The successor ideology, or the new orthodoxy, represents an evolution of liberalism rather than its replacement[1]. What then contests it must understand this evolutionary nature, recognising that the fruits of the new orthodoxy grew from the liberal tree. Sullivan identifies moral clarity as the clarion call of this movement[2]. This means the removal of objectivity or neutrality as values of a governing consensus, instead characterising nations or the Western ethico-legal order as intrinsically racist and subjective. Sullivan thereby reveals the flaw of his argument, that the liberal order was genuinely objective, whether in its governing apparatuses or in its media complexes.

The character of what is called progress contains a deep irony. In the flavour of dramatic irony, we as an audience can seemingly see ahead of our expert narrators, yet the play goes on as we are told that, no, everything is going according to plan. In fields as diverse as ecology, agronomy, economics or medicine there is a disconnect between what is witnessed and what is accepted. These fields are increasingly side-lined in developed economies which are dominated by their service and administrative sectors[1]/tasks[2], creating a loss of knowledge.

Enclosure, beyond its historical specificities as a means of enclosing common land, has a wider implication of enclosing autonomy itself in various forms. “The enclosure of common land ran alongside the decline of communal systems of agriculture and the marginalisation of other forms of communal entitlement”[1]. The specific aspect of the community is the maintained functioning of established lifeways and relations between groups/classes. Enclosure in a wider sense is the closing off of means of independence, in the form of freehold land, unclaimed commons or specific relations that entail duties between groups. Through a combination of structural imperatives and negotiated choices both rapid and extended declines of established modes of existence are curtailed and destroyed in favour of new methods and relations which close off autonomy.

A “peculiar species of authoritarian utopianism sweeping through the ruling institutions of American life, which I have termed ‘the Successor Ideology’”[1] is emergent in liberal democracies throughout the West. In various forms of identity politics, culture wars, NGO complexes[2] and institutional capture, a sociocultural logic is nascent, struggling to fully form into a coherent multiplicity of organisational and political structures. Through Rudi Dutschke’s formulation of a long march through the institutions, the successor ideology represents a bridge between systems of liberal government and neoliberal business practice and a metastatic superstructure of cultural revolution.