[Reviewing the new book by Christopher Rufo, architect of the
right’s crusade against “critical race theory.” ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ARE WE IN THE GRIP OF AN ‘AMERICAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION’?  
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Matt McManus and Nathan J. Robinson
July 21, 2023
Current Affairs
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_ Reviewing the new book by Christopher Rufo, architect of the
right’s crusade against “critical race theory.” _

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_America's Cultural Revolution
How the Radical Left Conquered Everything_
Christopher F. Rufo
Broadside Books
ISBN: 9780063227538

_Most of the bodies were naked, or at most covered with only shreds of
clothing, usually skeletal or dismembered, and often headless.
They’d been rendered unrecognizable by the gnawing of hungry fish,
which left deep pits for eyes and a horrible, yawning cavity in place
of the lips that had recited Chairman Mao’s quotes and begged for
the revolutionary masses to punish them for their crimes, their joyous
laughter and cries of grief having been eternally silenced. When the
corpses first began floating through Daojiang Town, crowds lined the
riverbanks in wide-eyed astonishment, discussing among themselves.
After the sight became common, however, people took no more notice
than of trees felled by a storm. Although rumors were rampant and
explanations varied, who these corpses were and what had happened to
them soon became an open secret. People quickly turned away at the
sight of the corpses, because the weather was hot and the stench
sickening, and because they had a faint inkling that the day might
come when they themselves must kill or be killed. Some itched for the
opportunity, while others lived in dread of that day._

Tan Hecheng, _The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent Into
Madness During the Cultural Revolution _(Oxford University Press) 

The Chinese Cultural Revolution was one of history’s most terrible
episodes. There were widespread mass killings, and the total death
toll may run into the millions
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The stories of the brutality are stomach-churning: students
cannibalizing their teachers
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the murder of children and the elderly. Tan Hecheng, compiling records
of the worst crimes, comments on how “an observer of the tragedy
[finds] what people did to each other, individually and collectively,
so horrific and irrational that it is almost beyond
comprehension.” 

If you pick up Christopher Rufo’s book _America’s Cultural
Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everything_
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you might think that America, too, had descended into similar madness.
But you’d be incorrect. The “revolution,” in Rufo’s telling,
is comprised of—wait for it—diversity programs at colleges, Black
Studies departments, protests against police brutality, and
corporations that tweeted pro-BLM platitudes in the aftermath of
George Floyd’s killing. His evidence for dangerous revolutionary
changes in our society consists of things like the appearance of the
term “institutionalized racism” in the newspaper. The most
important thing to know about a book purporting to discuss the
present-day “American Cultural Revolution,” then, is that the name
is necessarily extreme and amounts to unwarranted hyperbole that
minimizes the horrors of the original Cultural Revolution.

Rufo is a leading conservative activist who is proud of his role in
adding “critical race theory” to the long, long list of bogeymen
that the right uses to convince people that their culture is dying and
they are in an existential war for the survival of civilization. (CRT
may already be last week’s villain. Fox News is now warning that
“Trantifa
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are on the march.) Rufo has been quite open about his strategy of
trying to get people to associate
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they don’t like with the term “critical race theory,” saying
“[w]e will eventually turn [critical race theory] toxic, as we put
all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The
goal is to have the public read something ‘crazy’ in the newspaper
and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” Even, one
supposes, if such things have nothing to do with CRT! This seems to
have been effective, although his follow-up “rebranding
effort”—trying to convince people to say
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“trans stripper” instead of “drag queen”—does not appear to
have caught on. Rufo has now been appointed by Florida Man
[[link removed]] Ron DeSantis to
the board of trustees of New College
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Florida, where he is part of a mission to remake the college by
purging it of wokeness and turning it into a classics-focused
institution based on the Hillsdale
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Cultural Revolution _is his manifesto encouraging readers to join him
in waging a “counter-revolution.”

Books like Rufo’s (the right-wing screed against the
“revolution” wrought by left-wing intellectuals) are a cottage
industry in the United States, as we’ve noted
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before. Each of them tells a familiar story: authoritarian woke
Marxists have invaded the country, seized control of our institutions,
and threaten to destroy what’s left of our freedoms. One could be
forgiven for finding frustrating the lack of consistency in the
vocabulary of conservative rhetoric. Political correctness becomes
“wokeness.” Classic Marxism becomes “cultural Marxism,” then
“postmodern neo-Marxism,” then “race Marxism
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then comes home as “American Marxism
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then proves Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence true by
becoming cultural Marxism once again. 

Rufo does not so much offer an argument as a story, recounting the
life histories of radical intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse, Paulo
Freire, Angela Davis, and Derrick Bell
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and arguing that their ideas have infiltrated all of the most powerful
institutions of society. Interestingly, Rufo does not make much of an
actual _case _for why the ideas of these people are _wrong_.
Throughout the book, he assumes that his readers will be horrified
enough by terms like “institutional racism” that it will be
sufficient to trace the concept’s lineage back to the New Left.
Then, he assumes that by parading a series of infamous ’60s radicals
in front of us (not just Marcuse and Davis, but the Weathermen,
Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, and Huey Newton, all of whose lives
are discussed), he will have sufficiently convinced the reader that
the revolution is here and it is terrifying.

But what about a skeptical reader who doesn’t just need to be shown
_what _Angela Davis said but needs to be shown that Davis was wrong to
say it? Throughout the book, Rufo does not discuss _the things
leftists are writing about _so much as _the fact that leftists are
writing about things._ For instance, of critical race theorist Derrick
Bell, Rufo writes:

_Bell sought to write American history as a long sequence of gloom and
oppression. He wrote fictional stories attacking Thomas Jefferson and
George Washington as racist hypocrites. He made the case that the
Constitution was not a “hallowed document,” but a self-serving
compact that protected the interests of whites who controlled massive
“investments in land, slaves, manufacturing, and shipping.” In his
lectures at NYU, Bell told students that the Constitution was a
useless document, because the Supreme Court would always manipulate
the law to serve elite interests, then appeal to the Constitution
after the fact. “When I was a kid, we had cockroaches in the house,
but we didn’t have roach powder,” Bell told his students. “So we
killed the roaches by stomping on them. What the Justices do is stomp
on the roaches, and then spray them with roach powder. The
Constitution is like the roach powder.”_

A reader who already shares Rufo’s politics might be horrified. But
anyone who doesn’t might well reply “Yes, and?” Where we might
expect an argument that Bell was _wrong_, that the Supreme Court
_doesn’t _invoke the Constitution selectively to rationalize
decisions based on preexisting political preferences
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we get nothing. Rufo just goes on to describe more of Bell’s work,
including his famous “Space Traders
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science fiction story. He says that Bell “believed that the entire
arc of America’s racial history—from the Declaration to the
Emancipation to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Civil Rights
Act—appeared to be in the service of freedom for blacks but, in
actuality, served the self-interest of elite whites.” Instead of
evaluating Bell’s arguments, Rufo quotes Thomas Sowell, who
speculated that Bell’s extreme pessimism came from his desire not to
be a “nobody” in academia.

Rufo’s book is actually uncommonly well researched for a Left Panic
tract. Admittedly, the bar is not high—this is, after all, a minor
literature where standards have fallen so low that one can hear
diatribes against the “Franklin School of Critical Theory
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a straight face and senior intellectuals can breathlessly anguish
about ubiquitous “postmodern neo-Marxists
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without being able to name a single one
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asked. Rufo’s book contains copious endnotes and is even
unexpectedly generous in parts, conceding the brilliance of some of
the figures discussed and giving sympathetic accounts of their early
lives.

What the book lacks is an actual argument, such as making the case
_against _the beliefs of the people it identifies as dangerously
destructive. One can read _America’s Cultural Revolution_ with care
and find few, if any, engagements with the concrete claims of
left-wing authors. Rufo cites them plenty, but he doesn’t seem to
have understood them below the level of partisan polemic. Take Herbert
Marcuse’s complex (and problematic) account of how technological
rationality and consumerism have flattened our capacity for critical
thinking. This gets reduced to trite slogans of the kind we expect
from a Ben Shapiro: “Rationality had devolved into irrationality.
Freedom had turned into slavery. Progress had produced barbarism.”
Rufo misrepresents Marcuse’s philosophy as a “great refusal” to
suppress instincts, grow up, and mature. But Marcuse is insisting that
it is precisely the reactionary demand that one repress, rather than
acknowledge, the psychological drives that leads to the violent
expression of the instincts and the development of incomplete
authoritarian personalities. Or, in more banal forms, the immature
turn from what one really desires—community, love, solidarity—to
the cheap substitutes offered by technology and mass media. It’s a
complex point. It can be disputed. But to dispute it, it’s best to
try to understand it first. We’ve come a long way from a serious
conservative intellectual like Roger Scruton, who at least appreciated
the originality of the critiques put forth by Marcuse and his
contemporaries in the Frankfurt School
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anti-fascist academics who sought to unite Marxist theory with a
critique of culture and social psychology) even if he dismissed their
solutions.

For Rufo, most of his truths are self-evident, in need of no
substantiation. For instance, he tells us that the Department of
Education has funded programs for “systematic change to improve
equity.” So? And Angela Davis “identified the justice
system—law, courts, prisons, and police—as the primary
‘instrument of class domination’ and physical enforcer of
America’s ‘racist ideology.’” Indeed, but what arguments did
she and other Black Marxists make for why they believed this? 

Consider this list of dystopian funding activities by the National
Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities: 

_The NEA and the NEH pursued the same political line, funding, for
example, a speaking series on “race, reconciliation, and
transformation,” a national black writers’ conference on
“reconstructing the master narrative,” an artist-in-residency
program for “racial equity,” a leadership certificate program in
“diversity, equity, and inclusion,” an art exhibit on “race,
gender, and globalization,” an overseas research program that
“aims to dismantle hierarchies of race and civilization,” a
biography exploiting “the Black Power movement,” a “dance
theater trilogy on race, culture, and identity,” and a stage play
for “a manifesto on race in America through the eyes of a black girl
recovering from self-hate.”_

That last one turns out to be Antoinette Nwandu’s play “Breach
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Here’s a description of the plot:

_Margaret uproots her life, including her dead-end job and fizzling
relationship, after finding out that she is unexpectedly expecting.
She finds support and humor from her sassy and sharp Aunt Sylvia and
her new friendship with Carolina, a pregnant cleaning lady at her
office. BREACH is a smart comedy about friendship, motherhood, and
family, and tackles the mother of all challenges: learning to love
yourself._

Is this really what a “cultural revolution” of the Maoist type is
made of?

Nowhere does Rufo give generous consideration to the arguments
actually made by the people he despises. He treats it as obvious that
if the term “racism” is appearing more often in the newspaper,
this is a sign that Marcuse and Davis are winning. The alternate
explanation—that Americans are (rightly) starting to pay more
attention to inequalities that had previously (unjustly) been
overlooked—is not entertained. 

Rufo’s theory that leftist radicals have taken over everything runs
into trouble whenever he has to account for the fact that radicals
have taken over almost nothing. For instance, he believes that New
Left
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thinking has come to dominate not only academia, the state, and the
media, but the whole corporate world. This creates a paradox, he
admits, because “the critical theorists were vicious critics of
capitalism and wanted nothing more than to abolish it, … yet their
ideas have made inroads into the centers of capitalist power.” How
to explain that capitalists are now apparently anti-capitalist? All
Rufo says is that “the corporation is no longer the domain of the
conservative establishment,” offering as proof the fact that many
prominent CEOs are Democrats and JPMorgan Chase billionaire Jamie
Dimon took a knee for BLM
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surely a more sensible explanation is the leftist one: corporations
have embraced superficial social justice rhetoric because it’s cheap
and allows them to look good and doesn’t threaten the fundamental
relationship between capitalists and workers. McDonald’s doesn’t
declare itself pro-BLM because it’s a hotbed of radicalism but as a
branding exercise, because corporations will gleefully co-opt
rebellion to sell hamburgers.

Left Wing Resentment and Disintegrationism

We have seen that Rufo doesn’t care to deal with the left’s
arguments. Instead, near the conclusion of his book, Rufo develops an
account that pathologizes
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the motives of many of the figures he looks at. Rather than
understanding that these figures were fighting for justice or yearning
for emancipation, Rufo follows a long line of Nietzschean-inspired
reactionaries in describing the left in terms of “resentment”:

_The true heart of the quest for liberation—the driving force behind
its theory and praxis—is nihilism. [Eldridge] Cleaver believed that
raping white women was “freedom.” Angela Davis believed that
taping a shotgun to the neck of a county judge was “justice.”
Black Lives Matter activists believed that looting and burning down
shopping malls was “reparations.” But all of these are, in truth,
pure resentment. The black liberation movement rationalized violence,
first dressing it up in Kant and Hegel, and then, in the contemporary
period, using it as a method for extorting corporate and public
support. But this method of liberation is ultimately a dialectic of
destruction._

It’s certainly possible to be a leftist motivated by resentment, and
leftists would be wise to spend their time substantively defending the
merits of universal healthcare and condemning the enduring cruelty of
white supremacy and the criminal punishment system. But from
occasional snide comments by Derrick Bell or Angela Davis about their
desire to piss off white society, Rufo generates a sweeping and
unsubstantiated theory of left-radicals’ supposed psychological
motivations and historical ambitions.

Pathologizing the left rather than arguing with it is just one of the
well-worn conservative responses Rufo wheels out in the book_. _Rufo
follows the “counter-revolutionary” strategy of inverting the
causality of more nuanced progressive arguments by relocating the
source of social discontent from the content of what leftists are
writing about to _the fact that malicious leftists are writing about
things. _This strategy has a long history on the right, including in
the writings of some of its founding figures. Sophisticated critics
like Edmund Burke chafed at revolutionary criticisms which condemned
the monarchical regimes of Europe as tyrannical, unaccountable, and
unrepresentative and their citizenry subject to the arbitrary whims of
these very flawed rulers. While Burke was far more willing than Rufo
to confront these arguments with arguments of his own, one of his more
interesting responses was to accuse the left’s “sophisters,
economists, and calculators” of stripping away “all the pleasing
illusions which made power gentle, and obedience liberal.” The
implication becomes that it is not the injustices highlighted by the
left which prompted the revolution, but the left’s stripping away of
the “illusions” which conciliated subjects to their
betters. Rufo’s book follows in this mold. Indeed he gestures to
the “counter-revolutionary” genealogy of his work early on in the
book.

_The task for the counter-revolutionary is not simply to halt the
movement of his adversaries but to resurrect the system of values,
symbols, myths, and principles that constituted the essence of the old
regime, to reestablish the continuity between past, present, and
future, and to make the eternal principles of freedom and equality
meaningful again to the common citizen._

Like a lower frequency Burke, Rufo gestures to “truth” and
“myth” “values” and “principles” and “history” and
“eternity” and “order” against “chaos,” along with
“reason” and “instincts,” to justify a
“counter-revolutionary” approach to dealing with the left. Except
no effort is made to explain what any of these terms mean or reconcile
the potential contradictions between them. If it’s true that Rufo is
interested in “history” and tradition, how does he square that
with a commitment to “eternal” values which may well confront our
established dogmas? This wasn’t a small problem for Plato, for whom
eternal truth and justice required us to be critical of the
established “doxa”—or unreflective public opinions—of one’s
time (was he a critical race theorist _avant la lettre_?). This is an
especially vexing problem for conservatives who want to revere the
“Western” canon while ignoring that much of it inveighs heavily
against “doxa” and “heteronomy” and “ideology.”
Consequently, their efforts to “conserve” the Western canon’s
authority means denying that much of it is authoritative. After all,
there is no thinker more “Western” than Marx—a thinker who
synthesized German philosophy, French radicalism, and English
political economy and wrote for American newspapers. Or take Rufo’s
concerns with chaos and order. If Rufo is so concerned with
maintaining order against chaos, shouldn’t he be in favor of the
established DEI institutions and resist “counter-revolutionary”
efforts to disrupt them? This applies doubly for free marketers and
anti-socialists, who should be the last people wanting to coerce major
corporations into jettisoning a commitment to social justice rhetoric
if that’s what their shareholders and corporate boards want. 

Of course, trying to make sense of this may be beside the point. As
Rufo makes very clear, his pitch isn’t largely to the rational
intellect—at least noy beyond a few rhetorical appeals—but to the
“feelings” and “instincts” of his readers. But it’s worth
pointing out that the appeal to so many different foundations is
intended to glamorize Rufo’s counter-revolutionary inclinations and
attribute to them some kind of sublime
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In truth it comes across like a postmodern pastiche: a grab bag of
appeals to historicist traditionalism, natural right and natural law,
brute power politics, right-wing doxa, and the pure instincts and
feelings of those who have a “sense” that something is rotten in
the state of Florida and beyond.

In his classic book _Natural Right and History, _the conservative(ish)
philosopher Leo Strauss (in)famously criticized Edmund Burke for
completing the modern world’s intellectual descent into relativism
and nihilism
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through his very efforts to defend the _ancien régime_ from liberal
radicalism. Something very similar could be said about Rufo, who seems
to have decided that the best way to respond to bad arguments by
left-wing postmodernists is to become a distinctly postmodern
conservative
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Rufo’s Intellectual Pastiche

But it is probably pointless to show that Rufo is uninterested in
actually proving a case against the left. After all, despite the
copious endnotes, he doesn’t really pretend to care about being
intellectually serious. Rufo is open about the fact that he sees as
his central task the manipulation of people’s minds toward those
views he likes and away from those he doesn’t. This is very
different from the pursuit of truth. In an interview
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a year ago, Rufo said:

_The man who can discover, shape and distribute information has an
enormous amount of power. The currency in our postmodern knowledge
regime is language, fact, image and emotion. Learning how to wield
these is the whole game._

This attraction to the symbolic over anything concrete is very
apparent in Rufo’s book, right down to its lack of analytical
argument and rebuttal. Rufo often thinks that just coding something as
left or “revolutionary” conveys the “sense” that it must be
bad, despite the fact that one would have to prove it. Despite chiding
critical theorists for wanting “to dismantle the pillars of Western
society—rationalism, individualism, capitalism, natural rights, the
rule of law,” Rufo never bothers to defend any of these or even say
how they are mutually compatible. At some points, Rufo doesn’t even
seem to think they can be effectively defended rationally or
argumentatively. As mentioned, the conclusion of his book is not about
why “rationalism, individualism, capitalism, natural rights, [and]
the rule of law” are true and good. Instead, he talks about the need
to renew “symbols” and “myths” and construct the “narrative
of the counter-revolutionary” which is to be restored to
“political rule”: 

_Under the cultural revolution, the common citizen has been shamed,
pressed, and degraded. His symbols have been subverted and buried
below the earth. But he still retains the power of his own instincts,
which orient him toward justice, and the power of his own memory,
which makes possible the retrieval of the symbols and principles that
contain his own destiny._

As the point about leaning into “instincts” suggests, at times
Rufo even decides to simply eschew facts and argument entirely for the
feelings of those who accept his preferred symbols and narratives. The
result is a very abstract book that exists in the spacy realm of
summarization but that doesn’t bother to refute intellectual
discourses and is deeply disconnected from the material world. We are
not talking about the distribution of wealth, mass incarceration, or
the way health services are distributed, or the threat of the climate
crisis. Instead, we get a story about a series of nasty intellectuals
(the most successful of whom sold about 100,000 books) who ruined
everything. The powerful people who used the institutions at their
disposal to throw those dissident intellectuals in jail were
responsible for little. 

What is one supposed to make of a book like _America’s Cultural
Revolution_? Is he serious? Does he really believe that corporate
racial sensitivity trainings are the direct descendants of the
Weathermen, and that the NEH funding of plays about Black women’s
self-discovery is tantamount to the Maoist persecution of
nonconformity? No matter how many endnotes a book like this has, or
how elaborately it may lay out the doctrines of Marcuse, how can
anyone do anything but laugh at the evidence Rufo puts forth for the
existence of a great threat? Derrick Bell’s sci-fi stories? Angela
Davis is part of a movement that has “taken over everything”? As
always with this stuff, real leftists can only wish we lived in the
conservative fantasyland where socialists are everywhere. In fact,
socialists are a marginal group politically, as are people who
actually call themselves Marxists, whether in academia
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politics
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(As one example, if you search the tweets of AOC, one of the most
prominent self-described democratic socialists, you’ll find that the
last time she tweeted the word “socialist” was in 2021.) Ethnic
studies and gender studies programs are small, and university campuses
are dominated by business and economics majors
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It’s clear that Rufo does not want an actual debate on whether the
injustices identified by the left actually exist. The question of
whether leftist analysis is accurate is simply assumed away in_
America’s Cultural Revolution_. Instead, he is interested in
precisely what he says: crafting a compelling narrative that will help
build the counter-revolution. Those who would prefer to dismiss this
book should be warned that as a salesman of narrative, Rufo is an
expert. He thinks carefully about how to construct stories in order to
whip up a frenzy of resentment against the Marxist menace. Does it
matter whether the menace exists? Does it matter whether the Marxists
make some good points? Not to Rufo, who has made it clear he is on the
same mission as Ron DeSantis: the complete purging of leftist ideas
from institutions. We should be far more afraid of his plans for us
than of any present or imminent American “cultural revolution.” 

* Right wing ideology
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* Trumpism
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