Conservatives used to be known as people resistant to radical change. In decades past, conservatives sought to conserve traditional institutions and make them better. That stance appealed to many Americans who were unsettled by radical ideas, opposed to big-box stores that would wipe out small-town America’s Main Street. Conservatives were also known for opposing government intrusion into personal decisions; what you did in your bedroom was your business, not the state’s. What you and your doctor decided was best for you was your decision, not the state’s.
Chris Rufo is the face of the New Conservatism, who wants to frighten the parents of America into tearing down traditional institutions, especially the public school that they and their family attended.
Rufo became well-known for creating a national panic about “critical race theory,” which he can’t define and doesn’t understand. But he seems to think that schools are controlled by racist pedagogues and sexual perverts. In his facile presentation at Hillsdale College, one of the most conservative institutions of higher education in the nation, he makes clear that America has fallen from its position as a great and holy nation to a slimepit of moral corruption.
He has two great Satans in his story: public schools and the Disney Corporation. The Disney Corporation, in his simple mind, is a haven for perverts and pedophiles, bent on corrupting the youth of the nation.
Rufo asserts, based on no discernible evidence, that the decline and fall of America can be traced to the failed revolution of 1968. The radicals lost, as Nixon was elected that year, but burrowed into the pedagogical and cultural institutions, quietly insinuating their sinister ideas about race and sex into the mainstream, as the nation slept. Rufo’s writings about “critical race theory,” which he claims is embedded in schools, diversity training in corporations, and everywhere else he looked, made him a star on Tucker Carlson’s show, an advisor to the Trump White House, and a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote a profile of Rufo in The New Yorker and identified him as the man who invented the conflict over critical race theory, which before Rufo was a topic for discussion in law schools.
Before Rufo’s demonization of CRT, it was known among legal scholars as a debate about whether racism was fading away or whether it was systemic because it was structured into law and public policy. I had the personal pleasure of discussing these ideas in the mid-1980s with Derrick Bell, who is generally recognized as the founder of CRT. Bell was then at the Harvard Law School, after working as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He reached the conclusion that the Brown Decision of 1954 was inadequate to root out systematic racism.
At the time, I was a centrist in my politics and believed that racism was on its way out. Derrick disagreed. We spoke for hours, he invited me to present a paper at a conference he was organizing, which I did. Contrary to Rufo, I can attest that Derrick Bell was not a Marxist. He was not a radical. He wanted an America where people of different races and backgrounds had decent lives, unmarred by racial barriers. He was thoughtful, gentle, one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. He wanted America to be the land it professed to be. He was a great American.
Was 1968 the turning point, after which the radicals took over our culture and destroyed our founding ideals, as Rufo claims? No, it was not. I was there. He was born in 1984. He’s blowing smoke, making up a fairy-tale that he has spun into a narrative.
In 1968, I turned 30. I had very young children. I was not sympathetic to the hippies or the Weather Underground or the SDS. I hated the Vietnam War, but I was not part of any organized anti-war group. I believed in America and its institutions, and I was firmly opposed to those who wanted to tear them down, as the Left did then and as the Right does now. I worked in the Humphrey campaign in 1968 and organized an event in Manhattan—featuring John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and a long lineup of “liberals for Humphrey”— that was disrupted and ruined by pro-Vietnam Cong activists. That event, on the eve of the 1968 election, convinced me that Nixon would win. (While my event was disrupted, Nixon held a campaign rally a block away, at Madison Square Garden, that was not disrupted.)
1968 was the year that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. It was a horrible, depressing year. America seemed to be falling apart.
Did the Weathermen and other radicals begin a long march through the institutions and eventually capture them? That’s ridiculous. Some became professors, but none became college presidents, to my knowledge. Many were ostracized. Some went to prison for violent crimes. Those who played an active political role in 1968 are in their 80s now, if they are alive.
Rufo’s solution to what he sees as the capture of our institutions by racists and pedophiles is surpringly simple: school choice. He hopes everyone will get public money to send their children to private and religious schools, to charter schools, or to home school them. If only we can destroy public schools, he suggests, we can restore America to the values of 1776.
Good old 1776, when most black people were slaves, women had no rights, and the aristocracy made all the decisions. They even enjoyed conjugal rights to use their young female slaves. Those were the good old days, in the very simple mind of Christopher Rufo.
Turning the clock back almost 250 years! Now that’s a radical idea.
Thank you so much, Diane, for this salient post and all of your thoughtful work!
Yes!!!
Thank you. I worked hard to tell what I know.
I was there,too….and those who saw humanity knew the work to justice,was a beacon. But,the hatred,racism,classism and entitlements of the white class was threatened. Silently they worked.
The notion that radicalism took over the US in 1968 is, as you say a fabrication. You do fairy tales an injustice when you call it a fairy tale. The fairy tales had the intent of making statements about honesty and fidelity to certain values. Rufo is about power. He is smart enough to know that he is blowing smoke.
I have never been a teacher who believed that all students should dwell constantly on the seamy side of history. The wheat and tares of history grow together in the public imagination until their synthesis produces a zeitgeist that guides a present and a future. Children should know that slavery was extant and cruel. They should be introduced to the John Hope Franklin thesis that slavery produced a Militant South (his words). They should know that UB Phillips laid slavery to geography, for there is merit in that argument as well (slavery seemed to thrive in places of plantation agriculture long after it was outlawed not just in the United States but in the cotton fields of East Africa in the 1890s and the banana plantations of Guatemala).
But children need to know the sources of push back against the forces that would enslave. They need to try to understand the ambivalence of Thomas Jefferson. They need to beliefs in equality overcame beliefs about race superiority in the Twentieth Century. They need to know about the people who lived through the age of White Supremacy in the South and emerged neighbors rather than antagonists (people like my father and Gene Brady did this). They need to be able to understand the rise of radicalism without becoming radicalized, lest we sink into a world where we drown in divisiveness. They need to learn that we all lose when only a few of us win.
And today, they need to understand when people like Chris Rufo are trying to divert their attention in order to make the world safe for Kleptocracy. He knows better.
It is fair to say that extremism on the left or the right is so polarizing that is no way for political groups to compromise. I am not talking about protests or demonstrations that are perfectly reasonable and legal. When any group wants to blow up institutions, it is time to question the motives and methods of the group. The radical behavior of leftists existed in the ’60s, ’70s and even into the ’80s. In the early ’80s I was teaching very near the last stand of the Weather Underground. They robbed a bank in a local mall and killed a black police officer that was trying to stop them from getting on the NYS Thruway.
At least all of the leftist violence was confined to fringe groups. Today the Republican Party has become an extremist group. It has legitimized extremist views like not accepting the results of a democratic election and attacking public institutions. They are savvy propagandists that know how to influence large number of people through conservative and social media and religious groups. The fact that billionaires are pumping millions of dark dollars into their messaging makes it hard for truth and fact to prevail.
Your story of the Weather Underground makes me want to research violent groups on the left. It is my perception that the number of leftist radicals had dwindled so low by the early 80s that your experience might have been the last Weather crime committed. Radicalism on the left seemed also to be on the wane in Europe during this same period. Many of the people I knew who sympathized with the left during those years had moved by then toward the libertarian ideas now fueling the right wing. Their rejection of government stemmed from the experience that government had failed to respond to their points of view, so all government must come down. More moderate liberals went from Gimmie Shelter to Gimmie Tax Shelter seamlessly.
Meanwhile, the rise of radicalism on the right has united a strange set of bedfellows. Right wing libertarians hail Ayn Rand and Jesus Christ as if in one voice, seeing no contradiction in these two divergent lines of thought. The modern radical right sees no problem with its emphasis on tearing down institutions without offering alternatives other than weaker institutions. The modern Right Wing tolerates a president who will not call out the terrorists who openly demonstrated their racism in Charlottesville, who violates the same principles they aspire to, and who usurps the military intelligence system for his own personal gain. It fears the anti-fascists and accepts the ridiculous assertions of those who believe that the opposition is selling children out of a pizza parlor.
from Gimmie Shelter to Gimmie Tax Shelter
Oh Lord, that’s a great line, Roy!
Not my line, Bob. Straight out of SNL, circa 1980. They presented it in a list of oldie song titled re-worked for the hippie generation. Some great writers have been there over the years. That line has stuck with me as the perfect capture of a generation which was just a bit older than I am. I wonder how many of them carried sympathies for the war protests when they were in danger of being drafted and voted for neoliberal economic policies throughout most of their life.
Roy– Hippies ≠ Yuppies
Well said. The extremists who killed a black police officer in Nyack, NY, wen to prison.
New Conservatism has been taking pages out of authoritarian theory and practice. They understand that controlling the masses requires destroying free thought. That is why they are attacking public school and universities. Teachers have been an effective roadblock that continues to thwart their efforts to gain complete control. This is why teachers and their union are essential to protect our nation.
Diane, this is one of your finest posts. I was also there in 1968. You nailed it.
She certainly did. My Lord, what a fine thinker and writer she is!!!
I highly recommend my current read, “The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century” by Moíses Naím. Clear, direct, and user-friendly.
Naím shows that, since the fall of the USSR, imitating democratic processes while undermining them from within is the go-to method for re-establishing or attaining autocratic power. He coins ‘the three P’s’ as the formula used: the intertwining of populism, polarization and post-truth. Populism (a method, not an ‘ism’) frames every issue as the ‘people’—the village— vs the ‘other’ [often the intellectual elites, but any ‘other’ will work]. The goal is polarization, which slows and gums up democratic processes. Post-truth is the necessary ambience (greatly assisted by social media silos): intentional rumors, bullshitting, lying, conspiracy theories, fake news, propaganda, disinformation. The result is a steady chipping away at the checks and balances on power built into the laws of democracy. See Russia, Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela, among others.
Rufo uses these methods. Trump uses them. So do many Republican leaders speaking on the floor of Congress as well as from the gubernatorial soapbox.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn deserved his Nobel Prize and would have simply for his call in this piece, which says, when fascism has become so threatening that you cannot meaningfully participate in civil disobedience, there is still one thing you can do: refuse to participate in, to be a vehicle for, the lies:
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies
Here is the most evil despot of our time threatening his chief spy for not properly participating in the regime’s lies, its post-truth, alternative facts narratives.
It sad that so many the right are willing to accept Putin more than Biden. I never thought I’d live to see that day.
In a survey back in February, 95% of Republican voters who voted for Trump gave Biden a negative rating. 78% of the same group gave Putin a negative rating. This suggests to me that 17% of the respondents are very comfortable with the fascism of a foreign leader. I bet that is not too different from American attitudes toward Hitler before WW2.
Rufo. Cruz. Trump. DeSantis. Greene. Hannity. Carlson. The constant need for the attention spigot (and the $$ it generates) is what drives these people. Turn it on, and what you get in return is an endless unedited torrent of lies and nonsense that is disputed at every turn. You have to wonder what their parents did (or didn’t) do to them to make them this way. Unfortunately, the media is complicit in keeping the sewage flowing; it’s like managing a toddler. Stop giving them the attention they seek, and keep them out of the limelight that they crave so desperately. But it will never happen. The media has opened up that Pandora’s box, and now with Elon Musk’s private Twitter, he will be playing us all like a violin. Not hopeful for the future.
BRAVO!!! What a great post, Diane!
I worked hard to get this one right.
It’s beautiful.
second that. I love to read the work of a good historian who is also a good writer. That combo is as rare as hen’s teeth.
Diane Ravitch is the smartest person in the room and a breathtakingly courageous defender of free speech and democracy.
When I grow up, I want to be just like her.
I just want to grow up.
I’m torn on that one, Roy. Obviously.
“Turning the clock back almost 250 years!”
Yep, and that is why I refuse to label them conservative or New Conservative. They are regressive Christian fundie reactionaries who wish to go back in time (at least in their minds) that never was and never will be. They are a form of “reichwingers”.
I am with you. Reactionaries are never true conservatives. They are bomb-throwing radicals.
It’s because of Fox FAKE News, OAN, Rufo, Cruz, Trump, DeSantis, Greene, Hannity, Carlson, et al. that the sales of firearms broke all records in 2020 and 2021.
Guess who is buying firearms for the first time?
ANSWER: Registered Democrats that never thought they’d buy a firearm. and many of them are learning how to use those firearms at shooting ranges.
Why?
Even before January 6, they “WOKE” up and realized there was a serious threat to the US Construction. They were are getting ready to fight back if necessary, or to defend themselves if threatened.
“A 2020 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for gun retailers, ranges and manufacturers that lobbies Congress, said gun shop owners reported 40% of customers were first-time gun buyers from January to April 2020.”
First-time gun owners, young and old from across the country, are helping to push record levels of gun sales for what looks like the second year in a row.
“My gun store has had a run like I’ve never seen before,” said Todd Cotta, the owner of Kings Gun Center in Hanford, Calif., in the state’s agriculturally rich Central Valley. “It was just an avalanche of new gun buyers for the first time.”
These buyers are white, Black, Asian and Latino and come from all political beliefs. And they’re being driven by uncertainty, fear and a need to feel safe.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/26/989699122/1st-time-gun-buyers-help-push-record-u-s-gun-sales-amid-string-of-mass-shootings#:~:text=A%202020%20survey%20by%20the,from%20January%20to%20April%202020.
I read another piece that said at one point stores that sell firearms ran out of ammo, something that has never happened before.
If it hasn’t already happened, soon some of those first time firearm buyers will start to form militias not to attack our government but to defend the US Constitution from the likes of Rufo, Cruz, Trump, DeSantis, Greene, Hannity, Carlson, et al.
I really, really hope that it never comes to this. My worry is that the Republicans will sweep it all by 2025 and start enacting really regressive legislation that will in turn lead to lots of protests and demonstrations which in turn will lead to violent repression of these, and so on, in a terrible downward cycle into violence. Trump, who wouldn’t know the Posse Comitatus Act from a toilet with insufficient flushing power to handle destroying White House documents, wanted very much to use the military to shut down BLM, and Barr even tried the little green men strategy (special police without insignia) for a while to appease him, but ultimately Defense Secretary Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Milley refused to go along because they both understand how fundamental are a) the separation between civil and military forces, b) the right to assembly, and c) the right of free speech. These two men were and are great unsung heroes for having refused to go along, despite Trump’s well-known vindictiveness. Really, I think that they saved democracy for a time. But the next guy, the next Trump, is very likely to have in place his own version of Putin’s siloviki, who will willingly do his bidding. If this happens, democracy is in real trouble.
Is there a source for the buzz words used by the anti-public education right wing and what those terms actually mean in terms of the policies they advance?
This is an excellent narrative, Diane. I was sixteen in 1968. Old enough to understand what a terrible period we were going through and fortunate to have older and wiser friends who helped guide me through the turmoil.
Rufo fits in well with the Fox & Friends crew. Ignorance blaring through a bullhorn.
Diane, I like you, but you are way off base with this ridiculous assertion. 1776? Really? I mean, yes Rufo supports School Choice and that is the main thing he wants to do but maybe leave it there? Making these ridiculous comparisons just makes us look weak.
The vast majority of people upset about “CRT” are mostly upset about that ridiculous thing where “being on time is white supremacy.” Or separating kids into “affinity groups.” If the AFT and YOU, at first said “ok, this stuff is ridiculous and isn’t CRT” at the outset he would have had FAR less purchase than he does now.
Of course, now he has a following and he is very good at what he does, so it is harder to stop. Statements like these do not help.
Do better.
I support CRT. We live in a society that is highly segregated, where blacks suffer segregation, disrespect, and all sorts of indignities. Anyone who tries to understand why racism persists in engaged in critical race theory.
Any class that discusses racism either pretends it doesn’t exist or engages in thinking about why it persists.
Chris Rufo ended his speech with longing for 1776. I think he is a rightwing provocateur, a racist, and an apologist for the worst aspects of our society. He offers nothing but destruction of our public schools and our democracy. Sorry you don’t agree.