Chris Rufo’s “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything”: A Review
Christopher Rufo has earned a stellar reputation as both analyst of, and strategist against “critical theory,” and specifically CRT. In his new book America’s Cultural Revolution, with verve, precision, and clarity, he explains what it is, where it came from, and how, over the past fifty years, it was used by the Left to conquer America. His real target, however, is much older. As I have argued before, critical theory is merely the latest iteration of Left ideology, conceived in the Enlightenment and birthed in 1789. And the fruit of the Left’s latest conquest has been the same as always — the extreme degradation of a decent, productive society.
Rufo’s explicit purpose is to inspire a counter-revolution. This is a tall order. After all, despite successes Rufo and his allies have had in several quarters, the Left today dominates all areas of American life, not only all levels of government, directly or indirectly, but also private enterprise, education, media, culture, the military, and religious institutions. That this has led America to a dead end is irrelevant to whether Left hegemony will continue. The Left always ignores its perfect record of failure in its efforts to create a new society – they will only drop the power they have grasped if forced.
Nobody voted for any of this, so how did it happen? In Rufo’s telling, this updated left-wing project began with Herbert Marcuse. Of the four individuals Rufo profiles, Marcuse was the smartest, and his theories formed the bridge between the class-focused pre-1960s Left and the race-focused Left which spawned in the Age of Aquarius. Marcuse was a German Marxist, who emigrated to America in the 1930s along with other members of the Frankfurt School (a term Rufo does not use), and immediately began injecting their ideology into America (and back into Germany — Marcuse was one of the chief architects of the Allies’ postwar denazification program, which he used to try to usher in Communist domination).
What did Marcuse, and all the modern Left, want? (If I had an objection to this book, it would be its subtitle, “How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.” I’d argue there is no such things as the radical Left; only the Left.) They wanted to destroy the deep structures of the West, achieve total emancipation from all unchosen bonds, combined with forced total equality of individuals, in order to usher in utopia. It cannot be overemphasized that the philosophical, or rather psychological, goal behind the Left is the belief that the perfection of mankind is not only achievable, but just ahead, glimpsable around the next bend in the road. This necessarily implies that no price is too high to pay, right now, to reach this goal — especially if the price paid is merely the lives of men and women who oppose this future, as shown by their refusal to worship the new gods on offer.
A necessary, and historically unique, ingredient for the triumph of the Left in modern America was tension between blacks and whites, which Rufo does not mention. Without this history, Left advances would have been far less likely. But that is jumping ahead. In the early 1960s, the Left was retrenching. They had failed, despite their best efforts, to conquer America for “traditional” Communism. Therefore, in 1964, Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man, an update of Marxist theory, responding to the working class’s universal rejection of Marxism. Marcuse claimed workers had failed to serve the revolution because they had been seduced by “an ever-more-comfortable life.” Certainly, they remained alienated and unfree, but could not, and could not be brought to, recognize their own sad situation. The solution was to ignore the workers, to substitute emancipation of the supposedly marginalized for emancipation of the worker, and to call for rule by an intellectual elite, composed of men such as Marcuse, which would “educate” the rest of society. This was to be achieved by violent revolution, but the engine of the revolution was now to be the black underclass, rather than workers.
Marcuse’s plan seemed like a pipe dream at the time, but five years later it roared to life and became the engine of the New Left, and Marcuse became a global superstar. Even though he was now old, he wrote prolifically, aiming to assist in creating the “total rupture” that would initiate the Millennium, including a “qualitative change” in human nature “in accordance with the new sensitivity and the new consciousness.” To this end, Marcuse famously openly advocated violent repression, by the state in cooperation with private entities, of any person or belief opposed to the Left, casting repression as “liberating tolerance” and necessary to bring the masses to a state of true con
