How the Radical Left Conquered Almost Everything for a Time

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It is not my habit to recommend readings, much less those written by people who confess to having been radicalized and consider themselves activists, as is the case with Christopher Rufo. My recommendation to read his recently published book about the dominance of wokeness and its critical race theory in academia and in the American institutions from which it assaulted the rest of the free world (yes, most of the world is not free), is only because, as the following review says, «the research is meticulous, and the details are forensic».

«(...) Many previous intellectual biographies of thinkers like Bell, a Harvard law professor who fathered the discipline of CRT, and Freire, a Brazilian education scholar who developed his influential “pedagogy of the oppressed”, are written by smitten disciples and seemed more like religious apologia than rigorous history. Mr Rufo’s methodical recounting of their radical ideas—pushing to deconstruct the concept of merit, abolish prisons, dismantle capitalism and develop “revolutionary consciousness” in schoolchildren—is refreshingly sceptical. It is also difficult to dispute, given that the most incendiary points are usually delivered by quoting the thinkers directly.

The mostly restrained accounting, given Mr Rufo’s reputation for stoking controversy, gives the entire work a cerebral feel. “The elements of critical race theory are, in fact, a near-perfect transposition of race onto the basic structures of Marxist theory,” he writes. Through the recounted history, some worrying trends in American life make more sense. Universities are hiring based on applicants proffering the right answers to “diversity statements”, and Californian pupils will be required from 2025 to take ethnic-studies courses that will help, in the state’s words, “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, and imperialist/colonial beliefs” and “connect ourselves to past and contemporary movements that struggle for social justice”.

However, Mr Rufo’s analysis, for all its merits, falters in two ways. The first is that it often skips over the most interesting phase of the process—the actual mutation of these ideas within the academy into something more virulent—in favour of minute details in the lives of his four appointed prophets. This is not a critical flaw.

But the second one is more serious. Mr Rufo often cannot help but portray the left’s revolution as on the cusp of total victory, if not already there. “The corporation no longer exists to maximise profit, but to manage ‘diversity and inclusion’. The state no longer exists to secure natural rights, but to achieve ‘social justice’,” he writes.e takeover is hardly so complete. Companies are still plainly motivated by profit, and some are laying off the staff they had hired to oversee diversity-and-inclusion initiatives. Many Republican states are resisting the mandate of social justice and doing so in consultation with Mr Rufo himself. The fatalistic accounting of the takeover of the federal government - “the state, it turned out, was an easy capture…there was barely any resistance at all”—rests on a few questionable anti-racism trainings. It is hardly compelling. Much of the zealotry that ran wild after the murder of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, by police in 2020 has faded. Today Democrats pretend that some other party called for the defunding of the police.

The counter-revolution to America’s cultural revolution that Mr Rufo explicitly calls for is already happening—and has been under way for years. He should know that, because he is, to appropriate the Leninist terminology, in the vanguard.»