[CLIP] Christopher Rufo: How to Recapture America’s Institutions From Neo-Marxist Revolutionaries

I think Americans, many Americans, if not most Americans, have the intuitive sense that there is something happening, that our institutions are off kilter, that our culture is somehow under attack from ideological forces. But it's very hard for most people to describe exactly what that is, to define it, and also to get at its origins. Where did this come from? And so it's important to know a cultural revolution is, of course, an allusion to China in its own cultural revolution in the 1960s under Mao Zedong. But in the American context, and really in the Western context more broadly, in the 1960s the radicals of the West took that idea of cultural revolution from China, and they appropriated it and retrofitted it to fit the conditions and the politics of the West. And so they believe that you first have to go after a culture of a country, like the United States, and then only then can you change the politics of the country. So whether it's on race, gender, identity, religion, science, all of these great themes have been undergoing significant changes, accelerating in 2020 after the George Floyd summer. And the book is an attempt to explain what this is, to define it, and then to explain where it comes from, trace its origins. It was really fascinating to me to learn about Herbert Marcuse and his beginnings and his thinking and how profoundly influential he has been in fomenting everything that we're seeing today. But you actually identify four different people that you think are the godfathers of this whole ideology. Tell me about that. Yeah. So the book is separated into four parts. It covers the theory of revolution, race, education, and power. And each of these four parts is anchored by the biographical portrait of one of the key thinkers from the 1960s that really drove the left's ideological development along those themes. And so Marcuse is the first, and I think he really deserves that primary placement because he was a German-American philosopher, the leader of a neo-Marxist school of thinking, and he became the grandfather for the so-called New Left, which was a coalition of student activists and Black Panther activists and Communist Party activists that were gaining in power and gaining in influence in the late 1960s. He was their father figure. He was the person who legitimized and rationalized their ideas and impulses and then tried to guide them towards revolution in the West. And so everything comes from him and then trickles downward. The chapter on race is anchored by Angela Davis, who was actually Herbert Marcuse's graduate student. Then Paulo Freire, who had some related but different ideas on how to apply neo-Marxist ideology to education. And then finally, Derek Bell, the founder of critical race theory. And of course, critical race theory is a nod to Herbert Marcuse's original critical theory. And so in total, these four figures give you a sense of where, for example, BLM ideology comes from, where, for example, much of the left-wing ideology in university departments comes from. And I think that it's important to put a human face on these ideas because these aren't just abstractions. These are actually real people in a specific time and place that are doing this intellectual work that's had such an influence on our society. I want to go back for a moment to just my initial question because I do talk to a lot of people out there, but they see it more as kind of a weird fad, or I think I would describe it that way, rather than something that has been systemically growing over time and now is sort of so deeply embedded that we're seeing the surface manifestations. That's exactly right. And that's what's so important. And that's really the goal of this book, to give a reader a sense that this is not just a fad that spontaneously emerged in the summer of 2020 as people were posting their black squares on Instagram. But in fact, this is part of a very conscious plan. It developed over the course of a half century. It has thousands of activists scattered across the United States, embedded in our institutions for decade after decade after decade. And they built this moment to its culmination point in 2020. But by no means was it by chance, by accident, or by spontaneous design. This was implemented. It was well thought through. And unfortunately, even though it may have receded in the public consciousness as we move further away from that summer of George Floyd, it's still deeply embedded administratively and bureaucratically in almost every major institution in the United States. So is this just communism in a different form? Is that what it is? It's slightly different. And I think that's not quite accurate, because the old Marxist vision was to mobilize the proletariat to seize the means of production, and then to create a classless society governed by the proletariat. So that's kind of a very basic one, two, three playbook of Orthodox Marxism. By the 1960s, the smartest Marxist theoreticians understood that that was not going to happen. The proletariat was not an adequate revolutionary subject. They had no interest in seizing the means of production. They'd had no real serious plans to seize the Ford factory or the steel mill or the other methods of industrial production. And they knew that they would not be able to overthrow the government and install a classless society that was governed horizontally by the people. Because the people, the working class and middle class in the United States, were not revolutionary. They were anti-revolutionary. They could not be trusted with that. And so they developed a totally new theory. And that theory, if you boil it down to its basics, has two parts. Their strategy was, by the mid-1970s, no longer armed revolution. Their strategy was the long march through the institutions, meaning that they wanted to take influence over existing institutions by burrowing into them and then bringing the ideology in from the outside. And then their theory of revolution was no longer necessitated seizing the means of industrial production, but seizing the means of cultural production. And so this is the shift from a total revolution, like in the Soviet Union, to a more limited, but also very insidious, cultural revolution, meaning to take over the means of cultural production and transmission. So does it have lineage in Marxism and communism? Yes. Were some of the figures actually members of the Communist Party USA? Absolutely. But is their vision today one of unreconstructed or orthodox Marxism, communism? Not at all. I guess the big question, I think, on a lot of people's minds, we see a lot of traditional social structures having kind of disintegrated to a greater or lesser extent. And that's kind of portrayed as a natural factor of progress or something like this. But I think you make the case that this is a deliberate feature of this whole revolutionary process. Yeah, that's right. And the first part of a cultural revolution, and Chairman Mao knew this, he wrote explicitly about this, and certainly today's cultural revolutionaries in the United States and in the West more broadly understand this, you have to dissolve something before you can replace it. And so Marcuse said very explicitly, what we need to do is charge the negative side of the dialectic. We need to disrupt, dismantle, destabilize all of those institutions that keep the status quo in place. And this is not just the economy, but it's the law, it's family, it's manners and mores, it's sexual habits. So he believed that you should be freeing yourself even from all inhibitions on sex. This is part of the plan. And to say that it is an unintended consequence, I think, would be incorrect. It's actually merely a... But to say that it's the end, some people say, oh, this is what they want, they just want to destroy. That's actually not quite true either. This is really just a means to an end. And so they believe that in what Marcuse called the power of negative thinking, which is kind of an ironic and humorous phrase, but the idea that you first have to destroy in order to yield a utopia beyond. Of course, that turns out not to be true. Their utopia was unattainable. Their theory of human nature was unrealistic, it was false. And so their methods actually don't get us to a utopia, but in a very real way, as I document in the book, at every turn yield something profoundly unintended and profoundly disastrous.