A rough equilibrium was reached around the time when I was growing up:
1) There would be a few racial set asides for blacks that would play ball, but they couldn't cause too much trouble and should just be grateful for what they had and keep their head down. Think Obama in the media (not Obama in private).
2) Everyone agreed that slavery and Jim Crow were bad, but beyond that didn't think about it too much.
3) The failings in the black community were unfortunate, but what could you do beyond what was already being done?
I'd say the role of the ideological entrepreneurs Rufo talks about (and many many others in a similar vein) was to provide the rhetorical tools to break out of that equilibrium. This could be done by expanding the definition of oppressed classes (from blacks to brown, LBGTQ+, MeToo, etc) and making additional demands for Equity (higher amounts of affirmative action in a wider swath of society). Diversity and Inclusion is the ideological language used to justify the Equity demands.
Perhaps more important for me, they went after children. It's one thing for some wine aunt to play activist. It's another to hit children with this propaganda. I feel like what they did to kids during COVID was the kind of physical manifestation of what they want to do ideologically to them.
I put some thought into this a while back. Critical theory won the day starting in the 1930s through a combination of decentralized viral messaging and a highly centralized core of theorists providing direction and discipline, and coordinating the messaging and principles of the movement. These theorists understood propaganda and psychology and had a plan for the long game. They might not be household names but make no mistake, they were the essential core that made the movement work.
There is no parallel in conservatism today. Conservatism or any sort of anti-wokism will never win if it remains a purely decentralized populist movement. There must be a theoretical and principled foundation for the movement to rally around, and it must gain some sort of institutional beachhead through which to rally elite support.
My impression is that Rufo, having also studied the history of Critical Theory, understands this. I think he wants to form that new theoretical foundation of a disciplined conservative anti-Critical Theory, and to form that institutional beachhead to pull the movement together.
Critical Race Theory is just one of the “Critical Theories” that grew out of the original Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School theorists starting in the 1930s and eventually spawned a dozen or so academic disciplines. Critical Theory was the adaptation of Marxism for the West. Since full-blown Communism was a non-starter in the West, the new Marxist approach from the 1930s (Critical Theory) was to destabilize Western culture and society by ruthlessly and persistently hammering on the weaknesses of capitalism and the West, while not actually proposing any specific positive economic or social theories (hence “critical” theory). CRT was the more recent version using race as the wedge to hammer apart western society.
My personal take is that Marxism / Critical Theory fills the void that arose with the decline of religion in society, which happened first among the elites and academics. Rufo gives secular anti-wokism a chance, but in reality the best hope to beat back the rising tide of absurdity is a religious revival. Seems unlikely now, but a few more decades of rising woke absurdity and political failure and conflict will make people start looking to God again.
Secular anti-wokism is “education reform” and other things that tried to solve disparities between groups via technocracy.
Per Charles Murray this task was impossible. You basically need to give up on blank slate and find some other (in his case Christian) justification for charity and understanding of how to implement said charity.
It’s notable that around the time education reform and center left technocratic efforts at uplift had completely failed that we got wokeness. It is in some sense a natural response to expecting equality of outcome (due to blank slate taboo) and not being able to achieve it through moderate means.
I'm not religious but I have great respect for it and try to act that way. I think it does way more good than harm. That said, I think the chance of a religious revival is infinitely small.
"Hanania is not persuaded that a few relatively obscure intellectuals are as important as Rufo claims."
That's right! I re-post below my comment on Christopher's pitching of America's Cultural Revolution on his own Substack a couple of days ago. I personally admire Rufo for his activism and it may well be that simplifications and bogeymen are part and parcel of what is needed to get people outraged enough for a conservative reaction to reach critical mass. But his analysis is a cop out nevertheless by not facing the fact that millions of the university-educated are complicit in the advance of Woke.
And my post got a very lot of agreement:.....
"Yes, it's great to nail these Freire/Marcuse types for their Machiavellian poisoning of the West. But what made them so SUCCESSFUL in wokefying our Western culture? That's the bit that's missing here....and needs to not be shied away from if we are going to get at the real truth of things. What made them so successful is that so many people (especially the 'higher educated') are so intellectually biddable. Take another context: it is an almost universal conceit that the horrors of The Cultural Revolution were all about Mao and his gang. The truth is much darker. Mao would have been nothing without tens of millions of biddable, favour-seeking, grudge-bearing followers."
I wish I liked the Kling phrase: "The Deep Left" but I don't, even if there is some truth in it.. It's worse than wrong, it distracts from the only viable peaceful solution: Democrats need to lose in elections and Republicans need to win and to put in more freedom loving policies. More than Trump or Bush or Reagan got passed -- they need to win the House AND the Senate AND the Presidency. Like the Dems often have done, tho more often there has been some splitting, since we entered the Atomic Age (post WW-II)
Elected politicians are either D-Democrats or R-Republicans (99%). The Dem Deep State is the problematic Administrative State. Ramaswamy's 8 year term limit on Fed bureaucrats is best simple solution any Pres. candidate is now talking about.
For colleges and all edu institutions, there should be two commissions: Republican & Democrat. For an edu org to get tax exemption status, like Harvard, it must show that it does not discriminate against hiring Republican or Democrat professors. Less than 30% of either should lead to a presumption of guilt - but no criminal charges, merely loss of gov't benefits.
It's true that once one gets accustomed to unearned benefits, losing those benefits seems like punishment. Criminal punishment, stick incentives, should require proof beyond reasonable doubt. Qualifying for benefits, carrot incentives, requires fulfilling the optional requirements, or not getting the benefit. The semi-private "accreditation" process has been corrupted and taken over by Woke college indoctrinated Trump-haters / Bush-haters / Palin-haters ... Republican haters who deny that they hate Republicans generally, altho they do.
I don't think I disagree with anything here but it made me think of excesses on the right and wonder why you never discuss them. Personally, I don't see them as any less important. And it might also be an opportunity to highlight where the left has distorted or outright lied about what the right did if that was of interest to you.
I don't know your view on abortion but surely laws that make it hard to end a pregnancy where the fetus has already died isn't good. There are other situations where the fetus is nonviable that some of these laws have prevented termination. (I think it was ND that a Republican entered a bill to correct that and it was voted down.i saw a piece where the legislator described this.)
I can see the case for not using some books for teaching the very young but there have been various book bans from both sides, mostly conservatives though, that don't seem appropriate.
Is it really a problem if a girl wants to play on a boys sports team? At least one state has passed a law against that. Is there really a problem with coed teams, especially at elementary ages?
A rough equilibrium was reached around the time when I was growing up:
1) There would be a few racial set asides for blacks that would play ball, but they couldn't cause too much trouble and should just be grateful for what they had and keep their head down. Think Obama in the media (not Obama in private).
2) Everyone agreed that slavery and Jim Crow were bad, but beyond that didn't think about it too much.
3) The failings in the black community were unfortunate, but what could you do beyond what was already being done?
I'd say the role of the ideological entrepreneurs Rufo talks about (and many many others in a similar vein) was to provide the rhetorical tools to break out of that equilibrium. This could be done by expanding the definition of oppressed classes (from blacks to brown, LBGTQ+, MeToo, etc) and making additional demands for Equity (higher amounts of affirmative action in a wider swath of society). Diversity and Inclusion is the ideological language used to justify the Equity demands.
Perhaps more important for me, they went after children. It's one thing for some wine aunt to play activist. It's another to hit children with this propaganda. I feel like what they did to kids during COVID was the kind of physical manifestation of what they want to do ideologically to them.
I put some thought into this a while back. Critical theory won the day starting in the 1930s through a combination of decentralized viral messaging and a highly centralized core of theorists providing direction and discipline, and coordinating the messaging and principles of the movement. These theorists understood propaganda and psychology and had a plan for the long game. They might not be household names but make no mistake, they were the essential core that made the movement work.
There is no parallel in conservatism today. Conservatism or any sort of anti-wokism will never win if it remains a purely decentralized populist movement. There must be a theoretical and principled foundation for the movement to rally around, and it must gain some sort of institutional beachhead through which to rally elite support.
My impression is that Rufo, having also studied the history of Critical Theory, understands this. I think he wants to form that new theoretical foundation of a disciplined conservative anti-Critical Theory, and to form that institutional beachhead to pull the movement together.
Critical Race Theory only goes back to the 1980s, maybe 1970s. What are you referring to in the 1930s?
Critical Race Theory is just one of the “Critical Theories” that grew out of the original Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School theorists starting in the 1930s and eventually spawned a dozen or so academic disciplines. Critical Theory was the adaptation of Marxism for the West. Since full-blown Communism was a non-starter in the West, the new Marxist approach from the 1930s (Critical Theory) was to destabilize Western culture and society by ruthlessly and persistently hammering on the weaknesses of capitalism and the West, while not actually proposing any specific positive economic or social theories (hence “critical” theory). CRT was the more recent version using race as the wedge to hammer apart western society.
My personal take is that Marxism / Critical Theory fills the void that arose with the decline of religion in society, which happened first among the elites and academics. Rufo gives secular anti-wokism a chance, but in reality the best hope to beat back the rising tide of absurdity is a religious revival. Seems unlikely now, but a few more decades of rising woke absurdity and political failure and conflict will make people start looking to God again.
Secular anti-wokism is “education reform” and other things that tried to solve disparities between groups via technocracy.
Per Charles Murray this task was impossible. You basically need to give up on blank slate and find some other (in his case Christian) justification for charity and understanding of how to implement said charity.
It’s notable that around the time education reform and center left technocratic efforts at uplift had completely failed that we got wokeness. It is in some sense a natural response to expecting equality of outcome (due to blank slate taboo) and not being able to achieve it through moderate means.
I'm not religious but I have great respect for it and try to act that way. I think it does way more good than harm. That said, I think the chance of a religious revival is infinitely small.
"Hanania is not persuaded that a few relatively obscure intellectuals are as important as Rufo claims."
That's right! I re-post below my comment on Christopher's pitching of America's Cultural Revolution on his own Substack a couple of days ago. I personally admire Rufo for his activism and it may well be that simplifications and bogeymen are part and parcel of what is needed to get people outraged enough for a conservative reaction to reach critical mass. But his analysis is a cop out nevertheless by not facing the fact that millions of the university-educated are complicit in the advance of Woke.
And my post got a very lot of agreement:.....
"Yes, it's great to nail these Freire/Marcuse types for their Machiavellian poisoning of the West. But what made them so SUCCESSFUL in wokefying our Western culture? That's the bit that's missing here....and needs to not be shied away from if we are going to get at the real truth of things. What made them so successful is that so many people (especially the 'higher educated') are so intellectually biddable. Take another context: it is an almost universal conceit that the horrors of The Cultural Revolution were all about Mao and his gang. The truth is much darker. Mao would have been nothing without tens of millions of biddable, favour-seeking, grudge-bearing followers."
I wish I liked the Kling phrase: "The Deep Left" but I don't, even if there is some truth in it.. It's worse than wrong, it distracts from the only viable peaceful solution: Democrats need to lose in elections and Republicans need to win and to put in more freedom loving policies. More than Trump or Bush or Reagan got passed -- they need to win the House AND the Senate AND the Presidency. Like the Dems often have done, tho more often there has been some splitting, since we entered the Atomic Age (post WW-II)
Elected politicians are either D-Democrats or R-Republicans (99%). The Dem Deep State is the problematic Administrative State. Ramaswamy's 8 year term limit on Fed bureaucrats is best simple solution any Pres. candidate is now talking about.
For colleges and all edu institutions, there should be two commissions: Republican & Democrat. For an edu org to get tax exemption status, like Harvard, it must show that it does not discriminate against hiring Republican or Democrat professors. Less than 30% of either should lead to a presumption of guilt - but no criminal charges, merely loss of gov't benefits.
It's true that once one gets accustomed to unearned benefits, losing those benefits seems like punishment. Criminal punishment, stick incentives, should require proof beyond reasonable doubt. Qualifying for benefits, carrot incentives, requires fulfilling the optional requirements, or not getting the benefit. The semi-private "accreditation" process has been corrupted and taken over by Woke college indoctrinated Trump-haters / Bush-haters / Palin-haters ... Republican haters who deny that they hate Republicans generally, altho they do.
I don't think I disagree with anything here but it made me think of excesses on the right and wonder why you never discuss them. Personally, I don't see them as any less important. And it might also be an opportunity to highlight where the left has distorted or outright lied about what the right did if that was of interest to you.
I don't know your view on abortion but surely laws that make it hard to end a pregnancy where the fetus has already died isn't good. There are other situations where the fetus is nonviable that some of these laws have prevented termination. (I think it was ND that a Republican entered a bill to correct that and it was voted down.i saw a piece where the legislator described this.)
I can see the case for not using some books for teaching the very young but there have been various book bans from both sides, mostly conservatives though, that don't seem appropriate.
Is it really a problem if a girl wants to play on a boys sports team? At least one state has passed a law against that. Is there really a problem with coed teams, especially at elementary ages?
Rufo: sorry not buying into his take on wokness. Where would we be today if wokness was surpressed.
PS censorship is antiwokness IMHO