Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
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Speaker 3: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 4: We're really excited to be joined today by Christopher Rufo.
Speaker 4: He is the author of the new book America's Cultural Revolution,
Speaker 4: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Chris, thank you so
Speaker 4: much for joining Breaking Points and Counterpoints here on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: It's good to be with you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Chris, you missed it earlier on the show,
Speaker 1: But I was saying that the book, from my perspective,
Speaker 1: is extraordinarily well done. There's clearly a lot of talent
Speaker 1: went into it. I think the writing, the storytelling, and
Speaker 1: the research are all impressive. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: that masks some fundamental problems underneath it. But we're going
Speaker 1: to get into the contradictions and the contradictory things that
Speaker 1: I think we found it later but I did want
Speaker 1: to say that as a just as a matter of craft,
Speaker 1: I think it's impressively done, and I think for that
Speaker 1: reason it's going to get a lot of mileage, and
Speaker 1: I think the left ought to pay attention to it.
Speaker 3: Absolutely well.
Speaker 5: I appreciate that, And you know, the craft is something
Speaker 5: that's really important and often is invisible for a general audience.
Speaker 3: They feel like, Okay, this is a good book. I
Speaker 3: like it. It's fun, it's good pacing, and let's tease
Speaker 3: out some of those disagreements.
Speaker 5: That's what it's all about, and I enjoy having some
Speaker 5: back and forth.
Speaker 4: A good place to start is probably with the title
Speaker 4: America's Cultural Revolution. We wanted to begin by asking how
Speaker 4: you think critical race theory what you describe, I think
Speaker 4: really aptally in the book as an uber discipline for
Speaker 4: the contemporary left. Where does that critical race theory in particular,
Speaker 4: you're so known as a student and opponent of CRT.
Speaker 4: Where does that factor into what you probably describe as
Speaker 4: the cultural revolution?
Speaker 3: So the main storyline in the book is tracing.
Speaker 5: The arc of ideological development on the far left from
Speaker 5: the nineteen seventies to the present, more or less, and
Speaker 5: what I found and I think the critical race theorist,
Speaker 5: if you ask them, they've certainly written as much.
Speaker 3: They kind of pick and chose.
Speaker 5: They've had this process of picking and choosing from the
Speaker 5: various ideological strands, whether it's critical theory, whether it's the
Speaker 5: kind of race based ideology of Angela Davis, whether it's postmodernism,
Speaker 5: and so it's this interesting kind of converging point where
Speaker 5: you have all of these trends from the late sixties
Speaker 5: through the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, and they all
Speaker 5: come together in this intellectual stew that is critical race theory,
Speaker 5: and I think it also represents the culmination but also
Speaker 5: the dead end of this ideology. Of course, I'm a
Speaker 5: critic of critical race theory.
Speaker 3: That's well known.
Speaker 5: But what I wanted to do is go a bit
Speaker 5: deeper than some of the three minute news hits that
Speaker 5: I've done and show people exactly where it comes from,
Speaker 5: exactly how it developed, exactly how it achieved power, and
Speaker 5: then from my perspective, exactly how it can be defeated.
Speaker 4: And there's a really interesting tension that you pick up on,
Speaker 4: and it's obvious, I think, to people who read their
Speaker 4: work really closely, but this is G two A. I
Speaker 4: think we made a pull out quote of this part
Speaker 4: in your book. You write for all of their faults,
Speaker 4: Davis Kleever referring ANGELA. Davis and Black revolutionaries at least
Speaker 4: grappled with and appealed to the black loop and proletariat.
Speaker 4: The critical race theorists, on the other hand, treat them
Speaker 4: like lepers, the lump, and class is nowhere to be
Speaker 4: found in their work except a symbolic justification for their abstractions.
Speaker 4: This is where the critical race theists reach their final impasse.
Speaker 4: Their program has become a form of empty professional class aestheticism,
Speaker 4: designed for manipulating social status within elite institutions, not for
Speaker 4: alleviating real miseries or governing a nation. And this is
Speaker 4: where you write about Patrise Collars, for instance, the person
Speaker 4: behind the Black Lives Matter global movement, who describe yourself
Speaker 4: as a Marxist, a trained Marxist. And it raises this
Speaker 4: fascinating question of you know, does the Nicole Henna Jones
Speaker 4: or does the Patrice colorI who spent all this money
Speaker 4: on a mansion that was donated to BLM, do they
Speaker 4: actually want to seize the means of production and if not,
Speaker 4: how did you get from Marx to today's Marxists describing
Speaker 4: themselves as trained Marxists but promoting something that looks more
Speaker 4: like Marcus than it does Marx.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I mean they certainly can be traced back
Speaker 5: to MARCUSA and so you know, they're the person who
Speaker 5: really established all of the language, all of the ideas,
Speaker 5: all of the styles and esthetics.
Speaker 3: That were used by BLM.
Speaker 5: As Angela Davis, I mean, she developed all of this,
Speaker 5: you know, many decades before, and then also became a
Speaker 5: personal mentor to the leaders of BLM. And so one
Speaker 5: of the interesting things though that I that I felt
Speaker 5: in the process of researching and writing this book was
Speaker 5: even though I paint these biographical portraits of what I
Speaker 5: think of as the for profits of the New Left
Speaker 5: and the modern Left, Marcusa, Angela Davis, Paulo Frera Bell,
Speaker 5: the godfather of CRT, even though I.
Speaker 3: Really disagree with the work that they do.
Speaker 5: I think they've yielded devastating consequences in the United States
Speaker 5: and also abroad. But I gained a grudging kind of
Speaker 5: respect for these people. They were idealists who I'm afraid,
Speaker 5: through their mistakes, became cynics in some way, but you
Speaker 5: actually have to respect their own personal transformation from that
Speaker 5: idealistic starting point to their cynicism. When you compare it
Speaker 5: to something like b a Land, which I think is
Speaker 5: wholly cynical from the beginning.
Speaker 3: It doesn't have any of.
Speaker 5: That spirit of inquiry, discovery, breaking new ground idealism, utopianism
Speaker 5: even And so there's an attractive quality to these thinkers.
Speaker 5: And what I wanted to do in the book, and
Speaker 5: I hope you both agree, is I wanted to write
Speaker 5: a book that certainly has my point of view, obviously,
Speaker 5: but takes these subjects seriously, doesn't dismissed them, doesn't doesn't
Speaker 5: have a condescension towards them, but it actually seeks to
Speaker 5: first understand them as they may have understood themselves before
Speaker 5: launching into the critique.
Speaker 1: And so to that point, let's let's put up a
Speaker 1: G two Seks. I think you're on some of your
Speaker 1: most solid ground when you're kind of making fun of
Speaker 1: the kind of corporate DEI structures that have developed over the.
Speaker 3: Last couple of years.
Speaker 1: But I want to talk about what that actually means structurally.
Speaker 1: So you write at one point, the major corporations have
Speaker 1: made a simple calculation. They've achieved all of their desires
Speaker 1: from the political right on economics, tax cuts, free trade, deregulation,
Speaker 1: and so they are looking to appease their potential enemies
Speaker 1: from the political left on culture. It is a classic
Speaker 1: inside outside game. Corporate lobbyists quietly secure favorable legislation through
Speaker 1: congressional Republicans, while corporate executives publicly announce their contributions to
Speaker 1: racial equality and pledge allegiance to social justice. So when
Speaker 1: I read that, I'm underlining that and saying sounds right
Speaker 1: to me, like, Okay, this sounds right, And I think
Speaker 1: this gets at what I think is a conflation of
Speaker 1: Marxism in a variety of different ways, because Marxism gets
Speaker 1: tossed around just so utterly, loosely, and you have, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, a Marxism from a standard class perspective,
Speaker 1: But then the way that you're often using it in
Speaker 1: the book is through these more Marqusian lenses of using
Speaker 1: the word marx But you're actually talking about what is
Speaker 1: effectively identity politics. And identity politics, as you're writing about
Speaker 1: here in your book, is the shield that the kind
Speaker 1: of power structure uses to maintain that power structure. And
Speaker 1: to me, the reason that DEI and these types of
Speaker 1: things have been able to penetrate these institutions is not
Speaker 1: because Marque's successful, you know, pulled off a long march,
Speaker 1: but because they're useful to corporations and to institutions like universities.
Speaker 1: For instance, If universities are getting protested by groups for
Speaker 1: a variety of different things, if they can say, well,
Speaker 1: we did a training, you know, if they can let
Speaker 1: off the steam of that through there, through these trainings
Speaker 1: and through adopting the kind of lexicon of the protesters,
Speaker 1: but not the actual kind of structural demands that they're making,
Speaker 1: that's to me why corporate America and our political institutions
Speaker 1: have been so willing to embrace this. So to me,
Speaker 1: it seems like you're making the kind of counter argument
Speaker 1: that this isn't actually Marxists, this isn't actually revolutionary, it's
Speaker 1: just more you know, co optation by the power structure.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean there's a lot of truth to that, certainly.
Speaker 5: And the structural question is an interesting one. I think
Speaker 5: what we have today are Marxists without Marx, or Marxism
Speaker 5: without Marx, and so the the kind of dominant strand
Speaker 5: of the last that you see in critical race theory,
Speaker 5: that you see in the DEI infrastructure, the diversity training
Speaker 5: and such. You know, critical race theories explicitly say we
Speaker 5: are you know, Marxists, we are revolutionary, you know.
Speaker 3: But in some ways it's true. In other ways it's
Speaker 3: not true.
Speaker 5: And I think what's most striking about this is that
Speaker 5: it almost seems like we've come to a point where
Speaker 5: the left has given up the old Marxist politics of
Speaker 5: reshaping the economic base using the Marxist terminology.
Speaker 3: The critical race theorists.
Speaker 5: Don't want to take over a Ford factory and start
Speaker 5: building f one fifties. I mean, that's like they don't
Speaker 5: want to do that, they have no interest in doing that,
Speaker 5: no capacity to do that. They're very happy occupying the superstructure.
Speaker 5: And they have substituted that that old demand to change
Speaker 5: the economic conditions with a new demand simply to play
Speaker 5: symbolically with language, words, titles.
Speaker 3: Prestige, and position within the superstructure.
Speaker 5: And so it serves as almost a substitute or a
Speaker 5: simulacrum of Marxism that ends always in cynicism, right, because
Speaker 5: you can't claim to be a revolutionary, you know, sitting
Speaker 5: in your your your comfortable reading chair and in at
Speaker 5: the public university at UC Berkeley or UCLA or Harvard
Speaker 5: or University of Wisconsin, wherever you might be, and pretend
Speaker 5: that you know, when you're doing zoom calls with the
Speaker 5: Treasury Department teaching you know, employees about their white privilege,
Speaker 5: that that you're doing something revolutionary. I think it's wrong.
Speaker 5: I think it's harmful. I think it's wasteful. I think
Speaker 5: it could be disastrous for long term. But you're right,
Speaker 5: it's been a kind of this uneasy truth or this
Speaker 5: uneasy management of power between the corporation and between these
Speaker 5: activists that that probably really doesn't satisfy anyone. I don't
Speaker 5: think that old school Marxists are satisfied with DEI, and
Speaker 5: certainly conservatives aren't either.
Speaker 4: And is it this Marcusian idea that you need a
Speaker 4: better elite, like the idea the end goal can't be
Speaker 4: the Marxist end goal Marxism. He's looking around that stuff
Speaker 4: like the hard hat riots in the Nixon administration and saying,
Speaker 4: you know, the Marxist idea of what progress would look
Speaker 4: like is falling apart around me. And what we actually
Speaker 4: need is this benevolent elite, And that's where you have
Speaker 4: this sort of limousine liberal stereotype sort of come into play.
Speaker 4: Is that what explains how you get a Patrice Colores
Speaker 4: spending millions and millions of dollars on a mansion, money
Speaker 4: that was donated to the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation,
Speaker 4: whatever the formal group title is, because otherwise it seems
Speaker 4: utterly ine inexplicable and unreconcilable that people are trained, self
Speaker 4: described trained Marxists are pouring money into a mansion. Is
Speaker 4: it rooted in what happened as this all started to
Speaker 4: all apart in the sixties and seventies and the new
Speaker 4: Left kind of looked around and said, we're going to
Speaker 4: the universities because we need to train up a better elead.
Speaker 3: Well, I think this is always the case.
Speaker 5: I mean, if you look at even back to the
Speaker 5: Russian Revolution, you have Lenin's theory of vanguardism, you know,
Speaker 5: the leading the proletariat, shaping the consciousness of the proletariat.
Speaker 5: And so there's one argument that you could perhaps make
Speaker 5: that this is always the case on the left, that
Speaker 5: it requires essentially it leads to shape the consciousness or
Speaker 5: less charitably to manipulate the masses along the lines of envy, revenge, hatred,
Speaker 5: et cetera, in order to get them to take political action.
Speaker 3: But I think that we're.
Speaker 5: Being, you know, really honest about it. This is probably
Speaker 5: always true. I think politics is always been, and likely
Speaker 5: always will be an elite game first and foremost, and
Speaker 5: so public opinion in a mass democracy and a mass
Speaker 5: media republic like we have today, public opinion alone is
Speaker 5: not enough to make any changes.
Speaker 3: Something that I've learned.
Speaker 5: Public opinion has to be harnessed, shaped, directed, channeled, elevated,
Speaker 5: improved by organizations, institutions, leaders in order to actually bring
Speaker 5: public opinion as a force in the political process. So
Speaker 5: I think that the Marxist idea was always somewhat naive
Speaker 5: and how politics works, you know, a spontaneous revolution.
Speaker 3: Marcusa saw this. Marcusa said in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 5: He said, the working class in the West and the
Speaker 5: United States in particular, is anti revolutionary.
Speaker 3: They want the the you know, three.
Speaker 5: Bedroom house, you know, the ford car, the you know,
Speaker 5: the cabin in the woods for the summer.
Speaker 3: They're they're happy with this life that they have, and
Speaker 3: so it's.
Speaker 5: The frustrated, alienated intellectuals, not the frustrated, alienated working class
Speaker 5: that becomes the new sub of the revolution.
Speaker 1: Let's do a little bit on Marcus, because I think
Speaker 1: that one of the one of the problems I had
Speaker 1: with the book. I think the chapters on Markus are
Speaker 1: they're they're a fun read. It's kind of a romp
Speaker 1: through the late sixties and early seventies. But I think
Speaker 1: that if if you talk to people who were active
Speaker 1: in that period, they will tell you that to the
Speaker 1: extent that mark CU's was influential at all, it was
Speaker 1: more as a kind of after the fact justification for
Speaker 1: things that they were already going to do. Like they
Speaker 1: already wanted to shout down you know, right wing speakers
Speaker 1: on campuses, the weather underground, already kind of wanted to
Speaker 1: go out and start, you know, putting pipe bombs at
Speaker 1: the police stations in the United States Capitol. And so
Speaker 1: to the extent that there was this guy who was,
Speaker 1: you know, coming kind of along behind them and writing
Speaker 1: things that that was that that was fine for them,
Speaker 1: and it reminded me a little bit of the Powell Memo.
Speaker 1: You're familiar with the Powell Memo, right, So for people
Speaker 1: who aren't the This is a memo written in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one by a future Supreme Court justice that if
Speaker 1: you're on the left, it's it's like an article of
Speaker 1: faith that the next like fifty years of the conservative
Speaker 1: ascendancy came from literally this letter that a guy wrote
Speaker 1: to his neighbor that. But all the letter says is
Speaker 1: what was conventional wisdom on the right at the time.
Speaker 1: And people have kind of gone back in time and said, oh,
Speaker 1: it was that pal memo, It was that thing that
Speaker 1: produced the next fifty years. We find that's our that
Speaker 1: that we cracked the code. And so then if if
Speaker 1: you feel you feel like then if you can crack
Speaker 1: the code, then you can kind of unwind it. So
Speaker 1: I feel like you've you've done a little bit of
Speaker 1: that with Marcus. And now I have my own book
Speaker 1: coming out December that has a chapter on Marqus.
Speaker 3: So I don't think he's.
Speaker 1: Completely inconsequential, but I don't think he's anywhere near as
Speaker 1: consequential as you say today.
Speaker 3: So are you? Are you? So?
Speaker 1: I guess the question would be where do you left wing?
Speaker 1: Where does the left come from? Like do you believe
Speaker 1: that the system has contradictions that are going to materially
Speaker 1: produce opposition to the system. Where do you think it
Speaker 1: comes from kind of the imaginations and the theories of
Speaker 1: people like Marcus who can then kind of lead their
Speaker 1: graduate students around to then lead movements, Because I obviously
Speaker 1: think it's the former.
Speaker 5: Oh, I mean, I think undoubtedly it's a combination of both.
Speaker 5: And what I tried to do in the book, I think,
Speaker 5: contrary to the critique that you're laying out is that
Speaker 5: I'm not saying that MARCUSA was a prophet who was
Speaker 5: a causal force that the sixties and early seventies would
Speaker 5: not have happened without his ideas. I think you're right,
Speaker 5: and I think I kind of laid this out in
Speaker 5: the book in a similar manner that he was, of
Speaker 5: course reacting to spontaneous movements and people and ideas that
Speaker 5: were bubbling up around him. But what he did was
Speaker 5: serve as a method of rationalization and legitimation for this movement,
Speaker 5: meaning he took this incoherent set of ideas, whether it
Speaker 5: was from the student protesters or the riots in the
Speaker 5: black inner cities and the new political parties like the
Speaker 5: you know, the Black Panther Party, or even some of
Speaker 5: the radical movements in the kind of white intelligensi aside
Speaker 5: like the Weather Underground, and he synthesized all of these movements.
Speaker 5: He put it into a coherent narrative, He made them rational,
Speaker 5: using his really stunning intellectual capacities, and put them in
Speaker 5: the frame of the movement of Western philosophy from you know,
Speaker 5: Hegel to the present and then legitimized it because he
Speaker 5: was seen, I think rightly so as a as an
Speaker 5: intellectual force, as someone with intellectual authority, and so he
Speaker 5: served as a father or even a grandfather figure to
Speaker 5: this movement. But I still think and the reason I
Speaker 5: chose to highlight him in the book is that he
Speaker 5: offered the best intellectual case for the new Left. He
Speaker 5: offered the best analysis of the new Laft. And while
Speaker 5: of course I think it be you know, just flattery
Speaker 5: to him to say that he was the cause of it, I.
Speaker 3: Don't think that's true.
Speaker 5: I think that he's really the pivotal figure who understood
Speaker 5: it better than anyone.
Speaker 3: And then of course personally.
Speaker 5: He was connected to all of the most important radicals
Speaker 5: of the time. So through him you can tell the
Speaker 5: story of the whole movement, both in his personal connections
Speaker 5: and his intellectual ideological work.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, as we have this conversation about critical race theory
Speaker 4: queer theory, a lot of those theories are still alive.
Speaker 4: A lot of us came out of the eighties and
Speaker 4: the nineties, and so Kimberly Crenshaw, the creator of intersectionality,
Speaker 4: has responded basically to the new conservative opposition to critical
Speaker 4: race theory and said, basically, you know, this is all
Speaker 4: it is, fundamentally misunderstood. People are using intersectionality wrong. You
Speaker 4: get all the time, Chris, people saying you're just turning
Speaker 4: critical race theory into this blunt force object and it's
Speaker 4: too broad to mean what it's supposed to mean.
Speaker 3: What are from your.
Speaker 4: Perspective, A, are people either being dishonest when they talk
Speaker 4: about their own positions on theories like intersectionality and CRT
Speaker 4: or are they actually misunderstanding something about their own position
Speaker 4: or about their own worldview.
Speaker 5: No, I don't think they're misunderstanding it. I think that
Speaker 5: they're they're they're concealing it, they're obfuscating, and I think
Speaker 5: in some ways they're probably embarrassed of their own writings
Speaker 5: from the eighties and nineties, which simply don't hold up.
Speaker 5: Intersectionality is a complex word. It's a you know, latinate,
Speaker 5: multi syllavic word for a very simple idea that most
Speaker 5: people understand.
Speaker 3: When you hear the even the mocking terms.
Speaker 5: Like oppression olympics, that's basically what intersectionality is. It's it's
Speaker 5: it's not any more complex than that at part. And
Speaker 5: I think that conservatives are criticizing it, or some conservatives
Speaker 5: criticizing in an unfair way. Yeah, probably, but that's how
Speaker 5: politics works. And I think that uh, doctor Crenshaw's position
Speaker 5: of saying, oh, you don't understand, oh you're doing this
Speaker 5: or you're doing that, there's no such thing as CRT.
Speaker 3: I mean it to me amounts to a lot.
Speaker 5: Of whining and complaining, obfuscation, and I think that it
Speaker 5: betrays a lack of confidence on the part of the
Speaker 5: critical race theorists. These are people that are tenured professors
Speaker 5: at some of the most prestigious universities in our country.
Speaker 5: They could not mount a significant defense of their ideas.
Speaker 5: They failed to persuade the public. They got smoked in
Speaker 5: the matter of the public debate, and so they're trying
Speaker 5: to make excuses, and so you know, to me, it's
Speaker 5: a good sign.
Speaker 3: I offered to debate Crenshaw and the rest of them.
Speaker 5: Of course they didn't take me up on it, but
Speaker 5: if they want to clarify their position, I'm I'm still.
Speaker 3: Open we could do it. Even right here on breaking points.
Speaker 1: I wanted to pick up on a point that you
Speaker 1: were making earlier, where you allowed that the subtut of
Speaker 1: the book is how the radical left conquered everything, But
Speaker 1: you do allow that the DEI world has not actually
Speaker 1: conquered corporate America, like in other words, if it had.
Speaker 1: If it had, Twitter would not have sold itself to
Speaker 1: Elon Musk, Like if a Marxist left had actually seized
Speaker 1: the means of communications through Twitter, they wouldn't have just
Speaker 1: handed it over to Musk when he made a bit
Speaker 1: of fifty four twenty. But more broadly, you're sting your
Speaker 1: point that it's a uneasy alliance between these corporate leaders
Speaker 1: and this movement, I think is a fair way of
Speaker 1: putting it. The corporate corporate America gets its own benefits
Speaker 1: from that. So if that, if that's the case, what
Speaker 1: what can we really if it hasn't conquered everything, what
Speaker 1: can we really take from it?
Speaker 5: Sure, well, you know, the subtitle is is provocative, it's polemical,
Speaker 5: it is hyperbolic. And I think that the meaning if
Speaker 5: you take it in the ironic form, if you if
Speaker 5: you understand that it's kind of a wink in a
Speaker 5: nod in some ways, is that, uh, the radical leftist conquered,
Speaker 5: as we discussed, the entire superstructure. And so at the
Speaker 5: end of the day, when the board of uh, when
Speaker 5: when the board at Twitter is considering a sale and
Speaker 5: they're all gonna you know that they're all going to
Speaker 5: get rich. Of course they're gonna there. Of course they're
Speaker 5: going to sell Twitter to Elon Musk. I think at
Speaker 5: the end of the deal Elon Musk.
Speaker 3: Was trying to get out of the deal. Yeah, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: of course.
Speaker 5: And so I and I think that that actually, in
Speaker 5: a sense is exactly the case that I make in
Speaker 5: the book.
Speaker 3: It's that they've conquered all of the superstructure.
Speaker 5: They've given up that old dream of conquering the kind
Speaker 5: of economic structure, and it's created this really uneasy contradiction
Speaker 5: and and and in a sense I would agree with
Speaker 5: some of my my friends in the old Marxist camp
Speaker 5: who feel the same frustration. I of course am glad
Speaker 5: that they haven't conquered the economic structure of you know, uh,
Speaker 5: that would be a total disaster. But I think that
Speaker 5: it's disastrous enough that they've conquered all of the lead
Speaker 5: institutions that shape culture, knowledge, science, censorship. I mean these
Speaker 5: are significant things. Education, the transmission of values from one
Speaker 5: generation to the next, that is extremely significant.
Speaker 3: And I think that.
Speaker 5: Actually I'm a critic of many conservatives in this regard,
Speaker 5: who say, well, we've you know, we have you know,
Speaker 5: low taxes, low regulation. You know, corporations are people, they
Speaker 5: should be left alone to do whatever they want. Whereas
Speaker 5: I think that culture is very important, and I embrace
Speaker 5: the term culture war because ultimately, what is worth.
Speaker 3: Fighting for more than our culture? I mean that to me,
Speaker 3: in some.
Speaker 5: Ways, is more important than fighting about the marginal tax rate.
Speaker 5: You know, we can negotiate about that. Can go up
Speaker 5: a little bit, go up, go down a little bit.
Speaker 5: I'd prefer to go down, of course, but I foreground culture.
Speaker 5: And so when I say they've conquered everything in the
Speaker 5: terms of the cultural revolution, they have in the terms
Speaker 5: of the orthodox Marxist revolution, of course they have not.
Speaker 1: Well, let me push you a little bit on the
Speaker 1: cynical politics of it.
Speaker 3: Lee Atwater.
Speaker 1: You're probably familiar with this infamous interview that he did
Speaker 1: back in nineteen eighty one. I think we have this
Speaker 1: as two e He says, you start out in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four saying word enward nward. By nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: you can't say nword that hurts you backfires, So say
Speaker 1: so you say stuff like forced bussing, states rights and
Speaker 1: all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now you're
Speaker 1: talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking
Speaker 1: about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them
Speaker 1: is blacks get hurt worse than whites. We want to
Speaker 1: cut This is much more abstract than even the bussing thing,
Speaker 1: and a hell of a lot more abstract than nword nward.
Speaker 1: And so if we were going to stretch that out,
Speaker 1: it's kind of twenty years or forty years later. And
Speaker 1: the way I would if I were thinking about it
Speaker 1: in the voice of a contemporary, say Rufonian, you would
Speaker 1: say something like, there's now a populist working class right
Speaker 1: that doesn't want to hear those coded words about cutting
Speaker 1: social spending because that hits of some of the working
Speaker 1: class base of the Republican Party. So now you have
Speaker 1: to abstract it even further and talk about critical race theory.
Speaker 1: So is this not just kind of an extension of
Speaker 1: a Republican Southern strategy more just with a more sophisticated gloss.
Speaker 3: No, I mean I don't think it is, certainly.
Speaker 5: I mean, as one of the people involved in leading this,
Speaker 5: I don't think it is now at all. I think
Speaker 5: that that's not right, and I actually don't think it
Speaker 5: was that way in nineteen sixty eight. I think that
Speaker 5: Atwater's reading of that history is just flat out wrong.
Speaker 5: And you know, you know Richard Nixon, of course was
Speaker 5: a supporter of civil rights.
Speaker 1: Richard Nixon, well, he was an Atwater was an architect
Speaker 1: of it as a close Nixon strategist.
Speaker 5: That's right, And I'm saying that I think he's misreading
Speaker 5: even Nixon's legacy.
Speaker 3: And if you look.
Speaker 5: At Nixon's you know, taped conversations, you look at his diary,
Speaker 5: you look at all of the material from Nixon himself,
Speaker 5: I don't think he thinks in those terms at all,
Speaker 5: even in his most candid moments. And in fact, and
Speaker 5: his critique of welfare policies, even though we're talking just
Speaker 5: a few years after these programs were established in the
Speaker 5: Great Society, Nixon already understood the nature and and and
Speaker 5: the through his work, especially with with moynihan, what would
Speaker 5: happen eventually to these welfare state policies on the black community.
Speaker 3: And I think that even you.
Speaker 5: Know, a Clinton style Democrat could see that those policies
Speaker 5: were which were in the name of something good, something helpful,
Speaker 5: something to redress past discrimination and past maltreatment, we're actually
Speaker 5: counterproductive for most people. I mean, you know, I spent
Speaker 5: three years working on a film in a public housing
Speaker 5: project in Memphis, and you can see the legacy of
Speaker 5: those programs that just devastated these communities.
Speaker 3: And so I wouldn't.
Speaker 5: Concede for in a single minute that that's what critical
Speaker 5: race theory is about in twenty twenty two, which is basically,
Speaker 5: don't teach racial scapegoating to kindergarteners, don't segregate people by
Speaker 5: race and training programs, don't portray the United States as
Speaker 5: a force for evil, and portray the solution, as you know,
Speaker 5: suspending private property rights, limiting the first Amendment abolishing the
Speaker 5: equal protection of the law. I just think that it's
Speaker 5: such a bad misread and doesn't hold water really at
Speaker 5: any time after nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 4: And I think Ryan has another question, but just a
Speaker 4: quick comment there. It's so interesting that you have a
Speaker 4: New York Times that is happy to publish Nicole Hanna
Speaker 4: Jones sixteen nineteen project but would never endorse Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 4: Is always going to go if they're Hillary versus Bernie,
Speaker 4: They're always going to endorse Hillary, and they're going to
Speaker 4: do it Egerly.
Speaker 1: What was your no, Yeah, to pick up on that,
Speaker 1: basically to your point earlier that you'd much rather fight
Speaker 1: the culture war than talk about marginal tax rates or
Speaker 1: kind of fight over the structure nature of the of
Speaker 1: the economy. That gets back to the I think the
Speaker 1: fundamental disagreement we have here around the role of class
Speaker 1: in these uh in the way that our in our
Speaker 1: politics are shaped.
Speaker 3: And you start the book with.
Speaker 1: Mark Cuse delivering a speech titled Liberation from the Affluent Society.
Speaker 1: And for people who aren't kind of tuned into the
Speaker 1: politics of the sixties, affluent society nerds, Yeah, the nerds
Speaker 1: and losers who aren't. That's that's John, that's John Kenneth
Speaker 1: gall Bright's seminal book that kind of defined, you know
Speaker 1: what the kind of Keynesian left understood to be the
Speaker 1: most just way to set up an economy and a
Speaker 1: political economy. And it was the thing that kind of
Speaker 1: mark Us pointed to said he was sad that now,
Speaker 1: you know, the proletariat is no longer angry enough to
Speaker 1: lead a revolution, and instead of like being happy about that, that,
Speaker 1: like and Edward Bernstein might have been, he's he goes
Speaker 1: and tries to find some other revolution and group just
Speaker 1: have revolution for the sake of revolution. But it gets
Speaker 1: back to then, Okay, if if that's the thing you
Speaker 1: object to, and you think CRT flows out of this,
Speaker 1: then why not go back to the new deal affluent society,
Speaker 1: great society world where you're actually making sure that people
Speaker 1: are taking care of And it goes this question of
Speaker 1: I think economic nihilism on the right, that that says
Speaker 1: we're so angry that the patriarchy is collapsing, that the
Speaker 1: male bread male, you know, the male breadwinner can't bring
Speaker 1: home the bacon anymore, while at the same time crafting
Speaker 1: economic policies that make it impossible for him to do
Speaker 1: that and produce the kind of social collapse that that
Speaker 1: then creates the cultural rot that then is becomes the
Speaker 1: grist for the culture War.
Speaker 3: So why not just go back to the New Deal.
Speaker 5: Basically, if we could, you know, repeal the Great Society
Speaker 5: and go back to the New Deal, I would make
Speaker 5: that deal in a sense. And I think the greatst
Speaker 5: Society is an utter disaster. And there's two elements to
Speaker 5: your question that I think are are smart and perceptive,
Speaker 5: and I can respond in kind to each one.
Speaker 3: But the.
Speaker 5: Great Society is still the system that we have today.
Speaker 5: First and foremost, we have to understand that, as Robert
Speaker 5: Rector at Heritage Foundation has pointed out for years now,
Speaker 5: the United States spends more than one trillion dollars per
Speaker 5: year on means tested anti poverty programs. More than one
Speaker 5: trillion dollars per year on means tested anti poverty programs.
Speaker 5: We spend an enormous sum For Medica is huge one
Speaker 5: of those, right of course, Medicated a huge part of that. Again,
Speaker 5: it's a means tested an anti poverty program, you know,
Speaker 5: health education and welfare style program. And so the idea
Speaker 5: that somehow we have reduced. The Great Society programs is
Speaker 5: just factually incorrect in multiple orders of magnitude, the scope
Speaker 5: and scale of it.
Speaker 3: And then the.
Speaker 5: Assumption though is that if we had more, things would
Speaker 5: be better.
Speaker 3: And I think that that, again is just an assumption
Speaker 3: that doesn't hold true.
Speaker 5: Although where I would disagree or where I would rather
Speaker 5: agree with you with a twist, is that you know,
Speaker 5: a single income in the United States at a middle
Speaker 5: class wage can support a family at the same level
Speaker 5: of material comfort as I was in the you know,
Speaker 5: nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties. You would have to have, you know,
Speaker 5: like they did in that time, a very small house,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe one kind of old car. You'd have
Speaker 5: to have, you know, make some other sacrifices now to
Speaker 5: go to college, never go to college, et cetera. So
Speaker 5: I'm not saying that that is good and that we
Speaker 5: should return to that level of affluence. But what happens
Speaker 5: is that we have desires that have outpaced, outpaced the
Speaker 5: ability of one income to provide for and so we
Speaker 5: have more desires. And maybe marcusa is even write a
Speaker 5: little bit in this regard. It says, ah, the affluent
Speaker 5: society ends up just replicating desires to the point where
Speaker 5: you're in a frenzy of consumption. I mean, I think
Speaker 5: it's a little bit, you know, a little bit a
Speaker 5: little bit too far. But there certainly is something that
Speaker 5: in my view, I wouldn't analyze it from his point
Speaker 5: of view. But while I would agree with certain elements
Speaker 5: what he's saying, I would say that it's really the
Speaker 5: loss of those old Benjamin Franklin virtues of prudence, temperance, frugality,
Speaker 5: all of these things, self restraint.
Speaker 3: And so I would like to see not a society.
Speaker 5: Where the government spends more money on welfare programs that
Speaker 5: actually achieve the opposite of their intentions, but actually restoring
Speaker 5: people in a kind of maybe even like a hokey
Speaker 5: Dave Ramsey kind of way, those old American virtues that
Speaker 5: you know, Ben Franklin did his famous checklist every day?
Speaker 5: Am I being temperant and frugal? And I think that
Speaker 5: those things are so those things are so foreign to
Speaker 5: how we think today that I think that again, it
Speaker 5: kind of is a cultural problem more than a material problem.
Speaker 5: If we have materials to technical challenges to raising standards
Speaker 5: of living, I mean, we have an affluent society absolutely,
Speaker 5: and that's good. But we need to have the virtues
Speaker 5: that can restrain some of the problems and some of
Speaker 5: the temptations of that society if we want to have
Speaker 5: happy families, if we want to have strong communities, and
Speaker 5: so forth.
Speaker 1: One quick interjection before Emily response, because I thin, actually
Speaker 1: Emmy and I I started to agree on this more
Speaker 1: than disagree. But I would only say that I wouldn't
Speaker 1: characterize New Deal, Great Society and affluent society as government
Speaker 1: kind of support for the poor, but as government intervention
Speaker 1: in designing an economy that allows for union jobs, allows
Speaker 1: for wages to at least keep pace with inflation, allows
Speaker 1: for lots of private sector growth that is supporting families,
Speaker 1: not to just reduce it to transfer payments.
Speaker 4: Although I think that's where Chris is drawing the line
Speaker 4: between rightfully between the New Deal and the Great Society,
Speaker 4: in that you know, there's the conflation of.
Speaker 1: Both medicaid, but Medicaid and medicare, like they're major economic interventions.
Speaker 5: Like Medicare is not a not a means test at
Speaker 5: anti poverty program. But even if you take out Medicaid
Speaker 5: under the argument and and and there's some persuasive element
Speaker 5: to it that Medicaid subsidizes corporations who no longer have
Speaker 5: to provide health insurance benefits.
Speaker 3: There's a there's a there's a point to be made there.
Speaker 5: But even if you take that out, we have the
Speaker 5: most high spending social safety net for means test at
Speaker 5: anti poverty programs, even minus health benefits, of any country
Speaker 5: in the world. And if you look at poor communities,
Speaker 5: if you spend time in these communities, it's very hard
Speaker 5: to make the case that they're helping. I spent three
Speaker 5: years again in Memphis and Public Housing Project Memphis spends
Speaker 5: something like thirty thousand dollars a year per person.
Speaker 3: Under the poverty line.
Speaker 5: And then you look around the city of Memphis and
Speaker 5: you talk to people, you meet them, you go into
Speaker 5: their homes, you see their communities, and you say, we
Speaker 5: would probably be better off not spending this money at all.
Speaker 5: But we would most certainly be better off. You know,
Speaker 5: people are not living as if they had a thirty
Speaker 5: thousand dollars a year standard of living. I mean, where
Speaker 5: is the money going and.
Speaker 3: How is this not working?
Speaker 5: How is it actually ending up in trenching people in
Speaker 5: some of these dire circumstances.
Speaker 3: I just.
Speaker 5: I think, and I would love for everyone on the
Speaker 5: left that is the cheerleading for these programs to actually
Speaker 5: go look at the places where they've become the guiding
Speaker 5: force in society. Go look at those housing projects, those
Speaker 5: low income apartment projects in places like Memphis or Youngstown, Ohio,
Speaker 5: or Stockton, California. And I think it would change people's mind.
Speaker 5: If you're really compassionate person, you really care about people's
Speaker 5: ability to.
Speaker 3: Flourish and reach their potential.
Speaker 5: I think you come away from that experience saying, my God,
Speaker 5: we have to change something. This is not working, and
Speaker 5: and and and it's creating these it's it's manipulating social
Speaker 5: conditions in a way that ends up destroying people. That's
Speaker 5: the conclusion that I have reached through my own experience.
Speaker 4: You've spent a lot of time with Ronda Santis. I'm
Speaker 4: sure on this uh. As you launched this book, you're
Speaker 4: going to be getting a lot of questions. But just
Speaker 4: from a sort of human perspective, I'm curious what it's
Speaker 4: like to have conversations about these extremely uh esoteric academic theories,
Speaker 4: things like critical race theory, intersectionality, and to be sort
Speaker 4: of behind closed doors with somebody like Ronda Santis, who
Speaker 4: even whose critics should admit, is a very smart man.
Speaker 4: And other Republican lawmakers who I know that you've sit
Speaker 4: down You've sat down with over the last couple of
Speaker 4: years and gotten into sort of the weeds on what
Speaker 4: CRT is and what these ideas are. What is it
Speaker 4: like to sort of be face to face with a
Speaker 4: politician who's more concerned with the sort of day to
Speaker 4: day campaigning or fundraising, et cetera, et cetera, and sort
Speaker 4: of then bring in what the stakes are from the
Speaker 4: sort of intellectual perspective.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I'm extremely impressed with the governor. I
Speaker 5: appreciate everything he's done. I think he's by far the
Speaker 5: best governor in the United States. And you know, of
Speaker 5: course supporting him for the presidency. And I would say
Speaker 5: two things that I've noticed spending you know, one on
Speaker 5: one time in small group time with him. He really
Speaker 5: has an astonishing attention to detail in every regard on
Speaker 5: public policy. I mean, he's like a behind closed doors,
Speaker 5: he is a walks walk.
Speaker 3: I mean he really understands how.
Speaker 5: Law culture, funding, legislative priorities, you know, potential legal liability.
Speaker 5: I mean he has a whole sense of the constellation
Speaker 5: of power, where all the levers are what needs to move,
Speaker 5: who needs to be there, who should be you know,
Speaker 5: delegated authority to achieve it, who he needs to call
Speaker 5: in order to get the legislation moving.
Speaker 3: He's got this incredible vision that that comes out when
Speaker 3: you talk to him about policy.
Speaker 5: And I think in my experience at least, and I
Speaker 5: think I've read some reporting that seems to substantiate it otherwise.
Speaker 5: And he's not one for small talk, you know, I
Speaker 5: kind of chit chat with people. A lot of politicians
Speaker 5: want to kind of be s with you and chit chat.
Speaker 5: And I realized, huh, he's not really responding to this
Speaker 5: chit chat. And then I started talking policy and he
Speaker 5: lights up, and it's like a machine starts worrying in
Speaker 5: his mind.
Speaker 3: It's it's really impressive.
Speaker 5: And then what I've also noticed, and I also really
Speaker 5: appreciate about him, he can talk about you know, CRT
Speaker 5: and the structure of academia and tenure and hiring and
Speaker 5: all of these complex issues, and then he goes out
Speaker 5: there on the stump. And I've done a number of
Speaker 5: speeches with him and and love listening to him, and
Speaker 5: he says, you know, critical race theory is about we're
Speaker 5: not going to teach our kids to hate each other
Speaker 5: and to hate their country.
Speaker 3: And so it's like, oh, this is great.
Speaker 5: You take the wonkish issue and then you bring it
Speaker 5: down to like sixth grade syntax so that everyone can
Speaker 5: understand it. It becomes really clear and has an emotional
Speaker 5: quality to it. And so, you know, there's seems like
Speaker 5: there's some bumps in the road on the campaign side
Speaker 5: right now. But I hope that people can really get
Speaker 5: a chance to understand who he is and to see
Speaker 5: who he is, and I hope that he feels that
Speaker 5: he can let out the personality that he has, which
Speaker 5: is not a conventional warm Bill Clinton style, you know,
Speaker 5: you know personality, but I think is the exact kind
Speaker 5: of person we need.
Speaker 3: He's right for the moment.
Speaker 1: I know you've got to run in a second, but
Speaker 1: I wanted to press you on the R part of
Speaker 1: the CRT again one more time. You quote in the
Speaker 1: book Derek Bell writing that race is quote an indeterminate
Speaker 1: social construct that is continually reinvented and manipulated to maintain
Speaker 1: domination and enhance white privilege. That's a lot of big words,
Speaker 1: but he's basically just saying that racism is a real
Speaker 1: force our society. And do we have Tim Scott. I
Speaker 1: wanted to if we could roll that Tim Scott clip.
Speaker 1: This is Tim Scott talking about it in a personal way,
Speaker 1: apps at the kind of academic lingo.
Speaker 6: There's a deep divide between the black community and law enforcement,
Speaker 6: a trust gap, a tension that has been growing for decades.
Speaker 6: And as a family, one American family, we cannot ignore
Speaker 6: these issues because while so many officers do good and
Speaker 6: we should be thankful, as I said on money, we
Speaker 6: should be very thankful in supportive of all those officers
Speaker 6: that do good, some simply do not. I've experienced it myself,
Speaker 6: and so today I want to speak about some of
Speaker 6: those issues. Not with anger, though I have been angry.
Speaker 6: I tell my story not out of frustration, though at
Speaker 6: times I have been frustrated. I stand here before you
Speaker 6: today because I'm seeking for all of us, the entire
Speaker 6: American family, to work together so we all experience the
Speaker 6: lyrics of a song that we can hear but not see, peace,
Speaker 6: love and understanding. Because I shuddered when I heard Eric
Speaker 6: Garner saying I can't breathe.
Speaker 1: He goes on, as I'm sure you've seen that famous speech.
Speaker 1: He goes on to talk about a lot of his
Speaker 1: personal experiences with police and otherwise living in a world
Speaker 1: that treats him differently because of his race. And so
Speaker 1: what do we do as a society about that? What
Speaker 1: is our role if we acknowledge that this is not
Speaker 1: just the kind of aggregation of a bunch of individuals
Speaker 1: who can be kind of untrained. Let's let's say we're
Speaker 1: going to reject that that kind of get a two
Speaker 1: hour DEI training is going to solve that? So what
Speaker 1: do we do? And you know, do do you acknowledge that,
Speaker 1: you know, racism is a strong and powerful force in
Speaker 1: our society?
Speaker 5: No, I don't think that racism is a strong and
Speaker 5: powerful force in our society.
Speaker 3: I think it certainly has been in the past.
Speaker 5: But as I, you know, lived my life and and
Speaker 5: deal with people from all different backgrounds, I do not
Speaker 5: think that this society is racist. I do not think
Speaker 5: that racism is a determining force in the lives of
Speaker 5: most people and and and of all backgrounds. And I
Speaker 5: think I dispute also the factual basis of of Senator
Speaker 5: Scott's speech here, America has the most well disciplined, restrained,
Speaker 5: and professional uh uh policing system in the world. Unfortunately,
Speaker 5: we have also a country with very high rates of violence, crime,
Speaker 5: drug abuse, gang formation, and so the job for a
Speaker 5: police officer is very, very difficult. But the studies, the
Speaker 5: best studies from people like Rolling Friar at Harvard and others,
Speaker 5: show that that in general, police do not show any
Speaker 5: kind of disparate treatment for African Americans or other minorities.
Speaker 5: And so I think that Senator Scott is doing a
Speaker 5: disservice with this narrative. He's playing to the crowd, he's
Speaker 5: playing to the to his political opponents, trying to wrap
Speaker 5: them in an empathetic message. But I think that it
Speaker 5: actually needs some more clear headed thinking and analysis. And
Speaker 5: you know, I've spent a lot of time with police officers,
Speaker 5: observing them, writing about them, working with them, and you know,
Speaker 5: do they do bad things, yes, and they are punished
Speaker 5: in those cases as they should be.
Speaker 3: But I just, I just I just totally reject that notion.
Speaker 5: And even Tim Scott himself has he experienced some interpersonal racism.
Speaker 3: I think that he says that later in the clip.
Speaker 5: I'm not quite sure. I actually I have not seen that before.
Speaker 5: That's true. I'm not sure what he.
Speaker 3: Said, but I would I would take believe it at
Speaker 3: face value.
Speaker 5: But if you look at the so called systemic forces
Speaker 5: in society, those are an advantage for Tim Scott. And
Speaker 5: in fact, you know, all of the systems and policies
Speaker 5: that we have in the United States actually reward African
Speaker 5: Americans and Latinos relative to a pure merit based system
Speaker 5: and punish white European Americans and Asian Americans relative to
Speaker 5: how they would be treated on a system of pure merit.
Speaker 5: And so with widespread now fifty plus years of affirmative action,
Speaker 5: racial quotas, and other such policies, I just think that
Speaker 5: it's astonishing to say that our government, our policies are
Speaker 5: somehow driven by racism, when the only hard evidence suggests
Speaker 5: that in some ways not denying that racism is bad
Speaker 5: and we should we should seek to reduced and eliminate it. Actually,
Speaker 5: the opposite of the idea that the America is a
Speaker 5: systematically racist society appears to be true.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of the studies to show that
Speaker 1: wick when you control for everything except race, you wind
Speaker 1: up having lower property values and neighborhoods, you wind up
Speaker 1: having higher interest rates for black homeowners controlling for everything.
Speaker 1: But we're getting told you've got to run to your
Speaker 1: next day, Emily. Emily also has to run to her thing.
Speaker 1: We could but happy to pick this conversation up more
Speaker 1: in the future. We're going to have to leave it there, unfortunately.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we could do anytime. I appreciate it.
Speaker 5: It's it's great to talk to you both, and I
Speaker 5: love the pushback. It's really fun and I think it's
Speaker 5: a valuable service that you're doing.
Speaker 3: You all are doing well.
Speaker 4: Likewise, from my perspective, you've been so generous with your time.
Speaker 4: The book again is called America's Cultural Revolution, How the
Speaker 4: Radical Left Conquered Everything. You can get it. It's out now.
Speaker 4: Christopher Ruffo, thank you for joining us on Counterpoints.