Hanania, Rufo, and Conservative Strategy

Going after the Deep Left

Christopher Rufo has a new book, and Richard Hanania is on it. Reading Hanania’s review, I suggested coining the expression The Deep Left. Just as conservatives have come to see a Deep State arrayed against them, one can broaden the concept to include other institutions.

Bryan Caplan also offers an interesting take on Rufo.

I still maintain that wokeness is far from the most important evil in the world. Immigration restrictions, housing regulation, nuclear power strangulation, and universal redistribution are all far worse in absolute terms. While it is tempting to declare wokeness the “root cause” of all these evils, that’s just not so.

That said, wokeness is a top concern for me personally because I work in academia. This insipid, Orwellian cult really does rule the American university system. The current denial of academic freedom truly is much worse than McCarthyism ever was. And I have seen with my own eyes that woke administrators are plotting, by hook or by crook, to stamp out the last remnants of rational thought in the humanities and social sciences.

I note that Bryan’s mood when blogging is almost always upbeat, especially about the life of an academic economist. The second paragraph above shows how demoralizing the Deep Left can be for someone trying to hold on to enlightenment values in academia.

Rufo and Hanania have in common a strategic approach for dealing with the Deep Left. It involves identifying and shutting down the laws and government programs that reinforce the Deep Left.

Rufo’s book evidently makes a case that the Deep Left was created by nasty commies. Hanania writes,

The American education system, or at least the field of education itself, was taken over by literal communists. Those entrusted to teach children and young adults have as their greatest intellectual inspirations lunatics who would clearly have massacred their fellow Americans if they had the chance.

But Hanania is not persuaded that a few relatively obscure intellectuals are as important as Rufo claims.

It’s important to remember that while the figures profiled by Rufo were undoubtably influential, their ideas were in certain cases not all that different from what was previously accepted as mainstream liberalism.

…much in the way of race conscious governance came in response to urban riots of the late 1960s. Most of the participants weren’t reading Marcuse. This combination of white guilt and black agitation — in the forms of both political activism and rioting — had already given us many of the policies we associate with Rufo’s cultural revolution today, well before Marxist intellectuals and Critical Race Theorists could make their impact felt.

As for strategy, Rufo and Hanania believe that conservatives should engage in fights over school curricula and civil rights law, even though they will be denounced for doing so.

What conservatives are doing seems radical now only because the movement has been asleep at the wheel for decades. They are to blame for letting it get to the point where some of the worst people in the world are in charge of educating American youth and running human resources departments. Given where we are now, Rufoism therefore must involve running roughshod over the preferences of well-credentialed experts. So be it.

Hanania takes a swipe at Oren Cass and others who would throw libertarians under the bus. Hanania locates conservatism’s weakness elsewhere.

By leaving civil rights law intact and letting the public education system operate autonomously, the problem is that conservatives haven’t believed strongly enough in freedom and markets.

Hanania does not think that conservative victories in these fronts would be final.

If the spell of critical theory, or whatever shorthand you want to use to refer to our modern insanity, is broken, one has to consider the question of where smart and idealistic people go next. Chances are the next thing will probably be better, but part of me wonders whether it wasn’t the worst option to allow some of the people with the ugliest impulses to play in their little sandbox of academia rather than try to influence policy more directly.

…I don’t know what the end result of the war on wokeness will be, but I am sure that we’ve entered a completely new phase of the battle.

When I was in college, a big cause was a lettuce boycott, which was called for in support of Cesar Chavez and the farm workers’ union. Some economics students wanted to point out the problems with having the college join the boycott, but I argued otherwise. I said that of all the causes that the campus left might embrace, the lettuce boycott might be the least harmful. Friends of mine dubbed this “Kling’s least-harm principle of knee-jerk liberalism.” I get the sense that Hanania thinks that steering leftist intellectuals toward relatively harmless causes is the best one can hope for.

Reading Hanania, I think that conservatives are much clearer about their targets now. The institutional base of the Deep Left is very dependent on government for support. Conservatives now know which organizations they want to defund and where they want to change personnel.

If they win in 2024, conservatives are likely to make a historic effort to fight the Deep Left. But as Hanania says, one cannot predict the consequences. I have already suggested that the left might try to bring the country to a standstill.

Substacks referenced above:

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What Should I Ask Chris Rufo?

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How Much Do Intellectuals Matter?