America's Cultural Revolution

Book Review: America’s Cultural Revolution by Christopher Rufo


Christopher Rufo has been an outspoken critic of left-wing ideology for several years and is credited with influencing President Trump to remove aspects of diversity training from government programs. 

His new book is called America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. In it, Rufo lays out the history of the neo-Marxist ideology in the United States, describing how the ideas of the revolutionaries in the 1960s became incorporated into most of our nation’s key institutions.

The book looks at four aspects of this progression: revolution, race, education, and power. Rufo frames his history by focusing on four corresponding leaders and the influence they brought to bear: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell.

What is remarkable is how many of the ideas that we see in “woke” culture were articulated by these activists fifty or sixty years ago. The difference is that in the 1970s they were considered extreme; now they are mainstream.

The penultimate chapter of the book, “DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order,” is particularly relevant to those of us who are concerned with the integrity of our constitutional Republic. In it Rufo tries to answer the question: what is the endgame of the far-left revolutionaries?

He states that destroying the current constitutional order is not only not seen as “a transgression, it is a moral obligation.” While the Neo-Marxists are willing to cynically use the Constitution if it furthers their cause, their true perspective is, in the words of Mari Matuda, that “rights are whatever people in power say they are.”

Rufo describes three specific areas of risk to the American system.

First, the revolutionaries want to restructure the American notion of justice by replacing the principle of equality under the law with equality of outcome—what is generally meant by the term “equity.”

Second, they want to undermine property rights, foundational to Western Civilization, by schemes to redistribute wealth. He quotes Cheryl Harris: “Property rights…will not be absolute and will be considered against a societal requirement of affirmative action.”

Third, the essential freedoms guarded by the First Amendment will be subverted by restrictions on speech that is considered offensive or hateful to minorities or other vulnerable groups. As we know, “hate speech” can be conveniently defined to suit the purposes of the regime in power.

Ibram X. Kendi, author of the very popular and influential book How to Be an Antiracist, has even suggested an “anti-racist amendment” to the Constitution. This modification would establish a new federal department!—a Department of Anti-Racism that would monitor and override “racist” public policy and be empowered to bring disciplinary action against public officials who do not align themselves properly with the regime’s definition of “anti-racism.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Of course the chance of such an amendment being ratified by thirty-eight states is somewhere between slim and none. But Leftists are experienced in achieving their goals with or without explicit legislation or constitutional support. And this suggestion demonstrates their understanding that a robust, originalist constitutional order is a hindrance to their goals.

“The story of America’s cultural revolution is one of triumph,” Rufo concludes. In sixty years the New Left has undertaken and almost concluded its “long march through the institutions” that has profoundly transformed the fabric of American society.

But the author is not pessimistic about the future of our country. He points out that a core flaw in leftist ideology is that it does not contain the moral or philosophical integrity on which a civilization can be built. “Wokism” cannot create, it can only destroy.

Already Americans are perceiving the fatal flaw. We are seeing the crime, the economic problems, the disintegration of the family and the border. We are sensing the division, the purposelessness, the spirit of defeat. We hear the high-sounding rhetoric and realize that none of it is solving the problems at hand.

“Despite the success of the long march through the institutions,” Rufo asserts, “the new elite has failed to extinguish the bourgeois desires for property, family, religion, and democratic representation. The intellectuals and following them, the institutions have spent decades disparaging these desires as racist, exploitative, and illusory, but quietly, in the tract homes and small churches in the American interior, they have proven remarkably durable.”

The solution is a counter-revolution. 

An Article V convention is an essential part of that counter-revolution. It can serve as a push-back against the bureaucratic elites who want to impose their agenda without authorization from the people. It can be used to put government back into its Constitution-sized box so that it cannot be used to re-engineer American society. It can undo the legal contortions imposed by Leftist judges whose philosophy has been shaped by the likes of Marcuse, Freire, and Bell.

It’s time for those of us who understand the great gift of our Constitution to restore the rule of true government over bureaucratic tyranny. It’s time to promote eternal and transcendent principles over those rooted in raw power and manipulation. It’s time for us to challenge our fellow citizens who have grown accustomed to dictates from the self-proclaimed elite and re-ignite their spirit of self-governance. 

It’s time for an Article V convention of the states.