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 John McWhorter's "Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America"

 

The True Believers*

 

Columbia University linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter has written an important book about the plague of woke racism that is now haunting America. He claims woke racism is a religion, not like a religion. Here I believe he goes too far. To me woke racism is a substitute for religion. He quotes Sigmund Freud, “If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do that with another system of doctrines….” This is precisely what is happening now.

 

Just as Marxists are obsessed class, woke racists are obsessed with race. To them being born white is the original sin and represents a moral stain that cannot be erased. Similarly, while whites are the oppressors, blacks are the oppressed and wherever black achievement fails to measure up to that of whites, racism is the only cause, making this a truly narrow obsession.

 

To McWhorter the leaders of woke racism are the “Elect,” so privileged as to know the ultimate truth. This is very similar to Lenin’s vanguard of the revolution.  The Elect have superstitions, have clergy (e.g., Kendi, DeAngelo and Coates), are evangelical, are apocalyptic and searches out heresies and heretics, hence the cancel culture.

 

What is wrong with this. To McWhorter it hurts blacks. His examples include looking the other way school discipline problems caused by black teenagers, that black identity is based on not being white and unequal outcomes mean unequal opportunity. This last factor is most damaging because it makes to easy to excuse less than satisfactory individual outcomes. In other words, blacks are permanent victims. To me this devastates the whole notion of a coalition of “people of color.” Why would upwardly mobile Hispanics and Asians want to be in a coalition with African Americans caught up in a victim centered ideology.

 

McWhorter believes that instead of woke racism, the way to better blacks in Americans would be to end the war on drugs, teach reading properly through phonics (remember he is a linguistics professor) and to get past the idea that everybody has to go to college. In case of the last instead of costly four-year colleges that are unappealing to poor people, McWhorter favors two-year programs in vocational education that can quickly lead to high paying jobs.

I know that “The Elect” will not be happy with this review and are beyond convincing, but I believe that fair-minded people will read McWhorter’s book so we can go beyond looking at the world through the very narrow lens of race. People are and always have been multi-dimensional.

 

*With apologies to Eric Hoffer

For the full Amazon URL see: The True Believers* (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Joshua Rubenstein's "Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life"

The Permanent Revolutionary

Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in 1879 of Jewish parents, Russian revolutionary, leader of the 1905 Petrograd Soviet, skilled polemicist, Marxist theoretician, womanizer, coleader of the October Revolution with Lenin, founder of the Red Army, outmaneuvered by Stalin, exiled and assassinated in Mexico by an OGPU agent in 1940. He had quite a life and Joshua Rubenstein tells his story in a brief and succinct biography of only 215 pages.

Rubenstein’s Trotsky comes across as a brilliant egomaniac. Whether he was right or wrong he was never in doubt as he steered a course in opposition to Lenin and as a key ally. He was a great number two to Lenin, but it seems that in the struggle to succeed Lenin, he wanted power on a plate. He didn’t know how to fight for it as he was outfoxed by the wily Stalin. He should not have been surprised because he wrote well before the revolution that that Lenin’s party in power would inevitably lead to a one man dictatorship.

In exile he became Stalin’s leading opponent where presciently noted that there was very little difference between Hitlerism and Stalinism. However he remained loyal to the revolution to the end. This was his failure because Stalin was not an aberration, but rather the logical successor to Lenin. If Trotsky had won the power struggle he would have been little different from Stalin. His brutality during the Russian Civil War demonstrated that.

Because this book is part of the Yale Jewish Lives series I have to note that Trotsky was not really different from today’s Left with respect to Zionism. Trotsky was a universalist, while Zionism is particularistic. He cared more for the working class than his own people. 

Rubenstein touches all of the bases and highly recommend this very readable book on the life of Trotsky. He doesn’t get into the weeds and for this he should be commended.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R30O1N3R1MKA8N/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Shlomo Avineri's "Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution"

A False Prophet

Hebrew University political scientist Shlomo Avineri has written a sympathetic biography of Karl Marx under the auspices of the Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series. Although Marx came from a family of Rabbi’s, he was not Jewish. His father converted to enjoy the benefits of post-Napoleonic Prussia.

Instead of portraying Marx like his all too many dogmatic disciples, Avineri’s Marx is not of the one size fits all school. Hence in witnessing the advances in democracy in England and later on the continent his Marx become more open to realizing his working class dreams through the ballot box rather than revolution. Hence he learned from the failures of the 1848 revolutions and contrary to Engels’ later writings, he was critical of the Paris Commune. Further he was very ambivalent about the prospects for revolution in Russia, Indeed aside from 1848-49 Marx never directly participated in revolutionary activity; his role was to be theorist studying the inner workings of the capitalist system.

He rarely discussed Jews and Judaism. Early on in 1844 he associated Judaism with the worship of money in a typical anti-Semitic trope. Nevertheless in 1854 in his dispatches on the Crimean War to the New York Tribune he noted that Jerusalem was majority Jewish. This was 40 years before the establishment of Zionism as a political force.

For someone so focused on the working class Marx never lived among, worked with or studied directly real factory workers. He got his insights from the works of Engels and book learning. In a very real sense he was someone who loved humanity, but didn’t really like individual people; not too different from many liberals today.

What Avineri doesn’t touch on is that fact that in order to equalize society, the state doesn’t wither away, but rather it requires brute dictatorial force to keep people equal. Nevertheless for those readers interested in a short biography of Marx Avineri has offered up a very readable book.    

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/REBLW2QXDDEDG/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv