Inside America’s Right-Wing Intelligentsia

• America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything
• Christopher F. Rufo
• Broadside Books (2023)

As historical analysis, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything is poppycock. But it gives us a very instructive glimpse into the minds of America’s right-wing intelligentsia and the people who generously fund them.

Author Christopher Rufo is a rising intellectual and ideologue of the American far right. Not yet 40, he is a regular on Fox News, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute — a right-wing think tank — and a contributing editor of its magazine, City Journal. He has also been appointed as a board member of New College of Florida, which Gov. Ron DeSantis is converting into a conservative school modelled after Hillsdale College in Michigan, where Rufo often speaks.

Now Rufo has published his first book, with more likely to follow.

In many ways it’s readable and thought-provoking. Rufo is a good writer, well edited. He’s read his sources carefully, and his excitement practically radiates off the page: he’s got a big idea about how America got into trouble over 50 years ago, and another big idea about how to rescue the country.

He is also wrong on both counts.

Rufo and his many think-tank colleagues may differ on many fine points, but they tend to agree on the key points he makes in this book:

• The U.S. has been in moral, political and institutional decline since at least the 1960s.
• The American left has been in control of the U.S. for decades, especially education.
• Concepts like diversity, equity and inclusion, “wokeness,” identity politics and especially critical race theory are the fabrications of the American left and have ruined the country.

Many Americans (and Canadians) would see this as the premise of a bad alternate-history science fiction novel, but Rufo’s views are already becoming part of school curriculum in some Republican states like Florida. They could become the accepted version of American history nationwide, justifying radical political and institutional change.

And their dramatic goals deserve detailed examination. They appear to want either a “patchwork republic” of disunited states, or a post-democratic “American Caesar.”

A long march from 1968

Rufo argues that in 1968, a famously turbulent year in U.S. history, a handful of Marxists launched a violent, years-long attempt to overthrow the government. When the attempt failed, some of the Marxists planned a “long march” to capture American institutions, especially education, and thereby put an end to capitalism and the racism and inequality it inflicted.

Three people were the key authors of this long march: Herbert Marcuse, a German-born radical; Angela Davis, a Black philosopher and activist; and Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator. Derrick Bell, a Black civil rights lawyer and law professor, built on their work by helping to frame what we now call critical race theory.

Rufo says that all were brilliant, but Marcuse, Davis and Freire failed in their early revolutionary ventures. They then dropped the idea of violence and decided to change the American political system from within: to train cadres who would establish themselves in universities, governments, even corporations.

The cadres would change curriculums, implement policies and build a new culture — all in the service of what we now call “identity politics.” In the process, they would overthrow the systemic racism that they believed the United States was built upon.

Rufo makes a grave mistake in carving his subjects almost entirely away from their context. Apart from a few autobiographical quotes from his subjects, we learn nothing about the historical and social experiences that led them to radical politics. Freire, for example, grew up poor in Brazil; next thing we know, he’s the bestselling author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the inspiration for a total takeover of American education.

Worse yet, Rufo fails to analyze his subjects’ ideas; he simply quotes their shocking opinions, at length. That may be scandalously titillating to American right-wingers, but the rest of us may find the ideas of 1960s radicals either dated, silly, obvious or prophetic.

Some of us who remember the 1960s and ’70s may even find Rufo’s radicals mere nostalgia items. We can well recall the state-backed white terrorism of the American South, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Cuban October crisis, the increasing U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the huge demonstrations that failed to slow it. Things really did seem to be falling apart, and no one knew how to put them back together again.

Choose your own guru

So Herbert Marcuse drew followers, including Angela Davis; so did Marshall McLuhan and Paul Ehrlich and L. Ron Hubbard and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (My guru was Northrop Frye, who offered no social cures but at least showed that literature can make sense.)

Rufo sees his four radicals as charismatic leaders who easily took over American institutions by recruiting a new generation of scholars who went on to infiltrate schools and governments.

But Rufo tells us nothing about these sleeper agents — no names, no publications, no documented influence. We must simply take it on faith that a decades-long infiltration by an unknown number of PhDs has left American post-secondary (and public) education firmly in the grip of doctrinaire Marxists about whom we know nothing.

As one of the beneficiaries of the explosive growth of American post-secondary after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, I remember it differently. The U.S. Congress pumped enormous amounts of money into colleges and universities in an effort to match the Soviets. Canada soon followed suit. Young people seized the opportunity to gain an education and access to better-paying jobs, including jobs in education. Education itself expanded into more and bigger schools, hiring ever more faculty and staff and generating new programs needing still more faculty and staff.

Violent stupidity

Some students were deeply skeptical of an American government that seemed to support domestic terror against Black people and futile wars and coups overseas. Hence groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground responded (stupidly) with their own violence. Like today’s neo-Nazis and white supremacists, a few student radicals flattered themselves that their bombs and protests would trigger a mass uprising.

All they proved was that really smart people can be really unintelligent.

Marcuse and Davis especially should have realized that many of their followers were more likely informants than sleeper agents. The Communist party from the 1950s onward was largely funded by the FBI through the dues its informants paid.

Meanwhile the schools faced a predicament: the universities needed more students to keep growing, so the public schools needed to keep kids from dropping out. Black and working-class kids were no longer culled but encouraged to stay in and go on to post-secondary. The more butts in seats, the more government funding the universities could demand.

Until the funding dried up. As the government’s share of support dropped, students had to pay more of the costs of their own education. Soon they had to borrow to pay tuition, until their futures were mortgaged whether they graduated or not. Their degrees were now only lottery tickets giving them a chance at a job interview, not an assured career.

Even then, the revenues weren’t enough to sustain the ever-swelling university bureaucracies, so international students were invited to pay the full cost of their tuition in exchange for a prestigious American or Canadian degree. (There is now considerable alarm that Canadian schools will lose many of the 226,000 international students from India now enrolled.)

This kind of racket doesn’t seem like what a bunch of Marxist egalitarians would have planned as part of their takeover. If students were trapped in a paper chase, universities were equally locked into a money chase. Schools hungry for revenues were reluctant to push anyone away, or to let anyone flunk out once admitted. Besides, it wasn’t only the Marxists who were finding evidence of a deeply, systemically unequal society.

Greed-driven non-discrimination

Curiously enough, the results of this greed-driven non-discrimination have been pretty good. Women moved in large numbers into medicine, law and engineering. Some very capable people of diverse backgrounds have energized their professions and even managed to pay off their student debts. Academics have pioneered in new fields like women’s studies, Black studies and critical race theory and found strong evidence for inherent bias in the American political system.

Students who have gone into business have changed it, at least partly, from a pale-male monoculture into an economy capable of generating profitable surprises. Those who have gone into the sciences have shown us Pluto and how coronaviruses are put together; historians have re-examined the past few centuries of American and Canadian history and documented some embarrassing events.

Even more curiously, Rufo completely ignores the real takeover that began 50 years ago — even though he has gained fame and fortune from it.

By the late 1960s, the American business world was shocked at the ingratitude of the younger generation. The war babies and early baby boomers had benefited from the postwar golden years, with their improved access to education and enhanced social mobility. Then some of them had started opposing the war in Vietnam, registering Black voters in the South, planting bombs and complaining about the safety of American cars and other consumer goods.

In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis F. Powell wrote a memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, setting out a plan to turn the U.S. into a more conservative country with less government regulation. It electrified the business world and got Powell a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The corporate infiltration of government, the media and education is far better documented than Rufo’s forlorn clique of academic sleeper agents. The Powell memorandum inspired more intense lobbying of government, the founding of right-wing think tanks and the funding of right-wing political candidates. Year by year, the media began to complain more about government bureaucracy and red tape while praising entrepreneurs (a word scarcely heard in the 1960s). In 1980, Powell’s affluent revolutionaries put Ronald Reagan in the presidency and the modern neoliberal era began. Born in 1984, Rufo is a direct beneficiary of the Powell memorandum.

The real cultural revolution

This was the real American cultural revolution. It spread quickly to Canada, Britain, Australia and, through disaster capitalism, to countries like Chile, Poland, Russia and China.

The Powell memorandum literally made our world by transferring wealth to the wealthiest and impoverishing the poor. The Rand Corp. estimates that if the U.S. had kept taxation at 1975 levels, the bottom 90 per cent of Americans would now be $47 trillion richer.

The corporations and billionaires that got those trillions invested some of it in think tanks and education, creating a 1950s-style golden age for right-wing intellectuals like Christopher Rufo. The Claremont Institute, where he was a Lincoln fellow, enjoys funding by the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation and Thomas Klingenstein (among others).

Between 2018 and 2020, Hillsdale College received $8.4 million in funding just from the Steve and Amy Van Andel Foundation; Steve Van Andel’s father and Dick DeVos’s father co-founded Amway, which has annual sales revenues of over $8 billion. (Interestingly, Amway strongly supports diversity, equity and inclusion, which Rufo condemns.)

As for Rufo’s own Manhattan Institute, its financial supporters include almost 200 foundations, three of them set up by the Koch brothers. So there’s considerable irony in a mouthpiece for a real cultural revolution trying to blame the failed Marxists of yesteryear for America’s troubles.

American myth as panacea

Rufo’s solution for those troubles is a “counter-revolution”:

“The theorists of the counter-revolution must breathe new life into the American myth,” Rufo writes, “and mobilize the tremendous reservoir of public sentiment toward a project of restoration.... While the revolution seeks to demolish America’s founding principles, the counter-revolution seeks to restore them. While the revolution proceeds by a long march through the institutions, the counter-revolution proceeds by laying siege to the institutions that have lost the public trust.”

Rufo continues, “Its ambition is not to assume control over the centralized bureaucratic apparatus, but to smash it. It is a revolution against: against utopia, against collectivism, against racial reductionism, against the infinite plasticity of human nature.”

Translated from rhetoric into plain English, Rufo is calling for Trumpism on steroids: attacks on democratic government and its departments and agencies, on public health, on public and post-secondary education, on Black Americans and on anyone who is not straight male or female.

Slavery? Genocide? Meh

Rufo’s counter-revolutionary America would restore the sanctity of the Founding Fathers; the facts of slavery and genocide would merely “serve as a reminder of human limitation, which has been gradually and steadily overcome through the unfolding of the principles of the American Republic.”

“In the end,” Rufo goes on, “America under counter-revolution will return to being a patchwork republic: local communities will have their own autonomy to pursue their own vision of the good, within the framework of the binding principles of the Constitution.”

That was pre-Civil War America, when slave states and free states quarrelled. It is also a pretty good description of the present state of American affairs, in which some states ban abortion and gerrymander their electoral districts, while others do not.

Rufo’s patchwork republic would look like the petty principalities of 18th-century Germany or Italy, but one of his Hillsdale College colleagues, Michael Anton, offers a grander vision: an Augustan America, ruled by a “Red Caesar” without the need for tedious elections.

Nowhere in such writings do we see an argument that such changed societies would be better equipped to deal with real problems like pandemics or climate collapse. Rufo’s rejection of historical fact might let Americans pretend the Founding Fathers were saintly heroes, but leave citizens incapable of political agency.

Oddly enough, I find the arguments of Rufo, Anton and their fellow radicals rather encouraging. They have strong, clear-cut views and realize that their policies are as unlikely to be accepted as Angela Davis’s Marxism. Most Americans are too female, too racially diverse, too sexually liberated, too educated, too democratic and too damn conservative to vote for a politics so hostile to their own interests and their own liberty. Considering what the billionaires have spent on the right-wing intelligentsia, an old proverb about fools and their money springs to mind.

Only a coup or a civil war could impose a patchwork republic or an American Caesar on the United States of America. The first coup failed on Jan. 6, 2021; an outright civil war would fail as well.

And Christopher Rufo’s own long march to take over education would fail too. The educators can see him coming.