Review: America's Cultural Revolution by Chris Rufo

Over the past few years, Chris Rufo has emerged as one of the most effective conservative activists in the United States. As far as I can tell, he got his start in 2019 after reporting on non-profit and government employees who mystifyingly decided to hire a black-trans stripper to give a raunchy performance at a conference on homelessness in Seattle. The demeaning racial overtones and spectacle of exploitation and waste in the event seem pretty obvious to any normal person. The individuals responsible were later forced to resign. Rufo has since brought himself acclaim for bringing to light similar such excesses on the part of some liberals. He was even interviewed recently on The Intercept’s Deconstructed podcast, where he had a solid conversation with my colleague Ryan Grim.

This book is Rufo’s first. As you can imagine, its more ambitious in scope than his normal activism. America’s Cultural Revolution aims at laying bare the ideological underpinnings of radical liberalism, neo-Marxism, Wokeism, or whatever other term you’d like to use to describe contemporary progressive ideology. There are a raft of such books coming now, as the publishing schedules that were initiated in the the summer of 2020 are now reaching maturity. Rufo is a surprisingly talented writer and his book reads breezily. He seeks to explain progressivism through biographical sketches of the lives of a number of 20th century radical leftist thinkers. As a wordcel, I like intellectual histories and find this to be a good approach.

That said, the book didn’t really convince me. This is not because I have any bone to pick with him or his beliefs. But ultimately I did not find his argument to be a convincing account of the origin of the phenomena that he seeks to describe. In my view it goes overboard in its description of the power of intellectuals, while neglecting the structural factors, perhaps inherent to modernity, that drive cultural change, as well as the contribution of establishment conservatives to creating the radical progressive culture that they now claim to abhor.

America’s Cultural Revolution identifies the origins of radicalism liberalism in the writings of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paolo Freire, and Derrick Bell. The ideas of these thinkers are influential in some way but I think this has less to do with a concerted effort by progressives than structural changes in society like aging demographics, greater inclusion of women and minorities in institutions, the hollowing of public institutions by libertarian economic policies, and the impact of the communications technology revolution. These ideas just happened to fit well with the circumstances. If radical progressivism has won, I think it has largely been by default rather than through any careful planning or strategizing that seem hardly in evidence.

**

There is something profoundly ridiculous about the American culture wars. Whatever ones says about them they do not bring to mind the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the emergence of Nazism. There is simply not the same gritty seriousness of the 20th century ideological conflicts between liberalism, communism, and fascism. Our present ideological clashes are much more shallow, flickering hot and then cooling at the same tempo as our social media streams. I would argue that, rather than the culmination of a well-planned Marxist Long March through the institutions, we are witnessing the impact of ephemeral memes and fads, turbocharged by technology and aggravated by the growing-pains of our demographically transforming world, as they send people off in new directions every few years. Imagining your enemy as greater and more coherent than they actually are, even as literal revolutionaries enacting an ideological coup, strikes me as a coping mechanism.

Information used to be relatively controlled and curated by social institutions. This is a situation that has likely changed forever with the internet. It is inevitable that this change would have downstream social impacts, and the way that people interpret what they see will inevitably likewise be impacted by their positionality. I’m not surprised that social media has opened up the floodgates of cultural change related to race or gender. I also do not think that, all things being equal, regardless of the talent of their proponents, these social revolutions would have happened without the underlying technological change. The ideologies that happened to benefit in recent years are the ones that are most emotionally compelling and easiest to compress into memes and slogans that are trivial to broadcast and consume. I’m sure that radical progressive intellectuals are themselves surprised at how quickly their ideas have ascended in recent years.

The failures of conservatives are also inevitably responsible for the rise of an aggressive counterculture. I could enumerate many, including their own inability to uphold the stated values of their tradition. But the most important conservative failing has been their failure to invest in an alternate vision of a stable and harmonious society. I will explain this through a personal anecdote.

My mother was a public high school teacher for nearly thirty years before retiring. By the end of her tenure, radical liberalism had completely transformed her school in ways that she and her colleagues found disorienting. I wouldn’t have believed this if I’d merely read it online, but I saw the materials and heard all about it all firsthand.

There had been years-long efforts to slash funding and programming at her school for high-quality English programs, which she and her fellow unionized teachers had resisted for years. Towards the end, however, despite this resistance, classes teaching Shakespeare and other literary staples had wound up being cut at the behest of school administrators wielding anti-racist arguments that claimed that writers who were “old and white” were unfit for young and ethnically diverse classrooms. These classical authors were then replaced with less complex, and thus cheaper to teach, DEI-style writing by contemporary writers, who were supposedly more fit for reading by young minority kids.

In this way, an economically-conservative-yet-socially-liberal bureaucracy managed to win through the backdoor, running a campaign that exploited people’s natural aversion to racism to kill a rigorous and thus more expensive English curriculum. They did so by making the mind blowingly racist argument that non-white people need not be taught complex literature. One can only imagine the downstream social effects of all this. Yet local conservative politicians by all accounts seem to be very happy with this Defund the Schools idea, even if they didn’t choose its particular manner of implementation. In the end it still accomplishes their long-time goal of making public schools useless and forcing anyone who wants a real education to pay for it.

Despite their absurd image, the culture wars do matter and their outcomes can indeed negatively impact people, particularly those who are poor and working-class and rely on public institutions to help them through life. I object to much of the current drift of these institutions. But I do not think that the morality of it all is so simple. Defeat has many fathers, and if America’s (in theory) meritocratic traditional culture has truly been laid low, it is not just a few authors who abolished it.