Review of "America's Cultural Revolution" by Christopher Rufo. No Bob Homans. Introducing Anna Tsurkan.
20231113
Surprising that I have heard nothing from Bob Homans for several days. I’ll write to ask what is happening.
My longtime Toastmasters friend Anna Tsurkan has started a blog about Ukrainian history and culture. Anna visited our Toastmasters meeting yesterday. As it was our annual poetry meeting, she did some lines from Macbeth.
The plans are for Sasha’s internment and memorial service are still taking shape. Oksana says that she will be heading to Svetlovodsk - five hours each way - for the service. She put me on notice to the effect that I would have the three kids to myself for a while.
From that I would surmise that Grandma Nadia will accompany the body south and make arrangements. Oksana will be gone for a day or two later in the week. I will be tapped for money to send his remains back home and to pay for the priest and a wake.
My guess is that Nadia will stay there to take care of his affairs. She has two pieces of property - their 3-room apartment and her mother’s house. Too much work and money to take care of. With Sasha’s passing she will be reduced to her own pension, about $80 per month. Though she has a hard time with decisions, it appears she will be forced to sell something. I’m willing to help, but I not so much and so early that she is relieved of making that decision.
Among other changes, Marianna is in a new nursery school. The old one was forced to close. The owner had always had bad eyesight and a few months back woke up almost blind. She had to give it up. Last night Oksana and I pushed through a crowd of workmen refurbishing the place to be re-rented and picked up the musical instruments she had kept there when she occasionally taught. A sad goodbye.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, which still resounds with hollow coughs from the viral infection that lingers and lingers. I’m off shortly to do a big shopping in anticipation of a busy week.
====
Here is my review of Christopher Rufo’s “America’s Cultural Revolution” Amazon shocked me by putting it up in only one day.
Making more sense out of nonsense than is there to be found.
Steve Sailer opened a recent article entitled “America’s Untouchables” with the words “In this decade, America’s most effective conservative activist has likely been Chris Rufo…” Enough of an encouragement to read Rufo’s book.
The problem with any book is getting it published. My conclusion is that Rufo simplified the story in order not to ruffle feathers – so he could get the book published. However, you can’t solve a puzzle if you leave key pieces on the floor. This book provides a lot of good history, but it is overly simplistic.
Rufo discusses four personalities that have had an outsized affect on American culture – the American cultural revolution he calls it. He writes about the life and work of Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher; Angela Davis, the campus radical; Paolo Freire, the pedagogue and Derrick Bell, the legal thinker as if they were primarily responsible for what has happened.
Rufo gives them too much credit for good motives. They wanted recognition, career advancement, money and power, and were smart enough to see that radicalism would get them where they wanted to go. Rufo sees that their movements were ultimately nihilistic, going nowhere. I would contend that the four actors were themselves nihilists. Perhaps psychopaths, manipulating others for personal gain. They were creatures of their times, taking advantage of what they could.
What about the rest of us? Were we asleep? Hardly! The Berkeley campus had a lively leftist scene in the 1950s. They were vehemently against Joe McCarthy. There were Fair Play for Cuba speakers. Berkeley, and much of society loved the mordant, leftist comedy of Lenny Bruce and Mort Saul. Allen Ginsberg’s North American Man Boy Love Association was well known and tolerated. Finocchio’s transvestite nightclub in North Beach, San Francisco was crowded every night. It was still a decade before drugs invaded the campus, but we all read about them in Kerouac’s “On the Road” and heard about their use among San Francisco and New York beatniks. Rufo’s contention that we were a straight, conservative, God-fearing people had not applied to Berkeley or San Francisco for decades.
The four main characters of this book had no monopoly on nihilism. A significant portion of American society had already strayed far from its Puritan roots. These radicals were preaching to kids who had given up an old religion and were ripe for a new one. Rufo, in his conclusion, calls for the nation to return to what it was. Sorry, but most of us weren’t what he would like to think we were.
The key observation that Rufo is reluctant to put into words, the missing piece of the puzzle, is that people differ in ability. Peoples are different in average ability. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois wrote freely about the “talented tenth” that could master college education, who could serve as leaders for black society.
Rufo does repeat Eldridge Cleaver’s use of the German Lumpenproletariat, which translates as “ragged working class” - unskilled, unemployed, dispossessed and alienated. He writes that “Despite all of Eldridge Cleaver’s ideological posturing, Marx might have been right after all. The lumpenproletariat—the “thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society”—might have been too undisciplined, violent, hedonistic, and easily manipulated, and, thus, incapable of becoming the true subject of the revolution. As the BLA soldier Sundiata Acoli lamented, the media was able to highlight the movement’s “lumpen tendencies,” including “lack of discipline, liberal use of alcohol, marijuana, curse words, loose sexual morals, a criminal mentality, and rash actions,” in order to discredit the group from the outset.” The modern black authors Rufo cites understand the problem better than he does, as did those of the nineteenth century. It’s a mighty big lumpenproletariat.
One of Rufo’s themes is that the rhetorical trick has been to substitute “equity,” meaning comparable outcomes – for “equality,” comparable opportunities. It only works if you assume equality of ability. Since that can never be proven – it simply isn’t true – it must be presented as an unchallengeable a priori. All who question it are irredeemable racists. Scientific evidence is not sought, and freedom of inquiry is not allowed.
Here is Rufo’s table of contents.
Introduction: America's Cultural Revolution
• Part I: Revolution
Chapter 1: Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution
Chapter 2: The New Left: "We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy “
Chapter 3: The Long March Through the Institutions
Chapter 4: The New Ideological Regime
• Part II: Race
Chapter 5: Angela Davis: The Spirit of Racial Revolt
Chapter 6: "Kill the Pigs": The Black Revolution Explodes
Chapter 7: From Black Liberation to Black Studies
Chapter 8: BLM: The Revolution Reborn
Chapter 9: Mob Rule in Seattle
¨ Part III: Education
Chapter 10: Paulo Freire: Master of Subversion
Chapter 11: "We Must Punish Them": Marxism Conquers the American Classroom
Chapter 12: Engineers of the Human Soul
Chapter 13: The Child Soldiers of Portland
¨ Part IV: Power
Chapter 14: Derrick Bell: Prophet of Racial Pessimism
Chapter 15: "I Live to Harass White Folks": The Politics of Eternal Resentment
Chapter 16: The Rise of Critical Race Theory
Chapter 17: DEI and the End of the Constitutional Order
Conclusion: The Counter-Revolution to Come
Rufo’s explanation of the texts is quite good. However, the texts themselves are irrational. Post-modern. Deconstructing them does not lead to enlightenment. It is question of whether the times sought the texts they needed rather than that the texts found an opportune time. Like Foucault and Derrida, these texts are hollow. Their authors simply had the luck to tap into a pre-existing anomie, nihilism and religious vacuum.
Four stars, for a wonderful trip through the texts, even though the texts make no sense unto themselves and don’t shed much light on the people who embraced them.
Dysfunctional is an understatement! The right is splintering on Ukraine, and the left is splintering on Israel.
Things aren't going well for AFU in Avdiivka. That could be why Homans hasn't commented recently.
https://bigserge.substack.com/p/russo-ukrainian-war-the-reckoning?publication_id=1068853&post_id=138397270&isFreemail=true&r=16n8g0