Book Note: Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution

Ayn Rand Vindicated!

Christopher Rufo’s book is a formidable piece of scholarly writing, its 282 pages of text being followed by 48 pages of densely packed, small-type footnotes.  Most of the text is a description of the forward march of the radical left, from Marxism through antiracism to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The description is highly compressed.  For example, the left capture of the New York Times and other pieces of the classical main-stream media is covered in two pages. A short conclusion proposes that there will be a counter-revolution, without identifying detailed mechanisms therefor.

Ayn Rand?  Many years ago, at the foundation of the Libertarian Party, there was a disagreement between the party’s founders and the woman who had led them to their political decision.  Ayn Rand was a declared opponent of libertarian political activity, and the Libertarian Party in particular.  She maintained that the correct path to a libertarian world was to infiltrate the academy, populate first the universities and then the schools with libertarian thoughts, at which moment the political sphere would fall into the hands of libertarian leaders like a ripe apple falling off a tree.  The libertarian leadership with rare exceptions instead chose to form the Libertarian Party.

As we shall see in our analysis of Christopher Rufo’s new book America’s Cultural Revolution – How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, Ayn Rand’s analysis was correct.  It is possible to win by first infiltrating the academy and then spreading out from there.  Unfortunately, the people who did this successfully are very definitely not Libertarians, are very definitely not supporters of the Constitution Party, espouse ideas that are entirely incompatible with the Green Party’s major issue, and fit poorly with the stands of almost all other third parties, indeed, fit poorly with Western civilization. We’ll come back to this point, which is least appreciated by supporters of the Green Party and its concerns about climate and other issues, at the end of this review.

Rufo does not quite advance the great man theory of history, in which all historical events are explained by the leadership of a few important persons.  However, sometimes the deeds of particular persons serve to catalyze events, or to provide the nucleus around which the structure of history crystallizes.  We may refer to ‘The Age of Napoleon’, without claiming that Napoleon did everything.

Rufo centers his discussion around four individuals, namely Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell.  Marcuse was a German-born Marxist theorist who called for the total destruction of capitalist society.  Seeing the defeat of the revolutionary violence of the Weathermen and their allies, his followers instead proposed the Long March through the established institutions, beginning with the educational system, a process that has continued to the present day. Of particular note is his proposal of ‘liberating tolerance’, i.e., withdrawing tolerance of opinions that disagree with his.

Angela Davis was an African-American student of Marcuse who settled on the Communist Party to advance radical positions. She became involved in violent revolutionary events, though she was not convicted of related crimes.  She then transitioned to academia.  The movement around her transitioned from revolution to creating faculty positions, academic departments, and schools. 

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian Marxist educator with radical ideas as to how children should be educated. The program was implemented in one foreign country; it was a total failure. Followers of his ideas, says Rufo, have however totally radicalized the field of education, meaning that school children are subject to racist political indoctrination.  Rufo gives vast amounts of detail, showing how this approach is substantiated.  The Buffalo Public Schools (I grew up in two suburbs of Buffalo) are given as one of many examples.

Derrick Bell was the first black Professor at Harvard Law School.  His successful objective was to establish critical race theory.  Rufo proposes in an extended discussion that critical race theory, sometimes under the diversity-equity cognomen has taken over the universities, public schools, the Federal government, and major corporations.  The takeover was based on verbal force, the suppression of competing opinions.

Rufo largely runs out of steam in his writing before reaching deplatforming, in which dissenters are deprived of the ability to reach the public.   The censorship of Twitter, recently uncovered, the ejection of web sites and blogs from established locations, credit card firms refusing to do business with people whose politics they dislike, … that is deplatforming.

Ah, yes, why critical race theory as widely implemented is incompatible with the Green Party’s most prominent issue, anthropogenic global warming.  Our understanding of global warming is based on massive computer studies and huge amounts of data acquisition, which in turn require computer programs that work and numerical reports that are correct. Critical race theorists, on the other hand, reject as racist such mathematical ideas as perfectionism, objectivity, and getting the right answer.  Those are both approaches that invoke mathematics, but they are incompatible.  

Finally, the limit in the book.  Rufo proposes that there will be a counter-revolution, but is too light on details.  In my parallel column on Third Party Watch, I will discuss several steps that would take us in the needed directions.