Today I will continue my review of Christopher F. Rufo: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023).  In Part II, Rufo deals with race and develops the narrative with constant reference to Angela Davis (b. 1944). As in the previous essay, I will follow Rufo’s chapter divisions.

1. Angela Davis: The Spirit of Radical Revolt

Davis’s story is fascinating and well worth reading, but I want to focus on one thread, that is, how in her life Marcuse’s theory of revolutionary violence was put into practice. Angela Yvonne Davis was born on January 26, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. A very bright child, with school-teacher parents, she read vociferously. At age 15, she won a scholarship to Elisabeth Irwin High School, a private school in New York City. Many of her teachers were members of the Communist Party; they introduced her to the writings of Marx and Engels. At Elisabeth Irwin, Davis became fascinated with the Communist Manifesto’s vision of the abolition of capitalism and institution of a classless society. She studied next at Brandeis University where she met Herbert Marcuse, who became her mentor and life-long inspiration. After a brief stay in Frankfurt, Germany where she studied “Critical Theory” at the Institute for Social Research, she followed Marcuse to the University of California, San Diego.

The brainy and highly educated Davis soon became impatient with theory and pursued ways to get involved in the practical struggle. She joined the Black Panther Party but found it too unorganized. She then joined the Communist Party USA. Applying the Communist oppressor/oppressed theory to race, Davis interpreted the American judicial, law enforcement and penal systems as instruments of white oppression of black people. Within this ideological framework, criminal acts such as theft, property destruction and murder, when committed by poor black people, become legitimate acts of resistance to the structural and legal violence built into the white capitalist system. Putting this theory into practice on August 7, 1970, Davis participated, albeit at a distance, in a dramatic, failed prison escape that began in the Marin County Hall of Justice. A shootout followed at the end of which four people were dead including Judge Harold Haley. Davis had purchased the guns used in the attack and her finger prints were found on the gun manuals discovered at the crime scene. After a period of hiding, Davis was arrested and charged with murder. Instantly, she became world famous. At her trial, she and her lawyers turned the tables on the State of California, claiming that she was a political prisoner and that the prison break was a “slave insurrection.” Amazingly, despite the evidence, Davis was acquitted on all charges.

2. “Kill the Pigs”: The Black Revolution Explodes”

This chapter tells the story of the Black Panther Party and its founder Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver minister of information. The Party’s “Ten-Point Program” (1966) includes demands for black people to be granted full employment or a guaranteed income, free housing, exemption from military service, self-determination, and reparations for past injustices. The Panthers assassinated police officers and engaged in shootouts with the authorities. In the early 1970s Newton and Cleaver parted company, with Newton remaining on the West Coast and Cleaver on the East Coast. The East Coast faction, the Black Liberation Army, eventually became little more than another gang. Newton descended into drug addiction and in 1989 was murdered outside an Oakland drug den. Cleaver, too, became a drug addict and in 1998 died of a heart attack in Oakland. The militant revolution was dead.

3. From Black Liberation to Black Studies

The failure of black radical street violence to bring positive change provoked Angela Davis and others to retreat to the universities to begin the “long march” through the institutions. Davis worked to establish various forms of black studies programs in the university. She argued that marginalize members of society understand the true nature of freedom whereas the dominant classes do not; and the black woman is doubly marginalized, at the bottom of the heap of the oppressed. People of marginalized identities are sources of knowledge unavailable elsewhere. These special sources of knowledge, therefore, should be institutionalized in departments and studies programs. According to Rufo, “Davis’s theoretical work on identity had an enormous impact on the development of left-wing politics throughout the era” (p. 103). Of great significance for the future of identity politics is the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) made by a group of black lesbian activists. Drawing on Davis’s theory of the privileged access of marginalized identities to certain types of knowledge, the Statement coined the term “identity politics” and laid out the logic of what came later to be called “intersectional identity.” “This focusing upon our own oppression,” explains the Statement, “is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially radical politics come directly out of our own identity.” Rufo describes the significance of the Statement:

The activists eschewed the masculine inclinations toward violence…and created a uniquely feminine program that marshalled identity, emotion, trauma, and psychological manipulation in service of their political objectives. The Combahee Statement recast left-wing politics as an identity-based therapeutic pursuit (p. 104).

It worked. Today most universities contain “studies” programs for almost every recognized ethnic or gender identity.

4. BLM: The Revolution Reborn

The Black Lives Matter organization was founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza (b. 1981) and Patrisse Cullors (b. 1983). It burst onto the national scene in the aftermath of the 2014 death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson, MO. BLM’s guiding principles tracks almost perfectly with the Black Panthers’ Ten Point Plan. According to Rufo, BLM “can be best understood as a synthesis of the major lines of the black liberation movement—the racialist dialectic of Angela Davis, the identity first orientation of the Combahee River Collective, the Marxist-Leninist vision of the Black Panther Party—resurrected for the digital age” (p. 115). BLM’s innovations are in the way it packages its message. It appeals to (white) emotions of guilt and shame rather than fear. Using social media to highlight individual incidents of “police brutality” (such as that used against George Floyd in May 2020) as proof of systemic racism and the pervasive influence of white supremacy. According to the narrative created by BLM, police were conducting a slow genocide of unarmed black men. Is the number, 10,000 or 1,000 per year, as many people think? According to Rufo’s reading of the Washington Post database for police shootings, the actual number was 14. [According to my reading of the appropriated filtered database for the year 2021, the number was 12. I don’t know how to reconcile these two numbers.].

5. Mob Rule in Seattle

In this chapter, Rufo details the disasters that befell Portland, OR and Seattle, WA in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing in the long summer of 2020. BLM leader Nikkita Oliver (b. 1986) became the most visible figure of the “abolitionist” movement, which pressed for the abolition of police departments, courts, and jails. Weeks of protest and street violence roiled the city. Then, on June 8, 2020 the police department stationed in the East Precinct abandoned their headquarters. That evening armed men from Antifa and other militant leftist groups set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) bereft of police, courts, and jails. The new order followed the rule of “identity politics.” The bottom became the top and the top the bottom. Black, indigenous and trans women became the privileged and white male heterosexuals were shamed and urged to pay reparations to Black people. Division, chaos, and killings ensued. CHAZ lasted from June 8 to July 3, 2020. Rufo concludes:

The truth is politically impolite but factually unassailable: the real problem in America, from the Black Panther Party to Black Lives Matter, is not police brutality, but the brutality of the American streets…Like their historical predecessors, the new abolitionists are not seeking to achieve reforms within a given social order; they are seeking to overturn that social order altogether…The revolution is, after all, the relentless application of the negative dialectic: to subvert, to shift, to unmask, to destroy” (pp. 140-141).

It takes less than five minutes to cut down an oak tree that nature took 300 years to grow.

To be continued…