Our unusual interview with Chris Rufo
On yesterday’s Counter Points, we had as our guest the architect of the culture war we’ve been waging around “critical race theory,” right wing activist Christopher Rufo. The occasion was the release of his new book, called “America’s Cultural Revolution.” I actually read it, and so did my co-host, Emily Jashinsky. What I can say, and what I said on the show, is that as a matter of craft, of polemic, of storytelling and research, it’s unusually well done. I’ve thumbed through more than my share of right-wing hatchet jobs destined for warehouses after being bought up by a rich donor to juice the best seller rankings – and this isn’t that. As I also told him on the program, all that talent, however, ends up masking the book’s internal contradictions and the nihilistic worldview it represents. My take, I told him, is that Rufo’s work is more accurately thought of as a continuation of Lee Atwater’s famous confession from 1981:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****, n****, n***.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*****”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****, n*****.” — Lee Atwater
You can judge for yourself whether his answer was persuasive. The interview is here.
Rufo’s book is an attempt to tell a story of the left that runs from the revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s straight to the debates over wokeness and cancel culture on campuses and in corporate boardrooms today. If you don’t know the history of the left over that period, he tells a persuasive story that begins with Herbert Marcuse being disillusioned with the failure of the socialist uprising in Germany after World War 1, later emigrating to the United States amid the rise of Hitler. Rufo paints Marcuse as a father figure of the New Left in the 1960s, though as he concedes in our interview, Marcuse more accurately provided ex post facto justification for for what the New Left already wanted to do, and gave an intellectual explanation for why the white working class had yet to rise up in socialist revolt. Consumerism, Marcuse explained, had bought off the proletariat, so the task of revolution fell instead to college students and “the Black ghettos.” From there, he focuses heavily on his student, Angela Davis, and in both cases significantly overstates their influence on world events.
If you do know the history of the left over that period, you know they weren’t really that influential. Davis and Marcuse became objects of media attention amid those few years, but Marcuse was more likely to be quoted than read, and Davis was more a symbol of revolution than somebody guiding one. Judge for yourself, but I think Rufo concedes those points in the interview.
I focus on these distinctions because there is a tendency among analysts of the other side to ignore the real history and material reality that produced the events and movements we’re talking about while on the hunt for some secret cabal or memo or conspiracy that hatched the whole thing. If we can unravel that conspiracy, then we can explain it away as artificial, rather than having to grapple directly with it. The left does versions of this, the most famous being the legendary “Powell Memo.” Every good lefty can tell you that a memo written in 1971 by a future Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell, to the Chamber of Commerce, set in motion the rise of the right over the next 30 years. In reality, Powell sent it to his neighbor, and it was just a collection of bromides that amounted to conventional wisdom on the right at the time. If you go back and read it, there isn’t really anything you or I couldn’t have come up with. He just happened to have his memo unearthed later by reporter Jack Anderson, so now we all think his memo did something.
From there, Rufo digs in on Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator who is genuinely influential, and then Derrick Bell, who is fairly considered to be a godfather of the law school movement that became critical race theory. Rufo had quoted Bell saying that racism is “an indeterminate social construct that is continually reinvented and manipulated to maintain domination and enhance white privilege.” What he’s basically saying there is that racism is a real force in our society, and that it is adaptive in powerful ways. I then played a clip of Sen. Tim Scott describing a series of racist interactions he’d had, and talking profoundly about the ongoing role of racism in our society. I asked Rufo what we ought to do about that, and whether he would acknowledge that racism is indeed a powerful force in our society.
His answer shouldn’t have been stunning, but still it was: “No, I don’t think that racism is a strong and powerful force in our society. I think it certainly has been in the past. But as I live my life and deal with people from all different backgrounds, I do not think that this society is racist,” Rufo said. “I just totally reject that notion. And even Tim Scott himself, has he experienced some interpersonal racism?...I believe that at face value. But if you look at the so-called systemic forces in society, those are an advantage for Tim Scott.”
P.S. I’ll have more to say on this soon, but check it out: I’m publishing a new book. I also have a chapter on Marcuse, but I think mine’s better. It’ll be out in December but you can pre-order it now. It’s called “The Squad” and it’s on the evolution of the American left from 2015 to today.
Ryan - Really like your work, but this interview was awful. You had one of the smartest ideologues of the far right on, and you let him tell a revisionist story of the 60s that justifies the ongoing naming and purge of Marxists and Marxist influenced people from academe and other places. On Marcuse - his and other people in the Frankfurt School major contribution was a critique of consumer culture and the commodification of social life. His major liberating idea was about ***authentic*** social relationships between people and how these are destroyed in capitalism by people treating other people as commodities (objects) and not subjects with agency. This critique of capitalism was part of a larger understanding of the importance of culture in advanced capitalist societies. Consumer culture was seen as oppressive and repressive, and de-mobilized people from taking action to change things. The critical claim was that you could have formal democracy (elections, parties, debates) but still have people elect their oppressors because politicians promised to deliver more and more stuff that people could consume. Marxists and those influenced by Marxists felt it important to challenge the dominant culture with a counter-culture that focused on liberation, collective action (solidarity), de-commodification, and nurturing genuine authentic (“democratic”) social relationships. They did this critical work both in everyday life and in institutions, especially educational and other cultural institutions, where they sought to uncover the history that had been buried and forgotten. On violence - the implication of Rufo and others like him (and maybe also you a bit) is that the left violence was misguided and instigated (and then justified) by Marxist ideas. This is total bs. The violence of this period was caused by the police and the state more often than not. Read America on Fire by historian Elizabeth Hinton, which is about the many small rebellions during this period. Violence is always problematic, but understanding it, especially in political movements requires looking at who controls the means to be violent and use force. Bottom line - you let Rufo present his revisionist view of history with little if any critique of it. Now to the bigger point. People like Rufo and those involved in right-wing think tanks like Heritage are leading a purge, a new red scare, that is very very ominous and must be taken seriously as they are having lots of success. You should read the Heritage report How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—and How Americans Can Fight It if you have not already done so. As you heard in your interview, they view the civil rights movement and legislation as a setback for America and want to dismantle it. In fact, the civil rights movement and Great Society programs were America’s second reconstruction period where a second attempt was made to extend democracy to persons of color, especially black Americans. And as with the first reconstruction, there is an ongoing counter-reconstruction movement that is attempting to dismantle that extension of democracy. Of course this is not how Ruffo and others like him view the Great Society. As you heard they see it as an attempt by Marxist influenced people to find another oppression (racial) that they could critique and mobilize around given that the left’s ability to mobilize around economic class had failed. But this is all revisionist history. As we know, people continued to mobilize around class, the labor movement remained strong during this period, and many people wrote and thought about how race and class intersect, including the Critical Race Theory people. So in sum you and others need to be clear about what Rufo and people are doing, which is not all that hard to see as they are actively purging schools and universities in Florida and laying out their action initiatives for all to read in reports. It is fine to interview and debate with people like Rufo, but you can not let them get away with revisionist stories that they then use to justify their new McCarthyism.