I subscribe to an online link to brilliant, articulate, young conservative thinker, Christopher F. Rufo. I feel the need to stay informed about the latest trends and development in the resurgent conservative political and philosophical movement fomenting in this country, and I believe Rufo is a great resource for keeping old thinkers like me abreast of latest trends.
He has been in Hungary as some sort of visiting intellectual and he gave a speech there on April 20, this year, and I will quote from the text of that speech, where I find it of special interest, and then comment on what he writes. He is attending the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, Hungary.
The title of his speech is Liberalism’s Achilles Heel: How the Left exploited the separation of church and state and installed a new bureaucratic morality.
My response: Rufo conflates Liberalism and Leftism—as do many conservatives—but Dennis Prager differentiates between them. Liberals are mildly progressive but reasonable, while Leftists are ideologues, hard-core postmodernist Marxists, and they have to be opposed fiercely, actively, unswervingly, loudly and consistently. Here Rufo refers to Liberals but I believe he intends to identify them as Leftists.
Rufo: “We’re going to talk today about the ‘long march through the institutions.’ It’s a phrase that originates with the West German Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke, but in some ways takes its most impressive form in the United States. I’d like to explain why the United States was vulnerable to this kind of strategy and discuss the capture of state institutions from the 1960s to the present, the emergence of a new left-wing bureaucratic morality, and then suggest what can be done about it.”
My response: This long march through the institutions in America started early in the 20th century, and this Fabian expansion of socialist and statist influence over our federal government, and increasingly through all kinds of institutions, demonstrates how dangerous and effective is their quiet, persistent, incremental Marxist revolutionary takeover of the US government. This gnawing away at the fabric of all things American started long before Rudi in the 1960s, but he doubtless made it worse. Rufo’s expression, a new left-wing bureaucratic morality that now is the federal culture, captures what we are up against, and what must be done about it.
Rufo: “I think the key question that provides the foundation for all of this is the United States’ longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state. That is part of our history, a very basic tenet of our government. And the idea at the time . . . was to have a strict separation of the church and state, or the civil society and the government. And the idea was that if you could delegate religious or theological questions to the private sphere—in the United States we have a pluralistic tradition of many different churches and religious faiths—and then have the government administer the state institutions in a more neutral way. You also had a common moral consensus that was able to downplay some of those doctrinal differences and depolarize what is called the ‘theological-political” problem.”
Dennis Prager and others do not accept that the doctrine of separation of church and state was ever laid down in the Constitution by our Founding Fathers, and that it was a contrivance fabricated by federal judges in the 1940s. That seems likely: still, some separation of church and state in American government has some positive effect, if that court-engendered invention helps us be legally secular enough so that there is no sanctioned state church. Prager argues fiercely that we need God and morality in affairs of the civil society, the church and the state.
My principle of moderation would help to keep the society pluralistic, religious tolerant and open, even if god was reintroduced into the public arena.
Rufo: “And for a long period of time, this worked quite brilliantly. But the problem is that this form of governing has three presuppositions. First, it presupposed a limited government, the idea that the government should be small and limit itself to only securing the basic liberties of the people. Second, it presupposed a robust civil society . . . Even observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville saw that Americans were born organizers and had these very strong networks of non-governmental institutions. An third, it presupposed a basic consensus on Christian morality or Christian ethics, in other words, that all of the people of the time had the same basic Christian ethical framework, even if they had debates about doctrinal issues, they could be delegated to private society.”
My response: I think his three presuppositions hold well. We were founded on the principle of small government, and that allows for a robust civil society, much personal liberty, and for free markets to grow and make almost all people prosperous. Yes, we have always had a robust civil society and Eric Hoffer and Mark Levin comment on and approve of. There is no doubt that Judeo-Christian morality. That shared theological/cultural/ethical worldview was the cement that held our society together.
Rufo goes on to lament that these three presuppositions are now eroded and eclipsed. The state has expanded and its functionaries with their secular, bureaucratic morality now replace what was: “Second, civil society in the United State has been in free fall for decades . . . who have documented the dissolution of America’s social fabric . . . these social institutions have been replaced by the state management of society—the state has taken over the function of family, the church, and the civil organization.”
My response: I agree totally but would add that public schools and colleges used to be state or local concerns, but, increasingly, the federal government and the woke culture of DEI and CRT now rule everywhere.
Rufo: “Third, the Left has moved in direct opposition to a generalized Christian moral consensus. The left-wing theories of race, sex and power have maintained that all existing social structures are forms of oppression. The theoreticians have, in some ways, inverted the Christian moral ethic and replaced a transcendent conception of justice with a materialist conception of social justice, and then concluded that, in order to realize this kind of society, they had to smash all of the institutions. Whether its heteronormativity, the two-parent family, or religion itself—all are seen as an impediment to social justice, and, therefore, must be abolished.”
My response: The Left’s Marxist, materialistic, atheistic morality and ideology of social justice is a ideology leading to unrest, revolution, war and clashing. Collectivism and tyranny are the predictable outcomes. The Christian and Western concept of justice is predicated on the sovereign individual, his liberty, his prosperity and his protection of his property and rights by a limited, constitutional government. All that will be wiped out unless we traditionalist fight back.
Rufo: “ And so, what did this do? It created a moral void, in which you have this very unstable social structure. You have a large state bureaucracy, a weak civil society, and a collapsed moral consensus. And because of the separation of church and state—a prohibition that was increased in its level of restrictiveness over time—the state slowly eliminated Christian morality from the public square altogether, to the point that , even if you run a private company in the United States, you can’t put a Bible verse on your paycheck, because that is supposedly a violation of your employees’ civil rights.
The Left saw this development as a great opportunity. Their moral ideology and their revolution are explicitly secular, and therefore not restricted in any way by the separation of church and state. And they’re not opposed to a large state bureaucracy, or running a large state bureaucracy, which is also amenable to their politics. They had one problem, however: their ideology was not popular in United States, so they had to develop a plan to achieve cultural power without popular consent.”
My response: We need to push our traditional narrative: small, limited government, Christian ethics, individualism, the right to bear arms, constitutional republicanism, free markets, natural rights as given to us by God. We need ethics and God in the state affairs but with tolerance, coexistence and respect for religious differences accepted peacefully, a national set of values shared and lived by all citizens. We want to reintroduce God values into the public square without a return to religious wars which tore up Europe in the late medieval era.
We do not like what the globalists and educated experts in government are inflicting upon us, but they are unelected rulers over the masses, so we must take back the country. Individuator-anarchist supercitizens are the best antidotes to the tyranny practiced by the elites in government and corporations that now speak with one voice.
Rufo: “ . . . The strategy was fairly simple: in the 1960s, American left-wing activists realized that the route to power was not through democratic participation . . . So they said to themselves: ‘What we should do is bypass the democratic process, capture the state bureaucracy, and push our ideology through the public universities, K-12 education, and the administrative state.’
Unfortunately, conservatives were totally unequipped for resisting this maneuver. The Reagan conservative line was that government was the problem and therefore, conservatives should work to reduce the size of government—which, in effect, ceded all state activity to the Left. It naturalized secular leftist ideology as the defacto ideology of the state and then created a taboo for most conservatives that using power of the state to achieve conservative ends was forbidden.”
My response: Rufo is correct that we need to drastically but smartly need to reduce the size of government, but we have to fight to run the government still in place once it is reduced, devolved and right-sized. The indivduator-anarchist supercitizen is very politically astute and directly involved in running things from the bottom-up with a consensus formed by other supercitizen neighbors that have united with him to reinstate the American Way. No longer must Leftist revolutionaries be allowed to run things as a tyrannical élites from the top-down. Rufo is insightful in pushing that conservatives must participate and run the government to reverse the damage done in the last 100 years.
Rufo: “And then over the last three years, we saw the transformation of this ideology. Again, this is an evolution from the 1960s radical tradition, which was explicitly Marxist-Leninist, explicitly revolutionary, and explicitly violent, openly calling for the full-scale overturning of American society. You’re not going to see that kind of rhetoric when it’s coming from the Treasury Department or Lockheed Martin or your child’s elementary school, Instead, they translated those revolutionary principles into bureaucratic language. And so, we see the emergence of a bureaucratic morality that has animated all of America’s public institutions in the absence of any countervailing measure. We see a rationalization of revolutionary ideology. We see its absorption into the institutions, first in the state institutions, then laterally in private institutions.”
My response: Steven R. Hicks warned that Marxists from the Critical Theory revolutionaries from the 1930s on down through the postmodernists of the last 30 years, to all the intellectuals in all of the public and private institutions, today that preach soft revolution, still seek to overthrow and remake American society in their own image. Mark Levin warns in Ameritopia that soft tyranny is now here, and it will morph or be revealed as what it was always meant to be, a hard Leninist, totalitarian regime to rule America forever. Rufo is astute in uncovering these soft tyrants, these fanatics pedaling their cause, their mass movement, and it is consistent with what earlier and other thinkers have sounded the alarm about: the enemy is within the gates of the city.
Rufo goes on to describe this new cohort as the new elite, an all-knowing clas of administrators ruling society for its own benefit.
Rufo suggests that conservatives get back in the game, and not seek some Libertarian stateless utopia, but to take over and downsize but also run the existing government.
He is such a clear, competent thinker, concisely and articulately defining the problem and bringing a clear workable solution. He is a joy to read or listen to.
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