The Primacy

 

I subscribe to and receive frequent online, emailed publications from Chris Rufo. I received one today (10/27/23) which I will quote some pertinent lines from and then respond to. The name of Rufo’s publication is The Primacy of Culture, Why changing the law is not enough to defeat left-wing capture.

 

Rufo: “The editors of Aporia magazine have published an essay comparing my book America’s Cultural Revolution which argues that cultural and institutional capture are at the heart of the radical Left’s rise to power, to Richard Hanania’s book The Origins of Woke, which argues that civil rights law is the key mechanism for explaining the rise of left-wing politics.

 

My response: Hanania is a lawyer and he may be right that civil rights law, gone woke and pushing group rights for various intersectional victim groups, may well undergird the cultural war that the conservatives are losing.

 

Rufo: “Juxtaposing the two books helps to answer a fundamental question: how do we; change society—through political or institutional/cultural capture? Obviously both approaches are needed; after all, the left took both approaches. But at this moment of leftist hegemony, where should the right focus its efforts? In science there is a distinction between ultimate and proximate causes; if politics is downstream of culture, as the late Andrew Breitbart used to say, the efforts should be concentrated on the ultimate cause, culture. But if civil rights law is the ultimate cause of woke culture, then just changing legislation would be enough. . . . ‘

 

My response: we should do both at the same time; I wish I was not so invisible and unknown for Mavellonialism could provide a powerful philosophical underpinning, with its political conception of the anarchist individuator supercitizens jump-starting, ruling, and energizing the political system, and supercitizens that maverize, would revolutionize and crush woke culture.

 

Rufo: “If Hanania is right, then abolishing wokeness is simply a matter of taking over the government . . . and passing the right laws. Effects will then trickle down to the culture in the space of a few decades. But if Rufo is right, then what’s required is a painstakingly long process of intellectual and political activism: the anti-woke crowd needs to actually start caring to sacrifice their barbecues and become committed activists.”

 

My response: we lost the legal and cultural battle by not being political and cultural activists: the meaning of each supercitizen is that each is very politically involved, every day, every month, every year for a lifetime to not let ideologues, left or right, to take hold of our country. If good is not active, then foolish, inferior, evil thinkers, and their poor solutions, fill the void predictably and inevitably.

 

Rufo: “To an extent, my argument is that this is a ‘both/and’ scenario. The radical Left captured America’s institutions through cultural conquest and well as using civil rights law as a powerful tool for formalizing its rule. The solution to this problem, logic would seem to dictate, will require countering both approaches. But the question that Ivanov raises is one of emphasis and centrality: which is the proximate cause, and which is the ultimate cause?

 

We can discern the relative weight of ‘culture versus law’ by conducting a simple thought experiment: if we could instantly abolish one of these conditions, which would be more effective? That is, would we remove the cultural elements of left-wing radicalism—the ideology, the language, the activists within the institutions—or would we remove the provisions of civil rights law that enabled its bureaucratization?

 

I believe the answer is clearly the former. As Ivanov notes, Hanania himself writes that ‘the text of civil rights law is actually quite innocuous, and it was only through judicial and bureaucratic activism that such law became a tool of social engineering.’ In other words, civil rights law, and especially its interpretation, is dependent on the culture that surrounds it. Activists shape the conceptions, detach them from their original intentions, and apply them ideologically as a matter of policy. The legal text becomes nothing more than a justification for and an instrument of the broader cultural war.

 

This is an unhappy conclusion for the Right. To stop the advance of left-wing radicalism will require more than winning elections and changing laws; it will require deep cultural and institutional change, led by, in Ivanov’s words, ‘a community of people who are ready to fight for their ideals, and who command power.’

 

What do you think? What is the ‘ultimate cause of woke’: culture, law, or something else.”

 

My response:  I accept Rufo’s opinion that in fighting wokeness, we need to win the cultural war more than just changing laws, but we must fight both battles simultaneously.

 

The ultimate cause of woke is spiritual: the Good Spirits fight the Evil Spirits for mastery in this world, and the children of darkness has fooled billions of people by masking their attack upon people under the claims of morality (the fake morality of identity politics, group rights, collectivist economic and totalitarian political remedies), compassion and social justice battles supposedly  waged for the sake of the downtrodden and have-nots, when these useful idiots are but tools for the leaders of the children of darkness to take over the whole world, binding all to their blighted wills.