Illiberalism

 

Chris Rufo sends me out emails which I subscribe to, and I would like to quote from one and then comment on its content. Rufo is a very sharp journalist, thinker, and conservative activist. This email that he sent to me on 1/29/24 was entitled: “How to Stop DEI: Bari Weiss hosts a debate: Christopher Rufo vs. Yascha Mounk. The Right Way to Fight Illiberalism: Christopher Rufo and Yascha Mounk Debate.

 

This weekend, Bari Weiss hosted a debate between me and John Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk on ‘the right way to fight illiberalism.’ There were points of agreement, but ultimately, the debated diverged as we considered the practical necessities for winding down repressive DEI bureaucracies. My approach was more aggressive; Mounk’s was more cerebral . . . The following are highlights selected by The Free Press:

 

Bari Weiss (B after this): Some people call it wokeness, which sort of automatically brands you as being on the right. Other people call it critical theory or identity politics or postmodern neo-Marxism. There is a lot of disagreement about how we actually describe this thing that all of us are witnessing. So I want to start there. What is it that we’re actually talking about?”

 

Christopher Rufo (R after this): “I think it’s an ideological syndrome. So it’s a cluster of traits, ideas, concepts, narratives, and bureaucratic arrangements that have revolutionized American society over the last 50 years. I trace the immediate origins back to the year of 1968, and that the argument I make in my book America’s Cultural Revolution, is that all of the ideas from the radical left of that era—the late 1960s, early 1970s—have infiltrated universities and then started to move laterally through bureaucracies in the state sector, in K-12 education, in HR departments, and even the Fortune 100 companies. And what you see over the course of this process is some very multisyllabic, complex ideological concepts from the originators of these ideas in that period. And now they’ve filtered out through bureaucratic language, through euphemisms, to become what we know as DEI. That’s the ultimate bureaucratic expression of these ideologies.”

 

My response: The postmodernist neo-Marxist were very clever, hiding their racist, racialist, revolution-seeking, power-acquiring ambitions behind multisyllabic, complex ideological concepts that were enticing to the young and gullible, not sensing the iron fist of totalitarian government underneath the velvet glove. Bureaucratic language and euphemisms further disguised the intent of these radicals: to overthrow America and install racialist groups and elites that would judge and punish people based solely on their group-identity, the color of their skin, and their ideological heterodoxy. All dissent is to be crushed; all opponents imprisoned and silenced.

 

R: “You call it—any of those labels you just suggested, I think, are correct in general, at least facets of this ideology. But at this point, it’s not just an idea. It’s actually an administrative, cultural and bureaucratic power that has manifested itself and entrenched itself as a new, let’s say, hegemonic cultural force in American life.

 

Yascha Mounk (Y after this): “I think the best way to boil down the ideas of this ideology is in three propositions. Number one, that identity categories like race, gender and sexual orientation are the key prism for understanding society. But to understand how we talk to each other today, or to understand who won the last election, or to understand how political revolutions happen, you have to look at things like race, gender and sexual orientation.”

 

My response: Identity categories that are group-identity categories (race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and so on) are exactly the wrong way to seek to understand our society. We have always been an individualistic society, and we viewed people through the individual identities manifested and self-identified with by each citizen on her own, a unique person among tens of millions of citizens. Mis-identifying the traditional, self-identifying of themselves by citizens as individualists has done irreparable harm and will not be easily undone.

 

Y: “Number two, that universalist values and neutral rules, like those enshrined in the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are just meant to pull the wool over people’s eyes, that they actually were always designed to perpetuate forms of racist and sexist discrimination, that as Derrick Bell, the found of critical race theory, claimed, America in the year 2000 remained as racist as it had been in 1950 and 1850.

 

My response: Mounk’s point of view is typical Leftist distortion of the noble, decent attitudes of most Americans over the decades.

 

Y: “And, third, which follows rather needlessly if you grant the first two premises, that therefore, in order to make any kind of progress in our society, we have to rip up those universal rules and aspirations and make how we all treat each other, and how the state treats us all, explicitly depend on the kind of identity group into which we are born. I think if you understand that is the core of the ideology, what you call it is less important.”

 

My response: From Marx on forward through today's woke intellectuals that have overthrown American institutions, and are enforcing their DEI ideology, they operate on false, cruel moral assumptions. They value group morality, group identity, oppressor groups versus oppressed groups, collectivist ethics as noble. They condemn and refute egoist ethics, individual identity, individual morality as mere covers for the unjust, racist white male Christian heteronormative patriarchal hierarchy. But we are the good guys, and these woke radicals are the bad guys.

 

B: “On whether it’s accurate to say cultural Marxism is taking place:

 

Y: “I think where we probably have genuine disagreements is in the extent to which it’s helpful to think of this ideology as being Marxist. So, Chris, correct me if I’m wrong: I think you refer to it sometimes as a form of cultural Marxism. So the idea, broadly speaking, is that you take, sort of, Marxist political ideology—you take out the class and you sort of put in identity categories like race and gender and sexual orientation. And broadly speaking, you get the ideas we are talking about. I think that is wrong for a number of reasons.”

 

My response: The woke revolution that is now prevalent and dominant in America is cultural Marxism, of course. The transition from scientific, hard-nosed class-struggling, revolutionary, violent political Marxism to cultural Marxism is not that difficult to detect because Marxist identity category of class (rich and poor, haves and have-nots, exploiters and exploited, colonizer/occupier and colonized/occupied, oppressor and oppressed) smoothly bleeds over into the intersectional victim classes of race, gender, gender-orientation and so forth, dominated and oppressed allegedly by whites, males, heterosexuals, Christians.

 

Both the hard-core, old-fashioned Leninist Marxists and the putative soft-tyranny new cultural Marxists divide the world according to group morality, group equality and group inequality, group rights and group identity. The oppressor are all wrong and all bad, and to be overthrown, and the oppressed are all correct, all noble and justified in whatever they do to their oppressors to right the world.

 

And if the cultural Marxists win the government and set up their soft tyranny, it will soon enough turn totalitarian, nightmarish and Leninist, as the professors and intellectuals are swept aside so that the Communist Party running things can have their say. I see a straight line from Leninist Marxism to disguised cultural neo-Marxism back to fully revealed Leninist Marxism in charge, once they hold the American reins of power without effective opposition. There will be no more need to be nice or compassionate, and the intersectional grievance groups that the Marxists claimed to represent, will be cast down and aside like the useful fools they have been, pathetic true-believers no longer of any use to their entrenched overlords.

 

Y: “First, because I don’t think that there’s very much left of Marxism when you take out the economic categories. It’s a little like saying ‘when you take the bat out of baseball.’ You’ve gotten rid of too much for it to be meaningful. Secondly, because of the thinkers who really do, I think, make up this tradition. Michel Foucalt joins the French Communist Party, which is very much listening to Moscow in 1950, but he leaves it in 1953 in disgust. Derrick Bell says he barely read any Marx in college, and after that he never had the time. The people he really read were people like (W.E.B.) DuBois and others. And when you go back to the core thinkers of the Marxist tradition, to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the Frankfurt School and others, they simply don’t help you understand contemporary progressive politics.

 

Then, of course, the thing we haven’t really mentioned, which comes to be interpreted as the claim that if you stand at (a) different intersection of identities than me, then I really can’t understand you, and I just have to defer my political judgment to you. That comes out of Kimberl’e Crenshaw. And that, I think, is an area where we have a genuine intellectual disagreement.:

 

My response: The fact that Progressivism is now a mass movement and Leftists are true believers, proponents of their holy cause, cultural socialism, or postmodernist neo-Marxism—these realities make these pure collectivists easy to convert to or share a very close ideological sameness of collectivized ideological thinking as did the fanatical, hardcore, economic/political Marxist of old. They are almost intellectual clones.

 

C: “I personally don’t use the term cultural Marxist that Yascha has done. I don’t do so in the book, although I think that the basic concept, if we leave the moniker aside, is that Marxism—the basic categorical distinctions—move away from a purely orthodox materialist science or material determinism toward entities of culture, family, law, in a kind of Gramscian direction. (Herbert) Marcuse was a Marxist, and he was the most influential philosophical figure of the New Left, which is the prototype of the radical left we see today.

 

His doctoral student, Angela Davis, was a member of the Communist Party, is a devoted Marxist, and really took the Marxist tradition and applied it to racial categories. Then within academia, most notably her long career at UC-Santa Barbara, and then her mentees, the third generation, were the founders of Black Lives Matter. They said themselves, ‘we are trained Marxists.’ If you read a law review article written by one of the BLM founders, if you listen to their interviews and speeches, and then if you listen to their interviews with Angela Davis, they make very clear: ‘we are mobilizing along racial lines. We think that that’s the best rhetorical approach to score political victories. But the ultimate goal is the abolition of capitalism.’ And you see this absolutely everywhere: in training programs and academic work, and even critical race theory.”

 

My response: Rufo does a great job pointing out that abolition of capitalism is the ultimate goal for these true believers and champions of grievance groups’ identity politics.

 

B: “On what’s at stake in the Marxism argument. And if DEI is Marxist, why do Fortune 500 companies employ it?

 

But tell me what’s at stake, actually, in this argument, because I could go with both sides. But for the average person looking at this ideology and just saying ‘This is bad. Look at the way it segregates Americans. I look at the anti-Americanism all over it. I look at the anti-capitalism that’s definitely explicit in large parts of it, and I just think it’s bad.’ And then they hear the two of you having a disagreement about whether it’s Marxist or not. They might wonder, why does it really matter in the end, if we can all agree that it’s a bad thing and that it’s bad for America?”

 

My response: Hard-core Leninist Marxism was an especially brutal, violent mass movement, and cultural or postmodern neo-Marxism is also a mass movement, and, when fully implemented and victorious, its inner viciousness and complete ruthlessness will come to the fore. Whatever differences between these two kinds of Marxism or their surface distinctions as to love of revolution by violence or revolution that uses compassion, the Big Lie, euphemism and Fabian gradualism, the latter revolution will catch up the to the former, and turn just as nasty.

 

Both are bad and anti-American and bad for America, but, when one deals with evil, it is important to know the game the Devil is playing, and what words, concepts, justifications, and strategies he is deploying to gain victory before the sleeping masses wake up, in order that the masses are alerted in time to toss off such Leftist incrementalists. Stephen Hicks and Chris Rufo are just trying to let the masses know what they are actually up against, and how deadly its evil America-haters really are.

 

R: “What I think is really at stake—I think in Yascha’s interpretation, it appears to be this cerebral, abstract intellectual problem with academia. And if we can only have the right ideas and engage in debate, then the great ideas will win, and then the bad ideas will decay, and the everything will be fine. But if you take seriously the written words over the course of a half-century of these political objectives, of these thinkers and their activists, who have certainly seized territory in many, many institutions, you’re going to say it’s not just an intellectual debate.”

 

My response: Rufo is correct that conservative activists must fight back, hard, and now for bad ideas do not die out. When the masses become frustrated, they align with a holy cause, its guru and passing mass movement, not due to its superior ideas, but due to the strength and enthusiastic unity it offers people jumping on board, a chance to hide from their spoiled lives.

 

The cause promoted by these true believers can easily become the law of the land and its story and culture, though it is bad for all. This is where we are at with the Leftist woke revolution—complete victory for them is imminent, without principled, huge, unwavering, united conservative intellectual and political push back.

 

R: “In fact, they want to, as critical race theorists have written, eliminate First Amendment protections for any speech they deem harmful, for any speech they deem racist. The want to eliminate the right to individual equality, as codified in the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and have a system of racial categorization and racial spoils system in which power, privilege, wealth and property are redistributed along the lines of racial identity. And they want to abolish the system of free enterprise, free markets, entrepreneurial capitalism that has made a massive blessing, not just for the United States but for all over the world, and have it all run by a quote, unquote, ‘anti-racist bureaucracy.’ And I think what is really at stake is: if you value the right to free speech, if you value the right to private property, if you value the right to be treated equally as an individual, if you value the United States Constitution—that’s what’s at stake.”

 

My response: It is hard to imagine for the average citizen, happy, prosperous, free and blessed, trusting in people’s good intentions, and offering that people are basically good, just how cruel, evil, stupid, and wretched the Progressive true believers and their dangerous program is, but both Rufo and I know what they plan, and we know how horrible life will be degraded under these totalitarian, murderous monsters. The stakes could not be higher.

 

Y: “One of the things that you cannot understand if you think of these ideas as Marxist, is why the Fortune 500 companies have proven so willing to adopt them? Why is it that corporate DEI trainings have so easily been able to incorporate these ideas? They certainly never incorporated the ideas of Karl Marx. Diversity training certainly never said, ‘the true nature of American society is capitalists exploiting workers, and you should form a union and go on strike.’ That certainly would not be conformable with what a Fortune 500 company would allow its diversity trainers to say. So why is it that they are willing to have people come in and talk this kind of language?”

 

My response: My thought is that big business and big government are now in bed together, as government picks corporate winners and losers. The government is woke and the corporations are woke, thinking their adopting federal, woke ideology as corporate policy will buy them some time and forgiveness with cultural and bureaucratic socialists that hate capitalists, but, once the Marxist dictatorship is installed, then the corporations will be betrayed by the government apparatchiks as they did 30 years earlier for the citizens.

 

R: “Why would Fortune 100 companies do this? The answer to that is actually very important. It is because they felt pressure from the cultural left on these so-called racial equity issues. And they had already satisfied everything they needed from the economic right: tax cuts, deregulation, free trade abroad. And so what they did is made a gamble and really a co-optation strategy. And more accurately, they were paying the tax—or really like labor unitions and factories in the mid-century period would pay the Mafia protection money. They adopt DEI policies for a number of reasons.

 

One, to limit legal liability because of frivolous racial discrimination claims. Two, to buy off activist groups to leave them alone and not harass them and jeopardize their reputation. And then three, because there is internal pressure to, let’s say, ‘do something.’ And these are the offerings that are on the table. It doesn’t mean they are Marxists. Obviously not.”

 

My conclusion: Rufo introduced or triggered in me and to me and the reader is the embedded implication, the idea that the American political and cultural tradition gives pride of place to settling questions of justice and injustice and issues of equality and inequality for each individual. That is the American cultural and jurisprudential tradition, and the objective of the conservative counterrevolution is to restore it.

 

What the Progressive cultural, political, and legal revolution foisted onto America, after our adopting the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and after the followers of Herbert Marcuse and postmodernist professors from the 70s until today took over America, what was made top emphasis was that group rights not individual rights, group morality not individual morality, group identity politics and not individual identity politics would be the sole subject matter for how issues of justice or injustice, or equality or inequality were to be adjudicated based on group affiliation, not individual content of character or merit.