I pay a subscription to Christopher F. Rufo to receive online publications emailed to me’ His delivery to me on 11/14/23 was a lightly edited transcript of a speech Chris delivered at the David Horowitz Freedom Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. The title of Rufo’s speech was The Synthetic Revolution—How the old Marxism evolved into a new orthodoxy.
I will quote from the speech what interests me and then comment on it.
Rufo: “If you have followed David Horowitz’s work over the years, you can think of my work, in a sense, as a continuation of what he’s done, updating the public on the radical Left’s “long march through the institutions.” Rather than recapitulate the history of 1968 to the present—which you can read in my book—I’d like to give you a sense, not of the continuity, but of the change between now and then.”
My response: I have not followed Horowitz, but from his book he notifies the public that cultural/postmodernism Marxism is the old Marxism evolved into a new orthodoxy, but I fear that is smoke and mirrors, for the Left’s secret goal is to bring to America a hard-core Communist government.
Rufo, in the first element of his speech, notes the 60s radicals, by 2020, were the ruling American woke elite, now dominant. He notes that in the 60s the radical Left, a mixture of white middle class college kids and the predominantly black radicals from the inner cities, was a fringe movement, not popular and not influential.
Rufo: “All this has changed. This is no longer a movement of outsiders. This ideology has been absorbed on the inside, from the K-12 school system, to university humanities departments, to the human resources and DEI departments of Fortune 500 companies, which have all absorbed the ideologies now known as critical race theory, gender ideology, and ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’ It’s moved from the streets into the bureaucracy, from the fringes to the center of American life. It constitutes the new orthodoxy. If you’re sending your children to the median K-12 school or the median university, whether public or private, this is the orthodoxy. It is enforced with the power of the state, with the power of the institutions, with the power of law, and with the power of culture.”
My response: Rufo is a genius. He captures what is going on, and is able to distill it down to its ideational essence in clear, coherent messaging. Basically, the woke cultural revolution has upended the traditional American cultural story, and wokeness is now the new orthodoxy, now the law as well as the cultural metanarrative of the land. Rufo’s book is to offer a cultural counterrevolution to the orthodoxy and if we conservatives take back America, it will not be a moment too soon for the Left is very entrenched.
Rufo: “It is important to understand that the radical Left has moved from an organic constellation of intellectuals, activists, and other figures to a synthetic constellation of political actors—meaning these ideas are part of our bureaucratic life. They are incentivized bureaucratically and administratively, rather than bubbling up from below. The Italian Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci in the early 20th century said that the great hope for the Communist Revolution lay in what he called ‘organic intellectuals,’ people who had developed revolutionary consciousness when they were working in the farms, factories, and industrial centers—a grassroots vision of revolution.”
My response: I am too steeped in Eric Hoffer to accept, which Rufo is offering, that revolution is very often organic from the bottom up, though unrest is from the bottom up. Usually intellectuals, professors and idealists agitate on the fringes and sometimes the masses latch onto what they offer, leading to a mass movement and revolution. Herbert Marcuse with his sneers about zombie Joe Sixpack factory workers, and the Kaiser sending Lenin to Russia to overthrow the czar—that does not sound like Communist revolution from the bottom up to me. It comes top down from zealous elites, and the people listen, and later regret what they purchased, but it is then too late.
Still, let Rufo work his thesis: that the 60s revolution was organic and from the bottom-up but the synthetic revolution today is top-down. My objection is that all these revolutionaries are synthetic top-down radicals that coopt public opinion, and they gave the marching orders from early on.
Rufo: “Now, we have a total inversion of this dynamic. We have ‘synthetic revolutionaries’ who are highly credentialed. They march up the cursus honorum, or the scale of credentialing, in our society. They adopt these ideologies, not as authentic commitments, but, in many cases, as very cynical trappings: ‘This is what I’m supposed to believe and, therefore, I will say the words.’ We see this almost everywhere, and, for many people, it’s a matter of institutional survival. They affirm the orthodoxy because they don’t want to get fired.”
My response: I know not the percentages of radicals are that are fence-straddling feigners mouthing lip-serviced support for the new, woke orthodoxy, but I fear many supports have sipped the Kool-Aid, and are now true believers.
Rufo: “The second element that I’d like to address is the change in the ideology. If you read David Horowitz’s books, you’ll find some of the history. At the early point, the radicals of the 60s and 70s were self-described Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. For them, the great heroes of their time were the Third World liberation fronts that were violently overthrowing colonial powers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. If you take their rhetoric at face value—which, in many cases you can, because there is a certain honesty in their words—they wanted a change in political regime. They wanted to overthrow the United States, the Constitution, and the capitalist economic system, and bring about a Communist or socialist system of governing and political economy. If you read the pamphlets of the Black Panther Party, they are almost charming in their naivete’. They say, ‘We are going to take over the Ford factories and start building buses for the proletariat, for the people of the inner cities.’
I say it’s ‘almost charming’ because they are signing up for a lot of hard work. It’s actually difficult to make cars, to run factories, and to be productive. But this desire has totally changed now. The critical race theorist never talk about taking over a car factory or running a great industrial enterprise. They know that they’re not equipped to do it, and they have no desire to do it. They no longer want to seize the means of physical and industrial production; they want to seize the means of cultural and knowledge production. This is a big shift. They believe that if they can change the language we speak, the symbols we use in public life, they can change the country.”
My response: Yes, there has been a shift in the ideology from classical Marxist taking over industrial production to a bunch of white-collar elites, highly credentialed, taking over government, corporations, school systems, campuses, news media and Hollywood: making good on their self-promise to control language, speech and thought to change the country into a Leftist utopia, a soft Marxist revolution. I would like to remind Rufo and everyone that the end will be the same: once totalitarian Communism is the law of the land, these credentialed intellectuals will declare themselves competent and skilled enough to run the factories as well as the information institutions—after all, were not many of the commissars in the old Soviet Union former intellectuals given a lucrative, powerful berth under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hard revolution or soft woke revolution, it will turn brutal and genocidal in the end, no matter which route the Leftists travel to gaining ultimate power over society.
Rufo: “Conservatives have mocked postmodern theory, which is based in part on the idea that everything is reducible to language and that, if you control the discourse of a society you can control the society at large But in rejecting this philosophy out of hand, conservatives are making a mistake. The postmodern case for the primacy of language might be overstated, but it also contains a kernel of truth. In many cases, if you control the language that is promoted as public orthodoxy, you make it very hard to escape. Accordingly, the synthetic revolutionaries have determined, in a partial and contingent way, that controlling the language is more important than controlling physical production. Their idea if we play out the theory to its conclusion, is that when you control the language and culture sufficiently, it’s easier to take control of the economy. And you can do it not by going to the factory floor, and installing car doors, but by controlling the law and legislation. In this way, language is transformed into economic power by indirect leverage, rather than by direct control.”
My response: Things are unfolding under this woke synthetic revolution, much as Rufo describes events. Again, totalitarian control of the government, economy, farming, manufacturing and swapping of good and services, whether by hard-nose, organically originated original Marxists, or by their practically helpless, hapless descendants, the professors and intellectuals and bureaucrats—the woke revolutionaries of 2030--of today that would not know how to start a tractor, let alone repair a bad engine, but they will assume they are smart so they can do and run anything. It will be Bolshevik pain and hell, either way, at the end of the day.
Rufo: “Another change is to reflect on is how the radical Left now defines equality. How did Karl Marx or the orthodox Marxist-Leninists of the mid-century period define equality? It was equality of condition—put crudely, everyone having the same stuff. It was material equality, or, as conservatives like to say, ‘equality of outcomes.’ Subsequently, however, this process has been a perpetual disappointment, because equality of outcome never comes to pass. Look at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, for example: we currently spend approximately $1 trillion dollars per year on means-tested welfare benefits in the United States. It is an enormous expenditure. And yet, our rate of economic inequality—family patterns, rates of drug addiction, suicide deaths, etc.—has grown dramatically. The bottom stratum of the United States is worse off than before, despite this massive effort.
Consequently, the Left, operating from within the bureaucracy, is no longer interested in equality of rights, as the Founders envisioned, or even equality of conditions, as the Marxists envisioned. They have begun to pursue what I call psychological equality, or ‘equality of the spirit.’ The rhetoric about privilege, the theory of intersectionality, the categorical imperative of ‘trauma’—the dynamic of oppressor-oppressed—is now interpreted psychosocially, rather than materially. The institutions are no longer just promising transfer payments. The state, the school, the university now serve as a means of psychological conditioning. The individual who has racial privilege, which is attached to shame and guilt, has to be taken down a notch psychologically. The individual who does not have racial privilege, on the other hand, is provided with training about racial joy and then promoted upward in the hierarchy through intervention of the bureaucracy.”
My response: No longer just satisfied with equality of rights or equality of outcomes, the Left now seeks psychological equality—but I think they are reverse racists, and they push misperceived belief that whites as colonizers are feel superior and privileged, and that people of color feel inferior and kept down and back, so the bureaucracy raises up the victim groups it favors, and downgrades and humiliates those groups identified as oppressors.
None of this will work anyway, and they destroy fine America in the process.
Rufo: “Yet, despite all these efforts, we have a society that is more miserable than ever. I always think about these issues in terms of the American Founders, who saw very clearly that the end, the telos, of political life was to create happiness, properly understood, in an Aristotelian sense. And a decent heuristic as to how well our society is doing is to measure happiness. Is our government leading us towards happiness as a people? I think the answer is clearly no. In fact, the more the radical Left gains power within the bureaucracy and pushes its ideologies on the people, the less happy people become.”
My response: If people were happy and their telos and a people and individually were being met in traditional America under freedom, wealth, individual rights, and opportunity, and that gave them self-esteem or self-love, they were rather happy.
The socialism pushed by the left makes people lose faith in God, in themselves, in the country and everything has been debunked, deconstructed, and tossed onto the dustbin of history. We are struck by the fact that we are stuck with millions of poorer, tyrannized, godless youth with no future and no hope, and so they lack self-esteem and hate themselves. Is it no wonder that the Left and Big Government have made people much more unhappy than before, they do not admit being mistaken and back off: no, they double down on failed policies.
Rufo: “Which leads us to the final question: How do we create an opposition? What are the means of opposing the forces of ideological capture and the politics of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’? We find ourselves, institutionally, with very little at our disposal. So what do we do?”
My response: If we push that most adult citizens should grow into being developing anarchist individuators supercitizens, and push for capitalism, small government, egoism, and faith in God, with these additions, we should be able to form a nucleus of integrated, resolved patriots to bring back our traditional culture under this Constitution, to make America great again.
Rufo: “To answer the question, we must acknowledge the status quo. I use the label ‘conservative’ because it’s convenient to signal where my political loyalties lie, I’m part of the conservative movement—these are my friends, colleagues, collaborators. I have a relationship with the conservative political party, but ‘conservative’ is, in a sense, not a functional label for what we have to do. The project of conserving the institutions and the transmission of founding principles of our country has already failed. Conservatives, who adopt the posture of the establishment are deluding themselves, because, in reality, we are now on the outside, the fringes, the margins. Our ideas—the ideas of the founding of this country—are no longer public orthodoxy. Consequently, it’s not a matter of conserving the institutions as they are; it’s a matter of going on offense and changing the institutions into what they might be.”
My response: Rufo is correct: postmodern Leftism is now public policy, the new orthodoxy, and our job is to recapture the lost institutions and culture.
Rufo: “First, we must reestablish the political. I often hear people say, ‘I don’t want to make this political. I don’t want to be controversial. I want to avoid conflict.’ These people are not well-equipped for politics, because politics is political. If you criticize the public orthodoxy of the day, you’ll automatically be labeled as someone who is controversial. You have to accept this. Then you can begin to submit these institutional questions to the political process. You can begin to ask, why are conservative taxpayers paying for DEI bureaucracies and public universities? Why are they paying for departments of gender theory, which, as an intellectual matter, are equivalent to a department of witchcraft or astrology.
This is precisely the project that I have worked on this year: persuading state legislators that they did not have to fund radical, left-wing DEI bureaucracies in state universities. The people, through their legislators, ae the ultimate authority over the structure and value of public institutions, and if they decide that they do not want to promote DEI as the official orthodoxy of state institutions, they can lobby their legislators, who can write a bill to abolish these departments and send it to the governor’s desk for signature. And that’s exactly what happened in the State of Florida. These DEI bureaucracies, which offer no academic value, are no longer permitted in the state’s public universities.”
My response: Yes, the conservatives must unite, have an agreed upon agenda and set of policies for local, state and national levels, and then work tirelessly to taken over government and the institutions at all levels. We must get involved and stay involved forever to retake the country and keep it well run.
Rufo: “Second, we should appeal to and enact a sense of pluralism. This is where small ‘c’ conservatives can play that conservative function, which is to say that the existing institutions of civil society—the family, the church, the school, the civil association—should be protected. This means digging trenches around these institutions, creating space where these institutions can survive. The sociologist Max Weber talked about ‘value spheres.’ This is a productive way to consider our local institutions that haven’t been captured by these ideologies: the neighborhood, the small town, all those little institutions that operate on a human scale, of which there are still many. Conservatives must invest their time, money and energy into these institutions and declare, ‘This is important. This is what we believe. This is where we will stand and protect these values, within the sphere of activity in civil society.”
My response: Great.
Rufo: “The third tactic is institutional siege. If you think about the primary shapers of national life—the federal government, the Fortune 500 companies, the large K-12 school systems, the universities—they are all institutions that must be submitted to public deliberation, to a political process, and to a contestation of values. In a constitutional republic, this means submitting them to basic rules, which are determined through the Constitution and the legislature, the ultimate authorities over the great public questions. We must ask: Where are our institutions headed? What do our institutions believe? Which values do our institutions transmit from one generation to the next? These are the fights we must have. The greatest leverage for conservatives is political power—more specifically, the political power of the legislatures, which must ensure that the values of their constituents, of their citizens, are reflected in the public institutions.
This is, in one sense, simple, and in another sense, very difficult. Because it requires people that are willing to fight both in the media, politics, and other domains. And it requires, ultimately, replacing one system of values with another. It is tough work. We must be willing to say, ‘We have an institution and now we are going to bring in new people, new values, new policies, and new priorities.’ The challenge is great—we must begin this process across a wide range of institutions—but, if we understand our opponent and have an abiding faith that our republic is still functional, we can win elections, translate values into law, and reform the institutions so that they are governed in the best interests of the people.
This is the work of a generation or more. This problem developed and metastasized over the course of many decades. It will take many decades to fix it, but ultimately, this is the fight we must face. If we have political convictions, it is not hopeless, but rather, salutary, to understand just how difficult is the task ahead, because it gives us a sense of realism and perspective. Many generations before us have waged more difficult fights than ours. For the time being, ours is a fight over language, words, symbols, bureaucracy. We should maintain hope—this is the fight ahead.”
My response: It is our job to fight the good fight in this world with our whole hearts, our whole souls, fighting to grow goodness in this world without quitting or tiring, no matter how fierce the opposition, we must not be daunted, waver or quit. This is what the Good Spirits and benevolent deities command us to commit to openly, ferociously.
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