Tumblr Transformed American Politics

The journalist Wesley Yang’s “successor ideology,” his term for “wokeness” (or neoliberalism, political correctness, social justice, et al.) follows a similar trail, and his Substack Year Zero sets out to chronicle the history and rise of our new cultural and political landscape, or as he once framed it, our “bourgeois moral revolution.”

In his inaugural post, Yang alludes to successor ideology being a culmination of aspects of several important historical movements and events, including the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, the New Left, and the social movements these things spawned. Perhaps there is no single antagonist; instead, we were brought to our current moment by a number of factors, that, paradoxically, are contradictory.

Yang’s thesis seems more reasonable, as it appreciates just how complicated our current moral landscape is. The changes we’ve seen have been so vast and, in some cases, so radical that to pinpoint one cause (the university, feminism, the economy) seems like a fool’s errand.

Although it’s too early to tell with Yang’s work, as he’s still in the process of publishing it, others in the field of anti-woke criticism seem to miss an important element of the story. Just how did these theories spread so effectively? Yang and Lindsay are likely right—a complicated convergence of activism, policy, and economic changes led to a shift in our culture, the seeds of which were planted far before the Obama administration. But the narrative they’re piecing together seems to be missing one thing: the fact there was a clear and, importantly, documented “super-spreader” event.

That was the strange and powerful union of fandom, social media, and journalism between the years 2013 and 2015.