Great analysis from you and great insights from Rufo. But you both manage to describe a profound transformation in IDEAS without mentioning that from the 70’s (1) the demographic of the country has changed drastically, and (2) the balance of power between sexes has shifted. These two facts may explain why the social and legal impact of the deep leftist ideas has moved from being confined to academia in the 70’s to society today, and why the political culture in Europe was on the left compared to those in the USA in the 70’s, and is instead on the right compared to the USA today.
An important demographic (however small in numbers) was radical Jews, many of whom were disproportionately represented in academia and other organizations.
Jewish elite entrance and capture had a significant effect.
Though im not sure how productive or effective making that the focus now would be. Jews are somewhat in decline in american elite—dysgenic due to exogamy, lower fertility among smarter secular ashk—and are being eclipsed by other groups.
They helped pave the way for their own eclipse--because they were keen to displace the white majority. Amusingly (and frustratingly), you now see some Jews on Twitter who simultaneously identify as white when they want to criticize “we whites” and as non-whites when they want to avoid the wrath of minorities. Ultimately, they will be pegged as whites by anti-white non-whites. But the damage has been done.
Part of that marginalization was related to a failure to assimilate (Jews exist for a reason--they weren’t created by gentiles) and the uneasy relationship they had/have with the “host” society in terms of economics and culture. See the book Postville for an example (written by a Jew).
If some gentiles are hostile to Jews because of their (ahem) “lived experience”, then it’s not an issue of “pre”-judice; it’s just “judice”. Prejudice is basically a proto-woke word that frames any rejection of alien phenotypes (or ethnic groups) as solely based on “irrationality”. But people tend to reject other races due to aesthetic/cultural reasons, not just because, say, the stereotypes they hold are false with regard to this or that person.
Most precedent for modern civil rights law was set up before Clinton was in office. Hispanics made up only 4% of the 1992 electorate, Asians roughly 1%. The immigrants that accelerated anti-whiteness arrived here in the late 19th and early 20th century.
To Angela Davis add Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, the Kendi-ites and other CRT con artists, plus all the Farrakhan NOI babblers about Black Athena and all the imaginary Wakandas the white man took from them—the sad truth is as long as a black writer/activist/politician toes the line of liberal pieties and blames everything on white conservatives, they are safe and untouchable, because they serve an important purpose and white liberals keep them close as pets and mascots.
It's not simply this. It's an act of deliberate historical fabrication. There's a reason Jim Jones isn't so much as mentioned in the Sean Penn biopic, even though he was by far Milk's most important and influential political ally.
See also, Persepolis, both the comic and movie, which contemptuously blames the Cinema Rex attack on the Shah, even though it was obvious from the moment the attack happened it was the work of Khomeini's death culture, as detailed by Andrew Scott Cooper in Chapter 19 of The Fall of Heaven.
Well from what I understand he was doing a lot of good in the community to begin with, which is how he built up such support in the first place. Not knowing anything specific about her support, was she just into his community service? I think a number of black community leaders praised him for his on the ground work, well before the culty move to SA and mass suicide and I don't think that necessarily means they deserve to lose their credibility. They got took in by the legitimate helping of the poor, not the culty part.
The commitment of conservatives to socialism is clear in their support for public schools, done their way, of course. In a capitalist economy, conservatives and Leftists would be free to destroy only their own children in private schools. Conservative children would learn to pray. Leftist children would learn to-oh, wait a minute, theyre already learning that. Sorry!
Irrespective of where you stand on American Woke, to compare it to the Chinese cultural revolution is an exercise in exaggeration to the point of absurdity. Let's put it into context, how many people have died as a result of Woke? Probably a few. In the Cultural revolution, nobody knows for sure, but the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands and probably millions. How has the American economy done through the Woke era? Ups and downs as always, but the overall direction has been as good as anyplace on earth and better than most. In the Cultural Revolution era, the Chinese economy collapsed and remained comatose until Deng's reforms.
"Irrespective of where you stand on American Woke, to compare it to the Chinese cultural revolution is an exercise in exaggeration to the point of absurdity."
I don't think this is necessarily true, because events can have analogues that differ yet overlap. Like Twain said: “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme."
Yes, our Cultural Revolution is a thankfully tamer sequel, but this is a much richer safer country with much less of a tolerance for violence, but our radicals don't have to shed blood because they can get their way instead by shedding tears.
But there are definite commonalities: of course the Struggle Sessions, the energized college students with their hearts on fire for Justice and Equality, the revolutionary dogma and the way it could be updated to make yesterday's heroes into today's villains, and I think most importantly: both being top-down revolts approved and orchestrated by the respective ruling parties, in Mao's case as a reaction to his opposition after the disastrous famines, and in our case as a reaction against Trump and the 2016 Peasants' Rebellions by the global corporate class, who then converted en masse to the Social Justice religion.
Also, it's called a "Cultural" Revolution so it's NOT about the economy, there are some things as important as GDP, believe it or not.
When tallying the woke body count, if you reasonably include the incremental increase in homicides due to de-policing, first in the aftermath of Ferguson and then in the aftermath of Floyd, it is in the several thousands. Add in the increased traffic fatalities tracable to de-policing and it is several thousand more, approaching 10k. Steve Sailer has done the actual counting. Not cultural revolution numbers yet, but scaled to population it is not orders of magnitude less.
I'm sure it's been at least a few thousand, but that's practically a coffee break by PRC standards. They already killed significantly more people than that just by coming to power in the Chinese Civil War. And that's not even counting battlefield casualties. Brutal purges
For all the parrallels, and for all the good of nipping this in the bud, it's still grossly inappropriate to compare anything in the American experience to what happened when the CPC, the CPV, the CPK, the CPSU, or the NSDAP came to power in their respective countries, or for that matter, their road to power. (Seriously, the NSDAP had the least depraved rise of the bunch, and their rise involved murdering Dear Leader's niece/mistress to keep her quiet about their affair.)
Yes, there is much hyperbole from the anti-woke. On the other hand, it’s good to nip this movement in the bud before it gets even worse. As things stand now, many have been silenced for fear of speaking up, e.g. I think it would be risky for me to push back against woke at my workplace. That’s bad enough. DEI fosters dangerous incompetence too.
Countless urban metropolises were decimated by the civil rights era and black crime in the 1960s and 70s. If one wishes to use the same consequentialist argument of disparate impact, then the grossly disparate rate of black-on-white crime needs to be called out for what it is, which is genocide. The Cultural Revolution is exaggerated anyways, the vast majority of deaths under Mao were due to economic/agricultural incompetence, not political murder.
The NYT reported Richard Walker's (U-SC) estimate of Marxist murders in China: 37-64 million. Think of that when watching publically self-described Marxist analyst on CNN(. You cant even imagine a (virtually impossible) public Nazi. Fox News is bad but nowhere near that.
Chinese communists NEEDED to kill to plant the seeds of their stvpid ideollogy, having faced stern resistance from farmers
USA communists DONT NEED to kill to achieve same result, since they've already infiltrated colleges and institutions, and being even sponsored by naive or idiotic US bureaucrats and private firms
>to compare it to the Chinese cultural revolution is an exercise in exaggeration to the point of absurdity
What is HIS context of comparison? He may not be using your comparison. Similarities and differences are contextual. The Earth is big relative to the moon but small relative to Jupiter. And then you must compare his context to yours by
I think the more appropriate comparison is the Civil Rights Movement itself, as Richard plans to detail in his upcoming book. It's become our folk religion, not just in America, but in the broader Anglo culture. But the only part of it that gets focused on are the heroic parts, like fighting for the right to buy a bus seat or a restaraunt table or a hotel room. The domestic terror campaigns, the sexual abuse scandals, and the Kendiesque beliefs in "equity" -- though the term itself was not used in such times -- sincerely held by many of the religion's apostles, are just not brought up at all.
The issue is that it'll be tempting to merely dismiss all the problematic parts as the work of a few bad actors. It must be emphasized that the movement itself always had fundamental problems. In that respect, I'm at least happy the term "equity" is now popularized in this context. Because now the indefensible parts can be attacked and dismantled while we keep the parts that are worth keeping.
May I suggest the expression The Deep Left to refer to what you and Rufo are trying to address. The Deep State is a subset of The Deep Left. And I see you as arguing that a strategic approach can take away some of the institutional sources of power of The Deep Left.
I think if you say "Deep Left," many conservative politicians will quickly see what you are talking about. Not so much with "Cathedral." But they both refer to the way that some institutions are infested with contemporary progressive ideology.
I agree with the point that you made on a recent podcast about human nature, and suspect it offers an answer to the titular question here. In the absence of the dire necessity of the natural world demanding excellence in the pursuits of life (whether hunting, agriculture, or warfare), most would prefer to have things made as easy for them as possible. As you say, it is apparently human nature for people to want the government to give them money from other people's pockets. So too is it natural for the unworthy to agitate for equality or special treatment. As you say, it is natural to want to give in to women's tears. So too is it natural to try to be kind to the less fortunate even if the solutions they propose are insane. Conservatism has been asleep for decades, due partially to a complete misunderstanding of human nature or perhaps an unwillingness to be honest about it. The people who thought about it hundreds of years before the rise of anything resembling modern political systems recognized that the purpose of state power is to force citizens to do hard things that are good for them against all of their base inclinations. What we see these days is what we get in the complete absence of such a thing. Some unfortunate, effeminate, soft bodied, disabled misfit isn't pushing for a transformation of society to make his life easier because of ideological Marxism. Low IQ folks who are terrible at tests and can't meet standards don't agitate for the removal of tests and standards because they are communists. Rather, weakness, laziness, perversity, ugliness, and inferiority are their own reasons, and require no intellectuals to create them.
> Contra conservatism, man has free will and no innate ideas. Man must choose to create the Beast. And, unless we return to the Enlightenment, he will.
I can't tell f you're agreeing with me or advocating for blank-slatism. Craving sweet/fatty foods isn't an innate idea, it's an evolutionary urge that is now poorly aligned with health. Without any innate ideas about fat positivity, many people will simply become fat if given the opportunity to eat doritos and drink pepsi.
Biology is different from emotions, the automatic response to values resulting from the free will power, immediately experienced, thus the context of proof, to focus ones mind, thru the senses , onto concrete reality or to evade focusing. Focus and reason or evade focus and rationalize the evasion. This is the basic fact of mans nature. Further, because man is a mind/body unity, responses to food can result from what one is doing with ones life. Eg,anxiety can reduce the desire for spicy,heavy foods. A hangover can be eased with chicken soup. In the context of ideas, man is a blank slate. Innate ideas are the absurd claim that man knows reality prior to knowing reality. Ideas are the product of the minds voluntary processing of the evidence of the senses. Your many people above have chosen to evade focusing on healthy foods.
“White guilt is real and organic — it didn’t need Marxist intellectuals to deform our political culture.”
Kevin MacDonald’s (of _Culture of Critique_ infamy) last book was about Western individualism and universalism. He, too, stresses white guilt as a big factor. But there is no gainsaying the fact that left-wing Jews remade academia in their image after WWII and contributed enormously to blank slatism, the civil rights juggernaut, and Wokeism (although some Jews may regret how far it’s gone). Would this have happened if the Frankfurt School had never arrived on our shores? Possibly. It’s that possibility that allows many anti-woke folks to ignore the wildly disproportionate Jewish influence among this intellectual movement. Marcuse begat Davis, not the other way round.
Jews are prominent in many intellectual contexts because their religion is more worldly than Christianity and because of Maimonides, a medieval Jewish philosopher who liked Aristotles philosophy of reason. Christianity had strong communist influences since Jesus, the Sermon On The Mount, and early Christians. Marxs early anti-capitalism is virtually identical to the Christian anti-capitalism of his time, eg, the shared attack on the increasing rationality, selfishness and individualism. And just precisely how did the Crucifixion influence the US founding politics of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Do you see much happiness in torture? "Blessed are the poor in spirit" is the moral basis of communism, not Jefferson or Steve Jobs. The Good Book is Atlas Shrugged.
Exactly. Jews are also among the most prominent right-wing thinkers as well as left, simply because they are highly represented in intellectualism in general. Leo Strauss was Jewish and he basically shaped modern intellectual conservatism. Ayn Rand was Jewish and she shaped libertarianism. The neocon movement was heavily shaped by Jews like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol.
Meanwhile, and I say this as a Christian myself, I can see how Christian values have directly inflenced wokism today. Before Constantine, the West was built on conquest, the Nietzschean will to power. After that, the ideas of "turn the other cheek", "original sin", "the last shall be first and the first shall be last", "be meek like a lamb", etc. took over.
You could give also Edward Blum credit for knocking down affirmative action. That's pretty impressive actually, and he wasn't even a lawyer. Kept at it for 20 years, and finally won.
Yes, but not willingly. She despised its subjectivismm, anti-objectivity and anarchism. She was an Objectivist. They took her political ideas out of context.
A ,medieval, pro-reason philosopher, Maimonides, is the cause of of the greater Jewish respect for the mind. Its very indirect. Most Jews dont know of him.
The West was built on reason. Conquest is coincidental. Christianity is anti-West, as the Dark Ages show. Faith and force reinforce each other and both contradict reason.
lol. Christianity defined the West well into the 19th century; its morals, its history, its schools, its inventions, its peoples' migration, its wars. Jews sometimes sold things to said Christians. You guys can have the 20th century but that's about it.
Definition is by contextual essentials, ie, the most explanatory fact in a context. Baseball players wear hats but thats merely a non-defining property of baseball.
How did supernaturalism and faith define the Renaissance, Age of Reason, Sci Rev, Enlightenment and to today?! It defined culture from some time around the late Roman empire to the end of the Medieval era. And reason, not faith, causes inventions. Kants nihilism ended the Enlightenment w/modernism, especially Weimar Germany and 1960s US, and it continues now, with Christianity slowly returning.
DIM Hypothesis-Leonard Peikoff; a new exxplanation of conventional history.
Both your comment and mine can be true at the same time. Radical left Jews were enormously influential. Rand opposed these (particular) radicals but she and other Objectivists, many of whom were/are Jews, reflexively condemned racism as “collectivism”. I think a big part of this condemnation was because of their status as “minorities”. They are also fanatical supporters of Israel, so they display the “individualism for thee but collectivism for me” hypocrisy that many on the radical right condemn (and others quietly notice).
Jews are also overrepresesented among hardcore critics of Israel. There’s no intellectual movement - maybe even including intellectual anti-semitism - that isn’t disproportionately Jewish. You’re just reading tea leaves here.
Jewish critics of Israel likely are overrepresented but my point was that this alleged outpost of Western individualism is also fundamentally an ethno-state. Pointing out that Jews are wildly disproportionate among the radical left is not reading tea leaves. There is a likely connection between that and an ethnic goal of playing offense against an often hostile gentile majority.
Man has free will and no innate ideas. Look out at reality, not inward. Focus your mind, unless, of course, mans independent mind is such a terrifying responsibility that sacrificing it to an allegedly higher power is a relief.
Blaming an entire group for acting in concert specifically to destroy the natural order of humanity is absolutely racist. Your free to believe it yourself, but literally the only reason you're disagreeing with this is because the term "racist" is such a pejorative, insulting way of describing someone, you want to resist it even though you fit its exact description.
There are many influences on modern culture, including Christianity. Singling out Jews is a poorly hidden anti-Semitism.
> [Objectivists] reflexively condemned racism as “collectivism”
What?! Are you implying that thinking of individuals as deterministic members of a group is individualism? Thats so stupid that I dont know what to think of it.
> They [Objectivists] are also fanatical supporters of Israel
Israel, despite the obvious Jewish influence, is the lone rational, individualist, Western outpost in a fanatically mystical and primitive region. Its regional enemies have, in word and deed, committed to
> I think a big part of this [Objectivist] condemnation [of racism] was because of their status as “minorities."
Your evasion of Rand's philosophical, principled, systematic praise of individualism is...mind-boggling. You are intellectually lost inside the effects, psychology and sociology, while evading the cause, philosophy. Rand's enemy is the unfocused mind shared by Leftist subjectivists and Rightist mystics. Look out at reality, not inward. Focus your mind.
You often decry ad hominem but it seems that anyone who rejects Objectivism is automatically written off as an “unfocused” mind. I don’t see Rand as innovative at all; at best, she’s a classical liberal and that puts me in her camp (and her in mine) in that limited sense. If we are avoiding sectarianism, that should be enough.
Israel is Western in outlook but also inhabited by many fanatical Orthodox Jews. Why don’t the Israeli Jews just pack up and leave Israel and go to the actual West? Because they are committed to being Jews, not just individuals (as are Israel’s Jewish supporters in the West). Calling Palestinians “savages”, as many Objectivists do, is certainly “collectivist”.
>it seems that anyone who rejects Objectivism is automatically written off as an “unfocused” mind.
Objectivism is basically a method of using the mind, not basically politics, economics or even culture. Anti-Objectivists, even in or especially in universities, typically make the many reasoning errors that Rand repetitively identifies. E.g., overgeneralizing, ambiguity (package-dealing contradictions), and taking ideas out of hierarchical context. In effect, they use stream-of-consciousness and intuitions instead of looking out at reality and logically selecting and organizing concrete facts. An irrational epistemology is modern culture's basic problem. Man's life requires a focused mind. That, not capitalism, is the theme of Atlas Shrugged despite decades of irrelevant criticism of it. Because of Kant, modern thought is a competition among various types of the unfocused mind. Leftists want emotion to guide them. Rightists want faith. Classical liberalism, as the dominant intellectual power, died in the early to mid-19th century.
Whatever Israel's cultural and political problems, it remains largely or basically Western. Palestinians support an Islam that had no Renaissance or Enlightenment. They retain the mentality of primitive tribalists in the time of Mohammed. They CHOOSE this mentality. There is no social or cultural determinism. Most people choose to sacrifice their minds to social approval because their culture's intellectual leaders defend it and most people are insufficiently independent to challenge it.
Ashkenazim have disproportionate influence in high-cognitive-demand professions because of the Bell Curve. Academia just hasn't been about that since promotion there's been about race since at least the '60s. Earlier, in some fields. (Such as theology, as readers of Pappas would know.)
Yes, Jews have high average IQs, but the issue is that Jews contributed significantly to pushing academia in a leftist direction, including overthrowing the Darwinian paradigm as applied to human psychology/behavior and contributing to a general woke outlook.
High-IQ people, on average, have always contributed to the woke outlook; because high-IQ people, on average, like to believe their intellectual talents are something they earned through hard work, not something they were born with. Or, for those with more moderate beliefs, that intelligence is evenly distributed among every race of humans, and that differences in achievement are merely cultural.
It's why there's so much resistance to the Bell Curve, because it shows that neither the moderate nor the extreme beliefs are true, and that the cognitive divide of humanity will persist forever. It's why they must be fought and defeated, because if anything, they're worse than creationists. At least in the Anglo world, since creationism hasn't been a popular view among the high-IQ class since Darwin.
It wasn’t always the case that the elites were woke (or proto-woke). But in post-WWII US, the Anglo-Saxon elite were significantly displaced by an influential Jewish elite in academia, the media, etc. Notice that those who cry “anti-Semitism” will be the first to explain why, say, Jews are overrepresented among the financial elite by arguing that Jews were driven into these high paying occupations as a means of self-preservation. But then if you suggest that Jews might play offense in addition to pure reactive defense in the face of widespread hostility, they get offended.
This shows no understanding of actual history. Intellectuals in any society have always been predisposed to grand, utopian visions for reorganizing societies. Especially the Anglo-Saxons, who literally invented the word "utopia":
But that very general historical observation wouldn’t refute the idea that Jewish intellectuals play offense on behalf of their ethnic interests in terms of the political and intellectual movements they created and (disproportionately) dominated, e.g., Marxism, Freudianism, Boasian anthropology, Critical Theory, etc.).
Great article. I think the power of language is an important aspect of this ideological movement. It works well in eliciting white guilt. Add to that the increased activism of college educated women who tend to be more empathetic.
I am constantly amazed at how many people think DEI is a good thing. It plays on their feelings. I suspect a significant majority of the population don't know the difference between equality and equity. When I ask them about what diversity or inclusion means, I get vague answers. Questions such as: how do you determine if diversity is achieved? Why is that always desirable? Do you include only 'marginalized' groups? Most people don't even realize that the term 'marginalized' means not white (christian) heterosexual males.
Wokesters are winning by using language as a weapon against an apathetic, affluent society. It can also as a stick by ridicule and social isolation. I think challenging people to consider the meanings of woke terms will go a long way towards reducing it's reach.
Not only did Social Justice piggyback on the Civil Rights movement, it also styled itself and its priesthood of professors as Official Defenders of the Oppressed, and as their greatest skill is language manipulation they've managed to create an army of Kafka traps, where whatever the topic, by disagreeing you put yourself in the position of kicking down on the poor and marginalized, which is of course taboo and gauche (esp in post-60s America).
Some people focus on Civil Rights law, some people on intellectuals and philosophic genealogies, but another important aspect of the Social Justice takeover is their capture of morality. (With Soc Just morality more or less founded on white guilt, the sanctity of social victims, and the first purpose of politics and culture being rectifying/atoning for historical oppression.)
Once their morality became standard-issue for both the upscale liberals who control culture and education, and for successive generations of students they taught, victory was guaranteed, it was only a matter of time.
One would hope. I've found though that when the woke terms are accurately described, people either double down on their nonsense or start hurling insults at you
You don't quite spell it out. Is the idea here to abolish all equality/discrimination laws?
It doesn't seem all that hard to predict where things go even if that goal is achieved because they're already going there today. Even in the case of pure conservative victory in which all this law is rolled back, the ideology is one of radical equality of outcome so they will just move on to migrants, dating, salaries, anywhere else they can attack disparate outcomes. Civil rights law only covers a small part of it. You make a compelling case it's important, but communism long pre-dates US affirmative action judgements.
Conservatism has rejected its disasterously compromised, unprincipled, anti-ideological, Pragmatist individualism for collectivism, specifically ancestor worship. Note the appeals to "America's founding ideals" without identifying the Enlightenments rational individualism. Congresscritter, Josh Hawley, praises Augustine, the philosopher who caused the Dark Ages. Either Ayn Rand becomes intellectually dominant or we will return to Dark Ages.
I mean, you can't blame Augustine for the entire medieval period, the collapse of Roman civilization had something to do with that too. There are pretty good arguments the idea of an absolute immanent truth helped develop science by assuming there was a fixed universal truth 'out there' we could discover, as opposed to varying philosophical schools each with their own strengths and weaknesses. This actually happens to be true in the physical sciences if nowhere else.
I'm becoming more appreciative of Rand as the alt-right and the woke left gain ascendance, but she's not the only alternative to the Dark Ages.
Augustine's mysticism is the basic cause of the Christian Dark Ages (400-800AD), the most consistently Christian culture in Western history. Of course, Christianity is part of the West like a fly is part of a bowl of soup. Immanent truth is mysticism, ie, truth allegedly, impossibly, in reality, known by a non-sense-based method. Truth is a product of the focused mind, neither subjective or mystical. Science is solely a product of philosophy, ie, Thales discovery of natural causes, Socrates discovery of definitions, Aristotles discovery of systematic logic and scientific method (see his biology) and Francis Bacons discovery of systematic induction. Supernaturalism, faith , an unreal, random universe subject to supernatural whim and faith contradict science. Philosophy causes science and is currently destroying it with various subjectivisms and mysticisms. Rome collapsed because post-Aristotle, philosophy lost its nerve with superficial views, eg, hedonism, skepticism, Stoicism, and Platonic mysticism, all leading to Christianity. We will have a new Dark Ages unless Rand beccomes much mmore influential.
Yes, people are now starting to see the danger of nihilism that Rand, w/philosophy, saw in the 1950s. The danger is now so concretely in-your-face that even poorly educated, anti-intellectual conservatives see it. Philosophy is the longest-range view. It influenced, however indirectly, some 1960s rock music.
Troubled By These Days And Times-Savoy Brown, blues
Weve been trying to get high without having to pay-Broken English, sung by Marianne Faithfull,classically educated
"This would be the basis of my case that Rufo and other conservatives have a tendency to overestimate the importance of intellectuals."
I think we need to define the term "intellectuals." Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coats, and their Neo-Marxist predecessors in academia and elsewhere, would be considered to be intellectuals by their followers whether or not those who oppose their ideas agree with it. These Leftists generated the racial Marxism concepts, developed the practical discussion points, and wrote the books for their audience to consume.
The current prevailing "woke" culture is thus born from the intellectuals in academia. The core concepts were taught in education to impressionable minds and then practiced by the adherents in our society. We went from "all viewpoints are valid" in the 70s/80s, cross-cultural appreciation, and political correctness to strict adherence to "words are violence," "cultural appropriation," and "anti-racism" in the course of 50 years. It requires a series of intellectuals to move forward the movement from within academia to the broad application into the daily lives of average citizens.
"Rufo’s book is built around intellectual biographies of four activist-scholars: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell"
It would be difficult to imagine four more irrelevant people to the current state of academia. Let alone the state of the world. Unserious people can always drum up baddies, and impute to them power that they never had. But why would anyone take such a thing seriously?
"during the Cold War, some of the leading lights of modern academia were openly in favor of distant regimes that were engaging in mass killings in the name of equality." Notice the language: "openly in favor of"! Wow. Not "supported financially." Not "caused to happen." Nothing like that. So, Mr. Hanania, let me ask you: have you yourself ever "been openly in favor of a distant regime engaged in mass killings"? Russia, say? Oh, you will insist: I don't "openly support" Russia! Or, I only supported them BEFORE they engaged in mass killings. Or something. But let's be serious. This is the weakest sauce ever.
I'll come out and say it. I have, at one time or another, also been openly in favor of regimes that carried out mass killings. Not *because* they carried out mass killings, but *despite* it. I am, among other things, in favor of the United States. (Please deny that we've ever carried out any mass killings.)
It'd be as if I wrote a book explaining that the United States is in a crisis, and we must act NOW NOW NOW because ... well, let's find four random Republicans who openly support four different murderous states. Jared Kushner supports the Saudis, whose murderous history is legion. Donald Trump supports China, which has exterminated Uyghurs. Tucker Carlson supports Russia, which is massacring Ukrainian children. OK that's only 3 off the top of my head, I'm sure you can come up with one more.
"Yet Rufo also reminds us that it was Marcuse’s third wife Erica Sherover-Marcuse who designed courses that became the prototypes for DEI trainings across institutions." Come on, man. That has to be a troll sentence. Marcuse's 3rd wife designed courses that became prototypes!? That's supposed to be impressive? Scary? If it turned out that ... let's pick someone as obscure as Marcuse ... Dinesh D'Souza's 3rd wife designed courses that became prototypes for homeschoolers promoting Christian nationalism ... and therefore there's this deep connection and so we must all support radical new polices ... you would laugh in my face. And rightly so.
"In his conclusion, Rufo gives some thoughts on what a healthier society would look like. The common citizen will have the space for inhabiting and passing down his own virtues, sentiments, and beliefs, free from the imposition of values from above."
Yeah, that's what they're up to in Ron DeSantis' Florida. Making sure there's no imposition of values from above. For DeSantis, the only values that matter are Republican values. Rufo is clearly on board with that. Are you?
I had surmised that Chris Rufo was a joke. This review seems to confirm it. But I had thought you were intelligent and insightful. I still do, actually. This piece is just a misfire. Right?
Mass killings are not necessarily mass murders. You may recall the US military in WW2.
Your evasion of long-term, intellectually dominant Leftism on US culture is bizarre. America's original, Enlightenment culture of rational individualism has been largely buried under Leftist emotionalism and Rightist faith.
What America Is: The Moral Logic Of The American Revolution-C. Bradley Thompson
I don't think I "evade" the long-term intellectually dominant Leftism on US culture. I think I straight up deny it. It's just not a thing outside the fever dreams of some conservatives.
Now, sometimes I think I'm wrong about this, and a couple of things that Mr. Hanania has written in the past make me take that possibility seriously. In particular, the civil rights law stuff is going to be interesting, and I look forward to reading his book.
But from everything I've read about Rufo, he's barking up all the wrong trees. This review does nothing to change that opinion ... the reverse, in fact. "Oh noez the leftists are in charge of everything - here's proof, just look at these 4 irrelevant people!"
My belief in Mr. Hanania's ability to reason well about these issues took a serious hit today. I have hopes that this is a temporary setback.
I think it's more that they represent strands of an intellectual movement that took over the universities and media and entertainment industry (movies and TV shows affect culture, don't fool yourself) in the past 70 years, and people like stories about people. It's easier to get people to read a book about people than it is to read a book about long-term social trends and the political leanings of university faculty. Do people remember the sociopolitical structure of the Galactic Empire, or Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader?
I think he might have been inspired by Helen Andrews' Boomers (which went after Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Camille Pagllia, Jeffrey Sachs, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor), itself inspired by Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (a 1918 book that attacked four prominent Victorians).
We've reached a place where both sides think the other side is dominant. Just spitballing here, but should we consider the possibility that nobody is dominant. People believe what they believe, they take ideas from various sources, they agree with things - sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes not. Nobody's in charge, but if you have strong ideological commitments, it looks like the people on the other side are more in charge than your side is. But there are actually dozens of "sides." White Christian social conservatives vs. Black Christian social conservatives vs. Muslim social conservatives vs. Tech bros with a libertarian bent vs. Libertarians with a tech bro bent vs. Liberals with a tech bro bent vs. Liberals with an environmental bent vs. Environmentalists who can't stand wokeism, and on and on. None of us feel like we're in charge, because we're not. But that doesn't mean someone else is.
I promise you, there is no feeling more ludicrous than having actually read Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Freire and seeing these two men, of all people, being held up as exemplars of dominant culture power. Nobody reads Marcuse. Nobody reads Freire. Even in the academy! And the accusation that these two men are all powerful is ... coming from Chris Rufo!? A guy who is intentionally remaking an actually existing university, right now, in his own ideological image! No sir. I say no. This is bullshit. There is no way that Chris Rufo himself takes this argument seriously, and it says bad things about Mr. Hanania if he does.
Leftism is dominant in schools, media, art, and the humanities. In govt, Leftists have used altruism to shame conservatives into supporting bigger govt for 100+ years. Conservatives have recently adopted some anti-business, anti-capitalist values. Where is conservatism dominant? The culture is changing and conservatism will eventually be dominant. But not today.
Intellectual influence is mostly indirect, a march thru the institutions and thru layers of prior intellectuals. The philosophers are in charge, tho most are so incompetent that they dont know it. They just keep teaching nihilism and wondering why everything is falling apart.
I think the left owns the universities, the media, and the entertainment industry and the state and local government in a lot of blue states, and the right controls the state and local government in a lot of red states. The right has the Supreme Court right now, but that could change with a few elections. The executive and legislative branches are contested territory. So it's possible for everyone to point at something and say the other side has all the power.
It's kind of like MRAs pointing at men being most prisoners, war casualties, etc. and feminists pointing at men being most CEOs, government officials, etc. They're both right!
Re: mass killings vs. mass murders: I think you want to complain to Messrs. Rufo and Hanania, as they are the ones claiming that it's prima facie a bad thing to be a person who has ever been in favor of any country that carries out mass killings.
Defensive killings against literal terrorists like Ho Chi-Minh and whatever goons the ISI uses to tyrranise the Afghans aren't remotely comparable to offensive killings for the sake of mad, anti-human ideological impositions.
For that matter, they worked! We just left millions of innocent people in the lurch anyway, both Democrats and Republicans, for shallow political reasons, and did so long after American troops were actually doing any of the fighting.
I don't know what Rufo and Hanania's own views on Vietnam nor Afghanistan are, but I would not hesitate to tell them to their faces they were wrong if they told me themselves they opposed either or both conflicts.
And for that matter, you yourself are wrong if you oppose either conflict, too. The hippie peace movement of the '60s and the '00s were no better than the Nazi appeasement movement far-leftists supported between '39 and '41. The difference is for Vietnam and Afghanistan, the Nazis won.
"The American education system, or at least the field of education itself, was taken over by literal communists."
Incorrect. Communists didn't take over any specific aspect of America, America is a communist country. More precisely, communism is the default ideological operating system of a technologically advanced country with a large and open oligarchy.
A good exercise to do is to go through the Wikipedia pages of the Frankfurt School and note down the ones who spent large amount of time working for a branch of the U.S. government. Of course, it would be easier to make a list of those who didn't - you wouldn't even need a pen! The working theory of the Rufos of the world is that these were canny subversives and the CIA were their chumps and that this just keeps happening for some reason. But there is a more parsimonious model. Or, in short, just read Unqualified Reservations already!
"Communists, Critical Race Theorists, and feminists are in the same tradition of smart people with big ideas about the world, with the main difference between them and the major figures of the Enlightenment happening to be that they’re wrong."
When the word 'copium' makes it into the encyclopaedia, this should be the prime illustration.
"It’s important to remember that while the figures profiled by Rufo were undoubtably influential, their ideas were in certain cases not all that different from what was previously accepted as mainstream liberalism. "
So close, but yet so far. The eternal quest of the liberaltarian to notice.
Japan is much less of a freakshow than your average western country. But the Japanese constitution contains various clauses about equality which were written by Beate Sirota Gordon who, unsurprisingly as an employee of the U.S. government, was a communist.
Seriously, they may have maintained traditional roles, but their birthrate's in free-fall. Pity, I wonder where I'll be able to buy a good car in 30 years.
> communism is the default ideological operating system of a technologically advanced country with a large and open oligarchy.
Your rationalization of the unfocused mind, economic determinism subtype, is noted. Communism,of course, is the product of intellectuals, not "the people," eg, Jesus, Marx, Pol Pot.
Communism is a fairly obvious idea, so people keep having it at all sorts of points in history. The question is under what conditions it becomes appropriate as the political formula of a regime.
I won't speak to what's going on at the college level, although I'm sure it's overstated. But k-12 is not in any way taken over by communism. As others have said, the inclusion of Freire bits to read is equivalent to indoctrination is fricking moronic.
Ed school is not indoctrination. It's not a how-to in anything. It's a year spent thinking about how to teach--not being taught how to teach, mind you, just finding one's own way. I'm sure it's far more woke than it was a while back, and there's no question that it's the wise student who doesn't disagree too vehemently with the pabulum that gets vomited out. But no one buys it. Surveys consistently show that 1 in 3 teachers are Republicans, and most surveys also show that teachers are a bit left of center, not wildly woke.
Public schools aren't doing what they do because of teachers, but because of laws and voters. Most people convinced otherwise have vanishingly little knowledge about education law and policy.
Politics is downstream of Culture and Culture is downstream of Philosophy. So yes, intellectuals matter. A lot. Even if the vast majority are unaware of them, because they drive the elites.
Culture is downstream of material and technical conditions, intra- and intergroup competition??? Anyway, I feel like ideas-ppl have this habit of making grand pronouncements about the importance of ideas and then telling a fun story. Cat-nip for nerds who feel alienated or feel that they lack agency. Unfalsifiable, because conveniently the majority are unaware of them.
The other thing is, ideas are cheap. At any given time, the idea space is basically full. However, given particular conditions and audiences, some ideas enter discourse. Can an idea accentuate what was previously just an inarticulate propensity? Sure. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Right, few people have read Judith Butler and even fewer have understood her, but if she affects film schools she'll affect movies and 50 years later women will want to be Strong Independent Women instead of having families and the birth rate will fall. But there are always countless other factors, which is why you have to be wary of The One Big Theory To Explain Everything. It's Cultural Marxism AND labor-saving devices AND social media algorithms AND countless other things.
"Rufo and other conservatives have a tendency to overestimate the importance of intellectuals."
Well that's an understatement. Even Rufo himself had to acknowledge that when they actually looked into how much time and resources went into DEI at New School it was a lot less than he and others assumed. Read about it here - it is hysterical:
And this was at supposedly one of the most liberal schools in the country. The idea that these Marxist theorists from the 60s and 70s have much meaningful influence on the day to day of schooling is barely true in some of the crazier corners of academia, and nonsense in terms of your average student being forced to sit at a desk all day in high schools and elementary schools around the country. But Rufo has made a good living scare-mongering us, so kudos to him.
Yes, at some point if you get an education degree or go to enough in-service workshops you'll be exposed to Freire, Bell, etc. And then most teachers go back to doing what they were going to do anyway - which unfortunately is enforcing a system primarily meant to teach kids how to follow rules. Ironically, New School seems to have been a rare case of an institution that took the freedom and intellectual curiosity of its students seriously. But it attracted weird kids who tend to be liberal, and it's small so it made a great target for the radical conservative activists.
I'm opposed to much of the DEI nonsense too, but Rufo et al are exaggerating the problem and deserve much of the criticism they are getting.
"The idea that these Marxist theorists from the 60s and 70s have much meaningful influence on the day to day of schooling is barely true in some of the crazier corners of academia..."
I guess I must have been imagining that just about everyone under 30 with a boutique education speaks the language of Foucauldian power differentials, privilege, patriarchy, gender, "white" "cis" this and that, cultural appropriation, and are in favor of strict segregation of the imagination, punishments for misgendering, and all mostly believe the entirety of human history was a single uninterrupted hate crime, while being terrified to utter an unapproved thought or piece of outdated jargon and thus suffer social death.
Rufo doesn't exaggerate any more than any other political activist does, and as Social Justice is the new official state ideology, of course he's getting smeared.
But the whole "move along, nothing to see here" defense of academia is old by now and obviously false.
Didn't the U.S. have de jure equality since the end of the Civil War and the passing of the 14th Amendment? Certainly that's true on the federal and state level. I think the big novelty of the 1960's was the outlawing of various kinds of discrimination by private parties.
Great analysis from you and great insights from Rufo. But you both manage to describe a profound transformation in IDEAS without mentioning that from the 70’s (1) the demographic of the country has changed drastically, and (2) the balance of power between sexes has shifted. These two facts may explain why the social and legal impact of the deep leftist ideas has moved from being confined to academia in the 70’s to society today, and why the political culture in Europe was on the left compared to those in the USA in the 70’s, and is instead on the right compared to the USA today.
An important demographic (however small in numbers) was radical Jews, many of whom were disproportionately represented in academia and other organizations.
Jewish elite entrance and capture had a significant effect.
Though im not sure how productive or effective making that the focus now would be. Jews are somewhat in decline in american elite—dysgenic due to exogamy, lower fertility among smarter secular ashk—and are being eclipsed by other groups.
They helped pave the way for their own eclipse--because they were keen to displace the white majority. Amusingly (and frustratingly), you now see some Jews on Twitter who simultaneously identify as white when they want to criticize “we whites” and as non-whites when they want to avoid the wrath of minorities. Ultimately, they will be pegged as whites by anti-white non-whites. But the damage has been done.
Is your first name Richard?
No, it’s Dick.
they are white-adjacent, like asians. Any group that is successful is white adjacent and vice versa.
Part of that marginalization was related to a failure to assimilate (Jews exist for a reason--they weren’t created by gentiles) and the uneasy relationship they had/have with the “host” society in terms of economics and culture. See the book Postville for an example (written by a Jew).
If some gentiles are hostile to Jews because of their (ahem) “lived experience”, then it’s not an issue of “pre”-judice; it’s just “judice”. Prejudice is basically a proto-woke word that frames any rejection of alien phenotypes (or ethnic groups) as solely based on “irrationality”. But people tend to reject other races due to aesthetic/cultural reasons, not just because, say, the stereotypes they hold are false with regard to this or that person.
Most precedent for modern civil rights law was set up before Clinton was in office. Hispanics made up only 4% of the 1992 electorate, Asians roughly 1%. The immigrants that accelerated anti-whiteness arrived here in the late 19th and early 20th century.
immigrants tend toward social conservatism in part because the united states is so out there, unlike most of the world.
How Angela Davis still has any credibility left after she openly supported Jonestown before their mass suicide astounds me.
To Angela Davis add Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, the Kendi-ites and other CRT con artists, plus all the Farrakhan NOI babblers about Black Athena and all the imaginary Wakandas the white man took from them—the sad truth is as long as a black writer/activist/politician toes the line of liberal pieties and blames everything on white conservatives, they are safe and untouchable, because they serve an important purpose and white liberals keep them close as pets and mascots.
Harvey Milk was a supporter too, but he's practically beatified now. Shades of Josh Barro on the Kennedys: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/the-kennedys-were-always-bad
Interesting, I have not heard of this.
Right?? I've read a little bit about their support of Jim Jones and I about threw up
Either people don’t care or they just don’t know about her more reprehensible actions. Mind boggling.
It's not simply this. It's an act of deliberate historical fabrication. There's a reason Jim Jones isn't so much as mentioned in the Sean Penn biopic, even though he was by far Milk's most important and influential political ally.
See also, Persepolis, both the comic and movie, which contemptuously blames the Cinema Rex attack on the Shah, even though it was obvious from the moment the attack happened it was the work of Khomeini's death culture, as detailed by Andrew Scott Cooper in Chapter 19 of The Fall of Heaven.
Well from what I understand he was doing a lot of good in the community to begin with, which is how he built up such support in the first place. Not knowing anything specific about her support, was she just into his community service? I think a number of black community leaders praised him for his on the ground work, well before the culty move to SA and mass suicide and I don't think that necessarily means they deserve to lose their credibility. They got took in by the legitimate helping of the poor, not the culty part.
“To talk about the free speech rights of a public school teacher on the job is akin to defending the right of a bus driver to go wherever he wants.”
This line made me lol. Well played.
Though I do wonder what you would say about the Scopes trial.
The commitment of conservatives to socialism is clear in their support for public schools, done their way, of course. In a capitalist economy, conservatives and Leftists would be free to destroy only their own children in private schools. Conservative children would learn to pray. Leftist children would learn to-oh, wait a minute, theyre already learning that. Sorry!
You and Rufo are legends. The American woke revolution is the same as the Chinese cultural revolution. Think you’ll enjoy my pieces on them and an interview with my father, who has lived through both: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/tiananmen-square-massacre-cultural-revolution
Irrespective of where you stand on American Woke, to compare it to the Chinese cultural revolution is an exercise in exaggeration to the point of absurdity. Let's put it into context, how many people have died as a result of Woke? Probably a few. In the Cultural revolution, nobody knows for sure, but the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands and probably millions. How has the American economy done through the Woke era? Ups and downs as always, but the overall direction has been as good as anyplace on earth and better than most. In the Cultural Revolution era, the Chinese economy collapsed and remained comatose until Deng's reforms.
"Irrespective of where you stand on American Woke, to compare it to the Chinese cultural revolution is an exercise in exaggeration to the point of absurdity."
I don't think this is necessarily true, because events can have analogues that differ yet overlap. Like Twain said: “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme."
Yes, our Cultural Revolution is a thankfully tamer sequel, but this is a much richer safer country with much less of a tolerance for violence, but our radicals don't have to shed blood because they can get their way instead by shedding tears.
But there are definite commonalities: of course the Struggle Sessions, the energized college students with their hearts on fire for Justice and Equality, the revolutionary dogma and the way it could be updated to make yesterday's heroes into today's villains, and I think most importantly: both being top-down revolts approved and orchestrated by the respective ruling parties, in Mao's case as a reaction to his opposition after the disastrous famines, and in our case as a reaction against Trump and the 2016 Peasants' Rebellions by the global corporate class, who then converted en masse to the Social Justice religion.
Also, it's called a "Cultural" Revolution so it's NOT about the economy, there are some things as important as GDP, believe it or not.
When tallying the woke body count, if you reasonably include the incremental increase in homicides due to de-policing, first in the aftermath of Ferguson and then in the aftermath of Floyd, it is in the several thousands. Add in the increased traffic fatalities tracable to de-policing and it is several thousand more, approaching 10k. Steve Sailer has done the actual counting. Not cultural revolution numbers yet, but scaled to population it is not orders of magnitude less.
I'm sure it's been at least a few thousand, but that's practically a coffee break by PRC standards. They already killed significantly more people than that just by coming to power in the Chinese Civil War. And that's not even counting battlefield casualties. Brutal purges
For all the parrallels, and for all the good of nipping this in the bud, it's still grossly inappropriate to compare anything in the American experience to what happened when the CPC, the CPV, the CPK, the CPSU, or the NSDAP came to power in their respective countries, or for that matter, their road to power. (Seriously, the NSDAP had the least depraved rise of the bunch, and their rise involved murdering Dear Leader's niece/mistress to keep her quiet about their affair.)
Yes, there is much hyperbole from the anti-woke. On the other hand, it’s good to nip this movement in the bud before it gets even worse. As things stand now, many have been silenced for fear of speaking up, e.g. I think it would be risky for me to push back against woke at my workplace. That’s bad enough. DEI fosters dangerous incompetence too.
The bud was many years ago, we are long since in the full flowering
Countless urban metropolises were decimated by the civil rights era and black crime in the 1960s and 70s. If one wishes to use the same consequentialist argument of disparate impact, then the grossly disparate rate of black-on-white crime needs to be called out for what it is, which is genocide. The Cultural Revolution is exaggerated anyways, the vast majority of deaths under Mao were due to economic/agricultural incompetence, not political murder.
The NYT reported Richard Walker's (U-SC) estimate of Marxist murders in China: 37-64 million. Think of that when watching publically self-described Marxist analyst on CNN(. You cant even imagine a (virtually impossible) public Nazi. Fox News is bad but nowhere near that.
Van Jones the CNN Marxist.
the answer is implied in your response
Chinese communists NEEDED to kill to plant the seeds of their stvpid ideollogy, having faced stern resistance from farmers
USA communists DONT NEED to kill to achieve same result, since they've already infiltrated colleges and institutions, and being even sponsored by naive or idiotic US bureaucrats and private firms
>to compare it to the Chinese cultural revolution is an exercise in exaggeration to the point of absurdity
What is HIS context of comparison? He may not be using your comparison. Similarities and differences are contextual. The Earth is big relative to the moon but small relative to Jupiter. And then you must compare his context to yours by
I think the more appropriate comparison is the Civil Rights Movement itself, as Richard plans to detail in his upcoming book. It's become our folk religion, not just in America, but in the broader Anglo culture. But the only part of it that gets focused on are the heroic parts, like fighting for the right to buy a bus seat or a restaraunt table or a hotel room. The domestic terror campaigns, the sexual abuse scandals, and the Kendiesque beliefs in "equity" -- though the term itself was not used in such times -- sincerely held by many of the religion's apostles, are just not brought up at all.
The issue is that it'll be tempting to merely dismiss all the problematic parts as the work of a few bad actors. It must be emphasized that the movement itself always had fundamental problems. In that respect, I'm at least happy the term "equity" is now popularized in this context. Because now the indefensible parts can be attacked and dismantled while we keep the parts that are worth keeping.
its early yet
May I suggest the expression The Deep Left to refer to what you and Rufo are trying to address. The Deep State is a subset of The Deep Left. And I see you as arguing that a strategic approach can take away some of the institutional sources of power of The Deep Left.
John Carter from Postcards of Barsoom coined the term "Marxcissist" (Marxist narcissists), which really nails it.
The post on "Marxcissism:" https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-marxcissists
What is the difference between the Deep Left and Yarvin's Cathedral?
I think if you say "Deep Left," many conservative politicians will quickly see what you are talking about. Not so much with "Cathedral." But they both refer to the way that some institutions are infested with contemporary progressive ideology.
I agree with the point that you made on a recent podcast about human nature, and suspect it offers an answer to the titular question here. In the absence of the dire necessity of the natural world demanding excellence in the pursuits of life (whether hunting, agriculture, or warfare), most would prefer to have things made as easy for them as possible. As you say, it is apparently human nature for people to want the government to give them money from other people's pockets. So too is it natural for the unworthy to agitate for equality or special treatment. As you say, it is natural to want to give in to women's tears. So too is it natural to try to be kind to the less fortunate even if the solutions they propose are insane. Conservatism has been asleep for decades, due partially to a complete misunderstanding of human nature or perhaps an unwillingness to be honest about it. The people who thought about it hundreds of years before the rise of anything resembling modern political systems recognized that the purpose of state power is to force citizens to do hard things that are good for them against all of their base inclinations. What we see these days is what we get in the complete absence of such a thing. Some unfortunate, effeminate, soft bodied, disabled misfit isn't pushing for a transformation of society to make his life easier because of ideological Marxism. Low IQ folks who are terrible at tests and can't meet standards don't agitate for the removal of tests and standards because they are communists. Rather, weakness, laziness, perversity, ugliness, and inferiority are their own reasons, and require no intellectuals to create them.
> Contra conservatism, man has free will and no innate ideas. Man must choose to create the Beast. And, unless we return to the Enlightenment, he will.
I can't tell f you're agreeing with me or advocating for blank-slatism. Craving sweet/fatty foods isn't an innate idea, it's an evolutionary urge that is now poorly aligned with health. Without any innate ideas about fat positivity, many people will simply become fat if given the opportunity to eat doritos and drink pepsi.
Biology is different from emotions, the automatic response to values resulting from the free will power, immediately experienced, thus the context of proof, to focus ones mind, thru the senses , onto concrete reality or to evade focusing. Focus and reason or evade focus and rationalize the evasion. This is the basic fact of mans nature. Further, because man is a mind/body unity, responses to food can result from what one is doing with ones life. Eg,anxiety can reduce the desire for spicy,heavy foods. A hangover can be eased with chicken soup. In the context of ideas, man is a blank slate. Innate ideas are the absurd claim that man knows reality prior to knowing reality. Ideas are the product of the minds voluntary processing of the evidence of the senses. Your many people above have chosen to evade focusing on healthy foods.
I'm gonna keep it real with you, Chief. One of us is having a stroke, either reading that or writing it.
He’s an Objectivist ideologue
Objectivist philosopher. Ideology is merely social philosophy split from its basis.
?
“White guilt is real and organic — it didn’t need Marxist intellectuals to deform our political culture.”
Kevin MacDonald’s (of _Culture of Critique_ infamy) last book was about Western individualism and universalism. He, too, stresses white guilt as a big factor. But there is no gainsaying the fact that left-wing Jews remade academia in their image after WWII and contributed enormously to blank slatism, the civil rights juggernaut, and Wokeism (although some Jews may regret how far it’s gone). Would this have happened if the Frankfurt School had never arrived on our shores? Possibly. It’s that possibility that allows many anti-woke folks to ignore the wildly disproportionate Jewish influence among this intellectual movement. Marcuse begat Davis, not the other way round.
Jews are prominent in many intellectual contexts because their religion is more worldly than Christianity and because of Maimonides, a medieval Jewish philosopher who liked Aristotles philosophy of reason. Christianity had strong communist influences since Jesus, the Sermon On The Mount, and early Christians. Marxs early anti-capitalism is virtually identical to the Christian anti-capitalism of his time, eg, the shared attack on the increasing rationality, selfishness and individualism. And just precisely how did the Crucifixion influence the US founding politics of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Do you see much happiness in torture? "Blessed are the poor in spirit" is the moral basis of communism, not Jefferson or Steve Jobs. The Good Book is Atlas Shrugged.
Exactly. Jews are also among the most prominent right-wing thinkers as well as left, simply because they are highly represented in intellectualism in general. Leo Strauss was Jewish and he basically shaped modern intellectual conservatism. Ayn Rand was Jewish and she shaped libertarianism. The neocon movement was heavily shaped by Jews like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol.
Meanwhile, and I say this as a Christian myself, I can see how Christian values have directly inflenced wokism today. Before Constantine, the West was built on conquest, the Nietzschean will to power. After that, the ideas of "turn the other cheek", "original sin", "the last shall be first and the first shall be last", "be meek like a lamb", etc. took over.
You could give also Edward Blum credit for knocking down affirmative action. That's pretty impressive actually, and he wasn't even a lawyer. Kept at it for 20 years, and finally won.
> Ayn Rand ... shaped libertarianism.
Yes, but not willingly. She despised its subjectivismm, anti-objectivity and anarchism. She was an Objectivist. They took her political ideas out of context.
A ,medieval, pro-reason philosopher, Maimonides, is the cause of of the greater Jewish respect for the mind. Its very indirect. Most Jews dont know of him.
The West was built on reason. Conquest is coincidental. Christianity is anti-West, as the Dark Ages show. Faith and force reinforce each other and both contradict reason.
Atlas Shrugged-Ayn Rand
lol. Christianity defined the West well into the 19th century; its morals, its history, its schools, its inventions, its peoples' migration, its wars. Jews sometimes sold things to said Christians. You guys can have the 20th century but that's about it.
Definition is by contextual essentials, ie, the most explanatory fact in a context. Baseball players wear hats but thats merely a non-defining property of baseball.
How did supernaturalism and faith define the Renaissance, Age of Reason, Sci Rev, Enlightenment and to today?! It defined culture from some time around the late Roman empire to the end of the Medieval era. And reason, not faith, causes inventions. Kants nihilism ended the Enlightenment w/modernism, especially Weimar Germany and 1960s US, and it continues now, with Christianity slowly returning.
DIM Hypothesis-Leonard Peikoff; a new exxplanation of conventional history.
Caps, not hats.
Both your comment and mine can be true at the same time. Radical left Jews were enormously influential. Rand opposed these (particular) radicals but she and other Objectivists, many of whom were/are Jews, reflexively condemned racism as “collectivism”. I think a big part of this condemnation was because of their status as “minorities”. They are also fanatical supporters of Israel, so they display the “individualism for thee but collectivism for me” hypocrisy that many on the radical right condemn (and others quietly notice).
Jews are also overrepresesented among hardcore critics of Israel. There’s no intellectual movement - maybe even including intellectual anti-semitism - that isn’t disproportionately Jewish. You’re just reading tea leaves here.
Jewish critics of Israel likely are overrepresented but my point was that this alleged outpost of Western individualism is also fundamentally an ethno-state. Pointing out that Jews are wildly disproportionate among the radical left is not reading tea leaves. There is a likely connection between that and an ethnic goal of playing offense against an often hostile gentile majority.
Man has free will and no innate ideas. Look out at reality, not inward. Focus your mind, unless, of course, mans independent mind is such a terrifying responsibility that sacrificing it to an allegedly higher power is a relief.
Spencer’s an antisemite - every comment he leaves is about blaming the Jews.
A charge of anti-Semitism doesn’t refute criticisms of Jews. Or do you think Jews are beyond reproach? Are they not influential?
Blaming an entire group for acting in concert specifically to destroy the natural order of humanity is absolutely racist. Your free to believe it yourself, but literally the only reason you're disagreeing with this is because the term "racist" is such a pejorative, insulting way of describing someone, you want to resist it even though you fit its exact description.
You are still a racist.
There are many influences on modern culture, including Christianity. Singling out Jews is a poorly hidden anti-Semitism.
> [Objectivists] reflexively condemned racism as “collectivism”
What?! Are you implying that thinking of individuals as deterministic members of a group is individualism? Thats so stupid that I dont know what to think of it.
> They [Objectivists] are also fanatical supporters of Israel
Israel, despite the obvious Jewish influence, is the lone rational, individualist, Western outpost in a fanatically mystical and primitive region. Its regional enemies have, in word and deed, committed to
> I think a big part of this [Objectivist] condemnation [of racism] was because of their status as “minorities."
Your evasion of Rand's philosophical, principled, systematic praise of individualism is...mind-boggling. You are intellectually lost inside the effects, psychology and sociology, while evading the cause, philosophy. Rand's enemy is the unfocused mind shared by Leftist subjectivists and Rightist mystics. Look out at reality, not inward. Focus your mind.
You often decry ad hominem but it seems that anyone who rejects Objectivism is automatically written off as an “unfocused” mind. I don’t see Rand as innovative at all; at best, she’s a classical liberal and that puts me in her camp (and her in mine) in that limited sense. If we are avoiding sectarianism, that should be enough.
Israel is Western in outlook but also inhabited by many fanatical Orthodox Jews. Why don’t the Israeli Jews just pack up and leave Israel and go to the actual West? Because they are committed to being Jews, not just individuals (as are Israel’s Jewish supporters in the West). Calling Palestinians “savages”, as many Objectivists do, is certainly “collectivist”.
>it seems that anyone who rejects Objectivism is automatically written off as an “unfocused” mind.
Objectivism is basically a method of using the mind, not basically politics, economics or even culture. Anti-Objectivists, even in or especially in universities, typically make the many reasoning errors that Rand repetitively identifies. E.g., overgeneralizing, ambiguity (package-dealing contradictions), and taking ideas out of hierarchical context. In effect, they use stream-of-consciousness and intuitions instead of looking out at reality and logically selecting and organizing concrete facts. An irrational epistemology is modern culture's basic problem. Man's life requires a focused mind. That, not capitalism, is the theme of Atlas Shrugged despite decades of irrelevant criticism of it. Because of Kant, modern thought is a competition among various types of the unfocused mind. Leftists want emotion to guide them. Rightists want faith. Classical liberalism, as the dominant intellectual power, died in the early to mid-19th century.
Whatever Israel's cultural and political problems, it remains largely or basically Western. Palestinians support an Islam that had no Renaissance or Enlightenment. They retain the mentality of primitive tribalists in the time of Mohammed. They CHOOSE this mentality. There is no social or cultural determinism. Most people choose to sacrifice their minds to social approval because their culture's intellectual leaders defend it and most people are insufficiently independent to challenge it.
> left-wing Jews
So Jews are evil because they are capitalists and communists. That leaves only fascism for conservatives. And we are drifting there.
Ashkenazim have disproportionate influence in high-cognitive-demand professions because of the Bell Curve. Academia just hasn't been about that since promotion there's been about race since at least the '60s. Earlier, in some fields. (Such as theology, as readers of Pappas would know.)
Yes, Jews have high average IQs, but the issue is that Jews contributed significantly to pushing academia in a leftist direction, including overthrowing the Darwinian paradigm as applied to human psychology/behavior and contributing to a general woke outlook.
High-IQ people, on average, have always contributed to the woke outlook; because high-IQ people, on average, like to believe their intellectual talents are something they earned through hard work, not something they were born with. Or, for those with more moderate beliefs, that intelligence is evenly distributed among every race of humans, and that differences in achievement are merely cultural.
It's why there's so much resistance to the Bell Curve, because it shows that neither the moderate nor the extreme beliefs are true, and that the cognitive divide of humanity will persist forever. It's why they must be fought and defeated, because if anything, they're worse than creationists. At least in the Anglo world, since creationism hasn't been a popular view among the high-IQ class since Darwin.
It wasn’t always the case that the elites were woke (or proto-woke). But in post-WWII US, the Anglo-Saxon elite were significantly displaced by an influential Jewish elite in academia, the media, etc. Notice that those who cry “anti-Semitism” will be the first to explain why, say, Jews are overrepresented among the financial elite by arguing that Jews were driven into these high paying occupations as a means of self-preservation. But then if you suggest that Jews might play offense in addition to pure reactive defense in the face of widespread hostility, they get offended.
This shows no understanding of actual history. Intellectuals in any society have always been predisposed to grand, utopian visions for reorganizing societies. Especially the Anglo-Saxons, who literally invented the word "utopia":
https://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Thomas-Turner-Paul-translator/dp/0671465600
They certainly weren't woke by today's standards, but these are superficial differences. The similarities are fundamental.
But that very general historical observation wouldn’t refute the idea that Jewish intellectuals play offense on behalf of their ethnic interests in terms of the political and intellectual movements they created and (disproportionately) dominated, e.g., Marxism, Freudianism, Boasian anthropology, Critical Theory, etc.).
Great article. I think the power of language is an important aspect of this ideological movement. It works well in eliciting white guilt. Add to that the increased activism of college educated women who tend to be more empathetic.
I am constantly amazed at how many people think DEI is a good thing. It plays on their feelings. I suspect a significant majority of the population don't know the difference between equality and equity. When I ask them about what diversity or inclusion means, I get vague answers. Questions such as: how do you determine if diversity is achieved? Why is that always desirable? Do you include only 'marginalized' groups? Most people don't even realize that the term 'marginalized' means not white (christian) heterosexual males.
Wokesters are winning by using language as a weapon against an apathetic, affluent society. It can also as a stick by ridicule and social isolation. I think challenging people to consider the meanings of woke terms will go a long way towards reducing it's reach.
Not only did Social Justice piggyback on the Civil Rights movement, it also styled itself and its priesthood of professors as Official Defenders of the Oppressed, and as their greatest skill is language manipulation they've managed to create an army of Kafka traps, where whatever the topic, by disagreeing you put yourself in the position of kicking down on the poor and marginalized, which is of course taboo and gauche (esp in post-60s America).
Some people focus on Civil Rights law, some people on intellectuals and philosophic genealogies, but another important aspect of the Social Justice takeover is their capture of morality. (With Soc Just morality more or less founded on white guilt, the sanctity of social victims, and the first purpose of politics and culture being rectifying/atoning for historical oppression.)
Once their morality became standard-issue for both the upscale liberals who control culture and education, and for successive generations of students they taught, victory was guaranteed, it was only a matter of time.
One would hope. I've found though that when the woke terms are accurately described, people either double down on their nonsense or start hurling insults at you
You don't quite spell it out. Is the idea here to abolish all equality/discrimination laws?
It doesn't seem all that hard to predict where things go even if that goal is achieved because they're already going there today. Even in the case of pure conservative victory in which all this law is rolled back, the ideology is one of radical equality of outcome so they will just move on to migrants, dating, salaries, anywhere else they can attack disparate outcomes. Civil rights law only covers a small part of it. You make a compelling case it's important, but communism long pre-dates US affirmative action judgements.
Conservatism has rejected its disasterously compromised, unprincipled, anti-ideological, Pragmatist individualism for collectivism, specifically ancestor worship. Note the appeals to "America's founding ideals" without identifying the Enlightenments rational individualism. Congresscritter, Josh Hawley, praises Augustine, the philosopher who caused the Dark Ages. Either Ayn Rand becomes intellectually dominant or we will return to Dark Ages.
I mean, you can't blame Augustine for the entire medieval period, the collapse of Roman civilization had something to do with that too. There are pretty good arguments the idea of an absolute immanent truth helped develop science by assuming there was a fixed universal truth 'out there' we could discover, as opposed to varying philosophical schools each with their own strengths and weaknesses. This actually happens to be true in the physical sciences if nowhere else.
I'm becoming more appreciative of Rand as the alt-right and the woke left gain ascendance, but she's not the only alternative to the Dark Ages.
Augustine's mysticism is the basic cause of the Christian Dark Ages (400-800AD), the most consistently Christian culture in Western history. Of course, Christianity is part of the West like a fly is part of a bowl of soup. Immanent truth is mysticism, ie, truth allegedly, impossibly, in reality, known by a non-sense-based method. Truth is a product of the focused mind, neither subjective or mystical. Science is solely a product of philosophy, ie, Thales discovery of natural causes, Socrates discovery of definitions, Aristotles discovery of systematic logic and scientific method (see his biology) and Francis Bacons discovery of systematic induction. Supernaturalism, faith , an unreal, random universe subject to supernatural whim and faith contradict science. Philosophy causes science and is currently destroying it with various subjectivisms and mysticisms. Rome collapsed because post-Aristotle, philosophy lost its nerve with superficial views, eg, hedonism, skepticism, Stoicism, and Platonic mysticism, all leading to Christianity. We will have a new Dark Ages unless Rand beccomes much mmore influential.
Yes, people are now starting to see the danger of nihilism that Rand, w/philosophy, saw in the 1950s. The danger is now so concretely in-your-face that even poorly educated, anti-intellectual conservatives see it. Philosophy is the longest-range view. It influenced, however indirectly, some 1960s rock music.
Troubled By These Days And Times-Savoy Brown, blues
Weve been trying to get high without having to pay-Broken English, sung by Marianne Faithfull,classically educated
Like A Rolling Stone-Bob Dylan
Dating? Isn't that sort of an incel topic? I feel like the left disdains that.
They'll do anything that favors women and/or LGBT people.
"This would be the basis of my case that Rufo and other conservatives have a tendency to overestimate the importance of intellectuals."
I think we need to define the term "intellectuals." Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coats, and their Neo-Marxist predecessors in academia and elsewhere, would be considered to be intellectuals by their followers whether or not those who oppose their ideas agree with it. These Leftists generated the racial Marxism concepts, developed the practical discussion points, and wrote the books for their audience to consume.
The current prevailing "woke" culture is thus born from the intellectuals in academia. The core concepts were taught in education to impressionable minds and then practiced by the adherents in our society. We went from "all viewpoints are valid" in the 70s/80s, cross-cultural appreciation, and political correctness to strict adherence to "words are violence," "cultural appropriation," and "anti-racism" in the course of 50 years. It requires a series of intellectuals to move forward the movement from within academia to the broad application into the daily lives of average citizens.
"Rufo’s book is built around intellectual biographies of four activist-scholars: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell"
It would be difficult to imagine four more irrelevant people to the current state of academia. Let alone the state of the world. Unserious people can always drum up baddies, and impute to them power that they never had. But why would anyone take such a thing seriously?
"during the Cold War, some of the leading lights of modern academia were openly in favor of distant regimes that were engaging in mass killings in the name of equality." Notice the language: "openly in favor of"! Wow. Not "supported financially." Not "caused to happen." Nothing like that. So, Mr. Hanania, let me ask you: have you yourself ever "been openly in favor of a distant regime engaged in mass killings"? Russia, say? Oh, you will insist: I don't "openly support" Russia! Or, I only supported them BEFORE they engaged in mass killings. Or something. But let's be serious. This is the weakest sauce ever.
I'll come out and say it. I have, at one time or another, also been openly in favor of regimes that carried out mass killings. Not *because* they carried out mass killings, but *despite* it. I am, among other things, in favor of the United States. (Please deny that we've ever carried out any mass killings.)
It'd be as if I wrote a book explaining that the United States is in a crisis, and we must act NOW NOW NOW because ... well, let's find four random Republicans who openly support four different murderous states. Jared Kushner supports the Saudis, whose murderous history is legion. Donald Trump supports China, which has exterminated Uyghurs. Tucker Carlson supports Russia, which is massacring Ukrainian children. OK that's only 3 off the top of my head, I'm sure you can come up with one more.
"Yet Rufo also reminds us that it was Marcuse’s third wife Erica Sherover-Marcuse who designed courses that became the prototypes for DEI trainings across institutions." Come on, man. That has to be a troll sentence. Marcuse's 3rd wife designed courses that became prototypes!? That's supposed to be impressive? Scary? If it turned out that ... let's pick someone as obscure as Marcuse ... Dinesh D'Souza's 3rd wife designed courses that became prototypes for homeschoolers promoting Christian nationalism ... and therefore there's this deep connection and so we must all support radical new polices ... you would laugh in my face. And rightly so.
"In his conclusion, Rufo gives some thoughts on what a healthier society would look like. The common citizen will have the space for inhabiting and passing down his own virtues, sentiments, and beliefs, free from the imposition of values from above."
Yeah, that's what they're up to in Ron DeSantis' Florida. Making sure there's no imposition of values from above. For DeSantis, the only values that matter are Republican values. Rufo is clearly on board with that. Are you?
I had surmised that Chris Rufo was a joke. This review seems to confirm it. But I had thought you were intelligent and insightful. I still do, actually. This piece is just a misfire. Right?
Mass killings are not necessarily mass murders. You may recall the US military in WW2.
Your evasion of long-term, intellectually dominant Leftism on US culture is bizarre. America's original, Enlightenment culture of rational individualism has been largely buried under Leftist emotionalism and Rightist faith.
What America Is: The Moral Logic Of The American Revolution-C. Bradley Thompson
I don't think I "evade" the long-term intellectually dominant Leftism on US culture. I think I straight up deny it. It's just not a thing outside the fever dreams of some conservatives.
Now, sometimes I think I'm wrong about this, and a couple of things that Mr. Hanania has written in the past make me take that possibility seriously. In particular, the civil rights law stuff is going to be interesting, and I look forward to reading his book.
But from everything I've read about Rufo, he's barking up all the wrong trees. This review does nothing to change that opinion ... the reverse, in fact. "Oh noez the leftists are in charge of everything - here's proof, just look at these 4 irrelevant people!"
My belief in Mr. Hanania's ability to reason well about these issues took a serious hit today. I have hopes that this is a temporary setback.
I think it's more that they represent strands of an intellectual movement that took over the universities and media and entertainment industry (movies and TV shows affect culture, don't fool yourself) in the past 70 years, and people like stories about people. It's easier to get people to read a book about people than it is to read a book about long-term social trends and the political leanings of university faculty. Do people remember the sociopolitical structure of the Galactic Empire, or Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader?
I think he might have been inspired by Helen Andrews' Boomers (which went after Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Camille Pagllia, Jeffrey Sachs, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor), itself inspired by Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (a 1918 book that attacked four prominent Victorians).
> It's [culturally dominant US Leftism) just not a thing outside the fever dreams of some conservatives.
Leftists are dominant but conservatives are also very influential.
We've reached a place where both sides think the other side is dominant. Just spitballing here, but should we consider the possibility that nobody is dominant. People believe what they believe, they take ideas from various sources, they agree with things - sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes not. Nobody's in charge, but if you have strong ideological commitments, it looks like the people on the other side are more in charge than your side is. But there are actually dozens of "sides." White Christian social conservatives vs. Black Christian social conservatives vs. Muslim social conservatives vs. Tech bros with a libertarian bent vs. Libertarians with a tech bro bent vs. Liberals with a tech bro bent vs. Liberals with an environmental bent vs. Environmentalists who can't stand wokeism, and on and on. None of us feel like we're in charge, because we're not. But that doesn't mean someone else is.
I promise you, there is no feeling more ludicrous than having actually read Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Freire and seeing these two men, of all people, being held up as exemplars of dominant culture power. Nobody reads Marcuse. Nobody reads Freire. Even in the academy! And the accusation that these two men are all powerful is ... coming from Chris Rufo!? A guy who is intentionally remaking an actually existing university, right now, in his own ideological image! No sir. I say no. This is bullshit. There is no way that Chris Rufo himself takes this argument seriously, and it says bad things about Mr. Hanania if he does.
Leftism is dominant in schools, media, art, and the humanities. In govt, Leftists have used altruism to shame conservatives into supporting bigger govt for 100+ years. Conservatives have recently adopted some anti-business, anti-capitalist values. Where is conservatism dominant? The culture is changing and conservatism will eventually be dominant. But not today.
Intellectual influence is mostly indirect, a march thru the institutions and thru layers of prior intellectuals. The philosophers are in charge, tho most are so incompetent that they dont know it. They just keep teaching nihilism and wondering why everything is falling apart.
I think the left owns the universities, the media, and the entertainment industry and the state and local government in a lot of blue states, and the right controls the state and local government in a lot of red states. The right has the Supreme Court right now, but that could change with a few elections. The executive and legislative branches are contested territory. So it's possible for everyone to point at something and say the other side has all the power.
It's kind of like MRAs pointing at men being most prisoners, war casualties, etc. and feminists pointing at men being most CEOs, government officials, etc. They're both right!
Re: mass killings vs. mass murders: I think you want to complain to Messrs. Rufo and Hanania, as they are the ones claiming that it's prima facie a bad thing to be a person who has ever been in favor of any country that carries out mass killings.
Defensive killings against literal terrorists like Ho Chi-Minh and whatever goons the ISI uses to tyrranise the Afghans aren't remotely comparable to offensive killings for the sake of mad, anti-human ideological impositions.
For that matter, they worked! We just left millions of innocent people in the lurch anyway, both Democrats and Republicans, for shallow political reasons, and did so long after American troops were actually doing any of the fighting.
Are you arguing with Rufo and Hanania or me?
I don't know what Rufo and Hanania's own views on Vietnam nor Afghanistan are, but I would not hesitate to tell them to their faces they were wrong if they told me themselves they opposed either or both conflicts.
And for that matter, you yourself are wrong if you oppose either conflict, too. The hippie peace movement of the '60s and the '00s were no better than the Nazi appeasement movement far-leftists supported between '39 and '41. The difference is for Vietnam and Afghanistan, the Nazis won.
Hell to the yeah on all of this.
I don't think it would be that difficult, going by citation count.
"The American education system, or at least the field of education itself, was taken over by literal communists."
Incorrect. Communists didn't take over any specific aspect of America, America is a communist country. More precisely, communism is the default ideological operating system of a technologically advanced country with a large and open oligarchy.
A good exercise to do is to go through the Wikipedia pages of the Frankfurt School and note down the ones who spent large amount of time working for a branch of the U.S. government. Of course, it would be easier to make a list of those who didn't - you wouldn't even need a pen! The working theory of the Rufos of the world is that these were canny subversives and the CIA were their chumps and that this just keeps happening for some reason. But there is a more parsimonious model. Or, in short, just read Unqualified Reservations already!
"Communists, Critical Race Theorists, and feminists are in the same tradition of smart people with big ideas about the world, with the main difference between them and the major figures of the Enlightenment happening to be that they’re wrong."
When the word 'copium' makes it into the encyclopaedia, this should be the prime illustration.
"It’s important to remember that while the figures profiled by Rufo were undoubtably influential, their ideas were in certain cases not all that different from what was previously accepted as mainstream liberalism. "
So close, but yet so far. The eternal quest of the liberaltarian to notice.
I don't think Japan, for instance, is communist.
Japan is much less of a freakshow than your average western country. But the Japanese constitution contains various clauses about equality which were written by Beate Sirota Gordon who, unsurprisingly as an employee of the U.S. government, was a communist.
I don't know, have you seen anime?
Seriously, they may have maintained traditional roles, but their birthrate's in free-fall. Pity, I wonder where I'll be able to buy a good car in 30 years.
> communism is the default ideological operating system of a technologically advanced country with a large and open oligarchy.
Your rationalization of the unfocused mind, economic determinism subtype, is noted. Communism,of course, is the product of intellectuals, not "the people," eg, Jesus, Marx, Pol Pot.
Communism is a fairly obvious idea, so people keep having it at all sorts of points in history. The question is under what conditions it becomes appropriate as the political formula of a regime.
Mans basic method of survival is reason. Sacrificing reason to equality is the politics of death.
Hilariously hysterical article. Rufo's a hack.
I won't speak to what's going on at the college level, although I'm sure it's overstated. But k-12 is not in any way taken over by communism. As others have said, the inclusion of Freire bits to read is equivalent to indoctrination is fricking moronic.
Ed school is not indoctrination. It's not a how-to in anything. It's a year spent thinking about how to teach--not being taught how to teach, mind you, just finding one's own way. I'm sure it's far more woke than it was a while back, and there's no question that it's the wise student who doesn't disagree too vehemently with the pabulum that gets vomited out. But no one buys it. Surveys consistently show that 1 in 3 teachers are Republicans, and most surveys also show that teachers are a bit left of center, not wildly woke.
Public schools aren't doing what they do because of teachers, but because of laws and voters. Most people convinced otherwise have vanishingly little knowledge about education law and policy.
Politics is downstream of Culture and Culture is downstream of Philosophy. So yes, intellectuals matter. A lot. Even if the vast majority are unaware of them, because they drive the elites.
Culture is downstream of material and technical conditions, intra- and intergroup competition??? Anyway, I feel like ideas-ppl have this habit of making grand pronouncements about the importance of ideas and then telling a fun story. Cat-nip for nerds who feel alienated or feel that they lack agency. Unfalsifiable, because conveniently the majority are unaware of them.
The other thing is, ideas are cheap. At any given time, the idea space is basically full. However, given particular conditions and audiences, some ideas enter discourse. Can an idea accentuate what was previously just an inarticulate propensity? Sure. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Right, few people have read Judith Butler and even fewer have understood her, but if she affects film schools she'll affect movies and 50 years later women will want to be Strong Independent Women instead of having families and the birth rate will fall. But there are always countless other factors, which is why you have to be wary of The One Big Theory To Explain Everything. It's Cultural Marxism AND labor-saving devices AND social media algorithms AND countless other things.
Do you mean that intellectuals drive the elites? I thought that intellectual are elite. But your primacy of philosophy is right.
"Rufo and other conservatives have a tendency to overestimate the importance of intellectuals."
Well that's an understatement. Even Rufo himself had to acknowledge that when they actually looked into how much time and resources went into DEI at New School it was a lot less than he and others assumed. Read about it here - it is hysterical:
https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/local/sarasota/2023/02/28/new-college-has-first-board-meeting-with-president-richard-corcoran-sarasota-desantis-diversity/69954368007/
And this was at supposedly one of the most liberal schools in the country. The idea that these Marxist theorists from the 60s and 70s have much meaningful influence on the day to day of schooling is barely true in some of the crazier corners of academia, and nonsense in terms of your average student being forced to sit at a desk all day in high schools and elementary schools around the country. But Rufo has made a good living scare-mongering us, so kudos to him.
Yes, at some point if you get an education degree or go to enough in-service workshops you'll be exposed to Freire, Bell, etc. And then most teachers go back to doing what they were going to do anyway - which unfortunately is enforcing a system primarily meant to teach kids how to follow rules. Ironically, New School seems to have been a rare case of an institution that took the freedom and intellectual curiosity of its students seriously. But it attracted weird kids who tend to be liberal, and it's small so it made a great target for the radical conservative activists.
I'm opposed to much of the DEI nonsense too, but Rufo et al are exaggerating the problem and deserve much of the criticism they are getting.
"The idea that these Marxist theorists from the 60s and 70s have much meaningful influence on the day to day of schooling is barely true in some of the crazier corners of academia..."
I guess I must have been imagining that just about everyone under 30 with a boutique education speaks the language of Foucauldian power differentials, privilege, patriarchy, gender, "white" "cis" this and that, cultural appropriation, and are in favor of strict segregation of the imagination, punishments for misgendering, and all mostly believe the entirety of human history was a single uninterrupted hate crime, while being terrified to utter an unapproved thought or piece of outdated jargon and thus suffer social death.
Rufo doesn't exaggerate any more than any other political activist does, and as Social Justice is the new official state ideology, of course he's getting smeared.
But the whole "move along, nothing to see here" defense of academia is old by now and obviously false.
"The 1960s saw us achieve de jure equality."
Didn't the U.S. have de jure equality since the end of the Civil War and the passing of the 14th Amendment? Certainly that's true on the federal and state level. I think the big novelty of the 1960's was the outlawing of various kinds of discrimination by private parties.