Uploaded June 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Wesley Yang, on “The Successor Ideology in Power.” Wesley Yang is an author and essayist, as well as an arresting and original tweeter. He studied history at Rutgers University and in 2008 made a splash with the publication of “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” an essay on the perpetrator of Virginia Tech’s mass shooting. His first book, The Souls of Yellow Folk (2018), a collection of previously published essays, was selected as notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, as well as one of the best books of the year by The Spectator and Publishers Weekly. Yang spontaneously (in a tweet) coined the term “Successor Ideology” in 2019 to describe “the peculiar species of authoritarian utopianism sweeping through the ruling institutions of American life.”
Presented by the Program on Constitutional Government on October 29, 2021.
Wesley Yang, on “The Successor Ideology in Power.” Wesley Yang is an author and essayist, as well as an arresting and original tweeter. He studied history at Rutgers University and in 2008 made a splash with the publication of “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” an essay on the perpetrator of Virginia Tech’s mass shooting. His first book, The Souls of Yellow Folk (2018), a collection of previously published essays, was selected as notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, as well as one of the best books of the year by The Spectator and Publishers Weekly. Yang spontaneously (in a tweet) coined the term “Successor Ideology” in 2019 to describe “the peculiar species of authoritarian utopianism sweeping through the ruling institutions of American life.”
Presented by the Program on Constitutional Government on October 29, 2021.
