Rufo the Reactionary, Part I
Christopher Rufo is a blood-soaked gladiator who's fun to watch. But he can't be trusted with the power he craves.
Christopher Rufo is fun to watch in the arena. Every time I see him bloodsoaked, wiping his sword from whatās left of another social justice fundamentalist, Iām tempted to cheer among the throngs. But one day, a new Emperor will ascend to give the people a thumbs up or down. And Rufo will be plucked from the arena and invited into the Praetorian Guard. I think he would just as soon thrust his sword into my belly as that of the woke because that dude loves power more than wisdom or freedom. In what follows, you will read the words of Rufo the Reactionary. Then, I will react to those words as a warning and to dispel all that power talk. While there is truth in his words, there is danger.
(Note: Rufoās text is in Roman. Mine is in italics.)
The Right is reorganizing. Most intelligent conservatives, especially younger conservatives, who joined the political fray at a moment of sweeping ideological change, already recognize that familiar orthodoxies are no longer viable, and that ideas without power are useless. The Right doesnāt need a white paper. What it needs is a spirited new activism with the courage and resolve to win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends.
Into what is āthe rightā reorganizing? Rufo offers a clue. But he contradictions himself. āPower,ā after all, is a familiar orthodoxy. Rufoās counter-march through the institutions replaces dyed-blue hair with crew cuts. Same Hobbesian logic. Same hierarchies. Different hierarchs. Thatās not real reform. Itās another group ready to shove its One True Way down your throat. Iāll pass over that Bitcoin was first a whitepaper; Rufoās New Right doesnāt need a whitepaper because reactionaries donāt read or need whitepapers. Rufo represents what members of the Dark Renaissance call a āBoy Pharaoh.ā All brawn, no brainsāpower without wisdom. How did a whitepaper factory like the Manhattan Institute find someone whose ideology amounts to āThrow your weight aroundā? Itās a mystery, but Rufo is no mystery. He is a Boy Pharaoh whose plan is to reorient the violent apparatus of the state towards right-wing ārightful ends.ā
And what are those ends, pray tell?
This essay will introduce the basic principles of this activism: where it begins, how it might work, and what it must do in order to win. It is not āconservativeā in the traditional sense.
Activism is a means, not an end, much less a rightful end. If I thought Rufo was talking obliquely about underthrow, subversive innovation, or even satyagraha, I might forgive him the term. Hell, Iām for efforts to tag-team with the likes of Phil Magness to bring down the academyās plagiarist Pillar Saints, but thatās not mere activism. Yet it still doesnāt tell us what lies beyond any countermarch through the institutions. When I hear activism, all I can think of is something irritating or dangerous: chanting idiots clogging streets, snarking on X, or worse, blood-feuders who will become tomorrowās bureaucrats. The thing is, Rufo doesnāt even define activism. He just claims we need more of it.
The world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism is gone, and conservatives must grapple with the world as it is ā a status quo that requires not conservation, but reform, and even revolt.
Iām unsure whether this proves all Godās children need an editor, but I canāt make heads or tails of that sentence. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we saw Jefferson both write the Declaration and Burke bristle at the Jacobins. Jefferson was a revolutionary liberal who helped start a revolt and a nation. I agree that we donāt need Burkean conservatism if all thatās left of Jeffersonās project is the Deep State, the warring cartels of the Uniparty, and the captured institutions of the critical theory cum DEI class. But what kind of revolt are we talking about, and to what end?
We donāt need to abandon the principles of natural right, limited government, and individual liberty, but we need to make those principles meaningful in the world of today.
āMethinks thou dost protest too much,ā I thought before considering why he doesnāt consider those principles meaningful today. Is he suggesting that people have forgotten those principles, so all bets are off? Or is he suggesting that we abandon our principles so they can become meaningful again, like when George W. Bush said, āI've abandoned free-market principles to save the free marketā¦ā?
The older conservative establishment, assembling in ballrooms and clubhouses, has marginal influence over public orthodoxy because it lacks the hunger and grit to contest it. The energy is with a new generation, which no longer accepts tired platitudes, and demands a new set of strategies geared toward truly overcoming the regime ā the opaque and coercive set of psychological, cultural, and institutional patterns that has largely replaced the old constitutional way of life.
Overcoming the regime in order to do what? Iām 100 percent with him that the regime needs to be overcome, but I am skeptical that weāve had a āconstitutional way of lifeā in more than 100 years. If I knew what Rufo wants activism to be and what he wants to do after retaking the capitals, I might gird my loins next to Rufo to fight the opaque and coercive set of psychological, cultural, and institutional patterns. But I donāt know. And I donāt want to replace them with a new coercive set of psychological, cultural, and institutional patterns. And I sure donāt want to wake up scratching fleabites because I laid down with a wolf.
This movementā¦has the ambition of re-establishing a political vision that goes beyond procedural values and points toward higher principles.
What principles? The ones that are no longer meaningful?
The first step is to admit what hasnāt worked. For fifty years, establishment conservatives have been retreating from the great political tradition of the West ā republican self-government, shared moral standards, and the pursuit of eudaimonia, or human flourishing ā in favor of half-measures and cheap substitutes.
Okay, now weāre talking. Is this serious, or seduction and sophistry? Note these values align with eighteenth-century liberal or ālibertarianā conceptions. Alasā¦
The first of these substitutes is the self-serving myth of neutrality. Following a libertarian line, the conservative establishment has argued that government, state universities, and public schools should be āneutralā in their approach to political ideals.
Says who? While I no longer wish to wear the scarlet L on my tunic and depart from their orthodoxy on many matters, I know libertarians. I still share some of their priors. I am the former editor of The Freeman, the original libertarian magazine started in the 1920s. I know a little something about libertarians and what they think. I can tell you they donāt believe in āneutrality,ā much less āself-serving neutralityā in public institutions. Libertarians want to abolish public education from K to grad school because they know they canāt be neutral and will be captured. In the absence of some unlikely political moment where such an abolition would be feasible, libertarians prefer to opt out of such institutions when they can afford it. Where they canāt afford it, acknowledging that their third-grader will have to turn up to Podunk Elementary, for which they are coercively taxed, they want kidsā social studies to be about the founding vision of freedom, federalism, and equality before the law. Otherwise, libertarians know that āpublicā means curriculum wars.
But no institution can be neutral ā and any institutional authority aiming only for neutrality will immediately be captured by a faction more committed to imposing ideology. In reality, public universities, public schools, and other cultural institutions have long been dominated by the Left.
Find a libertarian who disagrees, and you will find a plucked cherry, not an exemplar. Remember, though, that imposed ideologies are practiced for all the wrong reasons.
Conservative ideas and values have been suppressed, conservative thinkers have been persecuted, and the conservative establishment has deluded itself with impotent appeals to neutrality.
Now Rufo paints the picture of a dopey old conservative who, having bought into Frank Meyer fusionism, listened to the Satanic counsel of libertarians whispering āneutralityā so that somehow they trick the conservative intoā What exactly? Of course, most libertarians donāt want to be taxed only to have their kids force-fed CRT and DEI, but they also donāt want to be force-fed PTL, that is, somebody elseās religion. And they prefer kids learn WWJD at home or church. But libertarians donāt call for neutrality.
The popular slogan that āfacts donāt care about your feelingsā betrays similar problems. In reality, feelings almost always overpower facts. Reason is the slave of the passions. Political life moves on narrative, emotion, scandal, anger, hope, and faith ā on irrational, or at least subrational, feelings that can be channeled, but never destroyed by reason. As sociologist Max Weber demonstrated more than a century ago, politics does not, andĀ cannot, operate on facts alone. Politics depends on values and requires judgment; political life is not a utilitarian equation ā and nor should we want it to be.
Rufoās not wrong. Although facts donāt care about oneās feelings, feelings can overwhelm facts. But notice also that Christopher Rufo does not mention morality or the good in this essay. Whatās dangerous about Rufo lies in what he omits. I dare say that as a Boy Pharaoh, right and wrong for Rufo reduces to the interests of the stronger, despite his nods to āmerica. I acknowledge that heās right that we live in a largely amoral world of political power struggles, but I also know that without some fundamental conception of good for which to fight, a Boy Pharaoh could turn on you once heās taken the beachhead.
Finally, the conservative establishment has appealed to the āfree marketplace of ideas,ā and the belief that the āinvisible handā will rectify cultural and political problems organically.
Whom is he quoting? The only invisible hand here is the one Rufo uses for legerdemain. The marketplace of ideas is a metaphor rooted in the spirit and letter of free speechāyou know, one of those āprinciplesā Rufo appeals to blithely in the interests of CYA. In other words, when speech is free, you can ābuyā an idea or not. The invisible hand is a concept reserved for how goods and services markets increase overall wealth and obviate the need for central economic planning or industrial policy. Rufo conflates these for a strawman to thwack. But, reading between the lines, he skirts dangerously close to We must take over the public institutions, get rid of free speech, and inculcate generations with Rufoism, whatever that is. (Notice I didnāt use quotation marks.) While many market liberals like me argue that the consequences of a free speech regime are that the most effective mix of rhetoric, reason, and power will prevail, this, too, is a fact. Like Darwinism. And this fact doesnāt care about anyoneās feelings. But that doesnāt mean we should give up on free speech. It means we must inculcate reason and critical thinking so the next generation can separate rhetoric from reason. Yes, that might take some power politics. But it takes more than that. In any case, Rufo needs to make clear where he stands on free speech.
But the formation of culture does not proceed like the production of cars and cannot be conceived the same way. The chief vectors for the transmission of values ā the public school, the public university, and the state ā are not marketplaces at all. They are government-run monopolies. In truth, the hand that moves culture is not an āinvisible handā but an iron hand clad in velvet ā that is, political force.
No credible person thinks of culture as cars. (For starters, āthe medium is the message.ā) No credible person denies the speed and power with which illiberal social justice memes coursed through āthe public schools, the public university, and the stateāānor do they deny that these institutions are government-run monopolies. Indeed, those pesky libertarians Rufo wants to blame know government-run monopolies are the pathology rather than the symptom. Yet Rufoās prescription is not exit, innovation of alternatives, or even political abolition of these pathological institutions. Instead, āactivism.ā You know, another long march to recapture something rotten for Team Red with a velvet glove of its own. Rufoās passing reference to āprinciples,ā ālimited government,ā and ārightful endsā rings hollowālike a ploy to coopt the fusionist remnant.
The adoption of these myths has rendered the Right ineffective, to the point of cementing, as opposed to contesting, the status quo of Leftist hegemony. The radical Left ruthlessly advances through the institutions, and the Right meekly ratifies each encroachment under the rubric of āneutrality.ā In view of the social and cultural wreckage this dynamic had wrought, it is not merely a matter of preference but a matter of urgency to break it. To do this, a new approach is required.
In our next installment, weāll see what Rufoās driving at. But notice that up to this point, he seems to be offering what amounts to a failure of imagination and an admiration for pure power: Tit for tat. Tug-o-war. Fire with fire. Authority for authority. When THEY march through the institutions, WE march through the institutions! This is the logic of the Boy Pharaoh, who craves power over fundamental reform. But we have to do better than āactivism.ā We must escape perpetual tug-o-war over centralized government institutions, especially when these institutions are the pathology. We need as many entrepreneurs building healthy alternatives as armies of activists.
We need to catalyze the social singularity.
(Read Part II here.)
Rufo is a Gramscian. War of position, hegemony. All the same tactics that his enemies on the woke left subscribe to.
Great food for thought, thank you. Iāve been noticing this tendency in the right. JBP in particular- would love to see you do a similar analysis.