Is "Critical Race Theory" the Wrong Term?
Are Republicans tilting at the wrong windmill? New Substack author Wesley Yang, who coined the term "Successor Ideology," describes a movement that goes far beyond race
	
Matt Taibbi
Jul 8	

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The headline for Wednesday’s CNN feature said it all:

The critical race theory panic has White people afraid that they might be complicit in racism

A quick note about headline style. Some time ago, the word came down in media circles that we should begin capitalizing the “B” in “black.” Trying to be forward-thinking, I went along with it. I remember New York Times national editor Marc Lacey explaining, “Some have been pushing for this change for years… They consider Black like Latino and Asian and Native American, all of which are capitalized.”

In that same article, “Why We’re Capitalizing Black,” the Times quoted W.E.B. DuBois, who once said using a small “n” for “Negro” was a “personal insult,” and that when the Times changed their style to agree with him, it was an “act of recognition of racial self-respect.” They added that “white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups.”

The Columbia Journalism Review reiterated the concept in “Why we capitalize ‘Black’ (and not ‘white’),” saying, “Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.”

Less than a month after these pieces, the Washington Post came out with, “Why ‘White’ should be capitalized, too,” arguing: “No longer should white people be allowed the comfort of this racial invisibility; they should have to see themselves as raced.”

In a flash the bulk of the business dropped their righteous reservations about using Stormfront style guide, and began employing capital Ws all over. I’ve since gone back to lower-casing everyone. People just make these things up on the fly, reveling in the overthrow of prevailing attitudes, even if the overturned standards are ones they themselves set ten minutes ago. It’s fashion, not politics.

Getting back to CNN’s story about the “panic” that “has White people afraid”: Republican politicians, mostly at the state level, are in the midst of an all-out, hair-on-fire campaign against “Critical Race Theory,” with legislators in 24 states attempting to introduce bans of its teaching. It’s become the main front in the culture war, and the Republican Party — which for decades now hasn’t yet met a political opportunity it can’t find a way to **** up — is losing. Even a perfunctory glance at laws passed in Tennessee, Iowa, Oklahoma, Idaho and Texas reveal they’re making a mess of a response to a phenomenon they don’t really understand.

Take the Texas law. In what’s supposedly an effort to fight a movement hostile to speech rights and rife with irrational orthodoxies, the Lone Star State is responding with dumber versions of the same thing. Their law includes broad mandates against “being compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy,” while also requiring teachers to present controversies “without giving deference to any one perspective.” Nearly all the Republican laws share this quality of imposing draconian bans on what they perceive to be elements of CRT, without really defining what CRT is. They don’t know what they’re fighting, so their solutions look like insane overreactions — like smashing at a water bug with a hammer and missing over and over.

The Republicans’ inability to define their target is a problem because conventional wisdom’s official position on “critical race theory” is that it doesn’t exist. The nebulous academic concept is said to be just a phantasm, a fascist fantasy. A recent Sunday edition of the Washington Post put it this way:

The challenge for educators amid the critical race theory backlash: How do you fight hot air?

There are two mainstream poses on this topic. One shrugs in would-be bewilderment, as if not understanding what conservatives could be upset about. The other points an accusatory finger back and insists Republicans cooked up the term as a stalking horse to prevent teachers from telling the truth about American racism. “Critical race theory,” said the Washington Post’s Colbert King, “is simple truth-telling.”

The war over “Critical Race Theory” in this sense has become a political marketing campaign that’s uniquely double-edged in its cynicism. Democrats are pretending they don’t know what the fuss is all about. Republicans are pretending there isn’t a dog whistle in their backlash campaign. At the center of it all is the concept itself, which does exist but is much broader, and both more interesting and more frightening, than the narrow race theory that has Republican politicians in maximum wig-out mode.

Two years ago, writer Wesley Yang penned a series of tweets about the “new language of power throughout the non-profit sphere,” giving it a name: the “Successor Ideology.” The author of The Souls of Yellow Folk created an umbrella term to explain everything from whatever the hideous moniker “cancel culture” means to purges of classics and STEM disciplines in universities, to the new move toward segregated “affinity spaces,” to “intent doesn’t matter,” to the spread of workforce training sessions that ask white employees in both the public and private sectors to focus on things like “undoing your own whiteness,” to a dozen other things.

Conversely, a wide variety of oppositional theologies, of varying degrees of eccentricity, have become allied in a unified front of negation:

What Yang went on to describe in a series of articles and appearances isn’t narrowly about race, or trans issues, or feminism, or American history, but a much wider concept that argues that our foundational notions about everything are wrong and need to be overturned. Conversely, as Yang writes, a wide variety of oppositional theologies, of varying degrees of eccentricity, have become allied in a unified front of negation:

From eco-feminism to Carlos Castenada to Carol Gilligan to German Romanticism, there isn't a single woolly-headed critique of Western philosophy that isn't thrown willy-nilly into this stew and presented as authoritative, despite the obvious internal inconsistency.

The movement Yang describes is strategically brilliant and substantively moronic, a perfect intellectual killing machine. The Successor Ideology has blown through institutional America with great speed, coming to dominate everything from academia to the news media to Silicon Valley almost overnight.

Attempts by conservatives or even critics on the left to question any of this are usually described in news accounts as efforts to clamp down on something uncontroversially right and necessary, e.g. “educational discussions about race.” This ignores the fact that the movement seems also to be about things like ending blind auditions for orchestra applicants, or redefining mathematics to discourage a focus on “getting the right answer,” to classics teachers canceling the classics, and many other bizarre things.

In some instances it pleases intellectuals to argue that all of these things are and must be connected — that the opponent of police brutality must also stand in opposition to everything from the Harper’s Letter to the young adult novels of Amélie Zhao and EE Charlton-Trujillo. Sometimes, as in the case of the response to latest Republican backlash, the argument is not only that none of these things are connected, but that there’s nothing to connect. Which view is right?

Yang, whose new Substack site Year Zero launches tomorrow (you can find it here) is one of the few writers who takes the time to explore these issues without making an explicit project of howling in outrage about them. He outlines the “Successor Ideology” with a kind of awed detachment, like a scientist sent to describe a revolting but admirably destructive insect species. I asked him to outline his theory of the “Successor Ideology,” and explain why media discussion of it has been handcuffed by the public’s association of it with right-wing backlash politics.

Our discussion, edited for length:

TK: You’re credited with coming up with the term successor ideology. What was the genesis of that?

Wesley Yang: I was discussing the subject in Twitter mentions, and it just made sense. On the spot, I tweeted that we have an authoritarian utopianism that’s emerging on the left, and we need a name for it. There’s a range of different words people use to describe different parts of the elephant. Identitarianism; social justice politics; cancel culture; wokeness; postmodern neo-Marxism, which is the Jordan Peterson version of it; cultural Marxism.

Some of these terms have a spoiled progeny to them, so you want to avoid them for that reason. Some of them just name different parts of it without encompassing the whole thing. Cathy Young proposed KenDiAngeloism [eds. note: referring to “antiracist” authors Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Some attribute the term to John McWhorter] which I think is actually quite useful, but that that only captures one element of it. There’s the race identitarianism. Then there’s also the gender-identitarianism, and they go together. Then there’s a radical feminist wing to it. Then there’s also a transgender ideology wing to it. There are internal tensions behind these movements, but the theory is, is that they all move together in concert.

You have people who refer to themselves as abolitionists. Of course, that’s a reference to the people who brought about the end of slavery. There’s a book I read recently that served as a key to understanding all this to me. It was called The Abolitionist Imagination, and it’s by the Columbia literary scholar named Andrew Delbanco.

He said: Look, there’s a recurrent tendency within American culture. It’s not just the people that we call the abolitionists with a capital A, where there’s a moral vanguard that emerges that feels that we are in the midst of a great moral crisis, that there’s a great moral evil in our midst that has to be eradicated at any cost.

Of course, the paradigmatic example of this is the original abolition movement, the people who in 1820 and 1830 and 1840, when the idea was unthinkable, said, “Oh, we could bring an end to human slavery.” Those people ended up being correct. There was a great moral emergency that was happening.

Up until 1859, nobody thought that we were going to embark on the largest war in the 19th century at enormous costs to settle the question. There’s a consensus that includes almost everyone alive today that that was a cost that had to be paid, because there was a great moral emergency which was slavery. So you had these people, they were on the vanguard, and they were seen as impractical, and they were seen as annoying, but they ended up being vindicated by the arc of the history.

Today, we have a professional activist class that sees itself similarly. So when I say the successor ideology, I see it as a vocational group that has an entrepreneurial project to advance a certain vision of the world as a matrix of oppression. They define themselves and what they fight against as this construct, this hyperobject. A hyperobject is like climate change: so large and pervasive that it structures everything else. So the hyperobject that we speak of here is this thing called white cisheteronormative patriarchy, the idea that there’s a unitary structure of domination that pervades our world, and that’s woven into every aspect of it.

MT: If you went to liberal arts school, that doesn’t sound completely crazy.

Wesley Yang: There was an anthology that came out in 1996 called White Privilege. There’s a couple of sentences from the introductory essays. One of them by a white guy named Richard Dyer, who wrote a book called White. He was an academic at this time, and he said, “Look, white people create the world in their own image, and in the process, they design a world that advantages themselves and disadvantages others.” On the face of it, it makes a kind of sense, right?

Then there’s a guy called Derald Wing Sue. He’s an Asian-American psychologist at Teachers College, who, in 2010, he wrote a book called Microaggressions in Everyday Life. Back in the ‘90s, he wrote an essay about whiteness, and he proceeds from this idea that I like to quote, which is that “there’s a vast socialization process that instills within us the white person above the non-white person, the heterosexual person above the homosexual person.” In some sense, this is true. But the question is: How do we derive the meaning from that? How do we apply it to the world?

The successor ideology proceeds from this idea that there’s a totalizing domination from which there is no escape, in which white cisheteropatriarchy is around us; that it’s unitary; that to attack one aspect of it, to attack what’s happening at the makeup counter, is to attack police brutality; but that it’s also necessary to attack all things on all fronts at all times… It’s important for there to be hyperobjects they are opposed to, so: abolish police, abolish prisons, abolish morphological preferences, abolish gender, abolish masculinity, abolish whiteness.

MT: Is that substantively different from being against police brutality, mass incarceration, misogyny, transphobia, etc.?

Wesley Yang: There’s this change in nomenclature that I noticed when I wrote an essay back in 2018, in Tablet, where people talk about racism and sexism, and then they began to talk about whiteness and masculinity. So there’s a line in an n+1 essay, where the person is saying, “Oh, we are now menaced by whiteness and masculinity.” Whereas in the past, we would have said, “Oh, we’re menaced by racism and sexism.”

There’s an inherent tension where, in order to get, say, the medical establishment to recognize their claims, gender identity has to be inherent and fixed. This was a problem if you were in college in 1995, that you would talk about. Queer theory was constantly both radicalizing identity but also fixing it as form of inherency. So there’s this essentializing, and then there’s a de-essentializing tendency. All of these things to varying degrees were inescapable if you were a humanities student back then.

Well, what happened? Schools produced graduates, and those graduates went into social work, and eventually they went into journalism, they went into law, they went into all sorts of professions. They have a class, the class that has an interest as a class in an entrepreneurial project in making themselves necessary and producing a demand for their services.

That class really attained much of what they were seeking with the Obama presidency and the Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage. The question became: Is it time now to declare victory, or are there more great moral emergencies that are in our midst, that it’s actually our job to fix? We institutionalized a class of people whose job is to identify great moral emergencies that other people don’t recognize, and then expand their moral horizons to begin to see these things as things that have to be eradicated. So you have a people whose raisons d'être depend upon there being a demand for their resources. It’s a bureaucratic professional endeavor.

MT: A lot of activist energy in the past was funneled into getting Democrats elected, but some recent causes seem almost designed to lose votes for Democrats. Is “The Successor Ideology” beneficial to the Democratic Party politically?

Wesley Yang: Over the last five years, Hispanics have been the group that have had seen the largest gains in income, including in the Trump years, and followed by Asian Americans. So you have these immigrant people that, for the most part, are living the American Dream and that are comfortable with the moral intuitions inherited from the pre-successor ideology worlds. Nonetheless, the thing keeps marching through. You have an activist class that claims to represent these people, but what they really represent are certain cause-oriented donors, because there’s this iron triangle within the Democratic Party that is its identity politics center. 

People don’t like it. Voters don’t like it. Democratic primary voters don’t like it. They don’t like the candidates that signal this stuff. So Kamala, Beto, Gillibrand... one by one, these people would be presented as serious candidates, and then the polls would go into the low 1%, and they’d be all but squeezed out of the race, leaving Joe Biden. But what they saw is that with Joe Biden, who’s this throwback figure, the activists could all rush to him and get most of what they wanted from him anyway. That is the process that we’re seeing now. Recently, Kamala tweeted a statement of solidarity with the AAHNPI community.

MT: Asian-American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, right?

Wesley Yang: Yes, there are those who say APA, or Asian Pacific American. Then, there are people who say APIA. But now they’ve added Hawaiian Native to it, apparently. So there’s this process of endless manufacturing, and this all fits into this thing. There’s an administrative entrepreneurial activity to people who have educations in this stuff, where they have to have something to do, and one of the things they do is they just dream up new things to abolish, and then they dream up new ways to alter the language, in pursuit of progress.

MT: Like whether or not to capitalize ‘Black’ and ‘White.’

Wesley Yang: This is now just a baked-in constituency within the Democratic Party. You have people saying, “Well, what does it mean? Maybe it’s just silly,” and so on. Skipping any deliberative process, we now have governments increasingly doing things that violate the spirit and letter of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. In Vermont at one point, non-BIPOC people had to be over the age of 55 to get the vaccine. I had to do some Googling to figure out whether an Asian person counted it, and apparently they did. Now, this only lasted a few weeks. There aren’t that many black people in Vermont.

But the point is that we crossed the Rubicon, in a way that once would have raised some eyebrows or even notice outside of the Tucker Carlson show or the Washington Free Beacon. It just happened. Everybody knows that if you say something about it, you’re immediately going to be seen as suspect.

Still, there’s a new, elite consensus that’s emerged on this, and how did that thing come into being? We made it clear that if you said anything against this, you would be canceled, or you would just be seen in a bad light. So then what happens is the only people who say anything about it are Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson. So it produces this dynamic where, once normal liberals see that this is only something that Tucker Carlson is talking about something, their prior moral intuitions get overwritten.

There was a moment when we made the switch from a text-based culture to an internet-based culture, and some people understood that you could reformat everything from zero. Yes, we still have a Constitution. We still have the most protective of free speech legal doctrine any country has ever had in the history of the world. That’s still there, but it doesn’t occupy the same place for liberals that it once did.

MT: This includes a re-think of things like due process, correct?

Wesley Yang: Due process is a great example. If you proceed from this idea that we’re going to give someone due process protection so that 10 guilty men walk free so as to prevent the one guilty man from being unjustly punished, we’re going to focus on averting all possibility of the false positive, and therefore, things like sexual violence become very difficult under that regime to prosecute.

There’s a transition there from a pursuit of justice to a redistribution of injustice. It’s the idea that we’re going to use administrative weapons, including the law, to become blunt instruments of deterrence. This is very clearly spelled out in, I think, a really important essay along this trajectory by Ezra Klein in Vox, where he says, “The yes means yes law is a terrible law, but I completely support it.” It represents that within our basic ideas of what it means to give due process, yes means yes makes things very difficult, because it proceeds from this idea that whatever has not been specifically agreed to, is an act of sexual violence.

He has a line where he says, essentially, “If we want to end this crisis, we need there to be a chill. We need to we need there to be a balance of terror.” He doesn’t use that term, but he’s saying, “There has to be chill at the base of your spine, when you know that, ‘Oh, well if I proceed, I’m entering into a place where I can no longer be protected.’”

MT: “Men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter”?

Wesley Yang: It’s very easy to justify this to oneself. You can say, “Look, for thousands of years or whatever, you have all these people that did not have any protection, and so why not tilt back from the class of the oppressors?” It’s persuasive, and the fact that it is persuasive is why we definitely have to guard against it more than anything else. It’s nihilistic. They’re not trying to be malicious, but they are trying to basically annihilate a lot of the foundational processes that we depend upon and then remake them anew. You operate from the starting point that all the previous ideologies, methods, and processes are untrustworthy, because they produced this outcome previously, so we’ve got to remake all of them.

I recently tweeted about an article that ran in n+1 around 2011. It was called Raise the Crime Rate. One of the things it talked about was that the number of rapes and sexual assaults that are reported, according to the best sources, have gone down by 85% in the last 30 years. Of course, not everything is recorded, but that is a constant. So there’s a drastic decrease. But that was right at the moment when the Obama Administration was about to ramp up with claims about a campus rape crisis, and the belief that we have to create this system resulted in the Title IX system. 

I wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Jeannie Suk Gersen. There are four Harvard law professors, all of whom identify as part of the feminist movement. They looked at what was going on, on campuses, and they were noting the fact that people who were being accused, in many cases, were not told the charges; were not told the identity of the accuser; had no ability to look at the evidence that was in front of us; there would be one person who was both the advocate on behalf of the victim but also adjudicating the case.

Everything that we know about how to design a fair system was being systematically violated in order to produce this redistribution of injustice, in order to make things better by producing this deterrent effect that Ezra Klein wrote in defense of. He basically said, “Yes, I understand that by all of the standards of law and due process that we know to be the case, this concept is bad. It’s terrible.” But his clever thing was to say, “I support it anyway, because I understand its underlying logic.” That’s the historical turn that’s important.

Suk co-wrote this great piece called The *** Bureaucracy, where she goes through how they define sexual violence to encompass, as she says, “almost everything that students are doing.” So they’re creating a system where nobody is innocent, everybody is guilty, and then, the system has the discretion to target whomever they wish. Their view, having been involved in the system, was that the number of black and Hispanic males who end up in trouble is radically disproportionate. So essentially it’s, “You created this system that’s going to end up reflecting the biases of the rest of society.” 

This is one of the many areas in which ideological succession ends up cannibalizing itself. In many cases, you reach a certain equilibrium, where people are basically free, and the only way that you still squeeze more progress out of it, is to take things away from other people or redistribute that equilibrium. I’m not saying we should be complacently at the end of history, but it may be the case that suddenly we see second wave radical feminists being made into the great enemy of mankind by transgender activists. There’s this process where we have to go back and we have to cannibalize the previous subjects of progressive reform in order for there to be more progressive reform. That’s a sign that this succession is becoming involuted and self-consuming.

MT: It seems to be a feature that whoever was at front of the consensus a moment ago becomes the target in the next instant. As a media story it’s hard to follow.

Wesley Yang: All of these things, they’re in the process of being introduced at scale, and we don’t know what the ultimate outcome of that is going to be. We know what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to produce a world where they’re on top. It’s amazing how far they’ve gone, because if you’ve been paying attention to them for the last 20 years, you mostly just saw them as this buzzing irritants, and you still have all these people insisting that that’s all they are, when, clearly, they have burst the bonds of anything that any serious person would have thought was possible already in their ability to change core policies, like giving vaccines by race. We’re not talking about it, and we’re not criticizing it, and the only people who criticize it are people who then end up vindicating the argument. It’s a paradox.

So that’s the kind of thing that we’re stuck in, and that’s the thing that I’m writing about. It’s an interesting story. It’s a funny story. The media is not good at covering it, because the media is where a lot of this is happening, so it’s constrained by the fact that these dynamics are being inflicted upon those editors and writers within those institutions themselves. So the place where you can write about this in an unfettered way is now, at the moment, limited. Maybe, going forward, it’s Substack.

TK: So it seems. Welcome to Substack, and thanks, Wesley.

Wesley Yang: Thank you.