The Unity of Oppression and the Turn to Successor Ideology
Some Aspect of the Successor Ideology
I have only discussed gender ideology in passing, listing the binary structure of sexual difference as one of the myriad Great Moral Emergencies (along with the existence of police and prisons, differential outcomes on standardized tests, morphological preferences in dating, and all measurable group-based disparities in outcome) that the Professional Activist Class has declared must be eradicated at any cost. I considered for a while continuing my Twitter practice of speaking of gender ideology primarily through implication and analogy — which is to say, in a manner consistent with the esoteric strategies that enable risk minimization while airing disfavored opinion —but I recall one of the stated premises of this Substack, which is to proceed as if one were free to say what one believes.1 And when one speaks of a politics of knowledge that parasitizes truth-certifying institutions and uses them to manipulate language so as to render certain thoughts unthinkable (and thus certain political outcomes inevitable), one must speak of the movement that today serves as its ne plus ultra, the thing that is more in the nature of the thing that it is than any other thing.
The Successor Ideology posits what I call a "unity of all oppression" narrative and sets itself in opposition to what it calls "Eurocentric cisheteronormative patriarchy", which is a pretentious way of saying "the rule of straight white men". The ideology says that whites are privileged over non-whites, that men are privileged over women, that the able-bodied are privileged over the non-able-bodied, that heterosexuals are privileged over homosexuals, and that every one of us has a unique experience of both privilege and oppression structured by the dimensions along which we are privileged or oppressed that in sum accounts for who we are and where we end up in the world.
According to this account of social reality, one of the the goals of legitimate institutions, and part of the basis of their mandate to rule in the age of ideological succession, is that they must work to dismantle those implicit hierarchies in all their myriad guises. Whether or not any of them really understand that they did so, or intend to follow through on all the implications of the act, the countless private and public organizations that declared themselves “anti-racist” organizations all signed on to fulfill the agenda that flows from these principles. If they prove resistant to any specific reform demanded of them by the successor coalition, they will be confronted by their prior commitments and asked — politely at first, and then through the medium of screaming fits and claims of genocide — to live up to them.
Year Zero is an ongoing inquiry into the ideological fever that overtook the governing and chattering classes of America during the Trump years. Free and paid subscriptions are available. The best way to support my work is by taking out a paid subscription.
A manifesto posted online in 2017 by a group of black student activists at Harvard Law School referred to a "malleable and insidious" racism, found in "the architecture of expectations, the ranking of authorities, the sway of circumstance, the nudge of defaults, and the grammar of culture...It’s in the norms, customs, precedents, and incentive structures of institutions, jobs, and roles.” This is a more elaborated version of what is meant by the term “systemic racism,” and a more articulated version of what the unnamed New York Times staffer meant when she told Dean Baquet that “I just feel like racism is in everything.”
A simple paradigm case of the kind of insidious racism, preserved within the “norms, customs, precedents, and incentives structures of institutions, jobs, and roles,” to which the authors refers is the designation of the kind of kinky hair that black people have by virtue of their biological difference as inappropriate to the workplace. A grooming standard normed to what is typical for the average white person but only obtainable through expensive treatments for the typical black person will impose cost and time onto those who are systemically disfavored by it, and exact a less tangible but no less real psychic toll. The standard expresses the greater, unthinking power of the majority group held by virtue of being the majority and is a constant reminder of the existence of that power.
It’s for this reason that the New York City Human Rights council, a quasi-governmental entity that has placed itself at the vanguard of institutions advancing the Successor Ideology recently declared a right of New Yorkers to maintain “natural hair, treated or untreated hairstyles such as locs, cornrows, twists, braids, Bantu knots, fades, Afros, and/or the right to keep hair in an uncut or untrimmed state.” I’ll be revisiting the questions raised by the NYCHRC in a later post (the rule seems to confer a freedom from any workplace hair standard on black people that it does not seek to confer on whites), but for now, the point that matters is that we’ve established through one simple example that there really are quotidian standards of comportment that really do have racially disparate effects on minorities and that really do call out for remedial action that most reasonable people would recognize as legitimate.
Now, if we grant that this is a discrete instance of a real micro-inequity, we can also imagine several different possible inferences to be drawn from it. We can imagine that hair inequity is only one of a much wider repertoire of other such micro-equities. We might imagine that a pattern of subtle slights and incursions based on intended or unintended racism baked into the “grammar of culture”, when iterated over time, could combine to produce large disparities of outcome through a largely invisible process that produces a stratification along racial and gendered lines that would resemble what an overt oppressor would aim at without entailing actual oppression. We might end up calling this process of oppression without oppressors, as the Successor Ideologists do, “oppression”. And we might demand that true equality means a root and branch criticism of all that exists in order to ferret out inequity still baked into our societal operating systems, followed by a transformation of all those institutions to purge them of that inequity. And we might find that the causes of this inequity is not confined to minor matters of personal comportment such as dress or grooming, but that the infection is deep and encompasses the core institutions and practices of society such as objectivity, reason, competition, the work ethic, and so forth. We might find that the aforementioned forms of inquiry and ways of interacting purport to advance universal interests and values while in fact disguising and mystifying the operations of power that keep their makers — able-bodied cisheterosexual white men — in power.
Here, then is the conceptual turn that distinguishes Successor Ideology from the liberalism from which it emerged — the moment where it crystalizes from out of the prior framework and begins the process of cannibalizing the very set of assumptions that gave birth to it.
This framework of course proved very useful in academia. It is a machine for generating discourse and imbuing that discourse with moral and sociopolitical significance. It is most effective at propagating discourse when it unburdens itself from a burden of proof or from the tests of proportionality or reasonableness, and hardens into a dogma. It is a discourse unusually susceptible to those temptations, as it purports to speak on behalf of marginalized truths whose proof is situated in lived experiences that the logocentric system rejects in principle. In practice, the valorization of the subaltern, and the invitation to extended to the Madwoman in the Attic to speak her suppressed truth has a a way of turning into a warrant to dispense with any limiting principles on the claims one can make without challenge, and swiftly move toward totalizing accounts of reality.
A necessary condition of fighting one aspect of this many-tentacled beast is to fight all of its other aspects. Over the years, this movement has elaborated a continually advancing series of dimensions of oppression that it is necessary to invoke anytime any other dimensions of oppression are invoked, so as to ensure that the unity of all oppression is centered in our discussion of any particular of oppression. This peculiarity of the movement is rooted in both the academic parlor game of Left academe, and the prime directive of the non-profit professional activism sphere, which is to manufacture out of various discrete grievances, a single seamless synoptic picture of the world that can yoke together those various grievance under the sign of a single unifying mission.
One of the most complete evocations of what the tenets of this ideology add up to in practice was recently delivered by the historian Robin D. G. Kelley in an interview he gave to the website Truthout. Beginning as a critical reflection on the discourse around the Tulsa Massacre, it ends with an evocation of the political fantasia implicit in the Successor Ideology:
“In the United States, where the structure of colonial domination is completely shrouded in liberal multiculturalism, neoliberal homilies about freedom, colorblind discourse that undergirds criminalization and white supremacy, enabling 400 years of state-sanctioned serial murder to continue with impunity, power cannot be unseated merely through violence. (Of course, the very utterance of the word impunity reveals a contradiction, in that the point of law for the colonized is not protection but containment, discipline, and in some cases, genocide.) But we have no choice if we want to save the planet and free ourselves from liberal humanism. Decolonization, however, requires the abolition of all forms of oppression and violence. It means disbanding the military/police, opening borders, opening the prisons, freeing the body from the constraints of inherited and imposed normativities of gender and sexuality. It means ending war entirely, and that means the end of America as we know it.”
Kelley gives the uncompromising academic radical version of a creed whose sudden and surprising rise (in softer-hued versions) to a place where it does not just possess mainstream respectability but in fact defines it, is the mystery that must be solved. The mystery, simply stated, is that those who sought to pursue the cause of black equality through the instrument of the civil rights state, instead wound up providing a warrant for federal judges to regulate the manner in which local principals would set bathroom use policy .
So therefore Ibram X. Kendi, high priest of the Successor Ideology declares that:
Which sets the table for the discussion of gender ideology that will begin in the next post.
One is of course free to say what one believes in much the same way that one could insult a royal power highly constrained in its ability to see and know in the age of monarchs. The rules enjoining good and forbidding wrong were as a practical matter inoperative most of the time. But if you had the misfortune to attract the attention of the authorities then, there was no recourse to concepts of free speech or open inquiry at all, as those terms had not yet been formulated.
Today we live in an electronic panopticon that is nominally committed to the principles of free speech and open discourse, creating a different path to arriving at a similar result. One may speak freely most of the time, but the gatekeepers of the manufactured consensus can choose to target you on the basis of unclear and shifting criteria at any time. Our subject here is the onslaught of an ideology that proceeds by defining all contrary opinions — and increasingly, contrary facts — as existing in the ever-ramifying zone of exception — “hate, harassment, and misinformation” — that a faction of the legacy media, working in concert with the Successor coalition, has carved out of the nominal commitments to free speech and open discourse that still obtain, in a way that seeks to hollow out those concepts from within and result in their eventual inanition in practice. One will be free to say whatever one likes — provided one is not “a shitty person”, a concept that those groups arrogate to themselves the authority to define, redefine, apply, or withhold at will. “Cancellation” is only a means in this pursuit. It is our purpose here to specify the ends that these means serve.
Just a quick comment on this incredibly helpful, thought-provoking, and needed essay. You mentioned a specific statement early on by black students at Harvard Law back in 2017. I went looking for it and quickly found it. It's by two progressive white professors and is actually dated 11/29/15: https://systemicjusticeblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/29/a-response-to-randall-kennedy/. Here are the two profs: https://systemicjustice.law.harvard.edu/about/team/. I don't think that this error on your part undercuts your claims about how the successor ideology has colonized the academic elite, but I'm a facts-guy and this needs correcting. It's for that reason, actually, that I wanted to post: because the event that Kennedy, a black center-right professor, was writing about, and that these two white professors are underlining--the infamous "black tape" episode where black law profs' photos at Harvard Law were taped over--was a hoax. It was a hoax almost certainly perpetrated by, or at minimum abetted by, Derecka Purnell, a student at the time who has gone on to write a book called "Becoming Abolitionists." Neither Purnell nor law school dean Martha Minow nor any of the HLS administration ever held her and possible co-conspirators to account. Purnell herself certainly hasn't come clean. But Wilfred Reilly wrote about this in his "Hate Crim Hoaxes" book, as did The National Review in the following article: https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/minow-harvard-law-school-hoax/. A small group of HLS students who were angered by the way in which Purnell's scam ended up stigmatizing white students and administrators even as it licensed the full-frontal march of the successor ideology there began a blog, and it's worth investigating. Here's one early post--and bravo for it. https://royallasses.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/3-evidence/. In any case, there's a bottom line here: One way in which the successor ideology has tightened its hooks around academic institutions is through such hate crime hoaxes. This doesn't mean that actual hate crimes haven't taken place, and don't take place, on college campuses. Of course they do. But as Reilly makes clear, and as the HLS episode forcefully demonstrates for those willing to listen, hate crime hoaxes ALSO take place on college campuses--and the response of the administrations and student bodiesd that witness them is not to call them out, or say, "We were wrong, sorry!," or investigate the alleged hate crime in adequate depth and then publicly chasten and punish those who committed the hoax. Quite the reverse: more often then not, it's to insist that the, um...we won't call it a hoax, "because it reveals deep-seated anger at racism blah blah blah." It's to blur the line, finesse the issue, insist on instituting additional campus climate surveys. Never, but never, do people pause and go, "Hmmm. Maybe things AREN'T as bad here as we thought." It's this floating-free-from-facts in the matter of race relations on campus that I find most destructive. It's the post facto justification of such acts as impressionistic but needed--ways of "raising consciousness of longstanding disparities," etc., that is most socially corrosive. Because the lack of actual accountability for those who perpetrated these hoaxes, in many cases, leaves the stench of APPARENT white (and usually white mal) maleficence in the air. The hoaxes themselves degrade the campus climate, even while they pretend--everybody pretends--that they were exposing a "systemic problem." Well yes, they were. It is indeed a problem, but not the problem it pretends to be. The problem, Wes, is exactly what you've articulated so well, which is that even the BAD facts--the hoaxes--end up getting subsumed within, and purified by, the Narrative.
Great piece, looking forward to the next installment. I would not be too hopeful about finding the philosopher's stone that reveals the unity of the many movements that make up the Successor Ideology coalition, though Nietzsche's resentment may not be irrelevant to the quest. The strongest source of the coalition's unity is people's desire to conform to (and participate in) the perceived dominant ideology; the second strongest is the pragmatic benefit of mutual support among allies. The strategists who are able to coordinate activists with different grievances and contradictory interests are intelligent engineers of power, like those who were able to use Communism as a clearing house for various, contradictory progressive movements, and steered these movements into serving the engineers. When the engineers have sufficient power, or as occasion demands, the progressive movements are downgraded or cast aside, having served their purpose.
You do not exaggerate the significance of Successor Ideology. It is the clearing house of today. The question is cui bono. It is only "the Communists" in the popular sense of the word, meaning subversives who seek to impose (not even necessarily exercise) totalitarian control over their neighbors. So who is it? Movement folks gain something for their supposed constituencies; advocates find an audience, which is enhanced by the advocate's actual exercise of power; money changes hands, public and private funding finds its way to the trough; but is there any higher order of profiteering? The billions that accrued to the billionaires as a result of the media-amplified COVID crisis point to one set of wire-pullers. But as Matt Taibbi wrote today, not even Zuckerberg actually controls the vast power he appears to wield. Who then? Satan and his generals aside, a critical thinker may come to the conclusion that any "Master Cylinder" is a figment of Aristotelian physics, when what we are really looking at is an ecology in which organisms discover and exploit ecological niches and compete for the ability to do so. The ultimate wire-puller is an Emmanuel Goldstein, invented to give people someone to hate, as the Successor Ideologists have invented the all-powerful white male. Successor Ideology, by contrast, may be found in many apparently unrelated niches serving different purposes, a kind of all-purpose vitamin for exercising power in any particular niche. More concretely, let's ask, what is the Open Society Foundation, a proponent of Successor Ideology in many forms, really after? For example, when it gives half a million dollars to the coalition agitating to reorganize the Minneapolis Police Department. Or when it gets DAs elected who decline to prosecute specific categories of crime. The answer seems to be, a seat at the table for our proteges, whom we will influence for our benefit as they acquire more power. We raise the valuation of the Successor Ideology itself by delivering practical successes. The whole enterprise benefits, from top to bottom, floating all activist boats, academic, professional, political, and commercial. It is also possible that this kind of practical Successor Ideology activity generates economic stress, which generates political stress, which generates even more economic stress, devaluing currency and other ownable assets for the benefit of whoever is left standing. This kind of query does not need to explain the whole world, only to link potentially related ecosystems. Thanks for your work!