Speakers
What do young progressives believe? In the popular vernacular, they are described as “liberals” or “leftists,” but these familiar labels obscure what is novel about the ideology many young activists are trying to advance in our universities, cultural institutions, media outlets, and even corporations. On issues of race, diversity, gender, and sexual expression these activists have made a clean break with their liberal forebearers.
Join our panel of experts – MI fellow and City Journal contributing editor, Coleman Hughes; New York Times opinion columnist, Ross Douthat; and columnist for Tablet Magazine, Wesley Yang – to discuss the “Successor Ideology” that is quickly becoming a major force in our national life. How is it that the Civil Rights ideal of a color-blind society was supplanted by calls for proactive anti-racism? Why do many colleges and universities feel comfortable dispensing with due process for sexual assault accusations? Do corporations have a duty to protect their employees from political opinions that make them feel unsafe?
In many ways, the intellectual terrain of our political debates and cultural life is unmapped. We hope that you will join our panel with some of the sharpest minds currently trying to make sense of our new reality.
Event Transcript
Reihan Salam:
Good afternoon, and welcome to our virtual event, The Successor Ideology. I'm Reihan Salam, President of the Manhattan Institute. I'll be moderating today's discussion with three of the most insightful observers of our evolving cultural and ideological landscape.
Reihan Salam:
We're joined by Coleman Hughes, a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal, Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist for the New York Times and author most recently of, The Decadent Society, and Wesley Yang, a columnist for Tablet magazine, and the author of, The Souls of Yellow Folk.
Reihan Salam:
Throughout the conversation, please feel free to submit your questions on whatever platform you're watching us from and we'll do our best to get to as many of them as we can.
Reihan Salam:
Today's conversation will try peel back the curtain on the cultural approval we've witnessed since the killing of George Floyd, which has taken the form of street protest and riots, turmoil at media and cultural institutions, and calls for dismantling policing as we know it.
Reihan Salam:
What are the intellectual origins and ultimate ambitions of the movement currently unfolding, and what's its relationship to the liberalism of earlier eras? There's no better group to unpack all of this than today's panelists.
Reihan Salam:
It's great to be here with you today. Let's start off with, Wesley. Wesley, you coined the term the successor ideology, which you've described as the melange of academic radicalism now seeking hegemony throughout American institutions. And this new [inaudible 00:01:41] has proved quite contagious. There are many people who are using it, many people who are embracing it. Tell us about what motivated this particular nomenclature.
Wesley Yang:
We have basic problem with defining what's happening within American institutions. Everyone who is a participant in those settings knows that we're in the midst of kind of a bourgeois revolution, a sort of bourgeois moral revolution, in which certain foundational liberal values concerning free speech due process, the presumption of innocence and so forth, have come to be seen increasingly as obstacles to the path of the attainment of a particular vision of justice that's being articulated and pursued by the activist classes whose ideas, that were once confined to obscure pockets of academia, have increasingly become sort of mainstream through the media and through social media as a part of the parlance of everyday life that affects those who are operating within those settings.
Wesley Yang:
There's a number of different ways to refer to it. Often, it's heavily positively or negatively varianced. So a term like social justice is sort of an attempt to identify the cause with justice as we all understand it, justice as such. A term like identity politics is a little more neutrally they varianced, but it doesn't actually encompass everything that compass under the rubric of what we see happening right now.
Wesley Yang:
Other terms from the right, such as cultural Marxism or postmodern Neo Marxism, in addition to having some descriptive problems often have a spoiled provenance that people will end up pointing out in either sort of moralistic or pedantic terms often in ways that are both moralistic and pedantic that serve the function of preventing us from being able to talk about what is happening.
Wesley Yang:
And so I was just sort of talking to myself on Twitter, writing a thread where I described some implicit bias training that the New York City Board of Education or the Department of Education has sort of required all of its employees to take. There was a screenshot listing some of the premises underlying this training, a description of white supremacy culture and the various facets of it and sort of white supremacy culture was characterized as consisting of perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word.
Wesley Yang:
The more you went into it and you started to break down both the internal inconsistencies of some of these ideas, but also recognizing the provenance of them, you saw that there were ideas taken from anti-colonial studies from post-colonial writings from black nationalist inflected approach that sees whiteness as itself like a form of oppression of nonwhite people.
Wesley Yang:
I ended up saying the sort of what's being encoded here is so diverse, and in many cases, so internally incoherence, and yet all of these different activist movements are moving together under a single umbrella and we need a word for it. And the word would be one that was as vague as the movement itself, sort of the successor ideology, because we are in the midst of a kind of ideological succession and the succession is one that makes reference to an often sort of masquerades as being consistent with the liberal principles of fairness and tolerance out of which it grows.
Wesley Yang:
But that in fact take this in a position where we end up seeing it necessarily to annul or at any rate at minimum, draw a boundary around the exercise of those principles. That ended up just being this thing I threw out. I said, "Oh, let's call it the successor ideology."
Wesley Yang:
It was just my own personal little thing for myself an the people that followed me personally, but eventually others began to see some utility in it. And eventually the person who mainstreamed it is here in this chat, it's Ross who did a column about it and soft fit to use it, I think for some of the purposes that I pointed out, but maybe he could talk a little bit about why he saw utility in the term, in the particular context in which he used it.
Reihan Salam:
Ross, I do want to know that, but I also want to observe what I detect is a subtle difference of emphasis. So while Wesley is talking about this melange of different academic radicalisms constituting an emerging new ideology, you've described it a bit differently, less as a successor to liberalism than as successor to the role that was once played by mainline Protestantism in kind of informing or filling the kind of liberal scaffolding of American institutions. So can you tell us a bit about that?
Ross Douthat:
Sure. I mean, one of the fun things about having to write columns twice a week is that you get to consider something and then reconsider it and then reconsider it again. So I did that a little bit with this discussion. I wrote the initial column that used, I think Wesley's term and very roughly speaking the way that he just described to capture the distinctive incontinence of this ideological movement and moment.
Ross Douthat:
And the fact that there is this movement back and forth between goals and projects, it seems to me pretty clearly within what we would have considered the normal parameters of liberal politics 20 years ago, and then movements and projects that seem to step outside of it, and as Wesley just said, to suspend the rules of liberalism for the sake of various goals.
Ross Douthat:
I think when you combine that back and forth movement with the uncertain and sometimes shifting content of what's going on here, that a term like successor is really useful, even if it still cries out for more specific definitions, which presumably more careful writers than a newspaper columnist can supply.
Ross Douthat:
I think that's going on, but I also I have a certain amount of uncertainty about whether the victory of this [inaudible 00:08:52] ideology would mean the end of liberalism in the things that we would understand liberalism to have ended under a fascist or Leninist, or Stalinist regime, or whether it would represent this internal transformation where, I mean, I think as Wesley was just saying, the moralistic element of this revolution is so palpable, and whatever internal contradictions there are and so on, I think it's very clear that the primary motivation is about establishing a new set of moral norms ranging across just matters of poly tests and how people talk to each other, to rules regulating sexual conduct on college campuses, rules for race relations and all of that, one of the distinctive things about this moment is that that component seems much stronger than the sort of technocratic side, the side of this that wants to have dramatic policy changes
Ross Douthat:
Not that there aren't dramatic policy changes being argued for, but I think if you read the literature of this movement, the moral is more important than the policy. The [inaudible 00:10:14], like a big shift from say early Obama era liberalism.
Ross Douthat:
When a writer named Helen Andrews coined this term sort of bloodless moralism for some of the stuff that was going on in liberalism, then you could only make moral arguments if they were garbed in the language of technocracy, and now there's blood in the moralism.
Ross Douthat:
But to the extent that that's true, the part of me that wonders about the sustainability of liberalism without a kind of underlying religious culture, and obviously I'm speaking here as a Christian and a Roman Catholic who has a certain investment in the idea that a religious substrate is important for society, that part of me wonders if it's better to understand this as a kind of post Protestantism that the fact that it's centered in institutions and often demographic groups that would have been mainline Protestants had they 50 years ago that America had for most of its history as some kind of liberal society in this incredibly powerful institutional Protestant substrate that is sort of dissolved in the last 50 years.
Ross Douthat:
And in that sense, maybe it is worth thinking about this in religious as well as ideological terms, or just in quasi religious. I mean, I don't want to push too hard on this because there's a certain laziness in saying that's a religion, about any ideology you don't agree with.
Ross Douthat:
I don't mean this as sort of a critique in that sense. I just mean clearly this movement partakes of the energies that we would have associated with Christianity, but specifically Protestant Christianity for most of American history.
Reihan Salam:
Coleman, you recently wrote the following passage in an article for City Journal, "At a gut level, it is hard for most people to feel the same level of outrage when the cops kill a white person as when they kill a black person. Perhaps that is as it should be. After all, for most of American history, it was white suffering that provoked more outrage.
Reihan Salam:
But I would submit that if this new anti-racist bias is justified, if we now have a moral obligation to care more about certain lives than others based on skin color, or based on racial historical blood guilt, then everything that I thought I knew about basic morality and everything that the world's philosophical and religious traditions have been saying about common humanity, revenge and forgiveness since antiquity, should be thrown out the window."
Reihan Salam:
This race-conscious framework has proven enormously compelling to many people, particularly younger people, particularly people that we think of by any conventional standard as exceptionally well-educated, yet what you're positing there is that this represents a really radical rupture. This represents an inversion of a kind of mainstream morality.
Reihan Salam:
So is what's going on here that these people who are embracing this new race conscious worldview were not steeped in that tradition or is something else going on? I'm curious about what makes this so compelling.
Coleman Hughes:
Yeah, that's a great question. Given what Ross just said and what Wesley said, it occurs to me that the mainstream, that when I say everything I thought I knew, what I'm referring to there is I guess a synthesis of liberalism as I knew it growing up and the kind of Martin Luther King style Christianity, which obviously went hand-in-hand during the civil rights movement, and which to a large degree for whatever their differences were really converged around the value of your race does not matter.
Coleman Hughes:
Your race is not an important feature of who you are. If you find yourself caring more about X, rather than Y because of the race of the people involved, that's precisely the kind of thing we have to step away from.
Coleman Hughes:
So that synthesis of, I suppose you could call it Christian morality, although I'm not religious and wasn't raised as such, and liberalism, like the kind of thing that Martin Luther King spoke to and could persuade liberals on political grounds and Christians on religious grounds, that kind of synthesis is what's being rejected now, in favor of the idea that race is very important, but in a very different way than it was important to the white supremacists of yesterday.
Coleman Hughes:
It's important if you're black to understand that you stand side to side with slaves in some sense. Even if your victimhood is of a lesser degree, it's really on the same continuum. And even if it's just something which for many of the people involved, we're talking about people sort of at the upper crust of society, it's for the most part, not people who are actually potentially getting racially profiled by the cops. It's much more likely to be people like me who went to Columbia and experienced two microaggressions, but that is thought to be on a continuum with slavery that puts you in solidarity with every victim of white racism going back to 1619.
Coleman Hughes:
If you're white, it's reversed. You inherit all of that guilt. And so to me, this is exactly the kind of thing that has destroyed human societies in the past multiethnic societies in the past, most of which have failed spectacularly to encourage harmonious relations between different groups of people.
Coleman Hughes:
I think we need a picture of American race relations. What I'm saying is basically that we got it right with what you might call the liberal Christian MLK synthesis that innovation is always a great thing in technology, but it's not always a great thing in values. It often is, but sometimes you hit the nail on the head, and people always want some new way of making the color of my skin and my tribe incredibly important. But I think we hit the nail on the head with that and we're losing that.
Reihan Salam:
One thing that Wesley has raised that came to mind with what you just said a moment ago, Coleman, is this idea of a law of conservation of psychic pain. Wesley, one thing that you've conveyed is that when you're talking about people in elite institutions, the microaggressions, it really seems they are experienced as something deeply painful, hurtful, and that endures.
Reihan Salam:
That's something that can seem a little surprising to some of us who don't inhabit this perspective. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. Just how is it that it's the people who are most upwardly mobile that Coleman was talking about a moment ago, are the ones who are most susceptible to this kind of injury to their sense of self, to their status? And how does this kind of contribute to the changing cultural context?
Wesley Yang:
Well, the 1990s, a black author named Ellis Cose, wrote a book called, The Rage of the Privileged Class, that was about precisely this. And close polling today, now demonstrates that black college graduates are more likely to say that they have been victims of racism than non black college graduates.
Wesley Yang:
And of course, in a sense it seems counterintuitive at first, but when you think about it, it makes sense, that as you ascend the class hierarchy, you move into spaces that are increasingly more and more whites. And so the problems of integration apart from first-generation white college students, will often experience sort of like, it's very hard for them to adjust-
Reihan Salam:
A sense of dislocation.
Wesley Yang:
Yeah, to a set of norms and expectations. When you compound that by a racial dimension and add onto it a microaggression discourse that is actually encouraging people to regard their experiences through a racial lens, you're going to create, you're going to exacerbate a well of this content that actually there's something real there. Like microaggressions are the way by which one sort of intentionally, or even unintentionally conveys to outsiders that they are in fact outsiders.
Wesley Yang:
There's a process that people go through when they enter into a new social settings where they don't know what fork to use at the dinner table, so on and so forth. And you can compound that much further. You add the racial dimension to it, and it can be a real challenge.
Wesley Yang:
Something I noted not so long ago was that the first affirmative action cohorts in the early 1970s, some of those people fit in very well. Some of them, it was a trauma, they were sort of airlifted and parachuted in to settings that were mostly comprised of rich white people, and often it was a traumatic experience for them.
Wesley Yang:
Some of the people for whom that experience was traumatic, became the authors of critical race theory, and one of those people turned out to be Clarence Thomas. If you read Clarence Thomas's memoir, it's one of the bitterest pieces of work ever written by a major public figure, because he was a Gullah speaking affirmative action student who came to see affirmative action as a plot to destroy the self sufficiency of black people, by making them reliant on the largest of white liberals.
Wesley Yang:
Those two different approaches, the critical race theory approach, and the Clarence Thomas approach are polarized, and yet they're responding to the same psychic humiliation that some people encountered when they entered into these settings without any social support, without any psychological support, they were simply told to sink or swim among rich white people, and it was hard, especially so at that time.
Wesley Yang:
And so from out of that traumatizing experience, the cannons of critical race theory came into existence and then [inaudible 00:20:59] themselves into a theory dogma that state that we're all subject to a vast socialization project process that instantiates the white as central, as primary, as valuable, and the non-whites as secondary and as less valuable.
Wesley Yang:
To some extent, there's a psychological reality through this. And it all depends on to what extent one is going to permit that to lead you into the position that race neutrality is itself a kind of denial of these underlying realities, and that it's a pernicious form of the recapitulation of those realities that will always keep us enslaved to that sort of underlying white supremacy. Because of course, white supremacy prior to 1964 was like, was instantiated in law, and in 1964, it was actually dismantled.
Wesley Yang:
But the people in America didn't cease to be the same people who were conditioned psychologically formed by the previous segregation as this instantiation. It would take a couple of generations before Americans would be willing to vote a black president into office, which happened in 2008.
Wesley Yang:
But when something enters into a kind of ghostly afterlife, like after being dismantled, it's very easy to turn that ghostly afterlife into something that is invincible, precisely because it doesn't exist. You can say that it is everywhere and that's ultimately what the microaggression and implicit bias discourse ended up doing. It ended up theorizing something that precisely, because you can't say that our laws overtly discriminate, you can say that it's in all of our minds, it's in all of our institutions, it is systemic, it's structural, and it is everywhere and it becomes this kind of pervasive and it collaborate with new ideas about the circulation of power from [inaudible 00:23:18], and so on. That-
Reihan Salam:
The fact that it's not visible speaks to its power in a sense.
Wesley Yang:
Right. Domination is built into the very fabric and structure of society itself and present in systems of adjudication, present within the criminal justice system even in the absence of conscious consent.
Wesley Yang:
It's that kind of that shift in our model of power from one of overt, dejure that allows it to lose its moorings and lose its limiting principle and become the kind of protean amulets, I'm thinking of the tiny easy coast terms of a kind of like Eldridge magic.
Wesley Yang:
There was a kind of transubstantiation of white supremacy that happened and that ultimately there is a cultural project that culminated in the second term of the first black president to bring this to the fore.
Reihan Salam:
I want to just raise something. This is for Ross and Coleman. One thing that Coleman referenced before briefly is the idea that the kind of opposite side of this is white guilt as something that is something that one inherits, regardless of the particular circumstances of one's upbringing. And that seems like something in a way, I wonder if it's actually aggrandizing.
Reihan Salam:
I wonder if in a society in which white people particularly younger whites are not as demographically dominant in a global economy that's changing, in which the majority white society is of the larger West are not quite as unquestioning, ablate dominant as they had been in the past, if this is just something that actually seems to put white people at the center in a way that might actually be less true today than was true in the past. That's one thing.
Reihan Salam:
Second. Ross, you've written a bit about another way in which this discourse can actually be very useful to particularly whites from elite backgrounds who embrace it, who embrace the successor ideology, who embrace the discourse of anti-racism in that it allows people in a kind of meritocratic race that can be exhausting to take their foot off the gas pedal.
Reihan Salam:
So I'm curious to hear both of you guys weigh in on this.
Ross Douthat:
Yeah. I mean, I'll go first quickly because I think one of the questions hanging over this discussion is, why now? Why have, not the last six months, but the last seven to eight years or so being this period of eruption of these ideas into national political consciousness, elite political debates, the use of this terminology in elite institutions, newspapers like my own and so on, given that they are all ideas that are in a sense 50 to 60 years old at this point?
Ross Douthat:
I think there are a lot of different reasons, but one subtle reason I think is a sense of exhaustion with the culture of meritocracy in which at least, you and I, Reihan were in college literally at the same time experienced in it's flower.
Ross Douthat:
There was this period that coincided with the kind of Fukuyama and end of history, where meritocracy really believed in itself, I think, and there is this sense that you could just run this system of high SAT scores and plucking people from all over and putting them into elite institutions and making them experts and it would all work out pretty well.
Ross Douthat:
That ran into trouble in part, because the meritocratic elites made a lot of governing mistakes, but it also ran into trouble, I think, because it just created this kind of exhausting treadmill effect for the mostly white upper middle and mass upper class. There's kind of insane competition that kept expanding more and more as colleges recruited more and more overseas. It was sort of the upper middle class was a version of outsourcing in the China shock in certain ways that you had this ever expanding field of competition for a fixed set of spots that was maybe most acute at institutions, academic and media institutions that were either not growing or actually contracting.
Ross Douthat:
I think, again, I don't think this is like the number one cause, but I think there is an appeal of a critique of meritocracy to people who have succeeded in meritocracy, but don't like it. I do think that enters in.
Ross Douthat:
Then the other thing is, to your first point, I'm not totally convinced that this... Some people will make the argument well, these narratives, they just put white people at the center. And so it's its own version of white supremacy all over again or something. I don't think that's exactly right, because I think there's-
Reihan Salam:
You don't think it assigns them this enormous psychic power over everyone who is not white?
Ross Douthat:
I don't think it's experienced as the assignment of power. And I could be wrong, but I think if it were, it would manifest differently. I think it is experienced as the assignment of guilt. And so to the extent that it's psychologically appealing, it should be understood in terms of psychology and religion more than in terms of political hegemony.
Ross Douthat:
I think people who are experiencing this language of confession and self scrutiny and being silent while other people speak and giving other people authority over yourself are experiencing a version of what people experience when they convert to a religious tradition and become a sort of neophyte believer, and I think that's just a very different kind of experience.
Ross Douthat:
I mean, as a Christian, I would say that everybody, every human being is marked by original sin and we all feel profound justified guilt at some level of our being. And if it ceases to manifest itself in religious rituals of confession, then it will manifest itself in other terms, but you don't have to accept the doctrine of original sin, I think, to see a version of that point being true.
Coleman Hughes:
I think there's for whatever reason, there's an original sin shaped hole in the human psyche. I think the idea that complicity is the word you more often hear nowadays. Sure, maybe you're not specifically guilty of enslaving black people, maybe you can't exactly see which dollar in your bank account is the result of 400 years of white supremacy, but in a very general sense, you've been complicit in this.
Coleman Hughes:
That does what I imagine the belief that the blood of Christ is on your hands in some sense, in some abstract way. That does something to a human mind that is fulfilling in a sense. There's some kind of hole that's shaped that way, that can be filled by politics or religion and this particular, the successor ideology, it fills that very, very well.
Coleman Hughes:
The other thing I observed, Ross, your idea that this is partly people that are tired of meritocracy being given a reason to take the foot off the gas pedal slightly. It occurs to me that the other thing, the other major ideology that bridges that are most of the world's religions, namely what is the rat race? The rat race is just of this earth. What really matters is the next world and your eternal soul.
Coleman Hughes:
That's obvious, I think there can be actually something very healthy about that because ultimately it is true that if you never stop to enjoy your life, you get to the end. And as they say, you don't get to the end of your life and say, "I wish I worked more." And you say, "I wish I spent more time with family." That's the cliché, I think it's probably true.
Coleman Hughes:
But I think that's just another parallel between religion and the success or ideology worth observing.
Ross Douthat:
Yeah. Can I just follow up on that because I think there's also one of the things that's been notable in the shift from let's say Protestantism to post-Protestant liberalism is that, guilt becomes more attenuated and abstract.
Ross Douthat:
So if you move from a system where the biggest sins are coveting your neighbors goods, and lusting after your neighbor's wife, and gossiping too much, and not honoring your father and mother to assist them where the big sins are connected to climate change and global capitalism writ large. These things are, they're just much more abstract, and you cannot use plastic bags at the local store and compost.
Ross Douthat:
There are various things you can do, but I think they often seem incommensurate to the problem. But then with race in America, if you're a white student at a selective college or if you're a white person in an elite institution, even if the institution is mostly white, you actually will have minority colleagues. You'll actually have African-American colleagues. So you'll actually be in direct human contact with people to whom according to this theory, you are sort of-
Reihan Salam:
You'll have an opportunity to live your values.
Ross Douthat:
You're guilty of sinning against them. And so there's just, I think a greater power in saying, "I'm going to be silent while my African-American colleagues talk as a sort of act of self abnegation than there is in the more abstract I'm going to compost to save the earth."
Reihan Salam:
So one question, and this is for all of you, because all of you have been addressing this in various ways in your work, I'm struck by the material dimension. There is this kind of psychic context that you've all delineated that you've all described. But also, there's this thought, there's this intuition that many of us have, which is that the essential backdrop for this is stagnation. The sense that we find ourselves in a kind of zero sum moment.
Reihan Salam:
The sociologist Richard Alba has argued that when you have this period of ethnic change, having a non zero sum background is essential to allowing those kinds of transitions to be peaceful. It's certainly true that for some time the American economy, the wider West, this has been a real moment of economic stagnation, but then again, perhaps that's a bit too simplistic.
Reihan Salam:
I wonder, Ross, you've expressed some optimism about the idea that policy can actually shape this environment, that when you look at the 1990s, the drastic reduction in violent crime, the successes, all the model successes, but the successes of welfare reform really changed the racial context and material way that seemed to create the possibility for a more constructive racial politics.
Reihan Salam:
Wesley, you have talk about Andrew Yang's ideas, and the idea of unconditional basic income as a kind of alternative to this politics driven by racial identity. Coleman, for you too, I just wonder thinking about younger people who are graduating from college in this moment of economic cataclysm, kind of how that might draw people towards kind of annihilationist ideologies, or towards a very kind of radical frame of mind.
Reihan Salam:
I'm just curious for all of you, how do you think about the intersection of the material and the spiritual when it comes to this culture a lot of people we're all experiencing? You're all so polite, so please, go right up ahead.
Wesley Yang:
The baby boomers were the most modernist and least foreign born generation in American history. The millennials, their successors, their generational successors are the as foreign born as any cohort that we've ever had and the least white cohort in American history.
Wesley Yang:
The drasticness of the change, and the fact that the millennials were battered, graduated into the financial crisis, the ultimate failure of meritocratic liberalism and the global capitalist system, and into a world where the liberal institutions like the New York Times and so on were buffeted by technological change that made conditions of scarcity and austerity imposed upon them.
Wesley Yang:
There's an enormous wealth gap between the mostly white baby boomers who own almost everything and the heavily nonwhite millennial generation that owns very little, and owns very little compared to all other previous cohorts at a similar age group.
Wesley Yang:
So we have this kind of generational succession and this generational tension that also takes on the coloration of the fact that if you are a person of color or sort of resenting your boss, it's probably an old white man, simply because of the demographics that are in favor. I think that's like a big part of it.
Wesley Yang:
If you discover that there is a mechanism by which you can get rid of them, because the baby boomers have been very tenacious on their holds on those positions, people will make use of whatever expedient is out there and race is one of those instruments that has shown itself to be efficacious in this direction.
Wesley Yang:
The thing about race and about structural and systemic accounts of it, is that the former results in a kind of de-personalized reading of racism. And so along with that kind of de-personalization, and I think Ibram X Kendi says this explicitly, the kind of anathematization of the individual who is said to be guilty of it since it is true of all white people that there are white supremacists, like under this construction of racism, there ought to be assertive, there ought to be a kind of like a shrinking of the penalties and the terrors associated with it, and the exponent of white fragility, and that kind of training are always saying this, like we're all racist, you are racist. You are the beneficiary of a system of white supremacy, and you have to own up to that fact.
Wesley Yang:
And when you own up to that fact, we're not going to then treat you as a villain because this is true of everyone. But obviously we're in an incomplete moment where racism remains the Cardinal charge that will anathematized you and make you a pariah in society, even as we're also saying that this encompasses all of society and leave no one untouched, both of these discourses are concurrent and they're operating concurrently in relation to one another.
Reihan Salam:
Yet they're contradictory in a sense. [crosstalk 00:39:12].
Wesley Yang:
The truth behind both of them has not diminished.
Ross Douthat:
Right. I know, and I think that's an example of, again, the term successor is useful in part precisely because there are these tensions that if you're just conducting a straightforward ideological accounting of left-wing thought at this moment, those tensions become apparent very quickly. An analysis of structural racism is very different from... analysis of structural racism ultimately leads to the conclusion that you have racism without racists. That it's like the inherited wealth gap exists and has racially biased effects, no matter what people do or believe in their hearts.
Ross Douthat:
But on the other hand, the discourse around microaggressions is all about very personal action and you can square the circle. You can say, "Well, the system creates the microaggressions that people are unaware of and so on." But there really are, I think, tensions there.
Reihan Salam:
It's interesting how that structural racism discourse smuggles in quite radical ideas. So if the transmission of wealth from one generation to the next is intrinsically racist, to those for whom the idea of racism has moral power than the formula is some kind of radical redistribution or kind of breakdown of something that's very established practice.
Reihan Salam:
But then if it's just pervasive and everywhere, one could just say, well, this banal, the term loses its power. It is odd the way that those two things coexist.
Ross Douthat:
Well, and also it raises what I think is one of the big questions hanging over this moment, which is just how radical does this actually get, right? In the sense that you could imagine a world where based on candy and premises, if you will, the American Left and eventually the American Democratic Party became committed to much more radical forms of redistribution of wealth that it's become committed to, and I think that would follow pretty naturally from some premises.
Ross Douthat:
At the same time, I think that's unlikely to happen and I think this ends up being much more about power and poly tasks within elite institutions. Even as the Democratic Party continues to fight to roll back the SALT caps to maintain... I mean, is the Democratic Party going to come out against for like 100% of state taxes? I don't think that's going to happen.
Reihan Salam:
I do want to hear your thoughts, Coleman and one just quick prompt, do you believe that if we had, we still had unemployment at three and a half percent, and if we had robust economic growth, and if young people felt as though they had the opportunity to accumulate wealth, climb the ladder, do you think that our politics would still be quite as rancorous when it comes to these questions of race and identity?
Coleman Hughes:
Yes, I do think it would be just as crazy because to me, first there's the point that Wesley made at the beginning, which is that wealthier black people, college educated black people are much more likely to say they're victims of racism than less educated. And as you said, it could be a function of just being around more white people.
Coleman Hughes:
But I would also wager it that it's partly the result of being educated into these ideas, a lot of the stuff you have to go to college to get. I don't mean to understand because it's so complicated. I just mean you're not going to receive this.
Coleman Hughes:
When I go to my family reunion, which is just middle class black people from Ohio, some college educated, some not, there's not a hint of work. There's a lot of center left politics, but not a single hint of the vocabulary of the successor ideology could be found, and it would be alarming if it were there.
Coleman Hughes:
Meanwhile, I'm at Columbia and I can't find anything. I can't even find the person using the language of Christianity. It's just intersectionality all the way down in the culture. So that-
Wesley Yang:
This is why they're moving into K-12 education for this purpose of conveying it more broadly.
Coleman Hughes:
Right. I think there are some people who want to believe that this is just a downstream consequences of economics and that would suggest we get the economics figured out that the tide on this will slow down, I would bet all my money against that.
Wesley Yang:
I did an interview of Coleman, for a piece that I wrote that eventually didn't see the light of day, will eventually see the light of day on my Patreon correspondence. But when I spoke to Coleman, he talked about social justice camp that he attended. And I think I'd love to hear him explain that here.
Reihan Salam:
This is the first time hearing of this, and this is very exciting. So please tell us about it.
Wesley Yang:
He gave his speech to his high school class about internalized racism and so on. So just-
Coleman Hughes:
It really is like a reverse Ibram Kendi experience. But basically what happened is in 2012, I was a sophomore in high school, sophomore junior, and it was Elite Prep School in New Jersey. They sent a few kids to this event called, The People of Color Conference that took place once a year and gathered a few thousand high school kids from all across the country for a few days.
Coleman Hughes:
I went because they paid your way and it was awesome. I didn't have any expectations, but it was like a few kids. They chose kids that were not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. They choose mostly kids of color or kids that were queer or gay or whatever. So that was my friend group. So it was a couple of folks from my friend group at the school, which was kind of marginal.
Coleman Hughes:
And so we went to People of Color Conference, and what it was is that it actually was a misnomer. It's not just for people of color. It was an intersectionality indoctrination camp. I had no particular problem with it at the time, but what they did is, all these kids went around.
Coleman Hughes:
I actually remember, it's important to state this, on the first night there was the person leading the conference, was this extremely charismatic gay black man. Just an amazing speaker, highly empathetic, the type that he could be selling books on the road and be drawing audiences to get his self help stuff.
Coleman Hughes:
He gets on stage, the first thing he says is, "Somebody in this crowd needs to talk to me. Come up on stage." And he waits about a minute. Somebody comes up and then that person begins crying right off the bat. This is the introduction to the conference. They talk about how they haven't come out of the closet to their parents and it's like this incredibly moving and spiritual experience.
Coleman Hughes:
And then that set the tone for the whole weekend. You have all of these kids coming out of the closet, kids from Kentucky and Tennessee, whose parents are highly homophobic. And then everything from that to just kids who had a bad experience at school, experienced a microaggression, and we're just all bonding over having experienced this kind of stuff.
Coleman Hughes:
Meanwhile, we're learning workshops about internalized depression and we're just learning the bullet points of critical race theory and intersectionality. And then I brought this back to my school. I was a mix of very touched by what was happening and a little bit perplexed and wanting to ask more questions about the ideas because I was suppressing some skepticism because everything was so unanimously believed.
Coleman Hughes:
But it was a very positive, psychological and social experience for the most part. I brought it back to my school, gave a presentation to the whole school about the concept of internalized depression as a way of communicating back to the school what I had taken from this conference. That was my very first encounter with the successor ideology.
Coleman Hughes:
I didn't know it was that at the time, but I found some of the stuff compelling. I got into it a bit and it took me a while to deprogram myself from it. But that was the context in which it was introduced to me.
Ross Douthat:
How did your school receive your presentations?
Coleman Hughes:
I would say most of them probably ignored it, some of them were probably mildly annoyed, and then there was probably a good 10% that thought it was awesome.
Reihan Salam:
One thing that Wesley observed in his opening remarks, is that when you're talking about the successor ideology, yes, you're talking about race and identity. It's been a persistent theme in our conversation, but there are other elements as well. Some of which relate to, for example, just structures. How do we approach wrongdoing? How do we think about restorative justice? How do we think about the regulation of sexual assault? Something that, Wesley you've written quite a bit about.
Reihan Salam:
I wonder how all of you think about how these different things intersect. Do you see some of these debates on Title IX as being kind of essential to this larger ideological turn? Do you see them as potentially separable? I'm just curious about the relationship of that component of what you've been describing, Wesley to the larger picture.
Wesley Yang:
Well, it's a model repressive apparatus that proceeds by the distinctive successor move makes, is that it defines misconduct such that there's no sort of objective correlate against which that can be held accountable.
Wesley Yang:
The species of feminism that it is instantiating in the world precedes from the assumption that the projected experience is all, and ought to be determinative of whether something went wrong. So there's no actual way that you can, if you are from the suspect oppressor class, guarantee that you have remained in compliance with it. So long as there is the presence of the complaint is seen as being sufficient to establish guilt.
Wesley Yang:
That's the sort of direction that it moves, and the apparatus is one that it defines wrongdoing so expansively that nothing actually technically falls outside of it. Then it seeks to use [inaudible 00:50:44], account of the way we construct reality and power as a sort of guidebook. And to say that this thing that was once a critique can actually be used in order to reconstitute new forms of subjectivity, that will not be impelled to do wrong.
Wesley Yang:
It gives us an image of how the left wants to use therapeutic discourses to create new forms of subjectivity that will not being shaped by destructive or domineering power relations that made us in the past, that characterize our relations in the past, to eradicate it at the root.
Wesley Yang:
And so for me, the real rhetorical shift that signals this change in orientation is when we ceased to talk about racism and sexism, and we began to talk about whiteness and masculinity, and to argue that it's within these [inaudible 00:51:47] itself, like that's the deconstructive move. Within these deep forms of identity itself are already deeply inscribed, the forms of domination that we want to overcome.
Wesley Yang:
So it's the gender binary itself that has to be dismantled or abolish. How do we actually go about that? The use of administrative power that we see in the Title IX system is the model of how you go about it and taking that outside of that system, outside of that closed system that's easy to control through the levers of the federal bureaucracy and through bureaucracies that are creating on campuses, and actually embedding it within the criminal justice system itself is the next step.
Wesley Yang:
There was a move within the American Bar Association a year ago to recommend the adoption of affirmative consent, which is the view that if I don't get prior explicit consent for an activist presumptively like an assault into the law and it was a close vote. That presumption of law, which is quite subversive to [inaudible 00:53:10] due process is not yet there, but it has a very strong activist presence within the organizations that actually have a role in determining what legal standards and practices are going to be.
Wesley Yang:
We see there are a model of what will eventually, there's plenty of militation, there's plenty of activist energy behind bringing similar to the Title IX apparatus, like apparatuses to hunt people for microaggressions and so on, on college campuses, and the eventual embedding of that within systems of corporate governance and within the federal government itself.
Wesley Yang:
So when Ross says that it's just about politesse, I don't think that's right on a couple of grounds because of the urge to increase the area in which there is regulation. And also because we're seeing increasingly corporations like CBS, they made an announcement that 50% of their writers rooms are going to be people of color within five years.
Wesley Yang:
There's more and more demand for and corporations actually saying, "We're going to have explicit numerical quotas." And that's a big-
Reihan Salam:
It's going to be more rigidly and thoroughly institutionalized.
Wesley Yang:
It's not consistent with the language or the intent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It's actually quite illegal. But they're going ahead with it anyway, because it represents elite consensus. And there's an understanding that whenever the law is out of conformance with elite consensus, the Supreme Court and or legislators are eventually going to bring those things together.
Reihan Salam:
We have a number of questions from our viewers that I want to jump into now. The first one that I will direct to Coleman. It's a question from Gabriel, "What would you say to people who believe one, Cancel Culture is a label people slap on criticism they don't like, and two, in the age of Patreon and Twitter, no one can really be canceled. And so the current panic around Cancel Culture is overblown?"
Coleman Hughes:
To the first one I would say, I'm sure there are some people who cry Cancel Culture at the first whiff of legitimate criticism. I think I've seen that happen probably more than once. But Cancel Culture, it's just the assumption that you shouldn't expect to keep your job if you say anything that doesn't agree with the 20 or 30 propositions that you're supposed to believe about identity issues.
Coleman Hughes:
There's a huge gulf between you criticizing me and you inciting a Twitter mob to make me unemployable. So it's that second thing that people are concerned about because it's happened so often in the past few years. It doesn't even have to happen that many times for it to influence the entire culture. Like lynching, it's not about how many people you do, it's about how publicly you do it.
Coleman Hughes:
Then the second question was in the age of Patreon, no one can really be canceled. I suppose what you must mean by that is that if you get fired, you can just get on Patreon and expect people to help you out who care about what you got canceled for.
Coleman Hughes:
I suppose there are people who have done that. There are people like Bret Weinstein who've had whole second careers out of initially just telling people why he was canceled and then unpacking the problems that led to his cancellation in the first place.
Coleman Hughes:
My expectation would be that a lot of people aren't really... You shouldn't have to become a Bret Weinstein, which is to say a public intellectual if you got fired from your job like Jonathan Frieland for saying the N word in a completely anti-racist context. The expectation shouldn't be, "Well, Jonathan Friedland, he could've just gone the Bret Weinstein route. So therefore Cancel Culture is not real." Most people aren't in a psychological or personal or social position to do that and shouldn't have to.
Reihan Salam:
Ross, a question from Tim, "How does the very public ascendancy of the successor ideology impact conservative politics? Does it mean the suburbs are lost to Republicans for the foreseeable future?"
Ross Douthat:
I mean, the boring cop out answer is that it's too soon to tell. I mean, I think one name that we haven't dropped in this discussion is the name Donald Trump. I think it's very clear that Trump's initial election was a partial, reflected many, many things, but the whole idea of Trump as someone who wasn't politically incorrect [inaudible 00:58:23]. It was an incoherent response to incoherent phenomenon, that there were people who liked Trump or voted for Trump because they had this sense that there was a sort of emergent, ideological move of foot in American culture that they didn't like, and they were going to vote for the un-pc guy as a reaction against that.
Ross Douthat:
But then I think it's very clear that Trump's presidency, and his very persona as someone who began his recent political career as a birther and someone whose approach to racial issues, to put it mildly, is inflammatory and ineffective, I think there's no question that he's then been an accelerant for the leftward move in lead American institutions and for the alienation of a lot of middle of the road not terribly ideological Americans, especially maybe suburban white Americans, maybe especially suburban white female Americans from anything like conservatism, which has meant that there's a lot more space for a more left wing ideology to run in American life than there would be if we had a different Republican Party and a different political leader for that party.
Ross Douthat:
Or at least, this is part of my ongoing argument with other conservatives about why people who fear the successor ideology the most actually have the strongest reasons to hope that Trump isn't reelected. But without going down that rabbit hole, I would just say that warps all of these discussion, the fact that Trump is president, the fact that everything in American life has polarized into for Trump or against Trump.
Ross Douthat:
I think it's possible to imagine a future where you have a kind of replay of what happened in America in the '60s, and '70s, where you have a big left wing swing that goes particularly far in elite institutions. And then this leads to some sort of obvious policy disasters in various ways, and alienates a lot of those suburban voters, and you get a swing back in politics that ultimately has effects in culture too.
Ross Douthat:
There are reasons why it couldn't happen the same way, but I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility. I do think it's out of the realm of possibility though, so long as Trump himself is the embodiment of the alternative to the successor ideology, if you will.
Reihan Salam:
Just very quick follow up on this, Ross, there is a widespread belief that President Trump has proven a unifying and galvanizing figure for a broad center-left coalition that might otherwise have many fishers that might otherwise have many conflicts.
Reihan Salam:
I wonder, if you accept that that is true or there's at least some truth to it, does that imply that regardless of the outcome of the election in November, there will be a desire to elevate Donald Trump as a figure to emphasize him, and that those on the right who might want to distance themselves from him, they'll have an awfully difficult time doing so given the imperative of raising his visibility?
Ross Douthat:
To some extent, yeah. I mean, obviously Trump himself is whatever else he is, he's incredibly masterful at putting himself in the headlines. And even though he's getting older and maybe has lost a step or two in his own way, I don't think that will cease to be the case in the post-election dispensation if he loses.
Ross Douthat:
So, yeah, I think there'll be a combination of strong incentives for the left and center-left to remain united against the menace of Trumpism, even if he's not in the Oval Office, and Trump's own incentives, and the incentives of his immediate circle, his family, people who have gone all in for him, to keep him front and center.
Ross Douthat:
But that's also why I think the key question here is, what happens in zones that are external to DC politics? Fundamentally, if the successor ideology ends up associated with a return of high urban homicide rates and major failures in American education, then it's going to have a tough time sustaining itself as a Reagan ideology.
Ross Douthat:
If on the other hand, crime goes down and in the new dispensation white meritocrats seem happy with their lot in life than they were before and so on, then the successor ideology will have a certain distance to run before it can be challenged. Then other things might happen that we can't predict like a global pandemic or something. I mean, lots of things happen to make fools of our predictions.
Reihan Salam:
Two questions that are somewhat related, that I'll direct to you, Wesley. First is a question from Greg, "You've described a line of critique that labels Asian-Americans as white adjacent. What do you think the future holds for Asian-Americans as members of the Rainbow Coalition?"
Reihan Salam:
The other question from Aaron, is about the sociologist [Eric Hartman 01:03:47], who argues that throughout American history, most immigrants, including most Hispanic immigrants have eventually assimilated to a generic "white" identity. So far blacks have not. Can they, should they, or does Calvin's framework obscure more than it illuminates?
Reihan Salam:
So I am curious because you've discussed people of Asian origin as a very important element in this kind of larger conversation, because they complicate some of the foundational themes of the successor ideology. So, please, eager to hear your thoughts.
Wesley Yang:
There's certainly a part of the exhaustion with meritocracy there that refers to. And this has to do with, we're parachuting in people in large numbers, millions of people from countries that have termed the life chances of their young people on the basis of a single high stakes examination for more than a thousand years.
Wesley Yang:
And so there are certain set of cultural priors that those immigrants are bringing with them. One of those priors is that youth bend a certain share, and depending on how large or small that income is, that share can be as large as 20 or 30%. This is something that was reported by the New York Times a few years ago when they were talking about the culture of test prep in New York City around the specialized high school examination that results in an outcome where Stuyvesant, which is seen as the jewel of that system has consistently been 70 to 80% Asian-American for the last 10 years or so. And of course there is a movement of thoughts to change those demographics.
Wesley Yang:
Just a few weeks ago, the University of San Francisco's Medical School announced the racial demographics of its incoming class of its medical school class, and an year reduction in the Asian-American population from 60% to something around 24%. And so we're talking about a reduction as a percentage of the class by more than half.
Wesley Yang:
That of course is the move that has been anticipated and explicitly declared as the goal that the New York City would have in mind in changing the schema for entry into the school, by a facially, race, neutral scheme that would take the top seven or 8% of each middle school and award them entry into the specialized high school system, getting rid of the test altogether.
Wesley Yang:
And so the way that the University of San Francisco Medical School, how did they arrive at that arc? They did it just by overt racial balancing. Now, overt racial balancing is something that has been against the law in California ever since voters in 1996 voted yes to a referendum that said that there'll be no race preferences from state universities and in hiring by public entities in the State of California.
Wesley Yang:
But they went ahead in defiance of that guidance, to in a way, to provide an image of what will happen because there's a new referendum that would annul that previous act of the people, that's coming up in September and now we see what it means. It means we're going to reduce the Asian-American population by more than half, and we're going to raise the representation of Hispanics and Blacks, which were at a much lower level prior to that, to more or less in parody to-
Reihan Salam:
Wesley, do you expect... There are many more than two outcomes, but two outcomes immediately come to mind. One is that you'd expect to see some backlash from people of Asian origin who see that because they complicate, because they are kind of inconvenient for this narrative, this framework of racial justice, that perhaps they will then reject it.
Reihan Salam:
Another possibility is that part of upward mobility and assimilation will be embracing this narrative and basically finding ways to more shrewdly operate within it and to thrive within it. Now, obviously one has stakes to generalize, but I wonder how you think about those two paths.
Wesley Yang:
I think both of those things are happening, and it's also very clear that Trumpism has had a huge push effect on Asian-Americans away from the Republican Party and away from conservatism, because he is perceived, I think, correctly as being anti-immigrant.
Wesley Yang:
And of course, it's not understood by everyone, but for the last half decade or so, the largest group coming to the United States, it's people from Asia. And so people from Asia, they are this reagent that is increasing, creating unpleasant conditions of competition, in the upper middle class for elite credentialing on the one hand, and having effects as a result that result and move away from the [inaudible 01:09:16], which needs to be a general move that they're using the pandemic as a pretext to temporarily remove the test at Harvard. But the University of California is removing it altogether.
Wesley Yang:
So there's exhaustion with the culture of meritocracy and there's a move to dismantle it that happens to coincide with the fact that there is a Asian-White test gap that has only been growing. And so there have been studies that were done in the past that showed that white people were very supportive of testing as a transparent measure of ability that had integrity so long as the gap between whites and non-white minorities was seen as salient.
Wesley Yang:
But once it was brought to their attention that there was a gap between Asian-Americans and whites, their support for the integrity and transparency of testing diminished as one would expect. And so I think a lot of the policy that we're seeing now follows from the results that we saw manifest in that experiment, which was large in the country as a whole.
Wesley Yang:
But to your question, I think that we're going to see some of both. It's mostly newer immigrants from the mainland who are involved in advocacy against affirmative action. And they were able to actually stop such a move in Oregon. They were able to organize politically and be effective-
Reihan Salam:
Forgive me, we have more questions now than we have minutes left for the discussion. But, I'm eager to hear more from you in the future on this. Coleman, I'm going to combine two questions that will seem very unrelated, but I know that you're going to weave them together beautifully in your answer.
Reihan Salam:
The first, is a question, what advice does Coleman have for someone currently on a liberal college campus who descends from the consensus we've been discussing? And second, a question from Grayson, "If the Cold War II framing between the US and China takes hold, will that set a limiting condition on the successor ideology, great power conflict demands, and facilitates a broad national identity?" So I'm curious to hear you on both.
Coleman Hughes:
The second one first, I have to imagine that, that will be bad for the successor ideology, both because it will, to some extent vindicate Trump's, you can call it instinctive antipathy towards China. The rise of any global threat makes America seem relatively benign and that it's a foundational theme of the successor ideology is that America is the worst.
Coleman Hughes:
So there's that, and to some extent, I think the threat of jihadism in the 2000s may have been one of the things that held people together on identity-based issues at home. Just the idea that there was a kind of a threat abroad.
Coleman Hughes:
On the first question, what advice do I have for someone who was in the position I was in until I graduated very recently? I would highly recommend trying to find professors and classes that you find interesting and do lots of research on your professor before you take a class. Is this a professor that is going to welcome all viewpoints, or is it a professor that is going to terrify you if you're skeptical of the code that you're reading? Try to reach out to people who are like-minded on campus, find a community, and if not, start one. And understand that college is only four years, you have the rest of your life.
Reihan Salam:
I have very unfairly because we literally adjusted that seconds are ticking down. I do have one question for the three of you, and I hope for a brief answer, if you can. I'm curious about whether you think this successor ideology that is still emerging, whether you think it will be in a more dominant position 10 years hence than it's in now. Will it be more fully articulated in our elite institutions? Will it have more thoroughly penetrated K-12 education? Do you believe that the successor ideology will at least for the next decade, continue to gain strength? Ross, I'll let you kick it off.
Ross Douthat:
Gut instinct is that 10 years is about when I would guess that its influence would crest, and that it's potent enough to dominate the next decade and the set by enough internal contradictions to sort of dissolve or run into real trouble thereafter. But that's a total gut-level response.
Reihan Salam:
Wesley?
Wesley Yang:
I think I agree with that. The question is how much harm to institutions happen in the meantime, such that it will have some end up a bell rock from the deep, much more dangerous and threatening than itself? I think there's a decent chance that will happen, but it is not assured and we have a say in the outcome.
Reihan Salam:
Coleman?
Coleman Hughes:
Yeah. I think if Trump wins again, then I think it will definitely have at least 10 years of being on the upswing. If not, my instinct is close to Ross that it has maybe 10 years and then it will dissipate. It will cease to be so exciting to kids who are coming of age 10, 15 years from now.
Reihan Salam:
Thank you very much to all of you. We're at the end of our time for today. Coleman, Ross, Wesley, this has been such a pleasure and such an honor. Thank you all for sharing your very original and perceptive perspectives with us today. And thanks to all of you for watching. We greatly appreciated your thoughtful questions.
Reihan Salam:
If you would like to hear about more conversations like today's, I'd encourage you to subscribe to the Manhattan Institute's newsletters. If you're interested in supporting our work, consider making a donation. There are links for subscribing and donating in the comment section on your screen.
Reihan Salam:
I also strongly encourage you to seek out, to find Coleman's work, Ross's work, and Wesley's. You can find them through a variety of channels and you will be richly rewarded for doing so. Thank you, everyone. This was great. Goodbye.
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