Christopher Rufo is a practical man, unlike most of the angry conservatives and other right-wing figures vying for public attention. Rufo pays attention to public opinion and to legislation, he has achieved certain successes that give conservatives confidence and progressives pause; he also makes it easier to understand how to deal with CRT and, more broadly, woke issues. He is now even trying to help in higher education, serving on the board of trustees of the New College in Florida, appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Rufo’s not yet 39—living proof that a young man can still succeed in public life in America!

Let’s turn to his first tract for the times, America’s Cultural Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everything, to understand his political activity, his public spirit, and his success. It’s a big success and quickly reached #1 on Amazon. What is the news Rufo brings to American conservatives and other people scared of “The Great Awokening”? As the title suggests, he follows the Gramscian idea of a “long march through the institutions” as the explanation of the major transformations in American life. Not Marxist economic analysis focusing on class, but a cultural takeover of public life by a Leninist “vanguard,” though one comprising of students and mobs, not “the proletariat.”

The “cultural Marxism” thesis is probably the only intellectual conceit that has popular support in conservative America, and Rufo is the first conservative activist to say, yes, the left became “tenured radicals,” and we should now do it, too, let them see how they like it. He acts on the idea of taking the fight to the radicals, which appeals to the “tit for tat” demand of justice, and seems to prove that it works. He also helpfully articulates a democratic fight against a foreign oligarchy, and what’s more all-American than that?

A Report On Radical Activism Since The ‘60s

As with most tracts, Rufo tries to give an account of American history since that golden mid-century moment, mixing institutional and ideological analysis. Rufo arranges his thoughts in four parts. Revolution is on Herbert Marcuse and his academic and activist followers; Race is on the radicalism that led to BLM; Education is on ideological brainwashing; and Power is on CRT and DEI. Rufo explains his reasoning and choice of figureheads:

Each part begins with a biographical portrait of the four prophets of the revolution: Herbert Marcuse, [his student] Angela Davis, Brazilian Marxist education ideologist Paulo Freire, and [Harvard Law Professor] Derrick Bell. These figures established the disciplines of critical theory, critical praxis, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory, which, in the subsequent half century, multiplied into a hundred subdisciplines and devoured the university, the street, the school, and the bureaucracy. Together they represent the intellectual genesis of the revolution. Their ideas, concepts, language, and tactics shaped and now suffuse the politics of the present.

Still, from activist to author is quite a leap. Rufo explains: “As an author, I’m able to be expansive, tracing the patterns of history, exploring the intricacies of ideology, and plumbing the depths of the personalities that have shaped the way we think, feel, and act.” The necessity for this writing comes from the ordinary man’s ignorance of what’s been going on in elite institutions:

My hope in writing this book is to reveal the inner history of America’s cultural revolution. It is a genealogy of darkness: an attempt to establish the human lineage of the new nihilism that threatens to overwhelm the country. But it is also a work of determined optimism: if we are to save this country from disintegration, we must first see the crisis clearly and confidently. We cannot look away.

Rufo’s burden as a scholar is to move from merely an external account of political events to an analysis of the fundamental causes of politics in order to change it. In the interest of brevity, I’ll take the first chapter on Marcuse as typical. It introduces not just a pattern in which an intellectual creates a movement for institutional takeover by propaganda, but, as the most influential of the intellectuals whom Rufo studies, Marcuse deserves the most attention.

Rufo seems to write a contradiction into his biography of Marcuse, whom he presents as the hapless intellectual he was, of no political importance whatsoever—until he became the intellectual celebrity of the youth revolt against civilization in the late ‘60s. Marcuse did very little to make himself a celebrity. Rufo correctly states that he was widely adopted in Europe and America by countercultural types, but does not draw the obvious conclusion that Marcuse was the creature of the moment, not the creator.

So the important events and actors—the major political shocks in ’60s America—go unanalyzed in favor of understanding an intellectual, which seems to me to delude the audience that Marcuse’s Nietzschean Marxism is the fount and origin of our problems. The most obvious and in a way the most important problem intellectually is the following: Rufo quotes Marcuse on “transvaluation of values” repeatedly, but did not learn from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of The American Mind that this is Nietzsche’s, not Marx’s project. “Cultural Marxism” is a misnomer for the process Bloom called “the Nietzscheanization of the left.” It’s unfortunate that such a bestseller by such an admired scholar as Bloom has so little influence on right-wing thinkers today.

Of course, one could make a weaker claim about the relationship between intellectuals, the propaganda they produce, and twentieth-century political transformations. Marcuse, as official countercultural propagandist, set a pattern that readers and listeners followed, perhaps through the intermediary of the few intelligent, articulate types in revolutionary movements, and by which his ideas caused changes. But this is also disproved practically—the movements themselves failed, yet the revolutionary ideas were revived again and again. The ideas don’t depend on those specific movements, they existed before and will exist a while longer. The fanaticism of the intellectuals and anti-bourgeois ire in highly diluted ways are still with us, though almost no one but Rufo remembers Marcuse. But we have little understanding of how ideas caused things to change since we hardly understand ideas in the first place and are ourselves caught up in events, lacking the distance needed for judgment. I fear Rufo likes the idea of Marcuse’s power as a propagandist because he’d like political change to be that easy, so we, the good guys, can do it, too. But it’s not.

Politics and Practical Reason

Rufo’s own success comes from TV and social media, a kind of techno-populism. As he explains in his introduction, his fame comes from going on Tucker Carlson (at that time, the major figure on FOX News) and asking the president (at that time, Trump) to issue an executive order banning CRT training in the federal government. Rufo got a call from Trump’s Chief of Staff the next morning; he got his executive order and, eventually, bans on CRT in public schools in 22 states. This is astonishing success. Scandal and political polarization work. What conservatives fail to do is found institutions and pay for journalists or politicians to do the job conservatives want them to do, so thank goodness for Rufo!

Rufo’s success must largely come from his embrace of ordinary conservative opinion. But the path of earnestness leads to incoherence since he has to satisfy two contradictory needs. First, to do what historians and reporters have failed to do for a long time: tell ordinary people what’s going on in America. How did society disappear? One needn’t blame only journalists or intellectuals here—perhaps people didn’t want to listen at the time and preferred to ignore the many shocking things that happened especially in elite institutions, from city government to colleges. Secondly, to blame some extremists for the collapse of the center, and in such a way that there appears a reasonably simple solution to the problem.

Let me explain this in Biblical terms. The Jews in the Old Testament constantly get themselves in trouble by their bad, apparently irrepressible habit of worshiping idols. This transgresses the command of God. Now, when you analyze such a situation, you can go down one of two paths, either you blame Jezebel, the extremist, or you blame the Jews, the center. Political rhetoric broadly requires blaming extremists, and this issues ultimately in propaganda in a vast country, too populous for politics to be conducted in person.

This is the job Rufo does, reporting on the many ways in which American elites fell into idolatry and abandoned the divine wisdom of the Founding. Americans were once the almost-chosen people; one hesitates even to remember that claim today. Rufo says:

This is, in short, a work of counter-revolution. The basic premise is that the enemies of the cultural revolution must begin by seeing the critical theories and the “long march through the institutions” with clear eyes. They must help the common citizen understand what is happening around him and mobilize the vast reservoir of public sentiment against the ideologies, laws, and institutions that seek to make the cultural revolution a permanent feature of American life. The task for the counter-revolutionary is not simply to halt the movement of his adversaries but to resurrect the system of values, symbols, myths, and principles that constituted the essence of the old regime, to reestablish the continuity between past, present, and future, and to make the eternal principles of freedom and equality meaningful again to the common citizen.

This is urgently needed work and Rufo does it much better than most; he’s a better writer and has better research to offer than the tracts that become conservative bestsellers. He’s got lots of footnotes, too, useful for researchers and for academic prestige. But this is not serious political analysis, because that requires in a way blaming the center. Why were Americans so weak to confront a generation of young protesters, why were there so many elites ready to go nuts in the late 1960s, or now? Rufo’s research is very revealing about what happened, but completely obscures the causes.

I learned much from Rufo’s tract and I recommend it. But there is too great a gulf between political philosophy and what Rufo does best, which is activism that leads to legal and political change and reveals the moral and intellectual corruption of public institutions in the hope of improving personnel and policy. Our modern politics is deeply and dangerously connected to political philosophy—our founders themselves were often lawyers reading political philosophy. We need to deal with that aspect of modern life in order to understand ourselves, but it’s not useful for the practical men and their audience, the ordinary citizens who don’t stay up nights reading Montesquieu. Rufo might have benefited from understanding this divide and his work would certainly be much more useful for his own activist purposes, which seem to me just and noble. Trying his hand at explaining the causal power of political philosophy or of intellectuals is more confusing than helpful, however tempting.

America’s Cultural Revolution seems to me the wrong pursuit for Rufo, but in a way, people are compelled to write books these days to achieve respectability and success. An unhappy situation, but not a hopeless one. Rufo should write America’s Cultural Counter-Revolution and explain what he has learned and achieved so that many other conservatives are inspired to join him, support him, and imitate him—to put together public spirit with knowhow, so that the people do not become isolated from politics by scheming bureaucrats. Anger without action is our social media hell, but action without knowhow of the law and care for public opinion could be worse. Rufo’s merit is in meeting the moment, seizing his opportunity to rouse Americans to righteous anger and public, organized, legal action. We don’t need scholarship for this—we need more Rufos.