Book review of America's Cultural Revolution by Christopher F. Rufo

America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything

by Christopher F. Rufo

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This is a remarkable book. Hugely impressive contemporary history along with a stinging critique, of the political and cultural changes that have taken place in the United States since WWII:

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“The descendants of the New Left have captured the elite institutions but have not been able to reorder the deeper structures of society… The universities have lost the ancient telos of knowledge, replacing it with an inferior set of values oriented toward personal identities and pathologies… The public schools have absorbed the principles of revolution but have failed to teach the rudimentary skills of reading and mathematics… The activist-bureaucrats had a simple list of objectives: capture the culture of the federal agencies; enforce political orthodoxy with critical theory-based DEI programs; turn the federal government into a patronage machine for left-wing activism… The state becomes the primary vehicle of revolution. It no longer seeks to serve the public but, following the dictates of critical theory, seeks to subvert itself.”

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“The bitterest irony of the critical theories is that they have attained power but have not opened up new possibilities; they have instead compressed the prestige institutions of society with a suffocating new orthodoxy. The revolution along the axes of identity has proven unstable, alienating, and incapable of managing a complex society, much less improving it… The Left has achieved cultural dominance over the entire range of prestige institutions… the critical ideologies are a creature of the state, completely subsidized by the public through direct financing, university loan schemes, bureaucratic capture, and the civil rights regulatory apparatus.”

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“The simple fact is that the ideology of the elite has not demonstrated any capacity to solve the problems of the masses, even on its own terms. The critical theories operate by pure negation, demolishing middle-class structures and stripping down middle-class values, which serves the interest of the bureaucracy but leaves the society in a state of permanent disintegration. Ultimately, critical theory will be put to a simple test: Are conditions improving or not improving? Are cities safer or less safe? Are students learning to read or not learning to read?”

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“If the endpoint of the critical theories is nihilism, the counter-revolution must begin with hope. The principles of the society under counter-revolution are not oriented toward sweeping reversals and absolutes, but toward the protection of the humble values and institutions of the common man: family, faith, work, community, country. The intellectuals and activists of the counter-revolution must arm the population with a competing set of values, spoken in language that exposes and surpasses the euphemisms of the left-wing ideological regime: excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos.”

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The book is structured around four pivotal figures, who have indelibly shaped modern America:

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“Herbert Marcuse was the preeminent philosopher of the so-called New Left, which sought to mobilize the white intelligentsia and the black ghetto into a new proletariat. Angela Davis was one of Marcuse’s graduate students and, after pledging to violently overthrow the state, became the face of racial revolt in the West. Paulo Freire was a Brazilian Marxist whose work on turning schools into instruments of revolution became the gospel of left-wing education in America. Derrick Bell was a Harvard Law professor who set the foundation for critical race theory and recruited a cadre of students who would capture elite institutions with their new racialist ideology.”

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“This represents a change in regime – a cultural revolution. The victory of the critical theories has displaced the original ends, or telos, of America’s institutions. The university no longer exists to discover knowledge, but rather to awaken “critical consciousness.” The corporation no longer exists to maximize profit, but to manage “diversity and inclusion.” The state no longer exists to secure natural rights, but to achieve “social justice.”… And just as it was for the revolutionaries in the Third World, the goal for Giroux, McLaren, and the second-generation critical pedagogists is always the same: dismantling the criminal justice system, disrupting the nuclear family, overthrowing the system of capitalism, and, in the words of Freire, turning the schools into “an extraordinary instrument to help build a new society and a new man.””

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Bettina Love is a prominent advocate of abolitionist education, who writes that: “White folx cannot lose their Whiteness; it is not possible. But they can daily try to deal with and reject the Whiteness that is obsessed with oppressing others, centering itself, and maintaining White supremacy through White rage. Being well and White is rejecting Whiteness for the good of humanity.”

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“The governing institutions in Portland have reached the strange paradox in which the state, through the organs of education, is agitating for its own destruction. They have condemned the entire structure of the social order and celebrated the figures who would tear it down. They might get what they wish for, although not in the way they imagine. As the historians have warned since ancient times, democracy can easily degenerate into mob rule, which occurs when the populace loses faith in the governing system and the rule of law. The result is not utopia, but anarchy.”

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“The real brilliance of critical race theory was not intellectual, but tactical. The “activist scholars” learned how to wield the politics of race in elite milieus and use it as a fulcrum for accumulating power.” Randall Kennedy provided a critique of critical race theory in 1995, in which he “laid bare an embarrassing truth: the critical race theorists crusaded for “diversity” but treated racial groups as monoliths. The discipline did not transcend racial stereotypes, it simply inverted them: minorities were assumed to be wise, disadvantaged, and deserving; whites were assumed to be sterile, imperial, and oppressive. Race became a proxy for worth and group identity became the new criterion of moral and intellectual evaluation.”

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“Together, the acronym for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” represents a new mode of institutional governance. Diversity is the new system of racial standing, equity is the new method of power transfer, inclusion is the new basis of enforcement… The pattern of conquest was perfectly circular: the intellectuals provided the ideology, the administrators captured the infrastructure, and private diversity contractors attached themselves to a new source of financing and distribution… Taken together, the three pillars of critical race theorists’ ideal system of governance – the replacement of individual rights with group rights, the race-based redistribution of wealth, the suppression of speech based on a racial and political calculus – constitute a change in political regime.”

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Complementing this book, have a listen to the podcast with Christopher Rufo and Coleman Hughes called "The Rise of the Radical Left".

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6eJqf92Jy8

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Christopher Rufo is a political activist and filmmaker known for his opposition to Critical Race Theory (CRT). He's a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute, and he's the author of this new book called "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything".