Friday, July 16, 2021

The "successor ideology" won't stop coming at us

 

Andrew Sullivan, a left-wing writer and commentator, has some sobering thoughts.  I think he's summed up very succinctly the dilemma confronting us, and the dire threat it poses to our constitutional Republic.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.


Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget [critical race theory] for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.

Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.

This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.

. . .

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.

In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)

And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.

. . .

It is absolutely no accident that this illiberal ideology has no qualms whatever with illiberal methods. The latter springs intrinsically from the former. Kendi, feted across the establishment, favors amending the Constitution to appoint an unelected and unaccountable committee of “experts” that has the power to coerce and punish any individual or group anywhere in the country deemed practicing racism. Intent does not matter. And the decisions are final.

. . .

We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown.


There's much more at the link.  Sobering reading, and food for thought.

I don't agree with much of what Andrew Sullivan says or believes.  I don't like or share his politics.  I think he's way off base in many areas . . . but in this, I think his analysis is very persuasive.  Writing from within the liberal camp, he can see the threat to it from its own left wing - and if it threatens him and his "traditional liberal" norms, standards and beliefs, it's doubly threatening to those of us who don't share that outlook on life.

As I've said many times before, there's no voting our way out of this.  Those who stole last November's election did so calculatedly, cynically, and with every intention of making us come to heel.  They want to impose on this country the new order - the "successor ideology" - that Sullivan identifies.  They're gearing up to fight tooth and nail to suppress and eradicate any and all challenges to the election, even though they may be supported by incontrovertible evidence.  If those challenges persist and strengthen, there's no telling what they'll do, not least because they know that if they lose, the consequences for them would be very bad indeed.  I pointed out some time ago:


The progressive Left has committed high treason.  They've subverted and undermined the US political process to steal power from the legitimately elected candidate.  They know that if they ever lose power, those who take the reins from them will want criminal investigation and prosecution of all those involved in that electoral fraud - and one of the penalties for high treason is death.  For the left to allow the right to win would be to commit at least political, if not a very physical suicide.  This they will never do voluntarily.


I fully expect a weaponized Department of Justice and other organs of the present Administration to be actively deployed against what the current, illegitimate "powers that be" regard as dissidents, even traitors (from their perspective).  They've stolen power, and they'll hang onto it by any means necessary, even if that means breaking the laws and the constitution that still theoretically govern us.  Part of this is that they know the punishment that awaits them if they're convicted of electoral fraud on this scale, and they want to avoid that:  but much more of it is that they're convinced that they're right, and we're wrong, and it's their mission, their destiny, to eradicate our false beliefs and make us toe the Party line.  (I would call it a "mission from God", along Blues Brothers lines, but they mostly don't believe in God, so that would be a misnomer.)

Folks, if you haven't yet accepted the reality of our situation, you need to do so now.  We're in a fight for the survival of our constitutional republic - for the survival of freedom itself.  If we lose, there's nowhere else to go.




We stand or fall here - and we'd better not fall, because if we do, we'll be ground into the dirt, and our children and our children's children will never know what it is to be free.

Yes, the struggle will be hard, and it may turn bloody.  God knows, after all I've seen and experienced in six-plus decades on this earth, the last thing in the world that I want is civil war . . . but those seeking to impose their will upon us have no such scruples.  If that's what it'll take to crush us, to force us to conform to their will, they'll do it.  As far as they're concerned, anything goes, because they know they're right in the very depths of their being, and there's no persuading them that they might, just possibly, be wrong.  They're "true believers".

It may be that many of us will have to pay with our lives to preserve the gift our Founding Fathers left us.  Are you willing to pay that price, if need be?

Peter


18 comments:

Eric Wilner said...

The successor ideology looks suspiciously like a Hegelian synthesis of World Socialism and Fascism, plus a regression to (as I noted back in the 90s) a degenerate sort of Feudalism in which class privilege is all-important and the concept of the oath of fealty is forgotten.
Since all of this strongly favors the existing ruling class, expect more of it. Arbitrary rule-by-decree, sumptuary laws, destruction of the upstart classes (Kulaks / Bourgeoisie), and all the rest.

Eric Wilner said...

What I omitted to say in my previous comment is that the visible insanity - the various flavors of Critical Intersectionalism - is merely a tool. Totalitarianism, under whatever banner, requires a supply of enemies; the madness that infects our institutions is a means of creating countless enemies.
The people united, as the feller said, will never be defeated. When someone sets about sowing disunity, figure he aims to defeat the people.

McChuck said...

"And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy."

Let's make this more clear. They intend to be the successors to the formerly White, formerly Western, formerly Christian America.

"They're gearing up to fight tooth and nail to suppress and eradicate any and all challenges to the election"

Always remember that we are the challenge to their authority that must be suppressed and eradicated. We are the carbon they so desire to eliminate.

"they're convinced that they're right, and we're wrong, and it's their mission, their destiny, to eradicate our false beliefs and make us toe the Party line."

This is called genocide. The previous times this was tried have names like "holodomor" and "killing fields" and "cultural revolution".

"We stand or fall here - and we'd better not fall, because if we do, we'll be ground into the dirt, and our children and our children's children will never know what it is to be free."

The future is mountains of skulls, rivers of blood, and oceans of tears. Freedom or slavery lies on the other side. Choose wisely.



CGR710 said...

I think the people of "modern society" have lost their capacity for critical thinking and the will to question the public narrative. Regardless of the source, the public narrative has lost any semblance of veracity and it morphed into "infotainment" best case and propaganda as worst case. The current and next two-three generations will be further sliding downhill, truly becoming the peons the current "true elites" wishes them to become, but in this degeneration they will also loose all that makes the human spirit innovative, ambitious and be reduced from living to simply existing.
The aforementioned "true elites" on the other hand fool themselves if they think a society can survive relying on such vegetating members. People fallen down on that level simply do not care for anything than their individual level of subsistence and the "modern society" will loose its infrastructure slowly but accelerating with the level of indifference manifested by the "peons" tasked with its maintenance. The "true elites" themselves cannot maintain this infrastructure which is absolutely critical for maintaining their control over the "modern society" - even if they have the know-how they don't have the manpower. They relied on the manipulated "peons", but the lower these fall, the less they care and the faster the infrastructure collapses.
That's the point of collapse for this whole utopia (or dystopia - depending if you are an "elite" or a "peon"), because, while the "peons" have become indifferent, they do care about their survival and a collapsed infrastructure threatens exactly this survival. That's the point where "peons" become a mob and the mob rages against anything and everything not a part of itself and that means open season against "elites"...
But that's some generations in the future, currently society is already sliding on the downward path past the point of no return. I'm old enough to don't really expect to live longer than the next 20-25 years and I'm afraid these are not going to be restful years...

Maniac said...

Sullivan, Pool and Maher are coming around. Look up Maher's "Strife of the Party" clip when you have a few minutes. But yeah, probably too little, too late.

Genji said...

What manner of hereditary profession did a Swisher follow in the Shtetl? Asking for a Friend.

Successor Ideology is OK. I prefer Baizuo == White Left with its Red Guards associations.

Genji said...

Come to think of it Successor Ideology has smell of infinite recursion about it which is nice. Not a bad coinage at all!

Unknown said...

Here is something we should be reading up on... I recall reading about this way back in high school or college.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_the_Orders

The Conflict or Struggle of the Orders was a political struggle between the Plebeians (commoners) and Patricians (aristocrats) of the ancient Roman Republic lasting from 500 BC to 287 BC, in which the Plebeians sought political equality with the Patricians. It played a major role in the development of the Constitution of the Roman Republic. Shortly after the founding of the Republic, this conflict led to a secession from Rome by Plebeians to the Sacred Mount at a time of war. The result of this first secession was the creation of the office of Plebeian Tribune, and with it the first acquisition of real power by the Plebeians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secessio_plebis

Secessio plebis (withdrawal of the commoners, or secession of the plebs) was an informal exercise of power by Rome's plebeian citizens, similar in concept to the general strike. During the secessio plebis, the plebs would abandon the city en masse in a protest emigration and leave the patrician order to themselves. Therefore, a secessio meant that all shops and workshops would shut down and commercial transactions would largely cease. This was an effective strategy in the Conflict of the Orders due to strength in numbers; plebeian citizens made up the vast majority of Rome's populace and produced most of its food and resources, while a patrician citizen was a member of the minority upper class, the equivalent of the landed gentry of later times. Authors report different numbers for how many secessions there were. Cary & Scullard state there were five between 494 BC and 287 BC.[1]

riverrider said...

in answer to your question, yes i will give my life. i have know this would come to pass from a very young age and now long in tooth i had thought i missed my destiny. i despair no longer, for destiny cometh.

Greg said...

This "successor ideology" not only contains the seeds of its own destruction, those seeds are sprouting and growing in malignant bloom all over the cultural landscape. We will write the history when this war is over, but there it will be very ugly before it is.
Johnny Cash had a song just for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht7mxF9XZiA

JoshO said...

@Maniac They aren't coming around. Maher isn't coming around, at Most he's trying to tap the breaks so more people are shocked awake in time. Pool isn't coming around, he sits the fence to try to keep getting views from both sides

JoshO said...

"aren't" I mean instead of "are"

Tschifty Mccoy said...

Ive lately come to the conclusion that the Regime will very shortly have no choice but to resort to force and violence. They will certainly strike first. They have no choice.

It's obvious that they are badly losing the current information war with its all-important human terrain. Very few Americans believe anything the Regime or its mouthpieces say. Most Americans don't believe the feds have any legitimacy.

This is why we see them acting with increasing desperation, constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric and threats, pouring ungodly amounts of cash and resources into their attempts to hold onto power. But when a government is widely seen as illegitimate by its citizens, they have only one, last resort: brute force. Some crisis-- false flag, manufactured or possibly real (caused by their incompetence) -- that will be used to demand some obedience from the people which can only be obtained by violence. Most commenters assume that common Americans will somehow rise up but, no. It will be the feds who strike first. How will active military respond? That's a big unknown. No doubt that is driving the mad purge of patriots from the services.

The Lab Manager said...

Reagan was a fraud:

https://mises.org/library/reagan-fraud-and-after

John T. Block said...

I know you've argued against violence quite a while, Peter. But they leave us NO CHOICE, to avoid it other than total surrender. It will be fight, or be forced into the boxcars, being sent to "camps", as Socialists are wont to do....

Stephen St. Onge said...

        I read things like Peter's post, or Sullivan's post, and my reaction is: "Gee, guys, welcome to the party, you're at least three centuries late."  But when I say this, I get a funny look, because Americans are absolutely determined not to know history.

        The "successor ideology" dates back to the so-called "Enlightenment" of the early 18th Century.  The core of Enlightenment political philosophy is a bunch of intellectuals screaming in rage that they are not in charge of everything.  They wanted to rule, and they couldn't, because they had the wrong ancestors.  "Put us in charge, because we want power so much" was the ENTIRE motivation of the philosophees, but they were smart enough to realize that wasn't much of a selling point, so they came up with an elaborate argument that society should be ordered and ruled "rationally," which in practice meant "ordered and ruled by the professional reasoners, who are us."

        And so they made the French Revolution, and started "rationally" guillotining everyone who might threaten their power, plus whomever they felt like killing that day.  And they've continued the quest for power ever since, and the mass murders whenever they could get power.


        And they have been winning all along, even though there have been occasional set backs.  They are winning because they recognized a key fact: once a society is judged morally illegitimate by enough of its own members, it collapses.  In the 18th Century, hereditary rule was delegitimized, in the 19th Century "capitalism" was delegitimized, and in the 20th the entire history of Western Civilization was delegitimized, including especially Christianity, which has been the main target all along.  The reason Christian civilization is to be held illegitimate changes, but attack never ends.

        The smart money says they are going to keep winning, because their opponents agree with them about the moral illegitimacy of today's society.  Andy Sullivan and his kind can't stop them, because the Sullivans agree that society is illegitimate, and are determined to remake it.  Sullivan lies to himself when he says "Liberalism leaves you alone."  Sullivan and Co. feel "let alone" by liberalism, because the things "liberalism" is determined to change are the things Sullivan doesn't care about.  The homosexual Sullivan isn't bothered by dicks in his rest room, and doesn't have any woman he's strongly attached to emotionally, so the female population will just have to put up with them, and the "trans women" have every right to use the power of the state to force their way into the Ladies toilets.

1/2

Stephen St. Onge said...

        "Liberalism" never left people alone.  It was always a movement to take power from private hands, and transfer it to the state.  Initially only businesses were targeted, and "free speech" was an absolute value.  But Roger Baldwin, co-founder of the ACLU, spilled the beans in his article "Freedom in the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.".  "Civil Liberties" needed to be defended because they were a useful in bringing on socialism.  After the Revolution, they would interfere with socialism, and so should be dispensed with.  Appropriately, it was published in the American Communist publication Soviet Russia Today, in the September 1934 issue.

        In the U.S., the movement against free speech began in the '60s.  I remember one tv special about politics and dissent, shown in the late '60s or early '70s, and there was a guy from the ACLU ENDORSING student mobs that prevented right wingers from speaking.  It was a sign that they knew they had conquered the universities, and didn't need to pretend anymore.

        As I said above, they are winning, and you should expect them to keep winning.  The American people are determined to stick to the "practical," to disdain philosophy, to ignore history and to ignore Europe.  Sure, the U.S. has the stories about Our Glorious People® and Our Glorious Ancestors® that every society has. But it doesn't have real history. Real history sees Our Glorious People and Ancestors as the fallen humans they were. And it gives us the horrible message that we aren't any better. That message makes us feel bad, so it won't be listened to.

        The evil at the core of the Enlightenment was laid out by a boring professor nambed Jacob Talmon in a book entitled The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy, which you're not going to bother to read. And you'd never dream of reading his two follow-up volumes Political Messianism – The Romantic Phase and The Myth of Nation and Vision of Revolution – The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the 20th Century, which carried the story of totalitarianism down to the Cold War.  You're going to continue ceding the intellectual field to the Left.  And that's why you'll probably lose Civil War II (‘This time, with nukes!’®) 2/2

Tree Mike said...

Peter, please drop this over at The Burning Platform. They are like-minded, and will appreciate this article. I would, but I'm too retarded. Thanks.