What Happens When a Carnival Barker Writes Intellectual History
Christopher F. Rufo is what is sometimes known as a shit-stirrer—a particular type of troublemaker whose game is to find something stinky, then waft its fumes toward the noses of those mostly likely to be outraged by it. In the past several years, controversies over race, gender, and campus leftism have ripened in part due to his publicity. Often the so-called antiracists, trans activists, and tenured radicals at the center of the controversies are self-discrediting. All Rufo has to do is quote them or post their videos on his Twitter feed—a teacher fanatically devoted to a trendy form of social justice, say, or someone preening about their identity. Even those who find their behavior outrageous often find Rufo’s tactics distasteful as well. (Many of his targets strike me as mentally unbalanced.) But the thing about shit-stirrers is that even if they are distasteful or loathsome, they’d be out of work if there were not already raw material to stir.
Rufo’s new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, is in this context surprisingly hygienic. It is not about the raw material but about the manufacturers of the porcelain vessels in which it is found. He curates a gallery of activists, academics, and Communists active in the mid- and late 20th century, and he describes how their ideas slowly took over campuses, HR departments, and leftist political circles. These figures are well known, and it is ethically refreshing to see him focus his revilement on public figures in full command of their rhetoric and ideas, rather than on possibly disturbed nobodies.
[Graeme Wood: DEI is an ideological test]
Even more unexpected are his points of agreement with his enemies. The people Rufo names as intellectual progenitors of wokeness are in fact the same ones the most literate postliberal leftists would name: the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, his American student Angela Davis, the educational theorist Paulo Freire, and founders of critical race theory (CRT) such as the Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell, all perennial entrants in what Jonathan Yardley once called the “America Sucks Sweepstakes.” (The most noteworthy omission is Michel Foucault.) These figures argued that the basic values of liberalism—freedom, equality, justice—are lies, and the systems and institutions that tout them are incorrigibly complicit in evil. To be “woke” is simply to be roused from the naive and dogmatic slumber in which one might dream that these lies were true. The remedy is cynical and radical: Stop believing the lies, and destroy the political and social systems that tell them.
Your appreciation of this book will depend in part on whether you prefer Rufo the carnival barker, luring in members of the public to see the lefty freakshow he curates, or Rufo the intellectual historian. The first is more fun but the second is just as biased. His description of the careers of these intellectual figures is meant for readers who know nothing of their work, and do not care to learn about it from a sympathetic source. The narrative is meant to build them up only to villainize them—and this is not difficult. Like Rufo’s TikTok freaks, his woke progenitors often said and did things that need no additional commentary to make them into villains.
Marcuse said he was “honored” to be associated with Mao, who was then in the midst of killing tens of millions of people. Davis, in a famous moment of candor quoted by Rufo, once said that political prisoners behind the Iron Curtain “deserve what they get.” (Prison abolition, one of Davis’s causes, evidently did not extend to the Gulag.) In 1970, Davis bought a shotgun that was used two days later to blow the head off a California judge. Paulo Freire called Mao’s Cultural Revolution “the most genial solution of the century,” a line that sounds, when applied to mass starvation, straight from the mouth of Lex Luthor.
Rufo, a recent appointee of Governor Ron DeSantis to the board of New College of Florida, hates all of these people, but he is plainly fascinated by their ability to achieve political traction for their bad ideas. Take Freire, a Brazilian crackpot who taught that the path to peasant education was through Maoist class suicide. His contribution to human well-being was almost certainly a net negative—yet his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is taught in every education school in America. “History should have reduced [it] to an ideological curiosity,” Rufo writes, with what I think is grudging admiration. He quotes Marcuse saying that the way to convert his ideas into political action is to abandon direct activism and instead infiltrate institutions, to take over universities and bureaucracies, and to initiate a silent revolution that ends in a radical victory before any of the old guard is aware of what happened.
The case of CRT is particularly striking in Rufo’s account. Rufo has made a bogeyman out of CRT, but it is real, radical, and influential beyond its origins in legal academia. CRT holds that white supremacy is systemic, insidious, and embedded in supposedly neutral liberal norms like color-blindness and freedom of speech. Derrick Bell argued that white supremacy is ineradicable, and that racial progress is just a veneer over a permanently rotten system. The norms and orthodoxies of a rotten system are owed no deference, because they are in fact part of the rot. Among the norms in legal academia that Bell broke was the format of the journal article, which later in life he eschewed in favor of short, didactic fiction, including a science-fiction story about white Americans selling Black people to aliens.
[Daniel Golden: ‘It’s making us more ignorant’]
Rufo notes that these theories were widely critiqued even as they were proposed. He cites a potent dissent from the literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., who warned against CRT’s unnerving calls to expand state power, in a manner “incompatible with democracy.” Its theorists’ aim was “not to resist power, but to enlist power.” When Randall Kennedy, a fellow Black legal academic, drafted another dissent, Rufo writes, “Bell personally intervened” to persuade Kennedy not to publish his critique. Kennedy published it anyway, leading Bell to suggest that he was auditioning to be an “academic minstrel” and professional race traitor. Kennedy’s 2019 essay assessing Bell’s legacy is revealing. He contrasts Bell’s “certitude” with his own self-doubt, and he notes Bell’s disregard for teaching students already motivated by racial justice “to understand and take seriously perspectives at odds with those that they embraced.” Kennedy says he attempts to teach these perspectives in courses about race; Bell considered this “a betrayal.”
Rufo is more interested in exhibiting these theories than assessing them. In most cases I would agree with him that the assessment should be negative. Freire’s argument that the path to literacy lies through Maoist collectivization; Davis’s belief that policing and imprisonment should be abolished; Bell’s contention that Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided and that “separate but [actually] equal” schooling for Blacks and whites would have been better, and that racial progress is a myth—these are all disastrous views, with grave and sometimes morally abhorrent consequences. It’s reasonable to wonder, as Rufo does, how these doctrines came to be taught with so little resistance. He accurately describes the takeover of certain sectors of education as a “long march through the institutions,” a Maoist reference to Marcuse’s suggestion that radicals hunker down in bureaucracies. And it’s worth considering the broken safeguards that allowed this strategy to succeed.
Rufo nonetheless seems to have little idea what universities are for. This is a significant deficiency, given not only his subject matter in this book but also his position as a university trustee. In this role, Rufo envisions himself as a tribune of the people of Florida, curtailing in their name the influence of leftist professors and administrators whose views they would find objectionable, hateful, or racist. He wants to end political tests that would exclude centrists and conservatives from the faculty. He thinks the solution to the problem is democratic oversight and policing the excesses of the left, in particular by exerting political control over hiring of faculty. I see little sign of a vision for a real intellectual space—which would have to include and even embrace weird or odious speech, especially the kind many Floridians disagree with.
I would not want Davis or Freire running a Department of Justice or Education. I suspect that if they ran even a Froyo stand it would devolve, as Rufo says of a Weatherman cell, into a fiesta of “hangovers, jealousies, gonorrhea, and lice.” But that does not mean Davis and Freire are unfit for professorships. Universities are precisely the places where society should stash its radicals and nutjobs, and universities function best when some fraction of their faculty is certifiable. Rufo is appalled that the University of California and Harvard employ such people. I am relieved.
[Conor Friedersdorf: DeSantis chose the wrong college to take over]
Consider Davis’s signature intellectual achievement, which is the call to abolish prisons. On this point my view is more in line with Richard Pryor’s after six weeks filming in an Arizona prison. Seeing so many Black men removed from their families and communities “made my heart ache,” Pryor said. Listening to those same men describe their murders made him “thank God we have penitentiaries.”
But the idea of prison abolition is powerful and challenging. (I recommend Tommie Shelby’s recent book on the subject.) Plenty of hitherto common penal practices have been abolished: ear cropping, castration, boiling in oil, amputation. Imprisonment is a corporal punishment that involves the whole body, all at once, and under some theoretical condition, we could imagine a day when it is retired along with those other corporal punishments. Davis saw this before others, and her radicalism forces reconsideration of the most basic ideas about how American society is, and should be, organized. Her ideas (about violence, communism, prison, and much else) are bad, but bad ideas can spawn good ones. And that is one of the ways universities work, by providing spaces where bad ideas proliferate along with good ones. Rufo might retort that the current balance is off, and the bad ideas have driven out the good. But nuking the bad ideas without collateral damage among the good is impossible, and DeSantis’s reforms in Florida look to me like a neutron bomb, more likely to kill off all ideas than just to reduce the bad ones.
The late novelist Cormac McCarthy was affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), an educational and research institution best known for its programs in theoretical physics. He understood the value of having madmen around. In 2015, he drafted a new mission statement for SFI. Its principles would make better guidance than whatever DeSantis is implementing. “SFI is always pushing creativity to its practical limits. We always court a high risk of failure,” he wrote. “Occasionally we find that an invited guest is insane. This generally cheers us all up. We know we’re on the right track.”