Trump election seemed to vindicate in the eyes of many, not just those who already believe these things but a broader cross section of the liberal public, who came to be very disturbed and upset by this exogenous shock in their narrative of progress that had only a couple of years ago culminated in the election to the U.S. Presidency the second term of America’s first Black president, there was a model there in mind. And eventually this thing that was held in check by traditional liberals who were still in charge, most of whom were still older white guys, found that they had no other grounds in the midst of the moral emergency in which we were held to be in the midst of, of the Trump years, babies in cages and so on, a literal Russian agent, et cetera.
Gerard Baker: Trump was seen as a validation of this. There is now significant pushback against this. You are an outspoken critic. There are a lot of people who are very thoughtful and outspoken critics of it. There are some indications that even in some of these woke corporations that maybe they’re starting to realize that actually this intolerant authoritarianism that many of their staff seem to be following maybe is not the way to go, so you’re seeing a little bit of pushback at Netflix and some other news organizations. But do you think it really is a fundamental threat and could actually end up essentially displacing or has it already maybe displaced the liberal democratic society that we grew up with?
Wesley Yang: The way I like to frame this is that right around 1985, 1986, two things happened within fairly obscure corners of academia. One of them was the foundation of the Federalist Society and the beginning of a long march through the institutions for the conservative legal movement. And that movement basically reached its destination right around 2019, 2020 when they obtained a majority of movement aligned lawyers on the Supreme Court. But something else was happening right around that time, which was they were the first symposia on what was then called a new movement within legal academia called critical race theory. And critical race theory held that we must not take for granted ideas of rationality, of free speech if we actually want to talk about obtaining reality in concrete terms in a society that has always been systemically racist and that continues to be systemically racist.
And that entailed a long march through various institutions. It was not a march that I think that the original founders anticipated would happened, but it happened in elementary schools. They captured schools of education. They captured schools of social work. They captured the discipline of psychology and so forth. And that long march to the institutions actually came to its fruition right around the year 2019 or 2020, because it was then that various school districts started to roll out a whole new curriculum that took as axiomatic these views that we all can be situated upon a hierarchy of oppression and these are the ways in which you are an oppressor, these are the ways in which you are oppressed, and you can tally these things up. We’re going to engage in this exercise where we discover our intersectional identity and we’re third graders. This is what we’re going to do with our young people.
And so the process of radicalization that happened spontaneously through Tumblr and within universities slowly is now in the process of being presented as axiomatic to a rising generation of Americans and to a rising generation of Americans who are already majority non-white. And so if you look at the ethnic studies curriculum that is going to be mandated in California, California is a state that is, I believe there are more Hispanics than there are white people in California, but if you look at the distribution of wealth in California, it’s very heavily in the possession of a small group of much older white liberals who run and own everything in that state. And right now what is being taught is there have been revisions that were done when the more or less explicit, definitely very implicitly anti-Semitic bias of that curriculum was objected to by Jewish groups and it looked for a while like there was going to be significant political resistance against it.
But that thing is in place and what they are teaching is that society is a matrix of interlocking oppressions and they’re doing it to a state that has that population structure. What will happen as a result? I’m not really sure. What I think will happen though is that the cohorts that entered into the professional world around 2014 and 2015 of young people who were driven by the passions of the successor ideology, they were able to really transform the character of journalism, they’re now facing some pushback within institutions like the New York Times. There’s one or two guys at the Times who are able to acknowledge reality, but there’s another person that’s able to acknowledge reality around masks and so on. And so one guy is the pushback. And so what I would say is that, yes, there’s pushback. There does seem to be an awareness that things went too far. It was crazy that we allowed you to drive our op-ed editor out of the newsroom because he published an essay saying that we need the National Guard to keep order in the midst of riots.
That’s a problematic principle to have made the center of liberal discourse now that we’re dealing with J-6. And so people are recognizing that many things that are going to be politically perilous for the Democratic Party, that are going to be a problem for maintaining the legitimacy around these various institutions is a problem. The meltdown that just happened at the Washington Post, it’s a frivolous story. It doesn’t matter but, of course, it matters because it is the story of ideological succession. It is the story of people who are driven by the new moral passions that are seeking hegemony within our institutions. Now there was pushback. A person actually did go too far to the point where they were held to be harassing their colleagues, and that person was fired but that person was fired after just going on an incredible tear. Not everybody goes on an incredible tear in public
Gerard Baker: I think she was fired for not anything to do with the underlying substance of the issues, but for being just obviously completely out of line in terms of trashing all of her colleagues. I mean, I think even the successor ideologues probably don’t want people out there actually undermining the cohesion of their institutions. We should be clear, I mean, it’s not trivial, I think it is important, but I think that’s why she was fired. Again, not because of any change of heart on the part of the proprietors or the editors at the Washington Post, but because she just was completely out of line in the end.
Wesley Yang: She went too far, but she also demonstrated an aspect of this ideology. It does encourage these struggle sessions and these meltdowns and it did it at the Times. There are some green shoots of that at the Journal that I think the op-ed page versus the staff, and you’ll see how you guys manage it. I think that you may well have learned something from the prior examples of those who immediately caved. And, of course, being to some degree a publication constrained to speak to the world of business and so on, but we actually are seeing with ESG and all this the extent to which this has actually penetrated into the world of business as well. The HSBC, you know what I’m referring to, their director?
Gerard Baker: For saying, “We’re not all going to burn in hell in three years time.”
Wesley Yang: Right. “Climate change is not an investment risk,” is what he ended up saying. I guess in that job you actually can’t say that thing, whether or not it’s true. Your job is to be an ideological enforcer within the institution. And so this is the point, we have ideological enforcers within every institution and we have an entrepreneurial project to generate more and more ideological enforcers within various institutions. And so if we want to talk about an end to this phenomenon, we have to talk about, well, what would it look like and what would it take? And from where would the energy come to drive out the ideological enforcers from all of these institutions? And if you don’t have a good answer of how that will be done, we will know that this is going to be a remora attached to the fin of our society for as long as that continues to be the case.
Gerard Baker: We’ve got to take a short break there, but when we come back, we’ll have more with author Wesley Yang. Stay with us. Welcome back. We’re talking with Wesley Yang about the successor ideology, the progressive orthodoxy that seems to rule so much of our modern world. During the time we have, I want to discuss a little bit the Asian American politics. And I think some fascinating things are going on there, which are, obviously, of course, not unrelated to this topic. But just finally on this successor ideology question, is there a danger that the pushback, if you like, the resistance to the successor ideology, is not a reversion, that those who are urging a reversion to the glorious days of classical political liberalism, but an authoritarianism of the right, if you like?
Because you’re seeing, I mean, again, this is this larger critique that a lot of people have of what’s happened to liberal democracy, that, yes, it’s under threat in exactly the way you’ve described from this progressive authoritarianism. But at the same time, it’s also under threat from conservatives, who’ve for a variety of reasons have found liberalism to be flawed in all kinds of ways and increasingly embracing this authoritarianism. Is the ground on which people like you think and I think I and others stand, which is for the defense of traditional pluralism, liberal democracy, as we understood it, all of those things, is that ground shrinking to a point where we’re going to be squeezed on both sides by an authoritarian right and an authoritarian and intolerant left?
Wesley Yang: It’s definitely a danger and it’s all the more important for those who want to stand on behalf of the traditional liberal system to hold in check those who would create the openings for an authoritarian right. And an authoritarian left absolutely does create openings for an authoritarian right. And, of course, to witness the elaboration of these ideas as they move their way through the public square is to see the failures of a center to hold in check the emergence of the authoritarian utopianism of the left and thus the emergence of an authoritarian utopianism of the right that ends up, of course, in turn feeding the authoritarian utopian of the left. And so to be caught in that Pincer Movement, and I think this actually is a very bad thing, however, we are seeing some instances of pushback, and this takes us to the Asian American thing.
If you want to talk about what happened in San Francisco, which is San Francisco is the vanguard city and San Francisco was for a few years the incarnation of the successor ideology in power. So you had people on the Board of Education who kept schools closed for a year and a half while they dithered and engaged in a proposal to rename all of their schools in order to purge various problematic historical figures, including Diane Feinstein and Abraham Lincoln among others. And three of those members who led those charge, one of whom had been revealed to use the word house N-word to refer to Asian Americans in a tweet, were driven from office by a resounding vote of the public. Mostly driven by an Asian American public for whom education is an important goal.
And this same group moved from triumph to triumph by driving out the scion of a post-1960s armed terrorist group, who managed to get himself installed into the role of District Attorney and who oversaw what normal residents of San Francisco came to see as a marked diminution in their quality of life as the city became an open air drug market and a place where there’s an online human feces map that was put on as a stunt. But that became more highly populated than in the past because enforcement of quality of life claims plummeted under the direction of a District Attorney who made it clear that he would not be enforcing any of those kinds of things in pursuit of what he called equity.
And so in both of these recalls, in both of these exercises of the democratic will of the people, Asian Americans who are not really a political factor anywhere in the country, except for San Francisco, a place where they are one-third of the population, and except for the state of California where they are 15% of the population and they hold a certain important balance in those circumstances where they’re able to achieve consensus and pursue a political goal. And we saw that happen in San Francisco. We saw a move toward the right in voting in New York City where actually Asian Americans are an important political voting block as well. So we’re starting to see an emergence of not just with Asian Americans, but also with Hispanics. Because there was this idea that there was going to be a non-white identity that would end up serving as the basis of a permanent democratic majority. That doesn’t seem to be the case.
And so the author of the book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, who wrote it in 2004, his name is Ruy Teixeira, has a sub stack where he records the dissolution of his own ideas. And so there are individual polls showing that an absolute majority of Hispanics would support Trump over Biden in the next election, which if that or something on the order of that or something of that kind were to happen, it would be an absolute political earthquake. It would mean the end of a particular scenario and a transformation of the politics to the country.
Gerard Baker: Well, I want to conclude with this final question and thought, that maybe this is in the end where the successor ideology fails and in one of the greatest ironies of intellectual history that having supposedly pursued this aggressive authoritarian ideology on behalf, enlisting minorities into it, unasked, by the way, but whether it’s Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and, of course, African Americans, that actually we’re seeing increasingly, we saw it in San Francisco with Asian Americans, as you say, just as you’ve described exactly we’re sting it with Hispanics generally across the country, very, very low approval ratings for the Democratic Party. Absolute rejection of some of the linguistic fantasies of this ideology, such as the word Latinx.
We know that when Latinos are asked whether they like the term Latinx, about 3% say they do. And even African Americans, sometimes that particularly over issues of crime and policing and law enforcement and all of this stuff that people like Chesa Boudin and those progressive Democrats believe in, that even African Americans are rejecting that. So is it possible that in the ultimate irony of, let’s say, intellectuality, that this whole successor ideology is itself an example of white elitism that may well fail precisely because the people, again, whom it’s supposed to be advancing, who are the supposedly oppressed people it’s supposedly advancing, actually find many of its tenants absolutely intolerable.
Wesley Yang: Right. So you have this archipelago of non-profit organizations, I call them AstroTurf, interest groups that purport to speak on behalf of various identity groups that don’t actually speak on behalf of those identity groups. And so we’re seeing at the polls a repudiation of the prescriptions of that group. And, of course, that group is what comprises what I call the successor coalition. Those who are engaged in this project of moral entrepreneurialism who in order to keep singing for their supper they need the country to continue to believe that we still live in white supremacy and patriarchy. We’re seeing the process by which those on whose behalf they’re supposed to speak are revealing that, “No, of course, you do not speak for me.”
And I think that is eventually going to happen. It’s going to take a few cycles of repudiation, but even at the end of it, all of these donor funded organizations can continue to exist, they’re going to continue to be minting graduates of their programs who will need jobs, and those jobs will be taken as a pound of flesh from various corporations who will pay their tribute in the form of having their ideological enforcers on board. So while American electoral politics may change, you’re still going to have to go to DEI training and be put through the exercises and mouth the slogans or not. That’s going to continue to be a facet of bourgeois life throughout the United States, the Anglosphere, and throughout the broader West in the years to come.
Gerard Baker: Well, that’s not the best note on which to end, but you’ve managed to inject a little note of optimism there. Wesley Yang, really, again, author of the term successor ideology, and author of books and commentary which really dissect brilliantly and anatomize pathologies of our modern progressive world, thank you very much, indeed, for joining me.
Wesley Yang: Thanks for having me.
Gerard Baker: Thank you. Well, that’s it for this week’s episode of Free Expression with me, Gerry Baker, from the Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages. Thanks very much for listening and please do join us again next time for another exploration of the issues that are driving our world. Thank you and goodbye.
Source: wsj.com
