Q&A: The right type of activist
American Experiment’s John Hinderaker speaks with Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist, researcher, and writer, about his bestselling book, the roots of cultural wokeism, and putting a stop to the political left’s long march through America’s institutions.
Christopher Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute. He is also a contributing editor of City Journal where his writing explores issues including Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities. He is a New York Times bestselling author and holds a BSFS from Georgetown and an ALM from Harvard University.
John Hinderaker: Your book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything is a terrific book. It traces how the radical left — when people were not paying attention — took over just about every institution in American life. What’s the CliffsNotes version of how they did that?
Christopher Rufo: That’s exactly right. The big bookends for this story are 1968, which I use as the point of origin, and then 2020, which was the point of conquest. In 2020 Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, “Defund the Police” — all of these movements came to this big culminating point together with DEI and Critical Race Theory. These ideologies seem to have grabbed hold of all of our institutions simultaneously. I just tried to peel back the layers of the onion to show where these ideas came from. How were they transmitted over time, and how is it that the racial radicalism of the 1960s suddenly was installed in your Fortune 100 HR program and your child’s K-12 curriculum? And then, of course, in elite universities. So the book’s goal was to tell that story, and tell it narratively, dramatically, and historically using some of the key personalities as tent poles to help the reader get through the sequence of history.
Your book is divided into four sections, each one associated with a person. The first one is called Revolution. Herbert Marcuse is the central figure, and he’s kind of the theorist for the whole new left movement that’s now taken over the country.
Yes. He was the theorist of the new left, which has since metamorphosized into what we now think of as the BLM left. But Marcuse was brilliant, and we have to give him some credit, certainly having spent time reading about his life, but also reading his key works; I mean, he was truly a brilliant man and had some great insights, even if his ideas ultimately, I think, are destructive. And it’s actually interesting because, for those of us on the right, there’s this great school of thought coming from Leo Strauss. In a way, Marcuse is the analogous figure on the left. And I think both are probably pound for pound as far as intellectually brilliant people. It’s always been a fascinating parallel for me to think about: These people had this kind of Continental European mode of scholarship — brilliant minds transplanted into the United States and then had a tremendous impact on how we think about politics.
Among other things, Marcuse is really the prophet who talked about the revolution that would come not from the working class, which he hated, but from above to be imposed by elites, which is what we have seen over the recent past.
Yes he was, and I think that he was in some ways realistic. He never gave in on his ultimate ideals, which were unrealistic. But in his tactical approach, he did have a dose of realism. And so he saw very clearly in even the 1950s that the Soviet Union was sclerotic, undynamic, repressive, and bankrupt. And to his credit, again, he wrote a book in the 1950s explaining why the Soviet Union had already failed at that very early point. And then, likewise, he saw in Europe — and especially in the United States — the working class and the middle class totally uninterested in revolution. Actually, working-class life was getting much better under the capitalist system.
And so, instead of jettisoning his philosophical priors, his mind searched for what point of entry he could find for these ideas. And he found a two-part proletariat. This is really the basis of the left coalition today. It’s the stratum of university-educated, bourgeois, white intellectuals at the top of the coalition, and then disenfranchised racial minorities at the time — predominantly black city dwellers and a disaffected urban class. And he thought you could combine those two groups and then they would be the force of revolution. And in some ways he wasn’t wrong. In some ways he was actually correct, again, because that is still the basic 1.0 version of the left’s coalition that we’ve seen to this day.
The second section of your book focuses on how this leftist structure started and how race became the key element. The person that you used to embody that is Angela Davis, who should have gone to prison for murder.
She absolutely should have. I reviewed court records, I’ve reviewed reports and other documents related to the Marin Courthouse Siege, where she really, by her own admission and by documented evidence, provided the weapons that were used in what we could describe as a jailbreak, like a hostage-taking in the interest of breaking free some Marxist radicals from prison — unsavory guys who had already been convicted of violent crimes. And she was implicated in this. And yet, as we’ve seen over and over, another pattern that I think has emerged: The jury was quite sympathetic to her because she represented a victim class; she represented a kind of way of “sticking it to the man.”
The third section of your book focuses on education. The left’s taking over all of post-secondary education has been one of its major triumphs. You talk about a Brazilian named Paulo Freire.
Paulo Freire is not a household name by any means, but according to academic databases, he’s the third most cited scholar or pseudo-scholar in all of the social sciences. So, his influence should not be underestimated. Some surveys not too long ago showed that he was among the most assigned texts or even the most assigned text in graduate schools of education — the diploma mills that mint new teachers in the American K-12 system. But he was an unrepentant communist. Even in the 1980s when the legacy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was well known, he was still a defender of what happened in Mao’s China. And lo and behold, you move forward over time. And this idea of using the school as a revolutionary recruiting base has become even more popular and more pervasive.
In Minnesota, Critical Race Theory has taken over public schools. We now have the ethnic studies component that we borrowed from California. And the goal of public education now is to turn kids into left-wing activists.
That’s exactly right. We’ve seen that starting in 2020. In many ways, I wrote the book because I was doing this reporting to show people what’s happening in K-12 classrooms. This is the ideology that the institutions are propagating. And it sparked my curiosity beyond just the headlines to give people a more three-dimensional understanding of what this is.
In 2021, American Experiment did a 23-city tour of the state of Minnesota, putting on programs about Critical Race Theory, how it was infiltrating the public schools, and why it was bad. But you’re right; it’s groups like ours that have to take on this behemoth of the left.
It’s very difficult. And I’ll tell you one thing that I’ve learned in the practical work that I’ve done in recent years: Winning the election is important, but winning the election is only the beginning. Winning the election is the price of entry. And even if you’ve won the election, even if you have the governor’s mansion, even if you have a majority in the state legislative bodies, nothing is guaranteed. And actually doing battle with these institutions is quite difficult. In a state like Minnesota, which is trending blue in recent years, that problem is very difficult. And what these folks believe is that they can buck parents in schools at the local level, they can buck protests from voters at the state level, and they could push these ideologies through knowing that they have in their mind a comfortable margin where they can survive some of the challenge and ultimately promote the ideology within the education system, which in their theory will create more compliant and amenable voters in the future.
The fourth section of your book is called Power, and it focuses on Derrick Bell, who I knew years ago. You could not foresee at that time that he was going to become this kind of important historical figure, essentially the father of Critical Race Theory.
He became very influential much later in life, and his ideas also changed. In the late 1960s and early ’70s when he first became a professor, he was writing legal scholarship in a serious way, even if he was a man of the left. But over the next 30 or 40 years, he drifted into this kind of racial nihilism and racial paranoia and racial hatred that you see seeping through.
And he’s more than the intellectual father of Critical Race Theory. He was the actual father figure or mentor to all of the young lawyers, law school students, and then law professors who established the discipline. From that early moment, they started this academic discipline that took some Marxist ideas and translated them onto the racial plane or racial dimension.
The Critical Race Theorists didn’t really innovate intellectually at all. They had some new terminology. Their only innovation was essentially using the tools at their disposal — affirmative action, DEI, office politics, racial guilt, and some hard-edged activist tactics to secure their employment, which in my view, they mistook for the supremacy of their ideas. They had bureaucratic and administrative supremacy, but I don’t think they had intellectual supremacy by any stretch.
In the march through the institutions, these doctrines — DEI, which is just a new name for Critical Race Theory — really came to dominate corporate America. How did that happen?
Corporate America is still a profit-driven, or at least a money-driven, enterprise. That’s true. There are a couple of reasons, though, where you have these left-wing ideologies layered on top of it. One is a legal reason — affirmative action, disparate impact, the 1991 Civil Rights Act, the EEOC, and civil rights enforcement generally, and companies need to protect themselves from even spurious claims. They have adopted a lot of this HR language that has turned very left-wing because of who works in HR.
The second reason is after 2020, public opinion was shifting pretty dramatically, and they sensed the vulnerability, and that they had to do something, and that something that they settled on was DEI. Essentially, the message was, “We’re doing DEI. Don’t hurt us.”
The third reason is fashion. They have a lot of young employees at these companies. It’s very fashionable, and it’s very high-status. The executives who probably should know better cave in to the employees, media, and other pressure points. Making things fashionable creates a very cheap but powerful incentive. I think that explains a lot of what’s happened in the last five years.
One thing that’s come to the fore recently is the antisemitism. That is one aspect of this whole left-wing CRT, DEI ideology, and I think it shocked a lot of people. How does that fit into the bigger picture?
It did shock a lot of people; I was surprised by it. It seemed like there was a bipartisan agreement or consensus — strong support for Israel on foreign policy and then a strong taboo against antisemitism in the culture domestically. That shifted after the Hamas terror attack, and it shifted dramatically online on the left or rather dramatically in academia on the left. And then to a lesser extent online on the right, we’ve seen some resurgence of some antisemitic social media content. And so this was a surprise to me, and I think it was a surprise to many people. And the most surprising part was that it came from very elite quarters where those attitudes one had previously thought were not permissible.
Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, was fired. You played a significant part in that.
The Claudine Gay story has two parts. She got herself into hot water with her disastrous response to antisemitism on campus at Harvard. She equivocated, she failed to create any moral distinction between Israel and Hamas. And then she, in this testimony before Congress, said that if students were advocating to kill Israelis or wipe Israel off the map, she wasn’t sure if that violated Harvard policy or not. That was the predicate, and then the conclusion came about because of that general problem. Through luck, another reporter and I came into contact with a dossier that had evidence that Claudine Gay had plagiarized huge sections of her thesis. And then another reporter in our circle discovered that she’d also plagiarized many other academic works. So you had this plagiarism crisis that, look, if you’re an academic, your reputation at the very minimum should be that you don’t plagiarize.
All of these things put enough pressure on her that Harvard felt that they had no other choice but to pressure her to resign. It’s a big moment. I think it shows that these institutions are not invulnerable and are not immune to public pressure. It opened a new possibility of seeing some reform.
Many people have referred to you as the most effective or successful conservative activist in America. What do you attribute that to?
It’s been a great few years, and we’ve had a lot of success. Part of it is good fortune, whether it’s CRT or trans ideology in schools or DEI or Harvard and academic reform, or what we did at New College of Florida — working with the governor to take it over and turn over leadership. And when you have one success, you have this sneaking suspicion that it’s luck or a fluke or that you will not be able to repeat it, but we’ve been able to repeat it on a number of issues over time.
And so I spend a lot of time thinking about what actually works in practice. And what I see on the right is people engaging in very fine doctrinal disputes in almost a medieval manner. And I see that stuff, and I always think, yeah, okay, great, but what are you going to do about it? And that simple question, “What are you going to do about it?” I found very effective at separating out theory from action or speculation from tangible concrete victory. And I like to win.
And so I orient all the things that I do toward that goal. And I like to have concrete wins because I think it’s like in business looking at your balance sheet. So the company that makes money or the company that has the stock price go up, there’s kind of an objective metric of success. You can measure it. It’s concrete, it’s undeniable. You can’t fake it. And I think I like to think about political life and intellectual life in the same way.
Part of the reason why I’ve been able to score victories is because I tried to do it. If you set out to notch a victory, you’re more likely to accomplish it than if you don’t think about it in those terms.