The Successor Ideology

Critical Racial Studies aka The Great Awokening amounts to nothing less than Nietzsche’s Slave Revolt in Morality applied to History and the entire Culture.

The inversion of values here redefines the heroic figures of American and Western History in general as villains guilty of “colonization” and oppression and dismisses the all of the artistic, intellectual, technological, and political achievements of America and the entirety of European Civilization as completely and utterly tainted and delegitimatized by the supposed crimes of Slavery, Military Aggression, Imperialism, and Racism.

This decisive moral standard is applied one-sidedly. There is no problem whatsoever with conquest, war, brutality, or slavery on the part of any nation or peoples outside of Europe and America. The abolition of Slavery by the West in the 19th Century, the elimination of Southern segregation sixty years ago, the succeeding decades and decades of racial favoritism have no significance. The crimes of the White Race are so uniquely terrible that they can never be erased either by the passage of time or by compensatory privilege and reparations. And neither the whole nor any part of the Ideology of the Grievances of the People of Color is open to debate. The question or attempt to debate any of it constitutes in itself yet another crime of violence and aggression.

Left-wingers look with delight on large-scale Third World Immigration and visualize an America in which persons of European descent will be an impotent and out-voted minority. Meanwhile, the universities, Big Business, and elite institutions generally have enthusiastically signed on in complete agreement with all the crazed rhetoric emanating from Marxist agitators and from all the crackpot pseudo-academics hired via Affirmative Action to staff up the constellation of intellectually-bogus Identity Studies departments.

The 1619 Project and all the rest of the “Critical Studies” folderol is nothing more than self-flattering fantasies and illusions masquerading as scholarship.

Wesley Yang, a couple of years ago, produced a Twitter thread that proposed referring to so-called Critical Studies as “The Successor Ideology.”

Everything old becomes new again. What we have here is the same “Rising Tide of Color” that Lothrop Stoddard and Houston Stewart Chamberlain fretted over during the early years of the last century, the same diabolical scheme to unite the primitive seething masses of the Third World to overthrow and replace the Civilization of the West on the part of Dr. Fu Manchu and the Si Fan that Nayland Smith was always thwarting, only this time it’s for real and the Western Community of Fashion is on its side.

The successor ideology is what happens when ideas meant to encourage critical self-reflection become a part of an echo chamber and grow increasingly divorced from reality.

The list takes on the coloration of every romantic, reactionary, and left-wing shibboleth ever created.

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) May 21, 2019