Christopher Rufo rejoins High Noon podcast to discuss his new bestselling book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything. Chris and Inez talk about which explanation for the roots of wokeness makes the most sense and how to recapture institutional power. They also answer a few of Rufo’s critics on the Left and Right.


TRANSCRIPT

Inez Stepman:

Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. And I’m really pleased to have back on the show Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at Manhattan Institute, former filmmaker. I think now current filmmaker, once again. Author of a book that we’re going to be talking about, America’s Cultural Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everything. I would add to your biography or formal biography, probably the most successful conservative activist in a generation. And for me, and I think for many other people, a walking white pill when we want to be just too depressed about the state of the regime, Chris Rufo is in the business of handing us Ws and upping our spirits. So thanks very much for coming back on High Noon.

Christopher Rufo:

It’s good to be with you.

Inez Stepman:

So this book feels very much like the manual or the intellectual architecture behind why you choose the targets you do as an activist. How you think about the, I guess nonviolent war that we are waging, the Cold War that we’re waging, both in describing how the regime actually works, how it got there. This is sort of a woke-origin-story book, but it’s a very intellectual one. You talk about really the history of ideas here, and each section of your book starts with, essentially, an academic or activist on the Left that you think still has a lot of purchase today, whose ideas have a lot of purchase today.

There are a lot of these wokeness origin stories that seem to be coming out from smart people, not all in book form, but some of them in book form. So you have this one from you, that focuses on the intellectual history. You have the Caldwell or Richard Hanania origin story of wokeness that focuses really on the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Act. There’s the James Burnham Managerial Revolution, economic interpretation of how to think about where we are. I think folks like Daryl E. Paul also talk about the economic and managerial transformation. So what is the best way—all of that to say—what is the best way to think about the origin of wokeness in the system that we live under? Because these aren’t necessarily visions that are in contradiction with each other, but why is it that you chose to tell the intellectual story here?

Christopher Rufo:

Yeah, I happen to agree with all of those points of view, and I think that they’re all taking different angles of observation on the same phenomenon. And so I don’t look at them as in tension or in conflict, although to a certain extent that’s inevitable. But I actually look at them as very much complementary. We’re all looking at the same patterns and trends and observations of the world around us and say, “Where does this come from?” That said, I think, of course, my origin story is the best. I think it’s the most comprehensive, I think it’s the most fruitful. But what I really try to do is to really understand this movement first as it understands itself over time. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then tracing it over time. And the story that I tell is not just a story of pure intellectual history that’s abstract in nature, but it’s a story of how these ideas gained power.

So it’s an actual practical analysis of how these ideas entered institutions and became the default ideology of the institutions with this process culminating in the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd. And so I think that, look, ideas do matter. Institutions matter, law matters, incentives matter. That’s true. But I think all of those are, in a very important way, derivative of ideas. Well, the law, before it’s written, is an idea. The institutions, they operate on a set of values and ideas. The civil rights bureaucracy, which is of course important and part of the book, comes from a very distinctive and very specific set of ideas that animate the civil rights bureaucracy before it becomes policy, law, custom, habit, et cetera. So what I hope the book does for the reader is give them a great understanding of what’s happening today and where it comes from. And certainly, I think a great panel would be to have all of those folks that you mentioned talking together, and I imagine that in 95% of the time we would be in violent agreement.

Inez Stepman:

There is a point of disagreement, though, not among the people that I just listed, really, although some of them may be. So you’re taking, as far as I can tell, if you were to give a shorthand for when America quote-end-quote “made a wrong turn,” in your estimation of our history and our intellectual history, I think it would be 1968. You think that’s fair to say?

Christopher Rufo:

Yep.

Inez Stepman:

So one point of disagreement on the Right recently has been how far back does this go? And to some extent, this is a fool’s errand because every intellectual movement has some ties to what came before it. You can connect everything going all the way back to Adam and Eve if you’d like. So you really firmly say, okay, something fundamentally changed in the American project in the 1960s, whereas some folks on the post-liberal Right, or other aspects of the Right have put it further and further back. Some people put it in 1964 rather than 1968. Some people in the Civil War, some people in the origin, the 1776 origin of America, and some people all the way back, we took a wrong turn with the Enlightenment. And fundamentally, this is working out of errors in thinking that came through the Enlightenment. What is this the strongest case, other than having folks read the whole book, but just in a tasty little bite here, to encourage them to read the longer argument, what is the case for 1968 being pivotal in the way or the trajectory of this country, the intellectual trajectory of this country?

Christopher Rufo:

Yeah, I like all these debates, I think that they’re all instructive in their own way. But when you’re writing a book and the first decision that you have to make is, well, what are the bookends of your book and what is the time period that you’re going to really focus on? And I wanted it to be something that felt current, that felt relevant, that felt fresh from page one to the final page. And you have to choose and delimit your field of research. And so I thought that, really, the two bookends are 1968 and 2020. And the argument that I make is that we’re, in a sense, in a loop. In 1968, the policies, the figures, the ideas, the concepts, the language, everything that we saw in 2020 with BLM and that summer of BLM was already developed in its fullest form in 1968 with the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, the New Left, intellectuals in the universities.

To me, you can actually go pretty deep in the history over that 50-odd-year time horizon. But also 1968, the summer of these, the massive riots, and in 2020, the summer of the massive riots, that was the only one bigger than 1968, since that time. It gave a really natural set of constraints. But also, and this is where I think I might disagree with some of our colleagues and friends, they paint 1968 as an inevitable outgrowth of 1964. I don’t think that that’s true. I actually don’t think that that’s true at all. I think that that’s a pretty weak argument. And actually, 1968 is very surprising in light of 1964. In 1964, and ’65 with the Voting Rights Act, you have full legal equality for the first time in the country’s history. I think that that is an accomplishment. I think that is something that was a gradually unfolding process that reached its culminating moment. And it’s actually surprising and not inevitable that in 1968, just five years after that, you would get this total change in attitude, this eruption of violence, this demand for revolution in light of having achieved this full equal rights. So the relationship between those two dates is really important. It’s really important to understand.

But I would even, just as a symbol, and I think that many people can visualize this: if you look at the march on Washington and you look at the images of the civil rights protestors, it is people, obviously predominantly African Americans, but really people of all different racial backgrounds. People are dressed in their Sunday best, the signs and the symbolism that they’re advertising are optimistic, they’re hopeful, they’re demanding equal treatment. But just the attitude, the feeling, the aesthetics, it’s people that are 35, 40, 50 people with families. They’re bringing their families in some cases. It’s a very wholesome image in some ways, those photographs. Contrast that with 1968, and it is completely different. The imagery is different, the attitude is different, the demographics are different. The messaging is different—and very much the same as we see in 2020. Those two things are interchangeable visually and aesthetically. The colors and the automobiles and the film processing, take that aside. The question is, well, how do we get from this ’64 to ’68? And that could be a book in itself. I think it would be a really fruitful study, but I’m not convinced that 1968 and 2020 are inevitable outgrowths of 1964. Maybe you disagree; I’d be curious to see what you think.

Inez Stepman:

I’ve always, actually, I think more leaned in your direction on this, in part because I think some of the folks who I think have been really incisive. and Richard and Christopher Caldwell, and I think there is something to the idea, I think their underlying intellectual framework is, well, when we granted full equality under the law and it didn’t solve “inequality,” that essentially it would inevitably lead… And I think there’s something psychologically to that, and I think it was best summed up… Actually somebody, back when I was in Fed Soc in law school, one of my professors said he used to go around debating affirmative action, like the legal architecture of affirmative action, with professors on the Left. And he said one of the professors that he debated very openly said—and this is the nineties to a public audience—said, “Look, I think we ought to give affirmative action another few decades before we conclude that these racial disparities are genetic.” Those were the only two options for the way that he thought about it, right?

So I can see the psychological mechanism that that might be true, but one huge gap to me in this architecture is that it seems like it overemphasizes the admittedly very fraught relationship with Black Americans in their country that has been fraught from the beginning. That’s one piece of the story to me, but leaving out, for example, the sexual revolution as it kind of…. It almost doesn’t have a place in Caldwell’s view of how we got here, and it has such a central place in the way I look at it, or the policing, crime and drugs revolutions of the seventies, all of these cultural revolutions. The falling away from religion. It seems to me that those are all interconnected but independent from the racial aspect of this. And it’s not that there were no overlapping sinews between those two things, but the racial discussion—and I shouldn’t even say racial discussion because that’s too broad, actually—the specific relationship of Black Americans with this country seems to me to be a topic deserving of splitting out on its own in terms of its importance and longevity in this country. Whereas the rest of this cauldron, I very much agree with you, seems to come about in the late sixties. And even though it has some tangential connections, and certainly, I think—you write about the Black Panthers—there is an overlap here. But it’s not clear to me that these are identical; that there may be a Venn diagram overlap, but it seems to me fundamentally that these are two separate questions.

Christopher Rufo:

And look at the rhetoric of the time and then the subsequent rhetoric. The Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army were not the same people as the civil rights marchers. These were totally distinct and opposed political factions. And one of my early mentors in politics, a gentleman by the name of Bruce Chapman, was a conservative Republican, Harvard graduate, worked in the Reagan administration, but he marched in the march on Washington. He was supportive of the civil rights march activism at the time. It was a pretty broad coalition, it was a wholesome coalition. It was people, I think, fighting for noble principles. And I think Caldwell and Hanania are right in the sense that it created a bureaucracy that enabled people to come in and hijack it and then use it to achieve the unfair ends. I think there’s a lot to that, I think that is certainly the case.

And then, well, we achieve full legal equality and then immediately Lyndon Johnson also signs an executive order mandating affirmative action. So it was this momentary equality that then overshot with this large bureaucracy, the mandate for affirmative action, et cetera. I think there’s a lot there, and I think that that’s generally true. But just still at the end of the day, I’m unconvinced of this thesis that somehow the whole time the Civil Rights Act was a Trojan horse and it’s enabled the country to go in this awful direction that’s created two competing constitutions. I think it’s overblown, and I think that argument is it doesn’t hold water, it doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. And I think that the question that you have is actually much more instructive; it’s “How can you explain continued now decades long racial inequality in light of the Civil Rights Act granting full legal equality regardless of race?”

That’s a very difficult and complex question. The Left has a very easy answer for it, which I think is not true. The Right has a number of competing answers for it, all of which are fairly uncomfortable to make and some of which are taboo. I think that we can untangle those two questions. What’s the nature of the civil rights law and bureaucracy? Has it overstepped? Has it enabled DEI-style discrimination that is against the principles of the declaration, the 14th Amendment, maybe even the ‘64 Civil Rights Act itself? And then the broader sociological, political, philosophical question of how does a society justify inequality, group inequality? Or is it always unacceptable and therefore justifies more strenuous and more vigorous intervention?

Inez Stepman:

I’ll tell you how—

Christopher Rufo:

Those are questions that haven’t been answered.

Inez Stepman:

Yeah. I’ll tell you how I frame it and you can tell me whether you agree or disagree with some aspect of it. But I actually think of it very similarly as I think about the progressive era versus the 1968 Leftism that you’ve written about in this book, which is the Wilsonian administrative state fully enabled, the structure of it provided the template for the powers that were then seized by radicals that the progressives of 1920 would not have recognized in certain ways. Not least because they had no pretensions to racial equality; quite the opposite. But it would’ve been much less successful for those activists to seize the levers of power if there hadn’t been this expansion of the architecture of the state. Versus now, we have that same architecture being weaponized by the woke deep state that has very radical views. In some way, I think you can think of the Civil Rights Act the same way, that it provided an architecture. It was an extraordinary solution in a certain sense, and in the constitutional sense, it was an extraordinary solution.

This is the biggest incursion into American freedom of association, among other things. And it was an extraordinary solution. And I think quite like the way that the 14th Amendment revolutionized our Constitution in a certain way. It was an extraordinary solution aimed at a problem that had been intractable in American society in a variety of ways and really had, very much, I know some people on the right don’t like this, but this phrasing, but very much had been the Achilles heel of the American project from the beginning. And had introduced to note, this is why so many of the founders were so sorrowful about the contra, the BS narrative of the Left. They were so sorrowful about bringing the country into an existence under the Declaration with slavery. And the overwhelming majority of the serious founding fathers whose names we know today opposed slavery. It doesn’t mean they were revolutionaries in abolishing it, but it seems like we have done a series of extraordinary solutions or interventions trying to solve this problem, the biggest of which was the mass bloodletting of the Civil War.

Now, however, that problem, if it is resolvable, if it’s not resolvable in American life, it seems like it has provided the architecture. Some of those solutions have provided architecture, but I still fundamentally see the impulse as something different. And in fact, I could see America carrying the wound of this problem as specific racial divide between Black Americans and the rest of America and trying in successive ways to solve that problem without the rest of this happening. And on the flip side, I could see a cultural revolution happening that actually had little or nothing to do with the racial element in America.

Christopher Rufo:

Because there are other vulnerable points or weaknesses that could be exploited in the interest of a cultural revolution?

Inez Stepman:

Yeah. Look, the cultural revolution, it seems like in, some sense, we don’t want to talk about how extraordinary the problem specifically that Black Americans have had with America is. And the Left has been very, very good at replicating it first to other racial groups. I know Mike Gonzalez, who you work a lot with and talk a lot with, his book obviously lays out how that particularized experience was then sort of copy-pasted by activists trying to attempt to create racial groups to treat Hispanics the same way, to treat AAPI, which is completely ridiculous. Now there’ll be NINA, throwing people in from radically disparate parts of the world and completely different cultural experiences in America into these categories. But it provided the template.

So I don’t know, I guess I’m rambling a bit, but I do see some of the connections that folks like Caldwell say, but I think they’re not as inevitable. That’s where I agree with you. I see some of the sinews connecting this stuff, and certainly it uses the same powers that were granted in special dispensation to try to solve this one racial problem in America. That being said, they’re sinews. They’re not like the beating heart of each thing to me seems fundamentally separate.

Christopher Rufo:

And I think, too, it’s quite interesting because we talk about the Civil Rights Act a lot. Obviously, that’s the subject of the origin story for these books. But the Great Society, which was developed and implemented and began implementation that same year, was also, in a sense, a social justice project. It was a project that sought to create material racial equality between groups as it was disproportionately targeting inner-city communities and inner-city Black communities in its programs and projects. So there was an idealistic and aspirational vision at that time to say, with the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, we want to have full legal equality. And then with the Great Society programs, the welfare state programs, we want to provide the tangible and material training, benefits, housing, medical care, education, and every other sort of social-scientific method of uplift to get those communities that have been suffering from racial discrimination, but also material inequality, to get them up to parity with other groups.

Both have failed. And that’s the context that we need to see 2020 in. Both of those ideas had 50 years to manifest, 50 years to implement, 50 years to develop and iterate upon, and neither the Great Society programs nor the equality of the Civil Rights, plus some of the actual positive discriminatory, if we take the kind of anti-racist terminology. That didn’t work either. And so you have neither of these great projects, beginning with LBJ in ’64, yielding their desired outcomes and, in some measures, actually making them much worse. So we have a big conundrum. There’s a big open question, unless we can resolve this question or find even a satisfactory answer toward it, I do feel like there’s an inevitable sense that these easy solutions from the New Left, from BLM, from the Black Panthers, will always reemerge because whatever their flaws are, whatever their consequences are, which are negative across the board, at least they’re attempting to answer the question that’s been posed that so far has not been answered.

Inez Stepman:

Yeah. So I guess my next question would be, do you think that there’s—and here again is where I split from the pure Civil Rights Act explanation for this—it seems to me there is a fundamental question of modernity as well involved in this. That there are certain existential questions, and you’re saying, I think, not just that these solutions from the Left have failed to create material outcomes for their adherence that are better, but they’ve also failed in some way to answer something more fundamental about what it is to be a citizen or even what it is to be a human being.

So the pessimistic question I would have for you is why do you think that this can’t go on forever? Or not forever, I shouldn’t say. But the Soviet Union lasted 80 years; America is much more prosperous or richer than the Soviet Union was when they began this project. And we’ll talk in a minute the differences between these two projects, but it seems to me like, yes, on the long scale, everything that must come to an end and has such contradictions and fails to actually explain much of the world to its adherence will come to an end. But why are you optimistic that it’ll come to an end in the next 10 or 20 years versus the next 200?

Christopher Rufo:

Well, I think because, at the end of the day, as I did the research for this book, a couple big lessons were revealed. And one is that we’ve defeated this ideology before. The New Left, the Panthers, the BLM, the Weather Underground, that whole method of violent radical Marxist-Leninist armed revolution was obliterated, totally shattered by 1972. So from 1968 to 1972, you get all of these groups riding high, believing that they could… They actually had a genuine belief. You can see this. I saw this over and over as I was studying their propaganda and their materials, their papers. They believed that they had a chance at sparking grassroots, third-world-style liberation armies to take over the United States. To assassinate their opponents and then to install themselves as the revolutionary government. And then by 1972, Richard Nixon wins 49 states in the largest electoral landslide ever since.

And so the country can actually shift very fast. It can have a return to normalcy that occurs rapidly after some of these violent spasms or changes. And then you had a long period of time in which these ideologies didn’t have any traction outside of the fringes, outside of the faculty lounges, outside of some communes down in Topanga Canyon or wherever. And then they come back to prominence in 2020. I think it felt as if they were truly dominant at that time, even coercively required at that time. But we’ve already seen through some of the activism, some of the intellectual work, some of the natural swinging of the pendulum, there’s already cracks in that hold. And what felt dominant in 2020 has started to feel more tenuous in 2023. And in fact, something like a BLM has gone through the same process that the Black Panthers had gone through at that time.

They have no responsible leadership. They have no message that can maintain legitimacy with the larger public. And outside of force, intimidation and media propaganda, their deeper ideas crumble when challenged in an open environment. What happens is they loot the organization, they pull out all the money, they decamp to their mansions or whatever. And then the movement suffers these big setbacks. So I think that right now is the time for offense. And I actually think that you of course have to understand the history of America’s culture revolution in order to think intelligently about it and figure out how to defeat it. But I think we have an enormous window of opportunity right now, and I actually think that we can push these folks back much further than recent history might suggest.

And I think that we are exposing and fighting these tactical fights that reveal the weakness of this ideology. And even though the subtitle of the book is of course How the Radical Left Conquered Everything in a cultural sense, it doesn’t mean that that’s inevitable. It doesn’t mean that that’s irreversible, and it doesn’t mean that they’re untouchable. But actually the opposite is true. They’re like an army that has extended too far from their position of strength, too far from their center defenses, and we have them very spread out. And I think now is the time to start really aggressively attacking, and we can see some significant victories in the coming years.

Inez Stepman:

So I guess I have two short follow-up questions to that. One is how much of this is a question of competence? And in this case, I’m for once not talking about the Right, but the Left—that this ideology, that perhaps one of its greatest weaknesses is that it’s unable to select for competence in a certain sense. And two, I guess the more black-pill question would be a lot of your strategy, I think, it’s a very Aristotelian mixed strategy in a certain sense because you’re on one hand talking about power from below from the demos, and you continually cite the fact that, actually, the basic principles of, for example, colorblindness is enormously popular with voters. But you also, obviously, are very sophisticated in how you implement and what levers to push, how to actually implement this in a way that does actually hit at the power that the Left is using.

Why are you optimistic that they will quote-end-quote “let us win?” Because watching not just 2020, which really did feel like a cultural revolution—regime change is what it felt like. And then if you combine that with the way that the administrative state and other sort of institutional forces in American life treated the Trump presidency for four years, breaking all kinds of the most important quote-end-quote “norms” of a democratic republic in order to make sure that this guy that they didn’t like and didn’t agree with them, wasn’t able to rightfully exercise the powers of his elected office. Why are you certain that that’s—or not certain, I guess no one’s certain—but why are you optimistic that this won’t be this moment where the grip seems to be more brittle and there does seem to be more of a cracks coming through? I mean, it seems like there’s a lot of authoritarian regimes where it goes the other way; when that power becomes brittle and exposed, it tips the other way into a more overt authoritarianism.

Christopher Rufo:

Well, I think that if it does tip that way, Americans will mobilize against it, and it’ll become even more clear to even more people. But I think that the phrase that you used struck me as something very important. You said, “Well, what makes you think that they will let us win?” And I just think that conservatives spend too much time thinking in those terms, and it’s almost like you’re asking for victory. You’re saying, “Hey, will you concede to my victory?” It’s like you’re playing basketball with your older brother who’s a foot taller than you, and you say, “Hey, can you let me win?” But this isn’t a family relationship. These are not people that have your best interest at heart. You have to win by winning, not by asking, not by positioning yourself to persuade the other side.

And I think that conservatives, in a very real way, do not have the self-confidence to say that “this is my position. It is the moral position, it’s the position that represents the democratic majority in this country, and therefore this position will become law. And those who would violate it are now in violation of the law.” And so for something like affirmative action, affirmative action is unjust, definitionally. Affirmative action is unpopular by any measure of public polling. And conservatives could tomorrow at the state legislatures, literally tomorrow could say no more affirmative action of any kind; any racial preferences is a violation of law, and companies or individuals or institutions that practice this kind of discrimination will be punished to the full extent of the law. We’re going to set the Department of Justice or the local attorneys general as the highest priority of enforcement. You could change things very fast.

And so my argument to our folks is have the confidence in your own position. If you really believe your position, if you’ve earned the votes of the public, if it’s within the constitutional bounds and it’s actually advances a constitutional principle, do it, enforce it, don’t apologize for it and certainly don’t ask permission about it. And I think that many of these things are hamstrung, not necessarily by what our opponents are doing, but by our own lack of confidence or our own really lack of self-belief, or even more basic than that, our own revealed lack of belief in our own principles.

I think sometimes these guys, you talk to governors or legislators, they get in there, they campaign on these ideas, and then they stop. They hesitate, they have fear, they don’t govern on these ideas. And to me, it’s just a sign that they don’t really believe them, or they’ve let the Left and the culture and the elite institutions fill them with just enough doubt that they cannot take action. And so, I don’t focus on what my opponents do, I just like to focus on what we can do. And if we can bridge that confidence gap among our own people, that’s going to do much more than anything we can do to persuade our opponents.

Inez Stepman:

So I’m going to defend my choice of language there because I chose it carefully, and I agree with basically everything that you said. I would call it maybe the Asa Hutchinson style of governance, and I’ve come to the same conclusion as you have, but that a large part of the right, simply…either they don’t believe what they’re saying, or they are not meant for politics in the capital-P politics sense; you win elections in order to use political power. It’s not just to put your election on the shelf and polish it every day, political capital is earned and then to be spent, not just to sit there. I was referencing something, I think, different, which is what happens if we do exactly all the things that Chris Rufo says we should, which I agree with almost to every jot and tittle in terms of actually a serious agenda to use political power to hit, institutionally, to hit the power of the Left.

What if the unelected bureaucracy simply says no? What if you have a direct contradiction between democratic power? And I can easily imagine that happening after…. I could never have imagined that in 2015, but I can easily imagine it happening after the four years of the Trump administration, where you had generals who refused to tell the elected president when they were negotiating with Chinese generals. That’s a pretty basic democratic norm that civilian control of the military decision-making process. When you have the apparatus of the FBI spying first on a presidential candidate on transparently political grounds, and then now the prosecution of the leading opposition candidate in the 2024 election. I guess my question of “let” was very direct, which is will they allow a democratically-backed political movement that guts all the things that they’ve won since 1968 happen?

Christopher Rufo:

Yeah. There’s two answers to that question. Either the answer is yes, and in that case, the republic survives, the principles of the republic obtain, they continue. Or the answer is no, and we get into some very scary, very frightening territory where the bounds of the Constitution have been broken and all bets are off. We enter into a bit of a state of nature again. I of course hope that we do not go in that direction. I hope that in, that case, the bureaucracy will accommodate or relent. But is that a guarantee? No. And if it gets into that state-of-nature style of politics, the proper course of action for conservatives would be to fight tooth and nail to restore the constitutional bounds and to really take the power away from the elements of the bureaucracy that would essentially subvert the Constitution in a very real way. Not a metaphorical way, but a very real way.

And so this is…these are big questions, and I hope that we don’t have to answer them, but certainly it appears as if many of us on the Right are starting to think about them. And just that sign is quite worrisome. But I think that we need a heroic figure that has the principles and the political skill to point out what’s happening, push people back into their corners and to restore the system that we have. Otherwise, post-constitutional politics is not something that anyone should want. It gets very dangerous very quickly.

Inez Stepman:

Yeah, I completely agree. And that’s why…. I mean, paradoxically, because there is this impulse to say that if we moderate, things will be quote-end-quote “safer.” There’s all this discourse about the polarization and radicalization of Left and Right and so on. I think completely 180 degrees different. The most important thing is to radicalize the politicians being elected on the Right in a way that actually… When I was calling you the white pill of America, I think it’s extremely important that the Right gets some institutional wins and restore, like you said, to send people back to their corners. I actually think that’s the only way a non-tragic or radical outcome is avoided. But let’s go with the critique you thought I was making, which is the critique that has been made of a lot of your solutions, that essentially, I think there’s a Reason article out recently about Chris Rufo has become what he hates, and there’s been a lot of critique that some of your solutions essentially violate small-L liberal norms. So not leftist norms, but classical liberal norms. Some of those specific policies that some folks have been complaining about in the center-Right or the libertarian part of the Right have been things like banning critical race theory from public schools. We will get to in a moment, I’m really excited to hear what is going on with new college and with how to run a public university essentially on behalf of the true, the beautiful, and the good. So what is your answer to your more centrist or libertarian critics when they say you are violating the spirit of 1776 when you wield political power and encourage Republican politicians to wield political power in this way?

Christopher Rufo:

Yeah, I think it’s just another point in the old book of why libertarians just can’t be taken seriously because let’s break down this argument. So the argument is, “Chris, you’ve supported and really spearheaded legislation to restrict critical race theory in K through 12 schools. This is an outrage, it violates the principle of limited government.” Well, let’s look at that. You’re saying the people through their legislators are saying that the government can no longer push this ideology on other people’s kids in public school. You’re actually limiting what the government can do. You’re saying, “Hey, the government can no longer push racial scapegoating, racial superiority theory, et cetera in public schools.” So the limited-government argument is just facially wrong. You’re limiting the government; you’re limiting what they can do in the public schools. The other argument is that, “Well, this is a violation of freedom of speech in the First Amendment.”

Well, any look at the jurisprudence would show that the Garcetti vs Ceballos standard clearly states that public employees—in this case, public school teachers—do not have unlimited First Amendment rights when they’re doing their official duty. In the sense that, when they’re in the classroom, they are public employees that are designed to teach a certain curriculum, a certain style of pedagogy that is consonant with the local school boards and the state curriculum. And they don’t have unlimited free speech rights because they’re government employees and this is the commission of their official duties, much as if you work in the water department for the city, you can’t use half your time to advocate for reparations or for Puerto Rican independence or whatever it is that you want to do. You have a job, you have to do your job first and foremost, and that doesn’t apply.

And then the other thing is, “Well, what we really need is a free marketplace of ideas.” That’s the liberal ideal that is at stake here. And I say, “Well, wait a minute, libertarians, we’re talking about public schools. Public schools are not a free marketplace of ideas. Public schools are, in fact, a government-run monopoly on education. It’s 90% of the education, K through 12 education market is a government monopoly. So by definition, this is not a market mechanism. This is a monopoly or at best kind of a cartel. So those rules, again, do not apply.” And they don’t apply, in addition, because these are children, these aren’t adults that can engage in a robust exchange and a debate of ideas. If you’re teaching little Timmy the kindergartner that he’s actually a girl and not telling his parents, Little Timmy is a kindergartner, he doesn’t have the ability to debate you about it.

Line after line, where do we get? These three points of argument that are totally incoherent. Even on libertarian grounds, they’re defending the right of the public schools to abuse your kids ideologically. That seems very un-libertarian, but what their argument amounts to is that the people through their elected legislators have no right to regulate their government. That that’s really what it boils down to. And so, for a libertarian to make this argument is so, it’s just rock-bottom stupid. The amount of lack of electrical activity in the brain should be studied on this question because you get libertarians arguing against the right of the people to regulate their government. If that’s not the definition of tyranny, I don’t know what is. I don’t know what motivates these people. I don’t know if it’s… I really have… I’m at a loss, frankly. Even on their own principles, they can’t defend their positions here. I think it may be they don’t like me… I don’t know what it is. Maybe you have some insight. I can’t figure out what drives this line of argument for them.

Inez Stepman:

I honestly have come to the very non-intellectual conclusion or explanation for this over the years, which is whatever people’s cultural allegiances are that tend to drive their politics. So in the case of parents—

Christopher Rufo:

And they rationalize it however they need to.

Inez Stepman:

Right. In the case of libertarians, it’s their cultural knee-jerk sort of leftist view on liberty or license, I would say, that drives, that’s like the tail wagging the dog to the extent that they sort of work backwards from “Well, the most important thing is a long list of license and the culture that supports legal pot—”

Christopher Rufo:

Age of consent—

Inez Stepman:

“… pornography everywhere.” And I honestly think that a lot of libertarian thought precedes backwards from that. Obviously, there are exceptions to that. There are more serious people, but I have come to that anti-intellectual conclusion. I wanted to ask you, actually, because Marxism is—to return for a moment to the book—Marxism is…. And the reason I was thinking about this is because libertarianism, at least at its best, and let’s say the sort of Hayek Freedman era really is a spear aimed at essentially economic collectivism, communism and the actual Marxist communist countries during the Cold War, starting with the USSR. To the extent that they ended up in the right-wing coalition, it was because they agreed on that communism is a bad idea, Marxism is a bad idea, they don’t work economically.

Is what we are facing now Marxist, or can it be called Marxist? Because you delineate both the intellectual connections and showcase how all these different groups, up to and including BLM, all call themselves Marxist. But you also, the thinkers you are picking before, starting with Marcuse and Derek Bell, and some of them are communists, Angela Davis, a vowed communist, but they all have separated themselves in some way or another from what might be called old school Marxism, like economic Marxism. So is the ideology that currently rules us Marxist in any meaningful way anymore? And if so, what is to be learned from this successful fight against, I would say, against old Marxism both sort of abroad? Is there anything to be learned from that, or is this a totally different beast even though it has some intellectual parentage from Marxists?

Christopher Rufo:

Yeah, it’s a great question and it’s not an easy answer, but what I would say is that this is Marxism without Marx. So all of these folks that adopt the mantle of Marxism adopt the kind of stylistic elements of Marxism, like the leaders of BLM are not really Marxists in the sense that Marx would understand his own political philosophy. Well, what does that mean? It means that, in 1968, Angela Davis’s colleague, Eldridge Cleaver, who was the minister of information for the Black Panther Party—really a kind of alternately fascinating and horrifying personality. He was an old school Orthodox Marxist-Leninist, and in the Black Panther newsletters that they were writing, their little academic journal, he was discussing the plans for how they would take over the factories and how the lump in proletariat—whom actually Marx had little faith in, but they had this idea of a Marxist revolutionary government.

And certainly in the Third World, they had the idea of Marxist revolutionary classes taking control over the industrial production facilities that was happening in Latin America and Africa, where Paolo Freire, for example, worked. They actually believed that they could have a Marxist economy and political economy. Nobody believes that anymore. I mean, the Cold War put that idea to rest with certainty. And so you have to ask the critical race theorists; the critical race theorists and the BLM activists self-identify as Marxists. They say, “We are Marxists and we take these ideas and we want Marxism,” in that specific sense, but they don’t really. Can you imagine the BLM ladies running the production line at a Tesla factory? They’re not going to do that. They don’t want those jobs. And so they’ve lowered their ambitions to just the knowledge economy or the means of knowledge production.

So they want to have the plum jobs in academia, media, HR, training, K through 12 school teaching. They want to change cultural attitudes in line with a neo-Marxist ideology. But they don’t actually take very seriously besides the rhetoric that they have, the kind of Elizabeth Warren rhetoric, I don’t think that they really take seriously the idea of actually taking over the economy and taking over the industrial production and taking over agricultural production because they know deep down that they have zero competence and zero actual skills and capacity to achieve it. What they want to do, really… And this is the end of the book, we get to this really awful and cynical ending where they have control of the bureaucracy, they have control of the arts and culture, they have control of the education and transmission of values, they have control of the university departments, but it ultimately ends in a form of nihilism because there’s no further that they can go.

They don’t have any vision beyond their own positions of security within the bureaucracy, and they end up just talking to each other in ideological code. They become parasitic to the institutions knowing that they cannot be productive within the institutions. So you have this really hollowing out, and that’s the process that we’re going through now. And I mean, it’s still very dangerous. You have institutions that are being hollowed out of their purpose, and these hollow institutions are trying to replace their purpose with ideology. So you’re going to get perhaps a slow but steady degradation of all the institutional functions that we see.

Inez Stepman:

I really think the average person feels that, whether or not they connect it to these, I think to the ideology specifically. Just there’s this pervasive sense that, after the pandemic, things just don’t work, that airlines don’t work, that nobody… So I guess the question is why can’t it just be blame snowball? What is preventing these ideologues or ideological compliance industry? And actually I’d like a number, what percentage of the U.S. economy or the U.S. GDP do you think is actually just fake? Because I think it’s pretty high. But why can’t they just blame it on the counter-revolutionaries the same way that the actual communists did for 80 years? Why can’t it be the fault of evil, racist white men that the planes are all delayed over and over again?

Christopher Rufo:

They’re certainly going to try. They’re certainly going to try. Then they have their own, “we need more solution. As the solutions deepen the problem, the only solution is more of the same solution.” So they’re going to try that. Absolutely. They have no other trick in their box of tricks. But I just think that the American people are too reasonable, they’re too rational, they’re too skilled in whatever industries they’re in. They’re too competent and capable and practical minded that, eventually, they are going to stop believing the—and I think in some ways they’ve already stopped believing them. It doesn’t mean that we’ve turned the tide or we’ve gotten rid of them from the bureaucracy or we’ve downsized, but it’s going that direction I think.

I think that DEI is one example and one of the examples—that was my big campaign this year. We got DEI abolished and DEI departments abolished in every public university in Florida and Texas. Those jobs are now going to be wound down and discarded. And even Fortune 100 companies are starting to really quickly shed all of their DEI job—not all, but many of their DEI jobs. And even high-tech companies in California and companies like Netflix, which are very left wing, arts and entertainment, obviously, they’re quietly shedding hundreds of their DEI jobs. So I just have too much… I live in a kind of middle-class small town; people that have really normal jobs, firefighters working at the Navy yard, nurses, teachers, kind of sales and marketing for small or regional companies. And people are far too reasonable. And I think as the economy goes into a rough spot, they’re going to be returned to reality. And many of these jobs will be correctly identified as superfluous, and then people will have the conditions that they need to start to slowly return their companies, their bureaucracies, their schools, to a sense of clear priorities.

And I’m already hearing this. I actually had lunch with a friend of mine who’s a very successful venture capitalist. He was a C-suite executive at one of the top, let’s say very top technology firms. And he said, “Hey, look, in VC and small companies, in high-growth startup environments where capital is competitive, all of my companies are starting to get really lean, really mean, really efficient, really effective, and the kind of honeymoon from that economic necessity is over. And that’s going to start going up the chain to the larger and larger companies in the months ahead.” So I’m optimistic about Americans in general. I feel like the people that I meet around the country are nice, they’re polite, they’ll put up with a lot, but when you cross the line, they’re going to fix the problem. That’s ultimately what gives me hope. It’s not an idea or an ideology, it’s just my sense of people and the culture of people who live here.

Inez Stepman:

Well, surely true that the American middle class is not the Russian peasantry. Let’s close out—

Christopher Rufo:

In the Russian peasants, that’s for sure.

Inez Stepman:

Let’s close out by putting more meat on what does the counter-revolution that you describe in the conclusion of this book look like? And even, or I don’t know if even more importantly, but almost as importantly, how do we get leadership that actually signs on and executes that? Because I get most…. I swing between optimism and pessimism. Some days I agree entirely with Chris Rufo. Sometimes I read James Burnham and I’m like, “Eh.” But where I get most pessimistic is not looking at the Left, because I see a lot of the same cracks that you identify in this book. I see that sort of institutional power that’s simultaneously being more taken over by the Left but losing its power in society that rightly losing the trust of the American people.

But then I look at the Republican Party, and I listen to what they still are advancing as the agenda with some key exceptions. And I feel like despairing because it seems like there is no connection. When I hear somebody like Nikki Haley go on Fox and say that she would welcome Disney and their jobs to South Carolina because mean old Florida or Governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t understand that this is an economic question, rather than a question of institutional power, I feel that I’m transported back to 2012 and I lose hope. So how do we get a leadership that actually executes on a more muscular political posture and a competent agenda that does target institutional power?

Christopher Rufo:

Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great question. I think Nikki Haley is a perfect symbol. Nikki Haley, of course, not only is saying the kind of Reaganite, Thatcherite, “all that matters is GDP, and therefore, even if Disney is pushing non-binary weirdos into your kids’ TV programming, their bottom line is the most important thing.” Not only that, the worst strands of right-wing holdover thinking, but actually she also opened her campaign by saying, “I am a minority woman. Hear me roar.” Was her campaign pitch. Like, “Really? We’re going to do intersectionality as our pitch in 2023 for the Republican presidential nomination?” It’s like she was designed to take the worst ideas from both sides and combine them into one campaign. Luckily though, what’s Nikki Haley polling? What’s her polling? 1%, 2%. I think that the optimism—and maybe quantifiable optimism—is if you look at the top three candidates from the polls that I see and give or take, that the polls are skewed in their own ways each, but I think it’s pretty much Trump, DeSantis and even Vivek in third that have, what, 90% of the Republican primary voters’ support.

And so all three of those people, they’re very different. And I support DeSantis. I’m not sure who you do, nor does it really matter, but Trump understands America’s cultural revolution. And his rhetoric is certainly leaning into these issues. DeSantis understands it better than anyone, and he’s been governing on these issues very successfully. And even Vivek, the kind of upstart, almost the third-party-candidate style of campaign, he understands these issues. I had a Twitter space with him recently, and he’s even more radical in his proposed solutions than anyone, in some sense, because he’s trying to gain traction and has to do a bit more exciting policies to get his name out there. But the top three candidates are going to the public right now, and the public is saying, “Hey, we want the people who know what time it is.”

That’s like a 90% majority across those three candidates. And so will the establishment revive the fortunes of Asa Hutchinson? I doubt it, but they’ll try. But I think that the voters are with us, and the question that you’re asking is an important one, but I think there is an answer is you have to do two things. You have to create a new system of incentives for politicians. I love politicians. I know a lot of people, even think tank people hate—I love politicians. I find them fascinating. I find them admirable. I think of my own work, in a sense, as in service to politicians. That is really abhorrent to some people, but I view it that way. I find myself as providing a kind of humble service to political leaders. I think that these people have the most difficult job category in the United States.

It’s a very difficult job. So what I always try to do is solve problems for politicians, provide them in a very easy package everything that they need to be successful, and demonstrate that if they follow this idea that I’m, say, proposing to them, and I give them clear kind of step-by-step help and then I support and cheerlead and celebrate victories, like state legislators, for example. And then they see that it’s popular. They see that it gets them donations and votes and other rewards, media hits, whatever it is. And if you can demonstrate the effectiveness of your ideas, the popularity of your ideas, the moral correctness of your ideas, and then more importantly than that, that’s great, you should do that. But more importantly than that, you create a system of incentives. So even the most cynical politicians follow because they see success in the path that you’re laying out.

I think that’s what we have to do. And those of us on the media and policy sphere, we have to remember, too, that most politicians follow our lead. They follow the lead of where the media and where the intellectuals go. So I don’t know. And I see great politicians. Look, I tried to help with my CRT fight. I had tried to help the school choice movement, which I think is an essential solution. And I’ll tell you who was the absolute warrior, was the governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey. Governor Ducey is a Reaganite, optimistic, business conservative. And you may say, “Oh, he’s a bit more in that older mold.” But he expended political capital. He fought for the policy. He did very shrewd negotiations with legislators on both sides. And he got universal school choice passed—the first time in history, the first state to ever pass it. And he knew it was popular. He knew it was the right thing to do. He had great outside support. He had the narratives that he needed on CRT, on masks, on shutdowns, on gender and sexuality.

So all of us did our part, and then he was able to go in and it was a winning issue for him. I’m ultimately optimistic about our politicians, but simply those recalcitrant ones simply must be taught through success and then punished when they deviate, and then I think they’ll follow along nicely over time.

Inez Stepman:

Well, and that’s why I think, regardless of some of the inter-Right debates about some of the philosophy, and I’m sure this book will be a great contribution to that. Ultimately I am suspicious of anyone who doesn’t think that Chris Rufo has been perhaps the strongest value add to the Right in the last, since you’ve really been working on our team for the last four or five years. So thank you so much, Chris, for coming back on.

Christopher Rufo:

I appreciate that, and it’s a lot of fun to talk to you, and I think you really understand what’s happening. And one last point of optimism, because that’s my role here, I guess, is just.… As I’m talking to politicians, I’m talking about the kind of rank-and-file state legislators, lower-profile state leaders, but we also have some real superstar politicians on our side. President Trump does not need guidance. Governor DeSantis does not need guidance and a couple of others. So I just think we have to do a better job on the Right of celebrating our people and boosting our people and rewarding our people. And those great leaders that don’t need any intellectual guidance, like a Governor DeSantis, but they do need our support and they do need our work to really make them successful. And I just think that we have great people in our coalition. We have great people in our movement, minus some of the more fringe strands, but we have a good story to tell. And the more that we tell it, I think the more we’ll succeed.

Inez Stepman:

You can find more about that and Chris’s work in America’s Cultural Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everything. I assume you can get that anywhere books are sold. I believe it’s now the number-one bestselling book in America, so that’s another reason for optimism. Thanks so much, Chris Rufo, for coming back on High Noon.

Christopher Rufo:

Thank you.

Inez Stepman:

And thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave, and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.