Chris Rufo sends me email articles which I subscribe to, and he interviewed a British Professor, Eric Kaufmann, who apparently is an expert cultural Marxism. Rufo was interested in Kaufman’s predictions about the future of social justice leftism.
Their interview runs about 15 pages, and I copied the whole thing below and will occasionally respond to what they say.
Rufo (R after this): “
Post-Progressivism
Social scientist Eric Kaufmann on the future beyond "social justice" leftism.
Jan 24, 2025
∙ P
Christopher Rufo: Eric Kaufmann and I have been traveling almost on parallel tracks. We had a book about the origins of woke ideology—mine is published. We work on some of the policy and university reform, me in the United States, Eric in the U.K. I thought this was a great opportunity to sit down with you and explore something that you’ve been working on at length, and it’s this idea of post-progressivism as an academic discipline, a concept, and a fulcrum for instituting some of the changes that we’ve been talking about the last few years. Why don’t you just open up at the beginning and tell me what is post-progressivism?”
Kaufmann (K after this): “
Eric Kaufmann: Thanks, Chris. Well, the first thing to say is that if you look at big trends in ideas, they often follow rather than lead events on the ground. If we think of postmodernism, or if you think of critical theory as well—critical legal studies, critical race theory—they all emerged after the tumult of the ’60s, when there was a real questioning about a lot of what the postmodernists called grand narratives or verities. One was this idea of economic progress. You’d had the oil shocks in 1973, and there was a questioning of the fat years after 1945 seemed to be coming to an end. You also had a number of events in the ’60s, obviously, the Vietnam conflict, but clearly decolonization. The Western empires were breaking up, and all these colonies were becoming independent. Then you had the so-called new social movements, the black Civil Rights Movement, followed very quickly by radical feminism and also the gay rights movement. All of these movements then lead to an intellectual ferment, which leads to something like postmodernism.”
My response: Of notice is that Kaufmann refers to postmodernist denial of the validity and universal applicability of grand narratives, or verities, which guide a people and give their lives meaning.
In this post-progressive period of counterrevolution, we will reinstate belief in the new verities and perhaps coin some new ones yet to be introduced, something like Mavellonialism.
K: “One of the things that I’m asking about, and I think we both have our antenna on this, is whether we are in a moment like the ’60s when there’s a change going on as a result of events. Just as in the ’60s and early ’70s, there was a questioning of this inevitable modernization and this enlightenment, scientific, technological progress narrative. Whether they were right or wrong, there was this questioning.
What we’ve seen with what’s now a decade—the populist moment, has been running since 2014 when the National Front, the U.K. Independence Party, and the Danish Progress Party both hit almost thirty percent of the vote at the European elections. And then we had Trump, and then we had Brexit, and we had a number of other things happening. We’ve now had a solid decade of populism. It’s not something you can say is a blip. We’ve got polarization happening in country after country. And there are a whole series of other social problems. For example, you’ve obviously got a problem with birth rates, and you’ve got a problem with men dropping out of the workforce, and you’ve got problems with disorders that you’ve covered. A lot of these problems aren’t easily addressed by the progressive paradigm.
What I’m arguing is the progressive paradigm that has sort of obtained since the late ’60s, which combines an expressive individualism in culture with a left-wing humanitarianism, again, related to race, gender, and sexuality—that’s been the paradigm that has energized a lot of the left-wing intellectual movements—it’s run its course. I’m arguing with post-progressivism that we are almost seeing the emergence of a bookend to the progressive era of 1965 to 2025, 60 years. I think we’re coming to the end of that, and I think there’s a shift in cultural mood. And I think that then leads to a whole series of questions we can get into.”
R: “Rufo: Before we do that, let’s go backward just a step. I wanted to talk a bit about what progressivism is. You’re talking about it in ideological terms. I see it also in bureaucratic terms. In the US, we had the Great Society, the buildup of programs and social programs designed to reshape inner cities, education, and welfare programs, to lift up the poor, to provide not only equal rights but equal educational or material conditions—equality of opportunity was a euphemism that many use in including people on the right. And I think that is also really at its exhaustion point. If you look at all the promises from the Great Society, they have spent now tens of trillions of dollars on these programs, and the numbers haven’t budged at all. In fact, many of the numbers have deteriorated. Do you factor that into if the ideology follows the conditions on the ground? Do you see that as far as government practice? That hasn’t changed at all. It’s not going to change in the near term. Are you arguing, though, that there’s just a sense of recognition that these ideas have failed in real life? How do you approach the bureaucratic question in addition to the ideological question?”
K: “Kaufmann: That’s a really good question. Here’s the way I think about this. I think that the economic Left—economic progressivism, if you like—has a somewhat different rhythm, not totally different, but a somewhat different rhythm. For example, there was already a lot of questioning of the welfare state. If you go back to stagflation and worries about economic growth and the debates around supply-side economics. What I would say is the welfare state model, the union power model, all those things have been questioned already in the 20th century. That’s not to say there aren’t issues there. But what really wasn’t questioned, what really was just taken as the inevitable progress of humanity was on the cultural side—race, gender, sexuality—that was becoming antiracist, more tolerant of different sexualities, sexual orientations. Women are going to be entering the workforce in larger numbers, becoming a more diverse society. On those sort of identity dimensions, I think was really a sort of unquestioned belief in progress.
Whereas I think on the economic side, you already had a debate between people who said, ‘Well, growth of the state crowds out economic dynamism.’ I think that’s not as new. Even if those reforms weren’t made, and, yes, maybe that’s overdue, but that’s a somewhat separate debate. I see this as primarily the end of an era of cultural progressivism, this idea of liberating the individual from tradition on the one hand, that diverse differences and change are always the best thing, but equally also that we have to have equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for minorities, that that represents human progress and you can’t question it. And I guess it’s that cultural side that I think is really hitting the barriers now.
R: “Rufo: I agree. I think we see it, and I think that the critique of these ideas has become more salient and gained more ground. How do you see your concept of post-progressivism as similar or distinct from the idea of post-liberalism? This is a debate that we’re having everywhere between the Left and the Right, and I think it’s important to really help clarify our terms because a lot of people listening and thinking through these questions use them interchangeably, liberal, progressive, but I think you’re using them distinctly. And on the other side, post-progressivism and post-liberalism, I think you’re using them in a different sense than someone like, for example, Patrick Deneen, who has a Catholic post-liberalism. So help me help me sort through the terms, so we can anchor the rest of the conversation.”
K: “Kaufmann: There is a little bit of overlap between liberalism and progressivism, but I think there’s also a lot that’s distinct. If you think about Deneen and Vermeule and some of Hazony and some of these people who are writing in the post-liberal vein, what they’re really questioning is, in fact, classical liberalism, even sometimes the American Constitution, that the idea of emphasizing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is really at the root of all of our problems. And that is a whole debate, and that’s why they’re saying we need first, a living constitutionalism—except in a conservative direction, right—not an originalism. What they’re talking about is negative liberty, the idea of I have a sphere of rights that I can swing my fist, up to the point it hits your nose, I have the right to swing my fist. That classical liberal doctrine of rights is something that the post-liberals are actually challenging, and I think that’s pretty radical, and, therefore, it is a relatively narrow position.
Whereas what I guess I’m talking about has a lot broader pickup, certainly in public opinion. For example, most Americans would be opposed to cancel culture, the idea that people’s feelings trump somebody else’s right to free speech. I think that it’s a different set of problems. Likewise, I think a lot of the issues that are being thrown up, first of all, all the cancellations that have been occurring on campus, for example, but also the restrictions on speech, that you have to say Latinx instead of Latino and all of these sorts of ideas. But in addition to that, some of the downstream effects of woke, for example. Right now in Britain, partly due to Elon Musk’s interventions, we’re having a big debate over something called the grooming gangs, which some people may not be familiar with, which are these Pakistani gangs that were exploiting young, working-class white girls in northern English cities and operating sex rings. One of the reasons that the authorities were unable to crack down on this is because they feared that this would be culturally insensitive, and they feared that this would somehow smear the Pakistani community if they actually exposed really went after these rings. So they more or less allowed this thing to fester and continue to operate.
What that is an example of, really, is a downstream effect of woke. Woke, which makes race sacred, means race is a taboo, means you can’t actually take action against these grooming gangs because they’re of a different race than the majority of the population, and that it would be a microaggression of some sort to actually implicate them. So there are a whole series of ways, I guess, in which the excesses of cultural progressivism are coming home to roost. Another would be you can’t deport anybody because it’s a largely white country deporting nonwhite immigrants. That’s something that’s a bad look, and so we’re not going to deport anybody. Well, what happens then? You get an uncontrolled border. So a whole series of these problems have metastasized as a result of this cultural progressivism. That’s in addition to all the cancel culture incidents, to The New York Times endorsing crazy things like the 1619 Project, all of those overblown charges of racism, and the crime spike after 2020.
All of these things, I think, are leading to a rethink. And for the first time, I think this is actually deciding elections. I remember reading I’m old enough to remember when Bloom’s “The Closing of The American Mind” came out, and that was a big deal. But that debate about political correctness and speech codes and everything really happened in a very small tier of magazines and on campus, and it never left the campus. It was never deciding elections. Now these issues are deciding elections. That’s a big change. They’ve escaped the seminar room. And because they’ve escaped the seminar room onto social media and into the press, they’re now political. And for that reason, those institutions, like universities, are actually coming under a lot more pressure. They really didn’t come under that much pressure in the ’90s, when political correctness was going, ‘Hey ho, Western civ has got to go.’ All of those debates remained a bit parochial.”
R: “Rufo: I think that’s right. As the university devoured society and then imposed its vision on real life rather than ideological life, then you start seeing the actual real-world consequences, like you mentioned: grooming gangs, uncontrolled borders, the woman who got lit on fire on the New York subway train. I think you can perhaps trace the ideological roots of these news stories, and I think that it’s been, even in my own experience, very fruitful to try to explain to people, that this doesn’t just happen at random. It doesn’t happen without a cause, without an underlying idea that’s driving it, but actually, it’s connected to these ideas and connected to these policies.
So what’s the evidence then that we might be in a post-progressive moment? Is it the Trump, Orbán, global, populist right, and the AFD in Germany? Is it a populist political movement that signals the end? Is it a shift in public opinion? Or are you trying to lay down a marker in advance of public opinion to say post-progressivism is here, and we’re going to usher it in? It’s here intellectually and we’re going to usher it in in reality. So which comes first? Where are we on the timeline?”
K: “Kaufmann: It’s really interesting. I mean, I think you mentioned populism, right? Most voters for populist-Right parties are mainly voting on the immigration issue, and not on the culture wars issue. However, the reason that progressive excess matters is because when they made race sacred and gender and sexuality sacred, they essentially took those topics off the table of discussion for mainstream political parties. So if a mainstream party can’t touch immigration because they’ll be accused of being a racist, the only people who can touch that are the populist parties, the Sweden Democrats, for example. The mainstream Swedish party wouldn’t touch immigration levels in 2014. Suddenly, the Sweden Democrats were in. Same with the AFD in Germany during the migrant crisis in 2015. Because of the speech restrictions, the mainstream was unable to address what the electorate wanted. That opened up the space for the populace. Once the populace comes in, there’s a freak out by the Left-dominated media. They have a freak-out and call the populist voters deplorables or whatever. And then there’s a subsequent backlash.
I think that populism is partly caused—or in substantial measure caused—by woke speech restrictions, but it also energizes polarization. One of the reasons I would argue for post-progressivism is this endemic polarization, endemic populism. What’s interesting now is, I remember a journalist from Slate, who shall go unnamed, but was one of the only reasonable journalists there who said, ‘We really need Trump to win again. And it’s only when he wins again will some of my colleagues wake up.’ I actually think now, the fact Trump won and did so convincingly, has induced a certain amount of soul-searching amongst a slice of the Left and Center in a way that I don’t think was true in 2016, when it was seen as a blip and it was all about just resisting. I think that soul searching is important to the shift in the culture. The scaling back of DEI to some degree; I’d say it’s now more acceptable to criticize DEI.”
My response: Kaufmann seems to recognize that populism today may be the polarized reaction to progressivism that is the post-progressive trend of the future—who knows? If populism was transformed into a society of individuating supercitizens, then that would bottom-up change and rule on steroids, on a grand scale, something wholly new and unprecedented!”
K: “Another interesting lab is—I’m from Canada originally—and Justin Trudeau has just recently stepped down as leader. Canada was at the forefront of all of these trends and has been since the Multiculturalism Act under Justin’s father, Pierre Trudeau, in 1971. The dissolution that’s going on in Canada right now is really astounding. The fact that in Canada, there is really a huge shift in mood in the country is, I think, another indicator that these sets of ideas have really lost a lot of their luster, even in a place that was supposed to be a standard bearer of this. Now it is worth saying, by the way, that public opinion, I don’t think, is necessarily the key here. If you look at Canadian, British, and American publics, they’re all pretty similar. They’re all like two-thirds against the woke position. So it’s not so much the mass public who have always been against extreme cultural progressivism. It’s the elite political culture and the shifts in the intellectual culture. There are even things happening now in the U.S., for example. I saw an article that came out in The Chronicle of Higher Education, I don’t know if you saw this, about conservatism in the humanities now. It’s not a big thing, but there’s a bit of a rethink going on about just having a critical lens to everything in English—in English, for God’s sake. They’re starting to rethink whether it’s great to be tearing apart everything about Shakespeare.”
My response: Kaufmann notes that the masses in the West are now against cultural progressivism, and even political and intellectual elites are starting to pull back from it.
R: “Rufo: I did see that piece. I thought it was very interesting, especially coming from The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is, for the most part, a pretty hysterical left-wing interest rag. It does signal a shift, but I think that we shouldn’t overstate it either. I come into this problem from a similar vantage point where, yes, supporting Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo is now somewhat embarrassing for members of the elite. Great. Yes. The Black Lives Matter movement and institution has been utterly discredited; it’s just a tick more popular than Hamas among American voters. And on down the line, the same thing with trans. The public opinion on trans and the public’s questioning of trans has shifted a lot, where even The New York Times is publishing pieces that are making the same arguments that perhaps we were making a number of years ago that were grounds for getting banned on all social media platforms. In a sense elite opinion is shifting, and I think it’s shifting very quickly, but the institutions have not shifted. In fact, there are tens of thousands of people who are professional progressives who are embedded in institutions that are drawing salaries on the basis of these ideas.
That to me is the second problem. Yes, perhaps we can shift culture, perhaps we can shift elite consensus, but do we eventually have to change to have to change and challenge the institutions? And that’s much more difficult, and my sense is that the Trump administration will be the first acid test of that. Are they going to be able to do what I hope they’ll be they want to do, or is the institutional problem so entrenched that it becomes impossible no matter what opinions are?”
My response: Rufo wants not just a shift in the cultural towards post-progressivism, but in the institutions too, where thousands of mid-level progressives are unrepentant, militant and embedded.
K: “Kaufmann: It’s a really good question. I think you’re right. Because when you have an institution like a university, you have academic faculty who are going to want to reproduce their ideas through hiring. There’s also another problem, which is that Gen Z has been indoctrinated to a significant degree in the school system now. If you look at attitudes, for example, should James Damore have been fired? These are all things I cover in my book, “The Third Awokening.” Should J. K. Rowling be dropped by her publisher? On all of these sorts of questions, young people are much less tolerant of free speech than older people. Young leftists are much less tolerant than older leftists. We have a generational problem as well as an institutional problem. As the young generation becomes the median professor, the median employee at a law firm, median medic, they are going to change the culture. And that’s the other thing I’m really worried about.
What are the things that we can do to try? We’re going to have to get at the institutions. One of the arguments that I make, and that you make—we agree—is that we need to use elected government to reform institutions. We cannot just rely on people voting with their feet in free market solutions like school choice. We’ve actually got to reform public schools and what’s being taught in public schools. And also to try and cut DEI, for example, at university—try to reform those institutions while also trying to fund alternatives, some of the new institutes—New College of Florida, as an example, or University of Austin—some of these newer universities, ideally with funding from the legislatures or public funding because there isn’t that much private money around. It’s actually much overhyped. If you compare the small amount of philanthropic giving to the enormous revenues from tuition, endowments, and foundations that exist in the system. We have to get at the big beast, which is the system itself. I think there has to be a reform program as well for the institutions because the entrenched interests there are going to try and reproduce themselves.”
R: “Rufo: We can move then from the diagnosis. We have defined cultural progressivism. We have made the argument that we’re entering a cultural moment in which those ideas have lost their spirit and their power. We have this institutional problem. But what I think you’re doing, which is really interesting, is to actually lay down an intellectual marker, to start a subdiscipline or a focus of scholarly activity to help define and clarify this problem and posit a solution. Tell me more about how you’re thinking about that, how you’re organizing, and what you hope to accomplish.”
K: “Kaufmann: This gets back to what I was talking about with postmodernism. In the wake of the tumult of the ’60s and the disillusionment consequent on the oil shocks in the early ’70s. You’ve got the rise of postmodernism. But along with that, they were saying, okay, ‘We’re laying down a marker here. We’re at the end of the modern era. We’re into the postmodern era.’ But along with that, they came up with a methodological innovation, which is essentially relativism. They wanted to replace scientific method, objective truth with subjectivity and relativism and to say that, well, words don’t have any fixed meaning. They’re just pieces of text floating around in the ether, and they’re unmoored from anything in the real world. That was their methodological take. It was enthusiastically embraced because most, or even back then a significant number of, academics were on the Left, and they eagerly plowed into this.”
My response: It seems to me that part of the post-progressive counterrevolution by conservatives and traditionalists must be to reinstate modernism with its classical values its scientific method and objective truths, once again dominating culture and educational institutions as progressives and their subjective, relativistic postmodernist agendas recede in power, numbers, supporters, and prominence.
I am an Ayn Randian: words do have fixed meanings, and their definitions are moored to the real world. Text is tied to reality, period.
K: “Now if we take the post-progressive moment from the 2020s onwards, I would say something similar is occurring. There is a sort of bookending of the cultural progressive era, 1965 to 2025. Along with that has to come a new research program and methodology. One thing that postmodernism and critical Theory did was they said, ‘We’re going to problematize the taken-for-granted, scientific method, the taken-for-granted arguments about modernization and about science.’ What I would argue is that we need to borrow some of that unmasking spirit, that critical spirit, without going the full distance. But what we’re going to do is we’re going to apply those unmasking tools to critical theory itself, to left-wing social science itself. Because left-wing social science is presented as normal and natural. What is needed is for us to actually try and say no. It’s actually not natural. It is subject to the same political power forces that in fact the postmodernists were accusing mainstream science of being motivated by.”
My response: Kaufmann is insisting that postmodernist, left-wing social science needs the tables turned on it by conservatives who unmask it, and deny that it is natural, but that it is only socially contextual, political, or ideological.
K: “They argued that knowledge is power, and therefore, it’s all about power games. That’s what influences which paradigms become dominant. I don’t go the full distance there, but I do think there’s a point, which is that there is an attempt to normalize concepts like systemic racism and to just assume that, well, that’s obviously true. Actually, as you know, when you peel back and ask what this is based on, there’s nothing there. It’s just self-referential. This is applying the methods of critical theory to critical theory itself. It’s what I call meta-critical theory.
Say, for example, critical theory might say race is a social construct that has been created by whites to oppress nonwhites. They’ve created this white nonwhite, conceptual boundary called race in order to oppress using systemic racism. So the oppressive structure is that of white supremacy or systemic racism. What meta-critical theory does is it just takes that up to the next level, and it just says, well, instead of talking about the social construction of race, we’re going to talk about the social construction of racism. Now it’s not to say that there’s no empirical reality to racism. There is, of course, real, old-fashioned, Klan-style racism and discrimination. However, it is also the case that the boundaries of racism can be stretched. We saw that in the 2010s, for example, when the number of white, liberal Americans saying racism is a very big problem in the country more than doubled between 2010 and 2016 or ’18 at a time when there’s growing acceptance of intermarriage, police shootings are falling, all the indicators are actually moving in the other direction. This was actually moral panic, a social construction, a stretching of people’s perceptions that racism was happening everywhere when it actually wasn’t. The number of people who think more than a thousand young black men have been shot by police, whereas the real number was 12 to 20. That’s an example of what I mean, is that you can get these moral panics. You can get the social construction.”
My response: Cultural Marxists see the world as meaningless but that group versus group power struggles and warring are eternal and inevitable, so the groups they favor (the downtrodden) are to be the new elite, and held back and down will be disfavored, newly discriminated groups like whites, Christians, males, heterosexuals, and Jews.
This entire woke ideology, a racist, totalitarian social construction and mass movement needs to be decisively defeated.
K: “The argument here, theoretically, is that there is a social construction of reality occurring around concepts like racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, where instead of talking about whites suppressing minorities, what we’re talking about is anti-racists oppressing racists. Now that may sound odd, but the argument is that the term racist is in large measure a social construction, not something reflecting reality. The term anti-racist is also a social construction. The argument here is that the people who claim the mantle of anti-racism, that’s a power move. And the people who are stigmatized as racist is also a power move. So that is applying the same method that they apply to the new woke if you like the woke categories. Instead of racial discrimination, we’re really talking about political discrimination now as a dominant axis of society.
Part of this is to say there’s a research program and a method that comes out of bookmarking the progressive era. The other part of it is to say, well, the research program is we need something. Instead of critical white studies, for example, we need a critical woke studies. What is critical woke studies? It is what, essentially, our books are about and this huge literature, really, John McWhorter and Yascha Mounk and all these people, and from the Left, from the socialist left, from liberals like Greg Lukianoff, conservatives like Douglas Murray. All of these books, many by non-academics like yourself, actually. What’s so interesting is actually academia is not in a great position necessarily to spearhead this. We’re going to have to have people from outside the academy do a significant amount of this. But there’s a whole literature. There’s actually, if you think about it, this is an entire academic discipline that has emerged just in the last five to 10 years.
But unlike most other academic disciplines, we don’t see the annual conference. We don’t see the journal. We don’t see any formalization in theory building, or at least systematic theory building. And now one of the things I want to do—I’ve got a conference coming up in June—is to be the conference that brings together authors in this new discipline. Because there are debates. Is it is culture downstream of politics, like Richard Hanania and Chris Caldwell say? Is it like you and I say, is politics downstream of culture? There are debates over self-interest and luxury beliefs versus true beliefs, John McWhorter versus Rob Henderson. There are all kinds of debates within what is actually an academic discipline. But because academia is so allergic to it, it can’t actually fulfill what it should be doing, which is creating these structures.”
R: “Rufo: It’s so interesting because even at New College, which you mentioned earlier and where I’m a trustee, they organized a course, and I didn’t hear about it until after the course was announced. They organized a course for, I believe it’s actually happening right now, a January course, on woke studies, essentially. They assembled some Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo and then my book. I think your book is in it as well. They’re pairing these readings of woke and anti-woke and having a class, to investigate it and to discuss it. The teacher of this class is Andrew Doyle, who is a British satire artist, and I didn’t know this previously, but he also has a Ph.D. from Oxford or Cambridge, I can’t remember where, in literature. He has an academic background, but he works very much outside of academia. Now he’s back to teach this course, and there was a bit of a controversy around this course, actually.
To me, it’s so funny because as you said, the Left protested the existence of this course, they wanted to shut it down, and the idea is so funny to me because, as you said, this is the dominant phenomenon of the last 10 years, post-Mike Brown, the establishment of BLM 2014, 2015 to 2024. It’s probably the most important cultural and political trend of the past decade, and yet you only have had one academic course exploring it, and most of the books are from non-academic writers, and the teacher of the course is a non-academic. It’s quite interesting, and I think that you’re right. We have built up a critique, those of us in this community, in this world. And yes, there’s arguments about it. They have the hereditarians and the culturalists and the civil rights obsessives and the long march of the institutions and anti-egalitarian, whatever. You have all the different flavors. We can settle the debates amongst ourselves. I think that’s very fruitful. But you’re right that we actually need to have a bit of higher level thinking because these are very important issues.
When you talk about theory building, walk me through some of the basic ideas that you’re thinking about that could provide maybe a comprehensive or unifying theory, through which we could understand this discipline or this emergent discipline.”
K: “Kaufmann: The easiest way to do that is an analogy with another field that I’ve been studying. That’s my academic background, which is the study of nationalism. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and you had the breakup of the Soviet Union, the breakup of Yugoslavia, for example, all these new countries being formed, there was a huge efflorescence in the study of nationalism. We had the journal, which I’m still an editor of. You had a conference series, an explosion. Now, of course, there’s also been an explosion of studies of populism, as a result of the last 10 years. All of those things have really taken off. There are now tens of thousands of papers on right-wing populism.
What are the main theories? If we talk about what I’ll call critical woke studies, essentially the study of the cultural left, I mentioned two axes. One is people who say, like Richard Hanania, that you had civil rights law, and it’s all about compliance with civil rights law, and over-compliance is what drives affirmative action, disparate impact, and political correctness. It’s all downstream. He almost says, well, this is really an accidental outcome of civil rights law. That is a very different theoretical take from someone like yourself or John McWhorter who would emphasize that you have a set of ideas that comes first, Marcuse and Paulo Freire, and that then gets institutionalized. There’s a march through the institutions.
There’s another debate—one is politics first or culture first—another is bottom-up versus top-down. For example, if you say Marcuse and the critical theorists, they institutionalize their ideas. There’s this link between the Panthers and BLM. It’s an intellectual argument. It’s still a top-down argument in a way where you have a plan, a march to the institutions. The bottom-up position is, I talk about this a lot in my book, that this is more like a mind virus, like a COVID-19 that people catch—also Gad Saad is talking about this as a mind virus—and it’s spread around from the bottom up. You have all of these almost religious entrepreneurs who are on social media trying to stir up cancel culture mobs and Twitter mobs, and they’re trying to get their influencers competing and jockeying. All of this is emerging like the Great Awakenings of American Protestantism, the 1st and 2nd Great Awakenings: it’s these upsurges of energy from below. So another debate would be, is it top-down versus bottom-up?
Then there’s finally this question about self-interest. Vivek Ramaswamy with his book “Woke, Inc.,” this argument that corporations cynically almost created this thing and certainly amplified it to almost divide the working class, take attention away from what they were paying their garment workers in Bangladesh; or someone like Batya Ungar-Sargon talking about, similarly, this idea that this is a status, or Rob Henderson that it’s a luxury belief thing, Musa al-Gharbi, another one. This is all about status and status demarcation and virtue-signaling your status. That is a very different argument to a John McWhorter, no, this is a true belief in a religion. Again, those are just some of the conceptual debates which I’m hoping to have.
The other thing I should say is that one aspect of this post-progressive research program has got to be interrogating this very dominant, cultural Left belief system, critical woke studies. But the other aspect is actually allowing us to put more resources and more energy into exploring topics that conservatives and maybe classical liberals would be interested in. How do you get social cohesion? What determines the health of families and birth rates, questions which are really ignored systematically by sociologists and psychologists. Their interest is in inequality and stratification. Secondly, they’re not interested in, for example, heredity or evolutionary psychology. They’re not interested in explanations of inequality that don’t revolve around structural racism, sexism, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity. They wouldn’t be that interested in, say, an argument that said family structure is really an important variable in the racial wealth gap, for example. There is a whole set of questions that aren’t being asked, a whole set of, topics that are essentially being underfunded or ignored entirely. That’s the second aspect of this is ideally, we would be we would have a lot of grad students and professors studying the fertility collapse, and the drop in workforce participation of younger men, looking at some of the reasons why we’ve got almost endemic pop populism and polarization. We’re not we’re not actually getting that research.”
R: “Rufo: It’s interesting. I’ll pick up there. A lot of these topics though, if you if you look hard enough, you can find a body of literature dating back many decades on these questions, whether it’s family structure, group differences, fertility, or family formation. If you look at even someone like Robert Rector at Heritage Foundation, who is a great social scientist, he did a number of papers 20 to 25 years ago, before that Charles Murray on the welfare state. But Rector’s statistical analysis showed that one concrete measure of inequality is correlated with race, yes. But if you control for the mother’s verbal skills, previous welfare participation, and family structure, the race gap disappears. There’s these papers that, if you know the right people and dig around hard enough, you can find them.
Is the question establishing the truth of these positions again, or is it a question of mass and scale? Do you just need more people working on these questions in order to build up a body of work or a body of literature that is perceived as persuasive or can find a foothold in the marketplace or can create conferences and more than just a one-off paper? It strikes me is a lot of these questions are actually resolved. So which is the problem?
I think they’re both problems. I mean, I think you’re right that there has been research on some of this stuff that is maybe 20 years old now. There has been research that is important and isn’t getting enough attention. Lee Jussim at Rutgers has done important work on this, that papers that go against the narrative—for example, that say we can’t find evidence of discrimination against women in hiring in academia or in publishing—most papers actually show that, but they never get cited. So it’s about disproportionate attention on the papers that go with the narrative and ignoring or gatekeeping the papers that go against the narrative. You do need scale in a way. There may be a paper or two that squeaks through and has somebody interested enough to do that research but never gets cited. That’s going to affect the nature of knowledge, of established science, right, especially as presented to the public as it filters through into policy. So one of the problems is that the good stuff is not actually getting cited. It’s not filtering through.”
My response: Good conservative think tank research and papers are not getting cited or bubbling up to the public eye—my blog cite invisibility, for example.
R: “A second problem is we don’t have enough people who are interested or brave enough to do the research in the first place. There are probably many questions and probably many aspects of racial inequality that are not being studied. Politically incorrect aspects, not to do with heritability, but just to do with basic things like family structure or cultural attitudes to saving, for example. That research is simply not being done. We’re not getting the full picture that we need. We’re not getting challenges to existing paradigms, which would knock down those paradigms and would then alter the tenor of public discussion and policy discussion.
Because the Left dominates social sciences and the social humanities, they’re able to establish the nature of truth. This is where this is almost a Foucauldian point, where perhaps at some level, money and power really do shape knowledge, or what is taken to be established knowledge. If you don’t have the heft, then you’re not going to be able to shape the contours of established knowledge. I do think that matters. It’s partly a matter of amplification of the few papers that exist, but it’s also, I think, a matter of having the manpower to actually get the research done that then reflects social reality. We’re getting a social science that is not giving a truthful, faithful reflection of social reality.
And that’s the fundamental point in post-progressivism. In a way, the postmodernist critique was that enlightenment-based science is actually just a power game. Without going that distance, what we’re saying is that progressive social science is a power game and is distorting knowledge. That’s the argument, and we have to actually try and pull the mask off of this system of power. I would call it ideologically motivated rather than simply self-interested. But we have to unmask that in order to have a social science that actually is faithful to social reality, and we actually have to reproduce a new knowledge.
Rufo: I don’t know. I’m torn on this question and may come down on it in slight disagreement. There’s another person in this, burgeoning field, Nathan Cofnas, who has the thesis that we’re all wrong, and he’s got the right answer because he says a hereditary truth-telling will shatter the woke consensus. And without even taking a position on the correctness of his analysis, my retort to that is, ‘But that position has been elaborated, you know, for decades.’ There’s been somebody with some prominence making some variation of that argument. It’s the Charles Murray argument, “The Bell Curve” in that political correctness phase of the 1990s. I was a kid, I was very young, but I still remember when “The Bell Curve” came out. I remember it being this huge scandal. I was maybe 10 or 11, maybe 12, I can’t remember exactly, but I remember thinking, ‘Oh, wow. That is a very scary, very bad book’. That was the message that filtered through.
It strikes me as something else. Again, I’m not even taking a position on that, but even if you were to, for the sake of argument, say, that is correct. Murray was correct in his analysis. He had more publicity than probably any book since “The Closing of the American Mind” a decade prior. Yet it was radically insufficient. There’s a bunch of these alternative explanations. Some of them are right, and some of them are wrong, but it strikes me that none of that has been sufficient to move the discussion or to reform the institutions.
I’m just very hesitant about this idea that if we only had another paper, we could finally break through with the truth. I think that Cofnas in particular, presenting himself as someone who is willing to step into the breach with the truth is actually somewhat naive. It’s like, well, okay, you present your paper, good luck. It strikes me as maybe the wrong locus for the work, but in fact, a better focus of the work would be to say how practically can these institutions change. That’s a question that it seems to me that very few people are asking and even fewer have answered.”
Kaufmann: There’s a lot there. I think they’re somewhat separate questions. The Cofnas question, I agree with you there. I think his argument is that woke really is all about the fact that black and white are not converging and that if you could somehow bust whatever paradigm exists for explaining that—my argument is it was never really about outcomes. Woke is not really powered by measurable concrete outcomes. It was never really about necessarily bringing blacks up to the level of whites. It was really much more about moralistic virtue signaling, and it was an ideological belief. I think that’s a separate debate.”
My response: The critical race attack on whites as racist oppressors of blacks was never intended to bring blacks up to the levels of whites; rather DEI is profoundly racist and vicious, and the ploy was to downgrade whites well below the level of blacks.
The only way that the division between blacks and whites can be eliminated—eliminating racism—is to encourage all people to become individualists, individuators motivated by egoist morality, and, with that radical downsizing of group identity and group values, then racism—a group versus group natural bias of insiders against outsiders—can be eliminated for the most part.
K: “But what I will say is I think it’s not enough to just have podcasts and YouTube shows and media personalities coming in with their opinion or even with very strong facts and numbers. I think that’s important. I think it’s hugely important. But I also think there is still a certain amount of prestige that comes from that deeper academic bona fides. If you have that credential, not the credential so much, but if you have somebody who’s been studying a subject for 20 years, has read all the literature, has done a lot of the data crunching or a lot of the work, that gets a certain respect from elites that somebody who, even if they’re very sharp and they’re in the online world, they are unlikely to have.
I think it is important, also in the policy world, to have these experts, to have the credentials as well as the people who are breaking boundaries online in the podcast world. This is where I do think that theoretical depth and analytical depth and building up a body of knowledge, having a set of papers that are peer-reviewed that you can point to, is important for credibility. That’s where I would argue that we also need the academic backing for a lot of the intuitions which are correct. It may be true. We all know it’s true, but we also need the data just to back it up.”
My response: Kaufmann is right that we need post-progressivism not just at the podcast level, but being done by real experts, academics he suggests, but I would go farther and in a different direction: millions of amateurs as individuating supercitizens could write white papers of originality, subtlety and insight to rival any egghead in the world, and that would provide real gravitas to the post-progressivist or neo-Modernist metanarrative.
R: “Rufo: I agree with that, and I agree with that point of view. But perhaps we actually need to go a bit underneath that. Your point that you make almost as a joke is actually the most important one, which is a lot of these questions we just know the answer to already through observations, personal experience, and intuition, and they’re confirmed with the most rigorous statistical studies by various people like, for example, Robert Rector. But you actually need it as a debating point or as a policy point or as a justification or rationalization.
Perhaps we can go a bit deeper though and try to untether the foundations of left-wing social science in itself, which is a fraud. It really is a fraud. You have a million papers on systemic racism. It’s all fraudulent. I think this is happening just by itself, but I think rather than playing the game, I think the danger in post-progressivism or a critical critical theory is Spider-Man pointing at the other Spider-Man. You can be in a circle. Whereas I think the better claim is perhaps to say, here are the fundamental paradigmatic flaws in left-wing social science, here’s why it’s all predicated on a fraudulent set of principles, and here is an alternative theory that is much closer to reality. Whereas the left-wing social science and reality have diverged to the point that it’s not credible anymore.
That to me seems quite possible, and then you could bring in a lot of the more contrarian social science to substantiate it. Then perhaps you have some room forward, but you still confront this problem of how you persuade institutional people who are ensconced to either break with the consensus or use policy levers to chip away at their resources so that the consensus is able to produce less. It’s very hard. It becomes very difficult.”
K: “Kaufmann: I think there are some things that can be done. One of the points is that most papers are either uncited or cited by only a handful of people. One of the ways forward—and this is especially the case given that only five percent of social scientists in the top 200 universities would be conservative, for example, and it’d be seventy-five percent or so on the left. You have only a very small number of people. They’re probably in the closet. A couple of things. I mean, one is to have some institutions. It could be institutes, like the Hamilton Center, University of Florida, or New College, where people feel freer.
But the second thing is that where we have that countercultural research, it needs to be amplified as much as possible. One of the things I’m trying to create is a hub, a one-stop shop for all that research where somebody will be compiling these papers. We might have an AI that can, if you’re interested in ‘Has any research been done on does family structure affect race inequality or something?’ You should be able to find some paper. If we could leverage this the tin—let’s face it, it’s going to be a tiny number of people—but if we can leverage those papers and get them read by a larger number of people, then I think that can actually allow us to punch well above our weight. Given that most papers are salami slices off an existing model and they’re never read, given that, it should be possible to achieve a lot. So that’s one thing.
The other thing is I do think government can play a role. One of the key things that I’m a fan of is grant funding. Ideally, we would have a grant fund for countercultural or alternative perspectives in social research, perspectives that have been ignored. Where the people who would be adjudicating, because this is all a racket and the people who actually score these proposals tend to be people of a certain bent; if you actually had people who were sympathetic to this approach on the appraisal committee and you had these funds ring-fenced, it’s a bit like setting up separate institutes. That would then get more money into those researchers. And it might incentivize people who are on the fence to say, ‘Actually, I can get a lot of research grant funding, which looks very good, and maybe I’m going to do some of this research.’ I think that’s 1 way of trying to incentivize more of this research to occur. We need to amplify it. We need more of it.
I think right now, for example, in the U.S. case, there’s been a lot of attention on these new institutes and universities. They’re mainly focusing on Plato and the Great Books and the humanities. We’re not getting a lot of new research. What we do need is more of a countercultural social science, a new social science movement. Again, this is something I’m trying to bring together in this conference in Buckingham in June. We’re trying to set an agenda, maybe an annual conference of countercultural social science, a way of trying to perhaps get donors, perhaps get these new grant funds out of sympathetic governments to try and pump prime and facilitate more of this research because we actually do need alternative research. It’s great that we’ve got Great Books education, classical education now in some universities, but that I don’t think is enough. Especially if you want to win for policy, I think we’re going to need a new social science as well.”
My response: Kaufmann is correct that a return to the Great Books education, classical education is necessary but not sufficient, that new post-progressive research needs to be conducted by conservatives.
Rufo: “I totally agree, and you have to have, essentially, conservatives in a greater number of disciplines. Even as I was getting resumes for New College of Florida and some of the other projects I’m working on, you see a flood of resumes in, for example, political philosophy, which is great. Classics, awesome. Straussian. Fantastic. American history. And it seems like we’re almost full in those disciplines or subdisciplines. There is much more opportunity if there were sociology, quantitative social science, and other fields on the other side of the disciplines where people could be very effective.
If you look hard enough, there was the old, Sara McLanahan and other fragile family studies. There’s been really good, what is in effect, conservative social science. But it has slipped off a bit, and perhaps it could be a place to put some money. My argument, too, is for red states, Florida, Texas, and others, wait a minute, you’re earmarking billions of dollars for your state universities, and you’re not going to fund any research that for example might be supported, by the people who vote for you. The opinion of the voters who pay for this is not represented in the institutions seems crazy, and we have to get beyond this fake, supposedly classical liberal idea that politicians cannot meddle in the great university, but the universities are self-governing beacons of knowledge. No. The universities are public institutions, and the legislators can quite easily say we need to have we need to have these principles represented and explored.
It’s like, why doesn’t the Red State University have an institute for the second amendment studies? That is almost inconceivable. Even saying that, I was like, woah, you can’t have that. But my argument is, why not? That actually is an important part of our tradition. It’s an important area for study. To the extent that they get comfortable with this, I think it is a huge value. And I think you’re right that the imprimatur of having an institute for the study of the family at the University of Texas gives it a certain amount of heft. Is it enough by itself? Of course not, but it’s a way to get further.
To wrap up, you’ve told us a little bit about the conference that’s happening in June. Tell us who are some of the people that we should keep our eyes on that are producing some of this great work that could become more prominent in the years to come?”
K: “Kaufmann: There are really two streams of this new research program. One I mentioned was critical woke studies, which we know the books that have come out. I don’t have to name you, Yascha Mounk, John McWhorter, and others. But there are now also a lot of perhaps less well-known social science scientists who are psychologists and political scientists. I could name a number of people who are doing this work: Cory Clark, Lee Jussim, and Jonathan Haidt in psychology. Some of the people around the journal Theory and Society, which is a sort of social theory journal but also quantitative social science, are doing interesting things. There are people in the Journal of School of Choice, Bob Maranto at the University of Arkansas, is another group that’s doing some interesting work.
There the problem is they’re scattered people. April Bleske-Rechek at I think, Wisconsin. There are all these scholars, but they’re very isolated, and they’re very scattered. It’s not enough that they produce a paper on left-wing bias in academia. We’ve now had a few papers that show that academics would openly discriminate against a conservative candidate or conservative grant application, twenty to fifty percent would openly admit that they would discriminate. We’ve had a number of those papers. I think that’s great. What we also need is, however, the textbook, the larger book that can be then taught in a class or post-graduate seminar. The next level is a distilling of this into texts that are taught in schools, like the Straussians in a way, but for the social scientists. One of the things I see is I get a lot of people who want to do Ph.D.s now in Britain who’ve heard of Buckingham, and they think, ‘Oh, that’s a place where I can study, I can take a critical approach to misinformation and hate speech and all of these other narratives.’ We’d almost need to develop graduate students and supervisors and textbooks. That’s the next level, and you slowly build up a counterculture.
Now maybe that’s protected by ring-fenced institutions in the red states, and grant funds for that research. And you build this as an alternative. One of the aims of this conference is to create a manifesto for a new social science that the mainstream is going to have to respond to. What you notice is the stuff does filter in. I was reading a paper just recently, and they were talking about somebody called Chris Rufo. And what was interesting was they have to do the obligatory, ‘He’s a conservative activist and blah blah blah.’ But it was also like, ‘But we can’t ignore the fact that some of the things he says are true.’ You take that statement. Now you may say that’s critical, but, actually, what that’s indicating is an acknowledgment. What that acknowledgment means is that some of Chris Rufo’s ideas are now going to be entering closer toward the mainstream. And that’s important, too. And I think that’s how this change can slowly occur, but it’s going to be a long-term process.”
R: “Rufo: Great. Well, it will be long-term, and we will check in again soon. Best of luck with the conference, and we’ll talk to you next time.”
K: “Kaufmann: Thanks, Chris. It’s been a pleasure.”
My response: The post-progressive emerging culture and world view is unfolding, but with some Mavellonialist input, perhaps it could be strengthened.
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