I subscribe to electronic newsletters from Christopher Rufo: he sent me one on March 15, 2024 which I will quote and respond to. It was entitled, From Left to Right: How I became a ‘conservative culture warrior.’
My response: Like Rufo, I started off on the Left in high school and ended up being conservative and a conservative culture warrior. When I was 18 years old, I was attending NDSU as an undergraduate. They had quarters, not semester at that time; I was taking a psychology class from a woman professor. We met in her office and somehow, we discussed human nature, and I mentioned that I thought people were not basically good.
She was shocked and rebuked me accusingly by responding that that is a conservative point of view. I did not comment but secretly agreed with her—that belief in human depravity is an essentialist, conservative outlook--and I knew from that time (1972) that I was a conservative.
Rufo (R after this): “Many readers know me as a ‘conservative culture warrior’ who has worked with President Trump, Governor DeSantis, and other right-wing political figures. But I was not always a conservative. As I explained recently on the Joe Rogan Experience, over the past twenty-five years, I have made a long political journey from Left to Right, which is where I find myself today.
Here is the story, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
I come from the Left. I was a radical leftist. My political formation was from my father’s side, my Italian relatives, who were all unreconstructed Gramscian communists. That was my political upbringing. I remember, as a child, going to visit my favorite aunt and seeing the books on her shelf, and seeing a beautiful collection of bound books. I ask my aunt, ‘Zia, what is this book?’ She said, ‘This is the collected works of Lenin.’
I went to get my undergraduate degree at Georgetown with the intention of being involved in left-wing politics. The first thing that really changed me was finding out that left-wing politics in the United States is not for the common man or to uplift the downtrodden. It’s about maintaining the elite’s own status and prestige with the institutions.”
My response: Any mass movement, whether cultural Marxism—now reigning culturally and powerful politically in America—or fascism, racism, fundamentalist religiosity, is inherently elitist. It is manned and populated by the men of words and action that run it, but the masses have no say, none, at all. Once the mass movement overthrows the existing dispensation, the masses will once again be brutally enslaved, oppressed, terrorized, and exploited the ruling elite that populate the ruling Party. Out-of-power elites seeks to maintain their status and prestige if they are the ruling elite, and they seek to overthrow if existing order and replace it with a dispensation that they rule.
Revolution is never about the downtrodden, though they are its justification, and its useful idiots and cannon fodder in battle.
R: “It’s a McKinsey consultant worldview, with the trappings of the Left. It’s the Harvard student who’s wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh, who then goes on to become an investment banker.
To me, it was a profoundly phony and empty political movement, run by the sons and daughters of American elites for their own benefit.
The second thing that really changed me: I spent five years making a film for PBS, which examined life in three of America’s poorest cities. And, by then, my center-left views—that the Great Society and public welfare programs were trying to help people—fell apart. When you actually see how these programs manifest in the south side of Memphis, the south side of Youngstown, or the south side of Stockton, California, you realize that many of these ideals that are presented to you as care, compassion, concern, equality, and reparations for our racist past, are, at best, cynical, and at worst, deeply destructive to the people they’re supposed to help.”
My response: The only solutions that work for people are one pushing hard-work, self-help, liberty, opportunity in a free and capitalist America, which will really take off if one is an individuator too.
R: “I spent so much time getting to know people in these forgotten cities, thinking about people’s lives and how politics affects them. And I realized that the project of the Left is a human disaster, even if, rationally speaking, it should produce something good.
And then the final change was in the run-up and aftermath of 2020. That year radicalized me. I realized how profound the Left’s cultural capture was, and that the consequences of this process are no longer abstract.”
My response: Philosophical theory is upstream from culture which flows down into politics, and the lived values of the populace. Whatever a thinker conceives of, one day will be part of daily human life. Cultural Marxism has been brewing from Rousseau all through the 19th century German thinkers, through the continental philosophers, and then into Europe and America after the 1960s. Lo and behold, cultural Marxism is the culture of the land and it is damn near political reality, our dictatorial apparatus by 2022 in America—it is no longer an abstraction only. Perhaps Mavellonialism will have such influence, though positive not deleterious, in 70 years.
R: “They’re no longer just destroying poor neighborhoods in South Memphis, which are totally run by the state, but now have proliferated to the middle and upper classes. It’s an ideology that wants total domination.”
My response: Leftism or any mass movement destroys all it touches, and when it reaches the middle and upper classes, it will win at taking down the entire society, and this is what the true believers peddling the Marxist holy cause seek to make the law of the land, as they come to control everything and everyone.
R: “Once I became a conservative, that was the end of my documentary career. I lost funding, relationships, distribution opportunities. And I’m launched into the wilderness. I thought, ‘That career is done. What do I do next?” And then I thought, ‘Let’s go into politics and use some of the skills that I’ve developed as a filmmaker to tell the truth about what is happening to our country.
I am not a traditional conservative. I’m not a college Republican. I don’t own a bow tie. But I realized that, although conservative principles might be expressed awkwardly or articulated poorly, they offered some deep truths that need to be resurrected and recovered for us to be successful again.”
My response: Amen.
R: “So, I threw in my lot with people I would never have imagined calling friends and allies. I wake up every day thinking about the people that are around me and noting that, in an odd way, I’m fight for people who are actually voiceless—not only the people in America’s cities, but normal, middle-class families, which have no representation in elite institutions.”
My response: Each American, poor, middle class or rich, in or out of any kind of institution, is only voiceless and in need of elite representations from intellectuals and celebrities like Rufo, if that individual does not lead a full life. If she were to maverize as an anarchist-individuator supercitizen, she would never be voiceless again, and elites could not control, oppress her or order her how to think and what to think or believe, any longer.
R: :I have a visceral anger at the people who have truly inherited positions of power and prestige in America’s institutions. The Left deploys all this rhetoric about helping the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘underprivileged,’ but they are actually playing a cynical game to maintain their own status. I find it a betrayal, and I don’t think that I would be where I am today had I not seen that betrayal up close and personal. It’s not only a betrayal of the principles of the Left, but the principles of the country.
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