The Power of Art and Literature Is a Question of Ambivalence

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I'm not simply a power seeking individual that wants to make other people love me because they have been coerced into it by a powerful social movement. It's not actually love right and so like I proceed from the assumption that ideally one would recognize the value of those things. And it's just a matter of like there's a propriety of different spheres of activity and the one that tries to transform the world inevitably moves in a direction that I take to be totalitarian.

Wesley Yang is one of the America’s leading essayists. From “Paper Tigers,” his examination of why Asian-Americans remain underrepresented in leaderships positions, to “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” his meditation on the shooter who killed 33 people at Virginia Tech, he has traced America’s shifting understanding of race.

But over the past years, the focus of Yang’s work has subtly shifted. He is now trying to chronicle and explain what he calls the “successor ideology,” the constellation of ideas that seek to usurp liberalism, and which others have called by such names as “wokeness” or “social justice.”

In the latest episode of The Good Fight, Yascha Mounk and Wesley Yang discuss the precise definition of the successor ideology; the need for genuine empathy when exchanging ideas; and what forms of cultural sensitivity are truly inclusive as opposed to alienating

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Podcast production by John T. Williams and Rebecca Rashid

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