My Amazon Review of Christopher Rufo's "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything"

Racial Marxism

Christopher Rufo, a leading agent provocateur of the Right, has written a deeply researched intellectual history of how the political culture of the 1960’s Left became dominant in 21^st century America. Rufo traces today’s diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) and antiracism training back to the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. Thus, there is a straight line from the cultural revolution of 1968 to the “wokism” of 2015 and beyond.

 

To me Rufo’s ideas ring true because as a young leftist of that era I first heard the terms “the long march through the institutions” and “white skin privilege” in the early 1970’s. According to Rufo the Left’s long march first succeeded in establishing university ethnic studies programs, then on to the education schools and soon enough the entire liberal arts were largely controlled by far-left ideologues. After the universities, came the newsrooms, the media and corporate HR departments.

 

Frankfurt school philosopher Herbert Marcuse is the founding father of racial Marxism. Marcuse gave up on the working class as the motive force for revolution and substituted militant minorities.  If you want to know why the Democratic Party lost the working class, you can do no worse than reading Marcuse. Instead having the white revolutionaries of the 1960’s we now have the limousine liberals and middle-class feminists linking us with urban minorities to form the guts of the Democratic coalition.

 

Rufo then goes on to Marcuse student Angela Davis who became the paragon of Black liberation. Her support of the Black Panthers was legendary and according to Rufo there is a straight line from the Panthers to Black Lives Matter. Her “kill the pigs” would become “defund the police” fifty years later.

 

Indeed, in the early 1970’s the white left was so enthralled with the Panthers that is took political direction from them. Further Davis was a stone-cold communist who followed the Soviet party line to the bitter end. Part of Davis’s politics was to destroy such icons of American history as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln to make white’s feel ashamed of their country.

 

I never heard of Paulo Friere before reading this book. His contribution was to emphasize education as a way to revolution. His “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is one of most widely cited books in academia. We see his ideas in school curricula designed to make white children uncomfortable about their heritage. This is not about teaching real history, but rather bending it to a leftist ideology.

 

His last ideologist of the Left is Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell who started to develop critical race theory in the early 1970’s. Bell is a racial pessimist because white people are inherently oppressors because of their “privilege.” Although not stated, it seems that under critical race theory the entire white population has to go through Maoist-style re-education camps. Don’t laugh, there are all kinds of institutional programs that are doing modified versions of this.

 

Rufo ends his book on an upbeat note. He is, after all, a counter revolutionary. As a trustee at Florida’s New College, he is working do away with a host of sham departments that cover for leftist organizing and doing away with its DEI programs. Eliminating DEI is essential to Rufo. His program can be summarized as “equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, and order over chaos.” As a personal note I stopped giving money to UCLA because, like many universities, the school required a personal statement in support of DEI in order to be hired or promoted. Simply put, a 21^st century loyalty oath.

 

Although polemical, Rufo has written a serious book that should be read by policy makers and the public alike. In order to make the needed changes we have to know how we got here.

 For the full Amazon URL see: Racial Marxism (amazon.com) 

My Amazon Review of Clara Bingham's "Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul"

The Late 60’s Through Rose Colored Glasses

Journalist Clara Bingham, born into the Louisville Courier Journal family, reflects her elite bias that was typified by the “radical chic” of 1970. Born too late (1963) to experience the late 1960’s she writes as a “wanna be” member of the Weather Underground. Her book is series of oral histories to describe the period between Woodstock (Summer 1969) to the end of 1970 as the anti-Vietnam War movement reached its apogee. The interviewees are a mixture of new left political types, veterans, G.I.s, pop culture figures, feminists, Black Panthers, LSD/marijuana entrepreneurs, high Nixon administration officials, occasional police officers and F.B.I. agents. She is at her best with histories of the Army math center bombing at the University of Wisconsin and National Guard killings at Kent State.

Although she has a host of interviewees her sample is biased towards her focus on the Weather Underground and in particular, Bernadine Dorhn and Bill Ayers. Recall that the Weather Underground glorified violence by initiating the “Days of Rage” in Chicago in 1969 and three of their members died in a bomb making factory in a very toney section of Greenwich Village. The victims of the bomb were to be G.I.s at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Ayers and Dorhn, both children of privilege, are unrepentant to this day. Not true of Michael Kazin and Mark Rudd who dropped out of the organization and moved on. Kazin is now a distinguished historian at Georgetown and Rudd taught for years at a community college in New Mexico. Rudd noted, and this is important, that it is results, not intentions that matter. Bingham’s failure is to look more to intentions than results.

I was more than a casual participant in the milieu of the late 1960s. In fact I knew several of her interviewees including Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, David Mixner, Barry Romo and Carl Bernstein. But unfortunately in her over-coverage of Dorhn and Ayers she leaves out her opponents in SDS who did not go the bomb making route. For example she could have interviewed Mike Klonsky and Marilyn Katz, both Chicago neighbors of Dorhn and Ayers. She also avoided interviewing the folks involved in what was then called the Revolutionary Communist Party. She fails bringing out the fact that there were an awful lot of little Lenins running around. They were hardly democratic and they worshipped at the altar of the Castro and Ho Chi Minh dictatorships. However, that would not have been consistent with her story line of how the late 1960s gave birth to the new soul of America.

She also quite accurately how much the new left was in thrall of the Black Panthers as the vanguard of the revolution, but she neglects to bring out that all too many of the panthers were street thugs. To bring out that point it would have helped if she interviewed former Ramparts editor David Horowitz who over the following decades moved from left to right. He witnessed the thuggery of the panthers in the Oakland of the early 1970s.

To be sure the reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s changed America to its very core, but it would have helped if Bingham gave a more balanced account. Although on balance the 1960s were a force for good, the era left quite a bit of wreckage in its wake. 

The full amazon URL is:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R46LFVT6B2VES/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv