Episode Details

Wesley is a columnist for Tablet magazine, the author of The Souls of Yellow Folk, and a newly minted substacker. I’ve long admired him both for his essays and for his dry-as-toast Twitter feed. In this episode, we discuss the Great Awokening and critical race theory in great detail. You’ve be warned.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). Read the full transcript here. For three clips of our conversation — on Wes describing the core concepts of the successor ideology, on some ways BLM has arrested a multi-racial liberalism, and on how wokeness has captured corporate America, including top magazines — head over to our YouTube page.

Understandably, given the polarizing topic of Israel and Palestine, many readers are upset over last week’s episode with Peter Beinart, who has become highly controversial in Jewish circles. This first dissenter accuses me of having a lens similar to the successor ideology when it comes to Israel:

I could begin this email denouncing you for letting Beinart lead us into the factual swamp of Israel/Palestine. I’m sure some will. But surely over the years you have read all the bulletins and bullet points — about how many times the Palestinians and their leadership has been offered generous, or at least negotiable, promising terms for a peace settlement. 

These are proposals that would have given Palestinians so much more than they might get today — land swaps, half a capital city of Jerusalem, etc. I would even spare you the history of the 48 War of Independence (who invaded whom etc.); the attempts to negotiate after various conflicts; the failure of Oslo; the terror; the genocidal Hamas charter; the refusal to give up the right of return; the fact that Israeli Arabs CAN vote in Israeli elections; the miserable conditions of Palestinians in neighbouring countries which so many anti-Zionists couldn’t give a damn about. Etc. Etc.

No doubt you know all of that — and how the center and left in Israel have been hollowed out by the failure of all of this, and the poisonous lack of trust on both sides. But what really amazed me about your episode was how you seemed to discard all that. It’s a great example of how a “successor ideology or narrative” can drain the complexity and nuance from the situation — even from from you, a complicated conservative who argues for nuance and complexity every week. It’s a victory for what might be called “ideological capture.” I expected more from you.  (Your friend Beinart, well, I expect little from him but utopian fantasy.)

I do indeed know all of that, and sympathize with much of my reader’s points. I also know that the settlement policy is now and always has been the core obstacle to any deal and that Israel has doubled down on that repeatedly, enabled by Washington in successive administrations. Another reader, “genuinely saddened by your episode with Beinart,” gets into more specifics:

I’m an Israeli, and like you, I’m originally from the UK. I’ve come to regard your podcast as essential, and up to this episode, you had not discussed Israel, and I had no idea of your views on my country. I listen and read enough from people, from all sides, discussing my all-too-obsessed-ab