"Successor ideology" is a term coined by essayist Wesley Yang to describe what he sees as an emergent ideology within liberal or left-wing political movements in the United States, Canada, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, centered around intersectionality, social justice, identity politics, and anti-racism, the rise of which, Yang argues, is degrading conventional liberal values of pluralism, freedom of speech, color blindness, and free inquiry.
[1][2][3] Proponents of the concept link it to an alleged growth in the intolerance of differing opinions, to cancel culture, wokeness, social justice warriors, and to the far left;[4][5][6] Yang himself describes it as "authoritarian Utopianism that masquerades as liberal humanism while usurping it from within.
"[4] The thesis garnered support from some commentators around 2020–2021, with Roger Berkowitz linking it to a broader retreat of liberalism worldwide that is challenged from the left in the form of the successor ideology and from the political right in the form of illiberal democracy,[7] and with Matt Taibbi calling the ideas of those he associates with the ideology "toxic" and "unattractive".
[2][3] The term was coined by political writer Wesley Yang in a 4 March 2019 Twitter thread discussing diversity in college admissions and among the professional-managerial class.
"[9] He expanded on the term in further tweets in May 2019,[10] and in a 2021 blog post,[11] and has appeared on podcasts by The Wall Street Journal and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research to promote it.