Today I will conclude my review of Christopher F. Rufo: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023). Again, I want to recommend that you read this book for yourself. If you want to understand the cultural-political situation in America, if you have children in school or young adults in college or graduate school, if you are a college student, if you are a teacher or a professor…you need to read to this book!

Conclusion: The Counter-Revolution to Come

The “Long March” of the New Left through American institutions is almost complete. The critical theory of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis’s politics of violence, the critical pedagogy inspired by Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell’s critical race theory dominate American education from kindergarten to graduate school, government agencies, and corporate America. Has the revolution succeeded? Have the neo-Marxists won? Have we reached the point of no return? In his final chapter, Rufo counsels against despair and charts a course for counter-revolution.

1. Counter-revolutionaries must expose the theoretical weaknesses of neo-Marxist critical theory. Marcuse, Davis, Freire, and Bell devised plans for destroying the traditional institutions of free enterprise, property, family, and religion, but they offer nothing but utopian dreams to put in their place. They divide people into evil oppressors and the virtuous oppressed according to race, sexual orientation, and gender. But they cannot summon a moral force strong enough to reunite what they have torn apart. The New Left can destroy but it cannot build. Their motto is “destroy it, and something better will come.” But it never does.

2. Marxism has failed everywhere it has been tried: Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cabral’s Guinea-Bissau, and Castro’s Cuba. Human beings resist giving up property, family, religion, merit, and privacy. Only a ruthless, totalitarian dictatorship can enforce such an anti-human regime. In the end, the supposedly idealistic revolutionaries, observes Rufo,

simply want their cut. The looters get a box of sneakers and a flat-screen television. The intellectuals get permanent sinecures in the universities. The activists get a ransom payment, disguised as a philanthropic contribution, from corporations and the local government (p. 275).

3. The New Left’s hold on American institutions, Rufo reminds us, “is a creature of the state, completely subsidized by the public through direct financing, university loan schemes, bureaucratic captures, and the civil rights regulatory apparatus.” Its power does not arise from the hearts of the people. “With sufficient will they [the institutions] can be reformed, redirected, or abolished through the democratic process. What the public giveth, the public can taketh away” (p. 270).

4. The New Left proclaims itself the champion of “the people.” In fact, however, the neo-Marxist elites despise “the people.” According to Rufo, the New Left is not really the champion of the oppressed against the oppressors. It is the champion of an “ideological regime” of gnostic-like arbiters of privilege over against the common “citizen.” It is to the “citizen” we must look for counter-revolutionary energy. The counter-revolution, explains Rufo,

is a revolution against: against utopia, against collectivism, against racial reduction, against the infinite plasticity of human nature. But it is also a revolution for: for the return of natural right, the Constitution, and the dignity of the individual” (p. 280). The counter-revolution must champion the “values of the common man: family, faith, work, community, country (p. 281).

The counter-revolution must assert “excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos” (p. 281). “The anti-democratic structures—the DEI departments and the captured bureaucracies—must be dismantled and turned to dust” (p. 281).

Next Time: I will bring a Christian perspective to bear on America’s cultural revolution, exploring some possibilities for counter-revolution in higher education, with Christian colleges and universities leading the way.