The term "successor ideology" was coined by Wesley Yang to describe a "melange of academic radicalism now seeking hegemony throughout American institutions." That's how Reihan Salam at the Manhattan Institute describes it while leading off a discussion on "The Successor Ideology" with Ross Douthat, Coleman Hughes and Wesley Yang.
But what are we to think?
I had several takeaways from the discussion. First of all, if you are a minority, especially if you are black, it is really rough trying to make it in the educated culture of the academy, the corporation, and the bureaucracy. It explains the mania about "microaggressions." Wesley Yang:
There's a process that people go through when they enter into... new social settings where they don't know what fork to use at the dinner table, so on and so forth.
In other words, the climb from being a middle-class "anybody" into an upper social class "somebody" is fraught with embarrassment and setback, because you are learning the culture as you go. In fact, the chaps that were "to the manor born" are going to sneer at you. Back in Britland, this sneering is encapsulated in the putdown: "not quite out of the top drawer, old chap."
So, you can react to difficulty by steeling yourself for the struggle, or you can complain about the meany-jellybeanie white supremacists that are laughing and sneering at you. Guess what: if you want to rise in the world, it is hard! Get used to it.
But, on the other hand, according to Ross Douthat, there is among ordinary white people in the upper social class "a sense of exhaustion with the culture of meritocracy." Or, to put it another way, there are a lot more people competing for the glittering prizes than there were a while ago, and the problem is that there are only a limited number of glittering prizes.
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.
So, even white people from good families can get on the successor ideology bandwagon because it gives them an excuse to fail.
Then there is the need for sin. In the old Christian dispensation original sin was a personal thing. But what to do if you no longer believe in the Christian concept of sin? Perfectly simple: you can believe in the collective sin of "enslaving black people" and fill your "original sin shaped hole in the human psyche" with the sin of slavery.
Then there is the baby-boomers-owning-the-world problem. If you are a millennial, and especially a non-white millennial, it seems like the white baby boomers have got the whole world cornered. No fair!
Then there is the class aspect. Black Coleman Young says:
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 [woke]. 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.
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.
In other words, this successor ideology is a thing of the upper social class, the educated Gentry. Commoners need not apply.
Coleman Young then relates how he got to go to a "People of Color Conference" that was led by "this extremely charismatic gay black man... the type that... could be selling books on the road and be drawing audiences to get his self help stuff." Er, no, Coleman. We are talking about a revival meeting and the sawdust trail. Good to know that the good old tent revival meeting is not yet lost to history, thanks to our lefty friends. And remember back in the day when revival meetings were just eeeuw!
Then Ross Douthat blames it all on Donald Trump whose "approach to racial issues, to put it mildly, is inflammatory and ineffective" and who has accelerated the leftward move in US institutions and driven a lot of suburban white Americans -- and white female suburban white Americans -- away from conservatism.
Yeah. Except that as far as I can see, Trump is running a full-court press for blacks and Hispanics to think of themselves as regular Americans. He is saying: come on in and join the party, because you belong as ordinary Commoner Americans.
Then there is the curious fact, introduced by Wesley Yang, that the current move away from entry to university on the basis of test results happens to coincide with a period in which a huge wave of Asians are outperforming whites in the test department. And these Asians come from a culture that determined "the life chances of their young people on the basis of a single high stakes examination for more than a thousand years." I mean. If you are exhausted with the competition of more and more people competing for the same glittering prizes...
I have a modest connection with this. Back when I was a kid in Britland as a baby boomer, I was conscious that I was the first generation of public-school boys that were not going to get into Oxbridge without extraordinary effort and brilliance. Oh well; I was not really that interested in competing for the glittering prizes anyway. But suppose I had wanted to dance with the girl who danced with the Prince of Wales? Then I might have been bitter for the rest of my life.
Oh, and I had my share of "microaggressions," like the prof at university that told me that I was taking a place away from a deserving working-class boy; or the managing partner at work that asked "where did this guy come from" when I made a mild remonstrance against something in a cultural sensitivity training session. But you know what? That is life. You don't let other people get you down. After all, they are knaves and fools!
My takeaway?
Yep. Life is rough right now for the scions of the upper middle class, the children of people that, without particular standout talent, rose to professorships and deputy assistant directorships. And life is rough for the young folks, particularly blacks, trying to make it in the upper social class of education, corporation, and bureaucracy, because you are learning a new culture, and that is hard.
But here's the thing. If you want to be a "somebody" then a career in the educated bureaucracies, whether in the university, media, coporations, or government or activism is actually fake. You will not make yourself into a "somebody;" it will all be let's pretend.
You wanna be a "somebody?" Well, then try to be an Elon Musk. Or a Steve Jobs. Dive into high tech for a season and then try your own startup. I know a young man that dropped out of university to get into a blockchain startup. One thing led to another and he's sold his company for a tidy sum to an outfit doing 401(k)s and IRAs. That is what I call real achievement; that is the real arc of getting from "anybody" to "somebody."
But if you are just checking the boxes in the existing upper-class hierarchy? Well, Charles Dickens had you figured out nearly 200 years ago when he wrote in Little Dorrit about the Barnacles and Stiltstockings at the Circumlocution Office.
If you fancy a career in the bureaucracy, which are you? Are you a Barnacle, just hanging on to your job until you get the pension? Or are you a Stiltstocking, strutting and fretting your hour upon the stage with the illusion that your dull post in the hierarchy will make you into a "somebody?"
Here's what I think. I think that this whole successor ideology or leftist reign of terror is a reflection of a cultural crisis in the educated elite, a failure of meaning.
The fact is that going through the chairs in the administrative elite is a life without meaning. You can see this in the parade of swamp creatures we have seen in the War on Trump. They are anybodies pretending to be somebodies. But the scions of the elite have always expected to jump the queue, to get a nice plum job without having to brave the dangers of the time.
And when they get frustrated they need to blame someone. They can't blame the minorities trying to come up through the system. They cannot blame themselves -- heavens no! -- so they blame the Trump deplorables.
Yeah, no kidding! Life is hard, even in these times when everyone in the world except way out in the country has a smartphone. Life is no longer a struggle to survive, to get the next meal on the table. But it is still a struggle for status, for being the equal or the superior of your fellows. People are still jockeying for position in the hierarchy. Indeed, according to the modern notion of the hierarchy of needs, once you have food on the table then your whole life turns around the next stage in the hierarchy. And there is no end to this.
The experts at the Manhattan Institute think that the successor ideology still has ten years to run before it runs out of steam.
Very good. But then what? What will succeed the successor ideology?
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