America’s Cultural Revolution

* Book: America's Cultural Revolution. Christopher Rufo.

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Description

Sasha Ivanov:

"Rufo started out as a filmmaker, and his book is more of a narrative, which elucidates the key facts in a masterful way. Hanania, on the other hand, is a trained lawyer and social scientist. His book makes specific claims about the ultimate causes of wokeness, and recommends specific measures to curtail it. He is certainly well-read on civil rights law. He is also a very American writer – his approach is hands-down, and focuses laser-like on the relevant legislation. Unfortunately, his book is a typical case of the hammer-nail bias.

The basic problem is that even if Republicans enact all the necessary laws, their efforts will be thwarted by a sea of liberal bureaucrats, who will end up interpreting and enforcing those laws (recall what happened during the Trump administration). Indeed, a recurring theme of Hanania’s book is that the text of civil rights law is actually quite innocuous, and it was only through judicial and bureaucratic activism that such law became a tool of social engineering. As the author himself notes, the civil rights bureaucracy attracts a very specific type of person. And when Republicans tried to find conservative judges and bureaucrats to appoint, they discovered that there simply weren’t enough of them.

Rufo provides a simple explanation for this. The bureaucracy is woke for the same reason that capital is woke: elite-college graduates are literally taught to be woke, from first grade up until they earn their PhDs and JDs. This is due to the systematic capture of education by leftists – a process described in Rufo’s book. Rufo’s “Critical Race Theory” is a repackaged version of the “Cultural Marxism” meme, that was circulating within the online dissident Right ten years ago. The meme was immediately successful – because it was true – which led to it being labelled a “conspiracy theory” by the modern gatekeepers of knowledge (i.e., Wikipedia). Rufo’s accomplishment is that he exposed the facts in a much more detailed, academic manner, making it much harder for the Left to label him a conspiracy theorist. He cites the original New Left sources and uses the appropriate jargon.

In other words, if conservatives want to end wokeness, they’ll have to win hearts and minds. They’ll have to compete in the marketplace of ideas, which Hanania claims does not exist. Note: the failed Tejero coup reference above was not merely meant to be humorous. For decades, Spain, Portugal and a host of Latin American countries were ruled by military dictatorships, with the explicit aim of upholding “traditional” values. And despite (or possibly, because of) this, Iberia and Latin America today are hotbeds of woke feminism. As the Spanish conservative intellectual Miguel de Unamuno warned Franco’s fascists: “Venceréis, pero no convenceréis” (you will win, but you will not convince)."

Discussion

Sasha Ivanov, outlines the strategic dilemma of the right based on the contrasting theses of Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania:

"At this moment of leftist hegemony, where should the right focus its efforts? In science there is a distinction between ultimate and proximate causes; if politics is downstream of culture, as the late Andrew Breitbart used to say, then efforts should be concentrated on the ultimate cause, culture. But if civil rights law is the ultimate cause of woke culture, then just changing legislation will be enough.

My own position can be summarized as follows: Rufo beats Hanania. Politics is downstream of culture, and not the other way round. Of course, the two books are more complementary than they are antagonistic, and neither claims that wokeness is singularly caused by politics or culture. However, Rufo clearly emphasizes the causal role of culture on politics, while Hanania clearly states that political decisions ultimately shape culture.

If Hanania is right, then abolishing wokeness is simply a matter of taking over the government (either Antonio Tejero-style or, as Hanania suggests, by influencing the Republican party) and passing the right laws. Effects will then trickle down to the culture in the space of a few decades. But if Rufo is right, then what’s required is a painstakingly long process of intellectual and political activism: the anti-woke crowd need to actually start caring enough to sacrifice their barbecues and become committed activists."

(https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/how-to-defeat-woke-rufo-vs-hanania)