Reading Caplan's reaction that you linked to is interesting to me because I am so much closer to Caplan intellectually on his interpretation of the critical theorists (that it's ALL CRAP) than I am to Rufo, but I like Rufo's political approach better because of its realism. My first experience with Foucault in university was akin to anaphylactic shock. Every line of it just filled me with a rage that I had never felt before and have never felt since. My notes in the margins were in all caps, nearly tearing through the pages.
Where Rufo has succeeded and the libertarian movement has failed is perhaps in his focus on state-level politics as compared to grand federal-level politics. I think political actors thrive on being able to point to something that they have done that has made the world better. Art Laffer can point to specific states where he lobbied to keep the state from establishing an income tax. Rufo will one day be able to point to Florida's state university policies. At one point, the Giulianiverse could point to the success of Giuliani Time. There are just so many interests trying to push the federal government in various directions that it is exceptionally hard to achieve anything lasting at the national level; it leads to the kind of chaos that you bring up as your concern about the ultimate results of Rufo-ism.
I think the way to create a more lasting political settlement is to just reify the federalist structure of the country and to get the federal government out of more aspects of society that should be left to state law. Getting to that point unfortunately would require at least five Clarence Thomases, but we can at least move towards it with support short of that. People who express fear of "Balkanization" because of that should read the Federalist Papers to recognize how the commerce clause structure strongly discourages conflict between states while also permitting states to structure their laws to suit their particular populations and cultures. We are more likely to "Balkanize" because of departures from those principles caused by things like California's wicked Prop 65 than from differences in social laws alone.
Yes, we have a problem with institutions not governing themselves well. That requires better institutional management, which is absolutely a good government issue, and has to be tied to a general pattern of good policies.
Rufo, in the interview above, makes the point that he is a political activist and that politics is a manipulative business. Yes and good luck to him. Western conservatism sorely needs people like him. But his analysis of the wokeification of the Western world is still a cop out. A cop out because he needs to flatter the majority of the general public and blame everything on some tiny minority of villains. A cop out because he dare not confront the fact that America now has wokeified people in the tens of millions.
As I said in my comment on his own Substack:
"Yes, it's great to nail these Freire/Marcuse types..... 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."
What do you see as the most important obstacle to displacing the current regime, mired in bad institutional management, beset by patterns of bad polices? Where is the fulcrum that you would place the lever to dislodge the corruption?
OK. I agree. What would a purge look like? Is it the Rufo strategy with New College? Or do you think it would be enough to eliminate the state financial supports they currently enjoy? Put them on the hook for student loans, Eliminate non-profit status, Strip state funding, etc.
Strong requirements in order to receive ANY government funding. This means closing down all Schools of Education, Communications, etc.. The more university training has dominated teaching and journalism, the worse both have got, as it encourages moral elitism and contempt for the general citizenry.
Sacking all Marxists, critical theorists, anyone who called for someone’s sacking for wrongthink in their scholarship, banning diversity officers or any similar commissars or inquisitors. All activist scholarship is degraded scholarship and should not be taxpayer funded, even indirectly. Also, if they will not share, we should not fund.
Require merit-only entry, put them on the hook for student loans, tax administrative bloat. Require the tenured academic staff to be the ultimate authority in the University, similar to Cambridge University.
While I can't disagree with any of that, I do have a strong feeling of "who will bell the cat" here.
The left will not give up their positions easily; they'll only leave kicking and screaming. Parallel institutions would help, but the left will simply refuse to accredit any explicitly conservative institutions.
Chris Rufo is doing yeoman work in Florida, but I can't see it happening in any solidly blue state, say Washington or Oregon.
I don't read Rufo as proposing any sort of Right dominance in place of the existing Left dominance. Cutting back on "patronage, loan schemes, bureaucratic employment, and civil rights regulations" would not establish Right dominance; only undermine Left dominance.
If you start with "One primitive is the knowledge principle which states that knowledge is subjective." the interaction with modern technology and the real world can't be understood. Without the language of real sciences, including math, where real knowledge is just our best scientific understanding of reality, all conclusions based upon subjective knowledge are meaningless.
Yes, raw power can dictate that genetics is not true as Stalin did with Lysenkoism < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism >, however the results were starvation. We now have our "Wokism" equivalent of Lysenkoism saying knowledge and science are subjective.
As an old scientist working in the environmental area, I have watched that whole area of knowledge evolve from science into way too much subjective nonsense. Even some environmental regulations are now burying known false assumptions in their mathematical models to obtain the subjective answers they want. If you don't want endangered birds killing/eating endangered fish, just exclude birds from the analysis and only consider human impacts (water usage and dams).
How many times have we been told that the world will die if we don't kill the fossil fuel industry in the US or California without noting that the CO2 greenhouse gas issue (a real issue) depends on the atmospheric concentration not the rate of increase (the derivative of the concentration over time) and if California went to zero rate that wouldn't significantly impact the concentration or the rest of the world.
There are only two relevant "resources" for humanity to continue to thrive and prosper and they are energy and human creativity. Both are dependent upon real non-subjective science, not "political and advocacy science".
The rachet only works in one direction. There is no going back, no matter what policy proposals you support. Where Rufo gets it right is by doing it state by state, however, in the end, the Left will never allow the red states to go their own way on these matters, even if they have to start shooting people.
Crawford's point about the underlying logic of wokeness and technical expertise, combined with the Lyons story of managerial vs bourgeois, are suggestive of a deeper unity.
Concerns in the 90s and aughts about Walmart displacing mom and pop stores, then later Amazon displacing brick and mortar retail and subjecting employees to algorithmic micromanagement...these are stories, not primarily of Wokeness or elite overproduction, but stories of economies of scale and technological change.
The populist pushback on both right and left, against both government and corporate institutions, arguably reflects pushback against these materialist-level changes. The cultural divides accompanying them (anywheres and somewheres, woke and reactionary, technocrat and bourgeois) are real and amplifying, but maybe their salience is exaggerated in the attention/danger/status-based social media and cable news environment.
Instead of Rufoism, I would prefer to see a political approach for the anti-Woke that focuses on building a winning coalition and governing well.
YMMD, but I see that as possible only from within the Democratic coalition. Who is most likely to favor cost effective polices to decrease CO2 emissions? Merit based immigration? YIMBY-ism? Better policing that actually protects minority communities? Gets guns off the streets? Globalization with a drop or two of diversifying critical supplies away from China?
I like your description of what might happen under conservatives who agree with Rufo. It's not necessarily correct or accurate but I like it
"Both developments expand the reach of managerial authority, generate new bureaucratic constituencies, and disqualify common sense as a guide to reality.“
It seems like it takes a rather twisted logic to argue wokeism and technological expertise are similar because they CHANGE current practices. Kind of like arguing poker and war are similar because they both use cards. (yes, there are probably much better comparisons) Be that as it may, I find it absurd to argue technical expertise disqualifies common sense. I don't think there's any doubt that tech expertise mostly improves on common sense by rooting out what we think is obvious but actually isn't even true. Are mistakes sometimes made? Sure but that doesn't change the conclusion that technical expertise mostly improves our understanding of reality.
... Whether common sense has any connection to reality is a whole other question.
I suspect a lot of what we call “wokeism” – along with a lot of “Trumpism” – would go away with diligence, competence, and humility from our governing class combined with simply ignoring them.
Reading Caplan's reaction that you linked to is interesting to me because I am so much closer to Caplan intellectually on his interpretation of the critical theorists (that it's ALL CRAP) than I am to Rufo, but I like Rufo's political approach better because of its realism. My first experience with Foucault in university was akin to anaphylactic shock. Every line of it just filled me with a rage that I had never felt before and have never felt since. My notes in the margins were in all caps, nearly tearing through the pages.
Where Rufo has succeeded and the libertarian movement has failed is perhaps in his focus on state-level politics as compared to grand federal-level politics. I think political actors thrive on being able to point to something that they have done that has made the world better. Art Laffer can point to specific states where he lobbied to keep the state from establishing an income tax. Rufo will one day be able to point to Florida's state university policies. At one point, the Giulianiverse could point to the success of Giuliani Time. There are just so many interests trying to push the federal government in various directions that it is exceptionally hard to achieve anything lasting at the national level; it leads to the kind of chaos that you bring up as your concern about the ultimate results of Rufo-ism.
I think the way to create a more lasting political settlement is to just reify the federalist structure of the country and to get the federal government out of more aspects of society that should be left to state law. Getting to that point unfortunately would require at least five Clarence Thomases, but we can at least move towards it with support short of that. People who express fear of "Balkanization" because of that should read the Federalist Papers to recognize how the commerce clause structure strongly discourages conflict between states while also permitting states to structure their laws to suit their particular populations and cultures. We are more likely to "Balkanize" because of departures from those principles caused by things like California's wicked Prop 65 than from differences in social laws alone.
And Darby too!
Which he rather undermines with his lifestyle.
Yes to “prefer to see a political approach for the anti-Woke that focuses on building a winning coalition and governing well.”
The Reds won the Russian and Chinese Civil Wars but lost the Spanish Civil War. The Nationalists being much more competent economic managers had a lot to do with the latter outcome. https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/08/01/the-victorious-counterrevolution-the-nationalist-effort-in-the-spanish-civil-war-michael-seidman/
Yes, we have a problem with institutions not governing themselves well. That requires better institutional management, which is absolutely a good government issue, and has to be tied to a general pattern of good policies.
Rufo, in the interview above, makes the point that he is a political activist and that politics is a manipulative business. Yes and good luck to him. Western conservatism sorely needs people like him. But his analysis of the wokeification of the Western world is still a cop out. A cop out because he needs to flatter the majority of the general public and blame everything on some tiny minority of villains. A cop out because he dare not confront the fact that America now has wokeified people in the tens of millions.
As I said in my comment on his own Substack:
"Yes, it's great to nail these Freire/Marcuse types..... 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."
What do you see as the most important obstacle to displacing the current regime, mired in bad institutional management, beset by patterns of bad polices? Where is the fulcrum that you would place the lever to dislodge the corruption?
The most important obstacle has been the lack of an institutional counter-strategy. Purging the universities is where the lever has to be placed.
OK. I agree. What would a purge look like? Is it the Rufo strategy with New College? Or do you think it would be enough to eliminate the state financial supports they currently enjoy? Put them on the hook for student loans, Eliminate non-profit status, Strip state funding, etc.
Strong requirements in order to receive ANY government funding. This means closing down all Schools of Education, Communications, etc.. The more university training has dominated teaching and journalism, the worse both have got, as it encourages moral elitism and contempt for the general citizenry.
Sacking all Marxists, critical theorists, anyone who called for someone’s sacking for wrongthink in their scholarship, banning diversity officers or any similar commissars or inquisitors. All activist scholarship is degraded scholarship and should not be taxpayer funded, even indirectly. Also, if they will not share, we should not fund.
Require merit-only entry, put them on the hook for student loans, tax administrative bloat. Require the tenured academic staff to be the ultimate authority in the University, similar to Cambridge University.
While I can't disagree with any of that, I do have a strong feeling of "who will bell the cat" here.
The left will not give up their positions easily; they'll only leave kicking and screaming. Parallel institutions would help, but the left will simply refuse to accredit any explicitly conservative institutions.
Chris Rufo is doing yeoman work in Florida, but I can't see it happening in any solidly blue state, say Washington or Oregon.
The Federalist Society is an example to us all.
All fair points. Building networks is so part of the necessary response.
I don't read Rufo as proposing any sort of Right dominance in place of the existing Left dominance. Cutting back on "patronage, loan schemes, bureaucratic employment, and civil rights regulations" would not establish Right dominance; only undermine Left dominance.
If you start with "One primitive is the knowledge principle which states that knowledge is subjective." the interaction with modern technology and the real world can't be understood. Without the language of real sciences, including math, where real knowledge is just our best scientific understanding of reality, all conclusions based upon subjective knowledge are meaningless.
Yes, raw power can dictate that genetics is not true as Stalin did with Lysenkoism < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism >, however the results were starvation. We now have our "Wokism" equivalent of Lysenkoism saying knowledge and science are subjective.
As an old scientist working in the environmental area, I have watched that whole area of knowledge evolve from science into way too much subjective nonsense. Even some environmental regulations are now burying known false assumptions in their mathematical models to obtain the subjective answers they want. If you don't want endangered birds killing/eating endangered fish, just exclude birds from the analysis and only consider human impacts (water usage and dams).
How many times have we been told that the world will die if we don't kill the fossil fuel industry in the US or California without noting that the CO2 greenhouse gas issue (a real issue) depends on the atmospheric concentration not the rate of increase (the derivative of the concentration over time) and if California went to zero rate that wouldn't significantly impact the concentration or the rest of the world.
There are only two relevant "resources" for humanity to continue to thrive and prosper and they are energy and human creativity. Both are dependent upon real non-subjective science, not "political and advocacy science".
The rachet only works in one direction. There is no going back, no matter what policy proposals you support. Where Rufo gets it right is by doing it state by state, however, in the end, the Left will never allow the red states to go their own way on these matters, even if they have to start shooting people.
Crawford's point about the underlying logic of wokeness and technical expertise, combined with the Lyons story of managerial vs bourgeois, are suggestive of a deeper unity.
Concerns in the 90s and aughts about Walmart displacing mom and pop stores, then later Amazon displacing brick and mortar retail and subjecting employees to algorithmic micromanagement...these are stories, not primarily of Wokeness or elite overproduction, but stories of economies of scale and technological change.
The populist pushback on both right and left, against both government and corporate institutions, arguably reflects pushback against these materialist-level changes. The cultural divides accompanying them (anywheres and somewheres, woke and reactionary, technocrat and bourgeois) are real and amplifying, but maybe their salience is exaggerated in the attention/danger/status-based social media and cable news environment.
Can a state get more woke than:
-book burning;
-voter repression
-Health care obstruction
-Tax evasion approval of its most affluent citizens
Instead of Rufoism, I would prefer to see a political approach for the anti-Woke that focuses on building a winning coalition and governing well.
YMMD, but I see that as possible only from within the Democratic coalition. Who is most likely to favor cost effective polices to decrease CO2 emissions? Merit based immigration? YIMBY-ism? Better policing that actually protects minority communities? Gets guns off the streets? Globalization with a drop or two of diversifying critical supplies away from China?
The Democratic party must be much different in your state. I couldn't see any Democrat where I live favoring *any* of those policy positions.
I like your description of what might happen under conservatives who agree with Rufo. It's not necessarily correct or accurate but I like it
"Both developments expand the reach of managerial authority, generate new bureaucratic constituencies, and disqualify common sense as a guide to reality.“
It seems like it takes a rather twisted logic to argue wokeism and technological expertise are similar because they CHANGE current practices. Kind of like arguing poker and war are similar because they both use cards. (yes, there are probably much better comparisons) Be that as it may, I find it absurd to argue technical expertise disqualifies common sense. I don't think there's any doubt that tech expertise mostly improves on common sense by rooting out what we think is obvious but actually isn't even true. Are mistakes sometimes made? Sure but that doesn't change the conclusion that technical expertise mostly improves our understanding of reality.
... Whether common sense has any connection to reality is a whole other question.
“prefer to see a political approach for the anti-Woke that focuses on building a winning coalition and governing well.” – Agree with this.
The article “The Elites Need a Lesson in Humility” by Jon Gabriel in Discourse <https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2023/08/10/elites-need-a-lesson-in-humility/> makes a similar point, that our key problem is that elites today just aren’t very good at being elites.
I suspect a lot of what we call “wokeism” – along with a lot of “Trumpism” – would go away with diligence, competence, and humility from our governing class combined with simply ignoring them.
Sorry for the duplicate paragraph!