Book Review: America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, by Chris Rufo
by Mitt Castor
America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything
Firebrand Chris Rufo’s bestselling book is a first-rate fusion of scholarly research and provocative polemic. It serves up both raw meat and brain food for counterrevolutionaries determined to go to war against Wokeness. At the heart is the best analysis of Marcuse and Gramsci’s long march through the institutions that I’ve ever read.
If you want to understand why the institutionalization of a nihilistic Marxist-Leninist ideology is the gravest threat to Western Civilization, read this book.
If you want to understand how race conflict has replaced class conflict as the fulcrum in a revolution that has already succeeded, read this book.
If you want to understand why Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and other progressive cities are coming apart at the seams, read this book.
If you want to understand how the violent Black Liberation Movement (BLM) became the violent Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), read this book.
If you want to understand how communist revolutionaries became elite college professors, read this book.
If you want to understand how DEI became the bureaucratic instantiation of Critical Theory, read this book.
If you want to understand why DEI is totally incompatible with free speech, viewpoint diversity, and academic freedom, read this book.
If you want to appreciate why the lauding of Angela Davis by MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth when she was invited by the DEI bureaucracy to keynote MLK Day is the most shameful thing MIT’s new president has done to date, read this book.
And ESPECIALLY if you believe the Wokies “have a point,” or are critical of the wrathful counter-revolution that Rufo is trying to foment (and that means you ivory tower purists and armchair libertarians at FIRE and Reason), you must read this book.
The cast of characters and their interlinked ideologies that Rufo carefully deconstructs is a who’s who of the Woke pantheon. The writings and actions of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Rudi Dutschke, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Patrice Cullors, Paulo Freiere, Derrick Bell, and many other key players that transformed the failed leftist revolutions of the sixties into the successful long march through the institutions are stitched together in a meticulously footnoted analysis. Our universities, media, cultural institutions, government agencies, and many corporate C-suites and board rooms are now in the hands of their acolytes, fellow travelers, and useful idiots exercising their power through enormous DEI bureaucracies and HR departments that ruthlessly cull out heretics.
The infusion of Critical Theory into K-12 education in many progressive states is perhaps the most frightening Leninist development as “the seeds they sow will never be uprooted.” The weaponization of language, the power of intersectionality, the creation of the cult of microaggressions, the rise of Bias Response Teams empowered to destroy the educations, careers, and lives of refuseniks, the rise of cancel culture, and the importance of free speech suppression round out the story.
Interestingly enough, Chris left out the metastasizing of the gay rights movement into the LGBTQ+ gender affirmation/trans insanity movement. Perhaps he’s saving that for a sequel.
Here is a brief précis culled from my Kindle notes, in Rufo’s own words.
“This book is an effort to understand the ideology that drives the politics of the modern Left, from the streets of Seattle to the highest levels of American government.
The book is divided into four parts: revolution, race, education, and power. Each part begins with a biographical portrait of the four prophets of the revolution: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. These figures established the disciplines of critical theory, critical praxis, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory.
Critical race theory bears all the flaws of traditional Marxism, then amplifies them with a narrative of racial pessimism that crushes the very possibility of progress. Over the span of fifty years, the cultural revolution has slowly lowered its mask and revealed its hideous face—nihilism.
This is, in short, a work of counter-revolution. The basic premise is that the enemies of the cultural revolution must begin by seeing the critical theories and the “long march through the institutions” with clear eyes.
This new counter-revolution will not take the form of the counter-revolutions of the past: it is not a counter-revolution of class against class, but a counter-revolution along a new axis between the citizen and the ideological regime.
The ultimate objective of this campaign must be the restoration of political rule. The deepest conflict in the United States is not along the axis of class, race, or identity, but along the managerial axis that pits elite institutions against the common citizen. The revolution, which seeks to connect ideology to bureaucratic power and to manipulate behavior through the guise of expertise, is ultimately anti-democratic.
The counter-revolution, on the other hand, seeks to channel public sentiment and restore the rule of the legislature, executive, and judiciary over the de facto rule of managers and social engineers.
The anti-democratic structures—the DEI departments and the captured bureaucracies—must be dismantled and turned to dust.”
As anyone who is paying attention understands, Rufo is not just talk. He means business, which is why he has attracted a deluge of vicious criticism not just from the usual Woke elites but from free speech advocates looking for right-wing boogeymen they can attack to burnish their “non-partisan” credentials. You may not like Rufo’s bare-knuckles approach to taking back our captured institutions, but he brings to mind one of my favorite Abraham Lincoln quotes defending the butcher Ulysses S. Grant. “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”
Mitt Castor’s other work can be found at this link.
Fantastic summary, thank you!
The link at the end is helpful. There I read "Mitt Castor is the pseudonym of an MIT educator who runs the Babbling Beaver satire website." Now, I enjoy the BB's humor, but I do hope the HeterodoxSTEM decides with this one to break the mold and not publish book reviews anymore. It's much too easy to pollute the site with such reviews. Here's a one-star review of the same book by Rufo, from the Amazon website linked in the O.P. (I didn't write this review).
1.0 out of 5 stars Seems a bit shallow
Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2023
I started reading this book because I wanted to know more about what motivates the author's anti-CRT and anti-LGBT activism (although the book seems more CRT-related), and here are my thoughts after reading the whole thing.
In my opinion the book is bad. The author has a habit of drive-by quoting the people he's talking about without explaining what they mean when, in many cases, it isn't obvious. This is something a college student does when they don't understand the material. Rather than trying to explain something he doesn't understand, he's just trying to tell a story where the people whose ideas he thinks he doesn't like look bad. Let's take the beginning of Chapter 1 for example. Imagine the next paragraph is a block quote:
"Speaking in a thick, Weimar-era German accent, Marcuse excoriated “the syndrome of late capitalism” and “the subjugation of man to the apparatus.” The audience, which included pedigreed Marxist intellectuals, counterculture artists such as Allen Ginsberg, and black militants such as Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, sat in hushed silence. They had gathered at the conference in order to “create a genuine revolutionary consciousness” and devise strategies for “physical and cultural ‘guerrilla warfare’”—and the old man, who wore a formal suit and peppered his conversation with references to the great philosophers of the past, seemed to hold the key to unlocking it."
First of all, I'm not sure what the professor's accent has to do anything; do most Americans know what a "Weimar-era" German accent sounds like? Secondly, the author makes this lecture sound like a religious sermon when he uses terms like "excoriate" and describes the audience as sitting "in hushed silence." (It was an academic lecture; it is not remarkable that attendees other than the lecturer were silent.) Thirdly, you can Google the title of the lecture and find the text and audio online easily; the part where Marcuse says "the syndrome of late capitalism" is like twenty minutes into the lecture. According to Marcuse, "the subjugation of man to the apparatus" is one of several things that "constitute the syndrome of late capitalism" so it's redundant to say that he "excoriates" both of them. Also he doesn't really sound angry in the audio, but Rufo makes it seem like he's totally unhinged.
At the beginning of Rufo's next paragraph he says that Marcuse "praised the hippies and the counterculture for initiating a 'sexual, moral and political rebellion.'" This happens way way later in the actual lecture, and Rufo doesn't explain how it's relevant to the main point of the lecture, and I'm not sure it's accurate to say that he "praises" them; if that's true it's an oversimplification of what he was saying, which really was sort of not the main point of the lecture anyway.
Later in the chapter, citing "An Essay on Liberation," Rufo writes the following thing (please imagine that it is in block quotes):
"Today, America is living inside Marcuse’s revolution. During the fever pitch of the late 1960s, Marcuse posited four key strategies for the radical Left: the revolt of the affluent white intelligentsia, the radicalization of the black “ghetto population,” the capture of public institutions, and the cultural repression of the opposition. All of these objectives have been realized to some degree . . ."
If Marcuse were alive today I don't think he would agree that "these objectives have been realized to some degree," and I also don't even think this accurately represent what he said (but I don't know if I can explain what he actually said because it's confusing). You can read An Essay on Liberation for free on the internet and see for yourself. I'm pretty sure I'm right though.
Also I think the author is trying to get us to think that the reaction to the killing of George Floyd was, for critical theorists, like that part of the beginning of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers intro where Rita Repulsa says "Ah, after ten thousand years I'm free! It's time to conquer Earth!" and maybe that's why it seems like all of the things that conservatives don't like about America started to materialize shortly after Trump's term ended, but I don't think that's what happened.
After having read the whole entire book, I think the problem with this book is that the author's real talent lies in doing the sort of thing he did in shaping the public's perception of critical race theory without really getting too specific about what it is, simply by connecting it to real things that were happening that were unpopular (but that were not "critical race theory"). Elsewhere he's rejoiced at his success in turning CRT into a four-letter word, saying the goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.'" It's incredible that one can be so open about intentionally deceiving people and still have so much influence. But I don't think this book will change much about how people think about critical theory because there are already so many conspiracy theories about this topic. In fact one of this book's flaws is probably that it's already been influenced by those; that's how it seems to me at least.
In conclusion, I don't think this book is very informative or honestly written really. If you think I'm biased, I'm capable of admitting when I think right-wing propaganda is kinda persuasive (for example stuff by Curtis Yarvin is sometimes a bit more challenging to avoid being swayed by, but I wouldn't recommend reading him either---I just have to namedrop someone to prove I'm not super-biased). If you must read this book for some reason, I think you should also check the sources Rufo cites (I think most of the Marcuse stuff is available online). I hope this review of the entire book that I read is informative and super well-written and all that stuff, and if you think I'm wrong about anything, I'm not a philosophy professor or whatever, so I'm not sure I'm 100% right on the details of why a lot of this book is wrong, but I really do think a lot of it is just not correct!