Having a Callin episode tomorrow, Friday January 21st, at 3:00 p.m. EST to talk with writer Wesley Yang, inventor of the term “Successor Ideology,” to talk Biden’s Awesome First Year, all the things that are literally eugenics, and the 14-point party affiliation swing. I know people are frustrated about the iPhone only factor, and I can only repeat what I’ve been told: Android accessibility is coming. Anyway, join us! Wes is smart, original, always interesting:
Hey Matt, thanks for doing these and providing a transcript last time. Ignore the people complaing about it being Apple only, i miss every one in real time because the timing
is usually not good for me, which is a notmal thing that people used to get. The endless whining from these douches about how you aren't catering hard enough to them in the comments is wearing, most of us are
Frustration with the iPhone thing, but specially frustration with the fact that they don't provide a normal RSS file so that we can subscribe and get new episodes.
In the meantime, a request: could you post here a link to the audio file when it's ready? That'd be great. If it's too much to ask... I understand, I'll continue paying anyway :-)
It's all there. I listened to the whole thing yesterday morning. I intended to report back, but forgot. The original request was for Matt to tweet or post here when it was available because it's frustrating to spend two minutes over and over again to find out it's not fully available.
Anyway, thanks. They probably do it to encourage people to set up an account, but if you don't have an iPhone, it's impossible to do that.
Can someone please ask what's up with the name for Yang's theory? I find his arguments very interesting but the name "Successor Ideology" baffling and unhelpful. I don't understand how it relates to the theory itself. And having a good, catchy, descriptive name is useful in selling a theory.
I think we can overcomplicate things and get too clever. The younger generation often rejects their parent’s world, sometimes with good reason or with a mix of good and bad reasons, and sometimes with indiscriminate abandon and the nearly murderous energy with which life attacks what’s in its way.
The rejection can be political, economic, artistic or technological. Or all the above.
Or it can be ethical.
It’s clear that US “capitalism” is only a name. As we all regularly lament here in comments, the “system” is a Fed Fueled orgy for the oligarchy and pension fund/401K boomers with young people especially forced into a kind of indentured debt servitude watching through their iPhones a world where everyone is wealthy and beautiful and famous. But they aren’t. With their college debts, grievance studies degrees and no prospects of a traditional American life, Unless they’re very very lucky, they are a peasant. Most people aren’t that lucky.
The pain becomes a form of abstract hatred at all the injustices of the world around them. And there are always injustices in the world and so the hatred is easy. But the hatred creates as targets, as hatred will, scapegoats who are blamed almost in proportion to their inability to defend themselves. The young are too naive and uninformed to truly understand that “the system” that worked for their parents generation was destroyed by politicians and theories of “economic growth” that traded debt for income and services for actually making things. And whose most egregious abuse perhaps was the education racket that’s their biggest financial ball and chain and perhaps one of the least pardonable excesses of financialization.
The “jobs” now, such as they are, are service jobs. Forms of soulless humiliation whose only sustenance is perhaps some good colleagues with no hope of wealth creation or career.
If that’s the world your elders left you, would you be angry? I would be. Their ideology is a reaction fueled by anger and their naive recycled humanist ejaculations and proto-Marxist collectivisms are responses to the money-fueled “I got mine sucker” cynicism that ripples under nearly every surface of American existence.
Sadly though, they don’t understand the source of the pain, and thus they confusedly misdirect the anger at humans who did nothing at all to deserve it and are as much victims as they are.
And now, if we’re not lucky, they’re going to take that anger and drive us all into a wall at 150 mph, and then whoever survives, when they can move and think, will wonder how the hell it all could have happened.
Just now, when I went out for groceries, I saw some graffiti:
"BLM = PLM, Free Palestine, Not Cosby!"
I feel like that's the perfect encapsulation of the Brooklynization of politics; a politics as simplistic, meaningless and disposable as the top 40 pop chart. "If it can't fit in a Tweet, it ain't worth believin'".
Young people are often into moral slogans more than they are into understanding the often ugly true nature of political struggle over material interests. This isn't new. I remember being like that when I was young. What's interesting now is that institutional and cultural choke points are in such a rush to cede power to these simplistic moral slogans.
"BLM = PLM, Free Palestine, Not Cosby!" isn't such a bad slogan, now that I think about it. It's quite funny and provocative. And I agree with it. Given the constraints on slogans and what they are supposed to accomplish, I gotta give this one high marks.
Near where I live there's a huge banner hanging from upstairs windows that reads "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention." I walk past that in the morning and mutter, "Well, now I'm angry, fukwad. I was enjoying walking the dogs in the park and you just reminded me how arrogantly condescending airhead moralists who allowed themselves to be trolled by Trump can be. I'm not paying attention. Right. That must be why I was enjoying my walk." That shit pisses me off.
I can guarantee that the person who wrote “Free Palestine, Not Cosby” knows zero about the circumstances of either issue, but is speaking with moral certainty on complicated issues they’ve learned about solely from Instagram stories. I do find it quite amusing, in its utter stupidity and breathtaking ignorance.
LOL several years ago when I was a New Yorker I enjoyed street photography and made a project of shooting in Long Island City, trying to capture colors of walls, sun and sky and the decaying stones and concrete of 20th century New York factories and alleys, this was before the high rise boom but when they were starting to build.
I once saw graffiti painted in 2 foot high words on a construction wall along Queens Boulevard “The Money System Will Not Last”.. That was about 10 years ago. It’s hard to tell if you’re wrong or just early.
I photographed said graffiti myself, and I’ve been shooting stuff like that in NYC for a couple of decades now.
I recently saw a photo of a punk band I used to see a lot in the early ‘90s and the shirtless guitar player was holding his guitar up to proudly show the “Bikes, Not Bombs” sticker on its back. There’s always been morally pure political posturing among the youth counterculture. Now that the counterculture was essentially seized and destroyed over the last 15 or so years by the privileged children of yuppies, they’ve made similar political posturing the centerpiece of their identities, and dispensed with the art and the subculture. They’ve used advanced tattletale-ing to enforce their simplistic politics on most political and cultural institutions. Suddenly the naive charm of silly slogans doesn’t seem so naive, or so charming.
"The younger generation often rejects their parent’s world..." that's the normal way of things. If that's what Yang means by succession then he's naming something I find quite interesting and novel as though it were perfectly ordinary. This just makes me more baffled as to why he named it thus.
Maybe Taibbi, or a caller, will ask him define "Successor Ideology" during this talk. If you haven't, you should read his essential intro piece on his Substack: https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/welcome-to-year-zero He certainly defines it here, but maybe not as clearly, or succinctly, as some would like, but it makes sense to me.
It seems to me to be a term to kind of tie all of these odd, disparate, but interconnected, phony radical or phony leftist thoughts, ideas and movements together; i.e., these are the people and ideologies that they believe will replace worldwide political leaders, the literary canon, educators, the arts, historians and history texts, established ideas about science and humanity, etc., to be replaced with some of the stupidest, most half-cocked yuppie bullshit you've ever heard. (Which would all be really funny in a dystopian book or a movie, if it wasn't happening in the real world, in real time.)
I'm sure Matt will ask him to summarize the theory. What I'm interested in is specifically how the words "successor ideology" describe it.
I read that twice and some of his other essays and I listened to him in several interviews. I believe I understand his arguments (there is some doubt because his use of language is often confusing). I believe Yang has the most coherent explanation of what's going on with woke authority. But what it has to do with an ideology of succession is still baffling to me.
I think Yang is alluding to the ambitions of the adherents to the "successor ideology", more than its prospects for success. I think that those prospects are awfully dim; there are overriding reality-based performance constraints on their extravagantly ambitious goals.
My primary problem with Wokist Dogmatism is that it adds so much noise and distraction to discussions of what are actually serious concerns about our future as a polity with a shared sense of pro-humanist values. Wokism as a movement doesn't have a hope of succeeding; it's merely had a few preliminary early victories in venues where the most belligerent acolytes have been able to rely on their assumptions of unchallengable moral superiority to prevail over easily intimidated opponents. But not everyone is a pushover. In fact, very few Americans are as easily cowed as fretful careerists in the corridors of academia and prestige news media who choose posturing amidst the shifting sands of faddish intramural politics over standing on a bedrock of consistent principles. Once outside of those precincts, most people are not inclined toward uncritical acceptance of the petty political dictates of imperious scolds. Much less to being pushed around by them.
So now the Wokists are facing increasingly strong opposition- and the skepticism of their views that is already on the record is getting more notice. But one problem is that some of the opposition is also partaking of hyperbole and spurious narratives; just because someone is anti-Wokist doesn't mean that they're fair-minded people committed to social libertarian principles of free expression, universalist values, and individual agency and autonomy. The Manichean framing of the Wokists- that you either adhere to every last point of Kendi/DiAngelo precepts of "antiracism", or else you're upholding White Supremacy- has practically ordained this situation. I don't buy that framing, but political coalitions that are built on a common stance of opposition make it difficult to sort out the ordinary people of good will from the opportunists harboring disingenuous (and sometimes extremist) agendas of their own. That's the noise that I'm referring to, in its political aspect. I take for granted that Wokism is doomed as a political project; I'm much more worried about the consequences of the galvanized Reaction to it. (And also the reaction to that, in the event that the dead-enders of Wokism follow their cognitive dissonance over the edge into concluding that Armed Revolutionary Suicide is the only alternative course for the movement. But that's speculative, and I don't want to get too far ahead of myself.) Some of the champions of Wokism are currently exaggerating threats and twisting statements out of context to serve a false narrative of Reaction https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/21/fox-news-lie-school-board-domestic-terrorists/ (Yes, I know- I'm linking Dana Milbank, who has a lot to answer for with his own hand-waving on CRT-related fiascos. But that Milbank column is accurate, as far as exposing Fox and GOP panic-driving via slipshod framings and hyperbole. So its come to this...)
Simply in terms of aiding the goals of clear communication and intellectual integrity in discourses about racism and American history, Wokist Dogmatism is a massive fail, and a diversion from open and honest dialogue. Wokism practically demands that its adherents jump to multiple untenable conclusions every day while reading the morning news, and that provides a terrible foundation for mental discipline and scholastic rigor. And there are political implications to that, because it cedes critical advantages to anyone capable of demonstrating even slightly more clarity of thought. Even if someone is just as full of shit in all sorts of other ways, they can obtain more credibility for their wider set of views if they're capable of astutely picking apart the fraudulence of Wokism. Particularly if they avoid the temptation to preen that so often distinguishes the Wokists, these days; hardcore Wokists c.2022 are as openly assured of their Final Wisdom as the adherents to the paradigm of White Supremacy were, c.1922. I wish those extremist fringes would pursue their stale cheesy battles somewhere else and leave the rest of us alone, but unfortunately, at present the rest of us are stuck with them, like infections in the body politic.
"But not everyone is a pushover. In fact, very few Americans are as easily cowed as fretful careerists in the corridors of academia and prestige news media..." 'Follow the money' is a key here. The fretful ones are those who have unwarily stepped out on the fragile limbs of academia, MSM, and much less fragile corporate and gov't institutional wokeism, and have begun to glance down ala Wile E Coyote. Many keep going with an eye on the nearest limb to grab onto. If you are a savvy climber there are plenty of them. Such is the nature of employment higher in the canopy of the 21st century monocultural careerist forest. At the very top one is bathed in an exponential explosion of golden light.
I kind of see it literally: the interwoven ideologies of the people that believe they will succeed the people in charge of the world. They're in line to rule, and they're forcing their way to the front of the line, and maybe torching everyone else ahead of them, and behind them, and that ever existed.
The younger generation is going to take the older generation's jobs and is going to distinguish itself ideologically and aesthetically as morally and culturally superior. But that's always the way. If that's the succession referred to in "sucessor ideology" then the particular qualities of the onslaught we're witnessing, which are really interesting Cultural Revolution stuff, are completely lost in such a banal name.
I agree that replacing previous generations in all modes of life, coupled switch a sense of superiority, has always been the case, but we’ve never seen something so supercharged, angry and forceful (and stupid) that’s achieved near-total institutional capture in about 5 years. It’s not: I’ll own this car and this house and have this job someday, it’s I’ll make sure nobody ever owns a car or a house or has an at-will job ever again.
It’s a new kind of succession, with a fluid rule-kit. “Successor Ideology” is a handy term to accommodate all of these disparate ideas.
You've hit the nail on the head of why this name for the theory fails. There are novel aspects to this particular generational succession. "Successor Ideology" suggests there aren't.
For us android plebs, is there a way to listen (even if it's after you've finished)? I know we our lesser life forms and therefore our actual input isn't wanted but I'd love to hear your discussion, I like Yang. (Also, Callin not being available on Android is literally eugenics.)
(Very small voice) i like these podcasts way more than Useful Idiots. (back to normal volume) Walter Kirn was a gem! Can't wait to listen to this one, really enjoy Wesley's thoughtful writing on the successor ideology.
Another vote for an RSS feed if you could use your clout somehow - it'd be great if the episodes could flow into Pocketcasts where the silence can be autotrimmed and i have some more speed and volume options. Only takes like an hour or two to write a snippet of code that outputs an RSS feed given a database, if they're not doing it they're just being walled garden jerks
Matt, you are my favourite investigative journalist, but only letting people who use apple products participate in these kind of cool opportunities makes me want to not renew my subscription.
As I understand it, a commenter, John J’onzz, notes that one can listen to the talks that generally will be recorded and on the "Callin site" to be listened to through a browser. If true, can someone put the URL of the site? Thanks...
Hey Matt, thanks for doing these and providing a transcript last time. Ignore the people complaing about it being Apple only, i miss every one in real time because the timing
is usually not good for me, which is a notmal thing that people used to get. The endless whining from these douches about how you aren't catering hard enough to them in the comments is wearing, most of us are
just happy you are doing your thing. Thanks.
Everyone needs to hear some counter-programming to shitty complaints sometimes.
Frustration with the iPhone thing, but specially frustration with the fact that they don't provide a normal RSS file so that we can subscribe and get new episodes.
In the meantime, a request: could you post here a link to the audio file when it's ready? That'd be great. If it's too much to ask... I understand, I'll continue paying anyway :-)
Yes, but WHEN. That's the key part of his request.
I'll take a look. Last week, it would only play for two minutes until it had been up for several days.
It's all there. I listened to the whole thing yesterday morning. I intended to report back, but forgot. The original request was for Matt to tweet or post here when it was available because it's frustrating to spend two minutes over and over again to find out it's not fully available.
Anyway, thanks. They probably do it to encourage people to set up an account, but if you don't have an iPhone, it's impossible to do that.
Can someone please ask what's up with the name for Yang's theory? I find his arguments very interesting but the name "Successor Ideology" baffling and unhelpful. I don't understand how it relates to the theory itself. And having a good, catchy, descriptive name is useful in selling a theory.
I think we can overcomplicate things and get too clever. The younger generation often rejects their parent’s world, sometimes with good reason or with a mix of good and bad reasons, and sometimes with indiscriminate abandon and the nearly murderous energy with which life attacks what’s in its way.
The rejection can be political, economic, artistic or technological. Or all the above.
Or it can be ethical.
It’s clear that US “capitalism” is only a name. As we all regularly lament here in comments, the “system” is a Fed Fueled orgy for the oligarchy and pension fund/401K boomers with young people especially forced into a kind of indentured debt servitude watching through their iPhones a world where everyone is wealthy and beautiful and famous. But they aren’t. With their college debts, grievance studies degrees and no prospects of a traditional American life, Unless they’re very very lucky, they are a peasant. Most people aren’t that lucky.
The pain becomes a form of abstract hatred at all the injustices of the world around them. And there are always injustices in the world and so the hatred is easy. But the hatred creates as targets, as hatred will, scapegoats who are blamed almost in proportion to their inability to defend themselves. The young are too naive and uninformed to truly understand that “the system” that worked for their parents generation was destroyed by politicians and theories of “economic growth” that traded debt for income and services for actually making things. And whose most egregious abuse perhaps was the education racket that’s their biggest financial ball and chain and perhaps one of the least pardonable excesses of financialization.
The “jobs” now, such as they are, are service jobs. Forms of soulless humiliation whose only sustenance is perhaps some good colleagues with no hope of wealth creation or career.
If that’s the world your elders left you, would you be angry? I would be. Their ideology is a reaction fueled by anger and their naive recycled humanist ejaculations and proto-Marxist collectivisms are responses to the money-fueled “I got mine sucker” cynicism that ripples under nearly every surface of American existence.
Sadly though, they don’t understand the source of the pain, and thus they confusedly misdirect the anger at humans who did nothing at all to deserve it and are as much victims as they are.
And now, if we’re not lucky, they’re going to take that anger and drive us all into a wall at 150 mph, and then whoever survives, when they can move and think, will wonder how the hell it all could have happened.
Just now, when I went out for groceries, I saw some graffiti:
"BLM = PLM, Free Palestine, Not Cosby!"
I feel like that's the perfect encapsulation of the Brooklynization of politics; a politics as simplistic, meaningless and disposable as the top 40 pop chart. "If it can't fit in a Tweet, it ain't worth believin'".
Young people are often into moral slogans more than they are into understanding the often ugly true nature of political struggle over material interests. This isn't new. I remember being like that when I was young. What's interesting now is that institutional and cultural choke points are in such a rush to cede power to these simplistic moral slogans.
100%
"BLM = PLM, Free Palestine, Not Cosby!" isn't such a bad slogan, now that I think about it. It's quite funny and provocative. And I agree with it. Given the constraints on slogans and what they are supposed to accomplish, I gotta give this one high marks.
Near where I live there's a huge banner hanging from upstairs windows that reads "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention." I walk past that in the morning and mutter, "Well, now I'm angry, fukwad. I was enjoying walking the dogs in the park and you just reminded me how arrogantly condescending airhead moralists who allowed themselves to be trolled by Trump can be. I'm not paying attention. Right. That must be why I was enjoying my walk." That shit pisses me off.
I can guarantee that the person who wrote “Free Palestine, Not Cosby” knows zero about the circumstances of either issue, but is speaking with moral certainty on complicated issues they’ve learned about solely from Instagram stories. I do find it quite amusing, in its utter stupidity and breathtaking ignorance.
LOL several years ago when I was a New Yorker I enjoyed street photography and made a project of shooting in Long Island City, trying to capture colors of walls, sun and sky and the decaying stones and concrete of 20th century New York factories and alleys, this was before the high rise boom but when they were starting to build.
I once saw graffiti painted in 2 foot high words on a construction wall along Queens Boulevard “The Money System Will Not Last”.. That was about 10 years ago. It’s hard to tell if you’re wrong or just early.
I photographed said graffiti myself, and I’ve been shooting stuff like that in NYC for a couple of decades now.
I recently saw a photo of a punk band I used to see a lot in the early ‘90s and the shirtless guitar player was holding his guitar up to proudly show the “Bikes, Not Bombs” sticker on its back. There’s always been morally pure political posturing among the youth counterculture. Now that the counterculture was essentially seized and destroyed over the last 15 or so years by the privileged children of yuppies, they’ve made similar political posturing the centerpiece of their identities, and dispensed with the art and the subculture. They’ve used advanced tattletale-ing to enforce their simplistic politics on most political and cultural institutions. Suddenly the naive charm of silly slogans doesn’t seem so naive, or so charming.
"The younger generation often rejects their parent’s world..." that's the normal way of things. If that's what Yang means by succession then he's naming something I find quite interesting and novel as though it were perfectly ordinary. This just makes me more baffled as to why he named it thus.
Well said!
Maybe Taibbi, or a caller, will ask him define "Successor Ideology" during this talk. If you haven't, you should read his essential intro piece on his Substack: https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/welcome-to-year-zero He certainly defines it here, but maybe not as clearly, or succinctly, as some would like, but it makes sense to me.
It seems to me to be a term to kind of tie all of these odd, disparate, but interconnected, phony radical or phony leftist thoughts, ideas and movements together; i.e., these are the people and ideologies that they believe will replace worldwide political leaders, the literary canon, educators, the arts, historians and history texts, established ideas about science and humanity, etc., to be replaced with some of the stupidest, most half-cocked yuppie bullshit you've ever heard. (Which would all be really funny in a dystopian book or a movie, if it wasn't happening in the real world, in real time.)
I'm sure Matt will ask him to summarize the theory. What I'm interested in is specifically how the words "successor ideology" describe it.
I read that twice and some of his other essays and I listened to him in several interviews. I believe I understand his arguments (there is some doubt because his use of language is often confusing). I believe Yang has the most coherent explanation of what's going on with woke authority. But what it has to do with an ideology of succession is still baffling to me.
I think Yang is alluding to the ambitions of the adherents to the "successor ideology", more than its prospects for success. I think that those prospects are awfully dim; there are overriding reality-based performance constraints on their extravagantly ambitious goals.
My primary problem with Wokist Dogmatism is that it adds so much noise and distraction to discussions of what are actually serious concerns about our future as a polity with a shared sense of pro-humanist values. Wokism as a movement doesn't have a hope of succeeding; it's merely had a few preliminary early victories in venues where the most belligerent acolytes have been able to rely on their assumptions of unchallengable moral superiority to prevail over easily intimidated opponents. But not everyone is a pushover. In fact, very few Americans are as easily cowed as fretful careerists in the corridors of academia and prestige news media who choose posturing amidst the shifting sands of faddish intramural politics over standing on a bedrock of consistent principles. Once outside of those precincts, most people are not inclined toward uncritical acceptance of the petty political dictates of imperious scolds. Much less to being pushed around by them.
So now the Wokists are facing increasingly strong opposition- and the skepticism of their views that is already on the record is getting more notice. But one problem is that some of the opposition is also partaking of hyperbole and spurious narratives; just because someone is anti-Wokist doesn't mean that they're fair-minded people committed to social libertarian principles of free expression, universalist values, and individual agency and autonomy. The Manichean framing of the Wokists- that you either adhere to every last point of Kendi/DiAngelo precepts of "antiracism", or else you're upholding White Supremacy- has practically ordained this situation. I don't buy that framing, but political coalitions that are built on a common stance of opposition make it difficult to sort out the ordinary people of good will from the opportunists harboring disingenuous (and sometimes extremist) agendas of their own. That's the noise that I'm referring to, in its political aspect. I take for granted that Wokism is doomed as a political project; I'm much more worried about the consequences of the galvanized Reaction to it. (And also the reaction to that, in the event that the dead-enders of Wokism follow their cognitive dissonance over the edge into concluding that Armed Revolutionary Suicide is the only alternative course for the movement. But that's speculative, and I don't want to get too far ahead of myself.) Some of the champions of Wokism are currently exaggerating threats and twisting statements out of context to serve a false narrative of Reaction https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/21/fox-news-lie-school-board-domestic-terrorists/ (Yes, I know- I'm linking Dana Milbank, who has a lot to answer for with his own hand-waving on CRT-related fiascos. But that Milbank column is accurate, as far as exposing Fox and GOP panic-driving via slipshod framings and hyperbole. So its come to this...)
Simply in terms of aiding the goals of clear communication and intellectual integrity in discourses about racism and American history, Wokist Dogmatism is a massive fail, and a diversion from open and honest dialogue. Wokism practically demands that its adherents jump to multiple untenable conclusions every day while reading the morning news, and that provides a terrible foundation for mental discipline and scholastic rigor. And there are political implications to that, because it cedes critical advantages to anyone capable of demonstrating even slightly more clarity of thought. Even if someone is just as full of shit in all sorts of other ways, they can obtain more credibility for their wider set of views if they're capable of astutely picking apart the fraudulence of Wokism. Particularly if they avoid the temptation to preen that so often distinguishes the Wokists, these days; hardcore Wokists c.2022 are as openly assured of their Final Wisdom as the adherents to the paradigm of White Supremacy were, c.1922. I wish those extremist fringes would pursue their stale cheesy battles somewhere else and leave the rest of us alone, but unfortunately, at present the rest of us are stuck with them, like infections in the body politic.
"But not everyone is a pushover. In fact, very few Americans are as easily cowed as fretful careerists in the corridors of academia and prestige news media..." 'Follow the money' is a key here. The fretful ones are those who have unwarily stepped out on the fragile limbs of academia, MSM, and much less fragile corporate and gov't institutional wokeism, and have begun to glance down ala Wile E Coyote. Many keep going with an eye on the nearest limb to grab onto. If you are a savvy climber there are plenty of them. Such is the nature of employment higher in the canopy of the 21st century monocultural careerist forest. At the very top one is bathed in an exponential explosion of golden light.
I kind of see it literally: the interwoven ideologies of the people that believe they will succeed the people in charge of the world. They're in line to rule, and they're forcing their way to the front of the line, and maybe torching everyone else ahead of them, and behind them, and that ever existed.
The younger generation is going to take the older generation's jobs and is going to distinguish itself ideologically and aesthetically as morally and culturally superior. But that's always the way. If that's the succession referred to in "sucessor ideology" then the particular qualities of the onslaught we're witnessing, which are really interesting Cultural Revolution stuff, are completely lost in such a banal name.
I agree that replacing previous generations in all modes of life, coupled switch a sense of superiority, has always been the case, but we’ve never seen something so supercharged, angry and forceful (and stupid) that’s achieved near-total institutional capture in about 5 years. It’s not: I’ll own this car and this house and have this job someday, it’s I’ll make sure nobody ever owns a car or a house or has an at-will job ever again.
It’s a new kind of succession, with a fluid rule-kit. “Successor Ideology” is a handy term to accommodate all of these disparate ideas.
You've hit the nail on the head of why this name for the theory fails. There are novel aspects to this particular generational succession. "Successor Ideology" suggests there aren't.
Like your new format and the guests. The Kirn was excellent, and Yang is always fascinating. Can I request Martin Gurri soon?
aww, dog damn this effing Callin iphone-only app-of-the-day. you're having Wesley Yang on for a chat with only apple users. f this s, man!
For us android plebs, is there a way to listen (even if it's after you've finished)? I know we our lesser life forms and therefore our actual input isn't wanted but I'd love to hear your discussion, I like Yang. (Also, Callin not being available on Android is literally eugenics.)
Here: https://www.callin.com/show/tk-live-VOaYFhTeLH
If you go to the Callin site, it appears you can listen to the recorded shows there from your browser.
(Very small voice) i like these podcasts way more than Useful Idiots. (back to normal volume) Walter Kirn was a gem! Can't wait to listen to this one, really enjoy Wesley's thoughtful writing on the successor ideology.
Another vote for an RSS feed if you could use your clout somehow - it'd be great if the episodes could flow into Pocketcasts where the silence can be autotrimmed and i have some more speed and volume options. Only takes like an hour or two to write a snippet of code that outputs an RSS feed given a database, if they're not doing it they're just being walled garden jerks
Matt, you are my favourite investigative journalist, but only letting people who use apple products participate in these kind of cool opportunities makes me want to not renew my subscription.
I'm an Android user and am happy to wait for the web version to be available. Thx for making this happen.
As I understand it, a commenter, John J’onzz, notes that one can listen to the talks that generally will be recorded and on the "Callin site" to be listened to through a browser. If true, can someone put the URL of the site? Thanks...
Yay! I stan Wesley Yang. He’s great on Twitter and also recommend reading his writing/essays.
Curious that Bernie Sanders does not appear in Yangs 2020 election narrative.
Where is the archive of this? I"m a locked out of callin subscriber due the platform issues. Surely there is more demand than just mine?
Would be great if Wes occasionally wrote something for his own substack that I’m also subscribed to
Is it up on Callin yet? I can’t find it…
Thanks... This should make the Podcasts available to any browser user soon? after it is streamed. I'm happy
Some of us live in hell holes with bad cell reception. Listen to you and Westley would have been such a treat. I'll settle for transcripts.
Excellent. Yang is brilliant and compassionate.