The Stalled Successor Ideology: (1/2)

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The Stalled Successor Ideology

Every revolutionary movement promises not only the destruction of an unjust order but the dawn of a coherent alternative. The slogan of the French Revolution - liberty, equality, fraternity - compressed an entire political cosmology into three words: the overthrow of hereditary privilege, the empowerment of the citizen, and the rebirth of society on rational, moral grounds. The Bolsheviks had their own version: land, bread, peace (with the promise of a secular utopia to come). Even neoliberalism, which posed as pragmatic economics, carried that utopian undertone of liberation through markets and individual choice and freedom.

Today, there is no such story. The contemporary protest milieu - green activism, anti-racism, gender ideology, anti-Zionism - represents a cluster of moral reflexes rather than a movement of aspirational power. It labels enemies but has no plan; energy but no architecture. Its rhetoric is redemptive, but it lacks any eschatology beyond “awareness”.

Antonio Gramsci wrote that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This is precisely the condition of the early twenty-first century: the moral passions of the young surge against the structures of liberal capitalism, yet no integrative countervision commands belief. Protest has replaced revolution as the central form of political expression.

Historically, insurgent ideologies succeed when three conditions align.

First, a mobilising myth must connect moral grievance to a credible vision of collective redemption. The ancien régime, the Tsar, the bourgeoisie - each in their time served as a definable oppressor whose overthrow would, supposedly, unleash human flourishing. Contemporary activists can identify injustices but not their causal mechanisms; the villain is “the system,” a shapeless abstraction immune to decapitation.

Second, there must exist an organised cadre able to translate moral enthusiasm into a disciplined machine for taking power. The Jacobin clubs, the Bolshevik party, the neoliberal think tanks with their political shock troops - each formed the nervous system and insurgent forces of a rising elite. Today’s moral movements are decentralised by design, living on social media’s perpetual outrage cycle. They possess no coherent theory of governance because - crucially - they do not aspire to govern.

Third, insurgent ideology must align with emergent material interests. Revolutions ride the pressure of classes or elite fractions newly capable of wielding power - the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, the unionised industrial proletariat of the nineteenth, the globalising managerial technocracy of the late twentieth.

But the post-industrial “precariat” - precarious service workers, freelancers and disoriented graduates - lack both economic leverage and institutional footholds. Their discontented angst is moral, aesthetic, and existential; it can express itself in protest but not rule.

Some commentators, particularly in the United States, have proposed Christianity - often Catholic integralism, the view that political authority should be ordered to the spiritual good as defined by the Catholic Church - as the potential successor ideology.

The appeal is not completely devoid of sense. Religion alone can still articulate an ethical hierarchy stronger than procedural liberalism; it provides fraternity, moral order, and transcendence. A political theology might seem to offer the shared purpose that secular progressivism has lost in its decadent fragmentation.

Yet unlike in earlier epochs, Christianity today is too thoroughly institutionalised within the established order to lead an insurgency. Its clergy form a moral bureaucracy, not a revolutionary vanguard; its antique metaphysics promise salvation beyond history, not transformation within it. The Church can criticise decadence but not overthrow it. In short, Christianity can inspire repentance and an ethical life within the community but not revolution. Most pertinently it has no desire to.

Technology, particularly AI, might seem a more plausible locus for renewal. Yet AI today is infrastructure, not ideology. It offers administration, not deliverance. Its moralisation - responsible AI, fairness metrics, sustainability audits - produces a bureaucratic ethos rather than a revolutionary creed. We may be moving toward the quagmire of a moral-bureaucratic technocracy, in which governance is justified by ethical algorithms, but this is an evolution of managerial liberalism, not its overthrow.

The larger truth is that utopian confidence itself has collapsed. After the ruins of Marxism and the cynicism of postmodernism, no grand narrative of progress is any more credible. The young inherit a world that semi-guarantees safety and self-expression - but not transcendence, not enchantment. Their politics mirrors that void: permanent critique without vision, righteousness without telos - activism detached from an idea of the good society it seeks to create.

A new ideology will emerge only when a movement can again answer that ancient revolutionary question: what comes after the destruction of the old? Until then, we live in a moral interregnum between myths, between elites, between worlds. The energy of rebellion remains, but it circulates without destination; let us pray that it doesn't end up somewhere ugly.

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