Cultural Revolution American Style

A review of the most recent book by Christopher Rufo

During the past three weeks, I have been reading Christopher Rufo’s important new book entitled,  America’s Cultural Revolution:  How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.  It is one of the most terrifying and sobering books I have read in quite a long time.  It is terrifying in that it describes a leftist vision of the future that few of us wish to live in.  Imagine a racialist version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  It is sobering in that it explains in considerable detail how a tiny minority of disenchanted intellectuals led and carried out what was, in effect a bureaucratic coup d’état that has overthrown much of traditional America and its constitutional order. 

As a young man who came of age during the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was, to quote the title of Dean Acheson’s memoirs, “present at the creation,” and was swept up in the movement for radical change at that time.  As a historian who turned his back on the radical left more than half a lifetime ago, I suspected that it’s eclipse with the end of the Vietnam War, was not the end.  Indeed, I suspected that the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991, signaled neither the “end of history,” nor the end of communism. With Stalinism gone, communism could rehabilitate itself and reemerge in a different and more seductive form.  As a historian teaching at a university during the ensuing thirty years, I could almost literally feel its gradual but steady resurgence first in the academic arena, and then in American culture more generally.  The success of this neo-Marxist cultural revolution poses one the greatest challenges to their freedom the American people have ever faced.   Unlike America’s wars at home and abroad, the nation confronts no enemy army on the battlefield.  In a profound way, it faces an inverted version of itself. 

As a historian, the question I find myself asking is how this came about.  What individuals, decisions, and forces have brought us to this point?  How did we get here?

These are the questions that veteran journalist Christopher Rufo, addresses.  In addition to an introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into four sections and seventeen chapters, each devoted to the consideration of a specific topic.

It begins where I left off as a young radical—with a consideration of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the leading theoretician of “critical theory.”  The latter was an attempt to rescue Marxism from the stark reality that neither the working class nor the middle classes in the west, the United States in particular, were revolutionary.  Indeed, much of the working class had become middle class, while blue collar workers in the U.S. in particular, were downright anti-revolutionary.  Accordingly, if socialist revolution had any chance at all in the west, Marxism had to find a new social class to carry it.  To make a revolution you had to have a revolutionary class.

Marcuse found his new revolutionary cadres among young black radicals inhabiting the nation’s ghettos demanding “black power,” and among angry white college students disillusioned by the Vietnam War, and alienated by the nature of American life in the “one dimensional society” that he described in his eponymous book, One Dimensional Man.  In short, Marcuse envisioned a revolutionary alliance of black radicals like his doctoral student Angela Davis, the Black Panther Party led by people like Eldridge Cleaver, and white campus radicals who were transforming formerly placid universities into staging grounds for political action.  To these groups, Marcuse added the growing numbers of “street people,” scorned by Marx as the “lumpenproletariat.” In short, Marcuse and his associates replaced the “working class” as the agents of revolution with this new coalition of black militants, radical white college students, and “street people” whom we think of today as the homeless.

The problem was that the violent turn taken by groups such as the Panthers and the Weather Underground was decisively defeated by the police and FBI just as the Vietnam war ended and support for radical political activity evaporated.  So, the radical left was confronted with a dilemma.  What could be done?

Young radicals responded with their so-called “long march through the institutions.”  They went back to the universities which served as havens for people with radical social and political ideas.  There they thrived, obtaining advanced degrees, along with tenured teaching positions which enabled them to foster the advancement of other young students with similar ideas.  As older traditional scholars retired, they were replaced by younger academic activists who gradually transformed university faculties into overwhelmingly left-wing enclaves.  Then they branched out to university administrations, where they became adept at bureaucratic warfare and seized control of large budgets. Over time they entered other major bureaucratic institutions such as governments at all levels where their talents were very useful in the acquisition of power.  Eventually they moved into corporate HR departments and management.

What’s remarkable about all of this is that the general public never really noticed the revolution that was taking place just out of sight.  The vast majority of ordinary people, as well as GOP politicians, were utterly oblivious to the transformation in their ruling institutions that was taking place beneath their feet.  Thus, when it finally burst into sight, most prominently during the George Floyd riots, most people were stunned at the radical transformation the nation had undergone during the preceding decades.

During the course of his discussion, Rufo describes the emergence of radical, neo-Marxist theories in fields such as education and the law, while offering enlightening character studies and vignettes of many of the major figures in these movements, thus bringing their ideas to life.

Among the most important of such figures was a Brazilian educator named Paolo Freire who, after traveling to the United States, published an extremely influential book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  Many of my fellow students, especially aspiring teachers, carried that volume around with them as they traversed campus, almost as if it was the Bible.

Steeped in the works of Marx and Lenin, Freire’s fundamental thesis was that the “liberal-democratic order creates the superficial appearance of freedom and prosperity, but upon deeper analysis serves the interests of economic elites and subjugates the masses to a form of psychological slavery.”  His life’s work was intended to demonstrate how to destroy those myths to reveal the nature and depths of the oppression of the masses, enabling them to liberate themselves.  He believed that the way to do that was through the “decolonization” of the educational system.  According to Rufo, Freire’s most influential disciple was Henry Giroux, a professor who “believed that public schools served as ‘agents of ideological control’ on behalf of the oppressor class . . . .”  With Freire and Giroux working in tandem, Rufo explains, “the project was born:  the critical theorists of education began methodically deconstructing the existing curricula, pedagogies, and practices, and replacing them, brick by brick, with the ideology of revolution.”

Over time the influence of the critical education theorists spread throughout the education schools and on to school districts throughout the nation.  Among the fundamental purposes, according to R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, an influential figure within the movement, was to “challenge the dominance of white Christian culture . . . .” Their methods were those of the Maoist struggle session in which teachers were compelled to confront their “White privilege.”  In short, activists “learned how to manipulate the primal emotions of guilt, shame, envy and pride.”

Another profession which has been dramatically subverted is the law.  According to Rufo it began with the work of a Harvard law professor named Derrick Bell, a man who fantasized that white Americans were so vicious that they were on the brink of exterminating the black population of the country.  As Rufo puts it, Bell “argued that Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were the cynical authors of ‘a slave history of the Constitution’ . . . and that the contemporary regime of colorblind equality was in fact, an insidious new form of racism that was ‘more oppressive than ever.’ ” He concludes that “It is not an overstatement to say that Derrick Bell set the stage for the racial politics of our time.”  Critical race theory began with Derrick Bell.  In subsequent chapters, Rufo explains how a handful of Bell’s disciples spread CRT throughout the legal profession in the United States, and how its programmatic offshoot “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” or DEI has become the regnant intellectual regime in both government and corporate America today.

Taken as a collective whole, these movements have transformed the nation from one based upon individual liberties, limited government, and personal responsibility, to one defined by collective racial guilt, conditional liberty, and almost unrestricted government power over the citizen.  It was, he says, the “revolution of 1968.”

Notably, it was not a popular revolution of the people overthrowing a hated and oppressive government. It was a revolution engineered by elite intellectuals and imposed from the top down upon an unsuspecting people, by bureaucratic functionaries backed by the power of government.

Depressing as this is for those who still believe in the old virtues, and the old Constitution, Rufo ends on a positive note, arguing that the “cultural revolution has an immense vulnerability.”  It was created by the administrative state without the approval of the people. It is entirely dependent upon public financing.  The entire edifice of the left’s cultural revolution can be swept away by a public, engaged and infuriated by what the left has done to the nation’s heritage of liberal democracy and individual rights while the ordinary citizen slept.  “The task,” as Rufo puts it, is “counter-revolution.”  

The counter-revolution, or perhaps we should call it, the restoration, begins at the ballot box—assuming we still have honest elections.