Rufo the Reactionary, Part II

Christopher Rufo's call to gird your loins for battle against "the left" misses the more powerful but elusive enemy operating in the shadows.

In the last installment, I questioned Rufo’s mission and motivation. In this installment, I go deeper into the manifesto of a right-wing rock star. And lemme tell you: Rufo is a star. The question is whether that star will become a supernova or an ember. I used to think—Amicus meus, inimicus inimici mei—but now I’m not so sure. Not only has that worked out poorly for the American Empire (which befriended the Muhajedeen, among others), but those who crave power above all will happily push you in front of a subway car if you have outlived your usefulness. It’s hard to say whether Rufo’s strategy is a product of sociopathy or bad sophistry. But strategy seems to supersede mission or morality. Still, let’s start by giving him the benefit of the doubt here in Part II.

The New Right activism must focus its efforts on three domains: language, institutions, and ends. 

As the Gospels state, In the beginning was the Word — and this is true also in politics. Modern political movements have always started with writing: with pamphlets, manifestos, and other publications. The New Right has already generated a high degree of innovation in this respect, spread across a growing network of publications, podcasts, literature, and visual arts. The point is not only to shape the meta-discourse as a matter of “general culture,” but to attack the political discourse directly on individual issues — in other words, to engage in agitprop.

I have always considered myself a pamphleteer. I consider Rufo’s piece a manifesto. So far, so good. Indeed, we have argued in this publication that we need “Benevolent Psyops for a Network State.” Surely, that will have to include agitprop. And Underthrow certainly does, I think. But it should also telegraph my allegiance to a tribe that is neither Red nor Blue. The lingering question is whether and to what extent Rufo has any “Gray Tribe” sympathies, particularly after scapegoating the Gray Tribe in Part I.
Here’s Balaji Srinivasan on those dynamics:

The tribal filter is a good way to understand what’s happening. To first order: Blue tribe: progressives Red tribe: conservatives Gray tribe: tech libertarians The US isn’t best thought of as a unified country anymore, but a tribal warzone of blue against red. Compare the polarization chart below of 1951 to 2011 — things are more Sunni-vs-Shiite than e pluribus unum.

[…]

Anyway, the defining feature of American life today is that any institution controlled by blues is used against reds (and increasingly vice versa). Think about the partisan fights over previously “neutral”-seeming institutions like the FBI and you know this to be true. Grays were once part of blues but have broken away and are increasingly siding with reds (see eg Elon Twitter), or at least against blues. (There are more tribes too, more on that later).

Grays are finally non-blue because blues have been waging total media war on grays and reds for the better part of a decade. Blues arguably lost that media war after 2021 once the population lost trust in them and Twitter got uncensored. They did capture big tech and the federal government for blue tribe, though, so they got something out of it. Now, with the soft power of media gone, blues are moving into phase two, which is not media war but money war.

Remember, they have already weaponized the banking system abroad (see eg Treasury’s War or the Canadian truckers). So now they are bringing that war home, and turning the banking system itself against gray and red. It’s “unintentional” now — but it just so happens that it’s targeting their tribal rivals and consolidating all the money at big blue banks.

See why I’m skeptical that the enemy of my enemy is my friend? I bristle at the idea of tribal allegiances, particularly in that there is wisdom in synthesis, specifically in what Srinivasan refers to as “e pluribus unum.” Yet no one has successfully devised synthesist agitprop since the Founders—unless, that is, it has been about war. I have become more radically decentralist in my outlook precisely because we are drifting so quickly away from e pluribus unum into a world of Sunni/Shi’ite conflict. But to ride this metaphor, if I’m a Sufi with Sufi hopes and dreams, such dreary circumstances suggest I can trust neither orthodox Sunni nor Shi’ite. Said more plainly: I shouldn’t trust anyone so conspicuously on Team Red or Blue, which is why I find myself trusting civil-libertarian dissident Blues such as Michael Shellenberger and Glenn Greenwald more than I do crypto-authoritarian reactionaries like Chris Rufo. It’s because Rufo reeks of Exitus acta probat. He’s a centralist.
(Thank you for permitting the lengthy detour. Now back to Rufo)

Agitprop doesn’t mean sacrificing the truth, but rather, channeling the truth, toward victory. Postmodernist theorists who reduced politics to “language games” may have overstated the case, but they were right in one respect: language is the operative element of human culture. To change the language means to change society: in law, arts, rhetoric, or common speech. The Right must build a new vocabulary to overcome the regime’s euphemistic rule, which enacts abuse of power through abuse of language. The point is to replace contemporary ideological language with new, persuasive language that points toward clear principles.

Principles. Principles. Rufo keeps talking about principles, but with such a zealous call to arms, you’d think he’d offer more than just a passing reference to “individual rights” and “limited government,” which have indeed become boring RINO talking points. I don’t think he’s wrong about the need for more agitprop, but where he’s offered us a surfeit of tit-for-tat activism, he offers a dearth of justification for why we should join him on the barricades. What is this agitprop’s message? For godssake, Boy Pharaoh, give examples, quote quotes, and name names! Don’t just offer a bunch of abstractions under the banner of “activism” that look like a foggy, red-tinted mirror of the Beautiful Trouble website. He needs to give us specifics and then tell us exactly what principles he wants to instantiate once the remaining roaches skitter back to whatever’s left of the Blue Church.

From language begins a longer process of legitimation. A movement gains legitimacy by taking territory in discourse, the adoption of its discourse by society’s elite, and eventually, through elevation of its discourse into law. Win the argument, win the elite, and win the regime — that is the formula, which traces the path from the pamphlet to power.

Discourse over territory > Discourse by elites > Discourse into law. Got it.
From pamphlets to parlors to power. It sounds plausible, but it doesn’t assuage my concerns about principles, much less the problem of power. There is something decidedly Gramscian about Rufo’s call but something Nietzschean, too. He sees the left’s having gone all in on the slave morality of resentment politics and wants to bring master morality to the conflict. But master morality can give us either Steve Jobs or Napoleons; more Bitcoin or more Big Government. The difference is vision.

Institutions are where the word becomes flesh. The men who shape the discourse must understand that above them stand the statesmen: men of practical affairs who govern, legislate, and rule.

I see. If you don’t, Dear Reader, allow me to translate: Know your place. Pamphleteers—the “men who shape the discourse”—are put on this earth to serve the powerful, that is, those “above them.” There is honor in serving those masters, for they are the men of practical affairs whose dark practices are occulted but create and maintain hierarchy. Christopher Rufo has ascended nigh to the highest echelons of men who possess power’s dark arcana. They are your betters. Here’s a ring for you to kiss. In exchange for your obeisance, you might ascend from the ranks of lowly pamphleteer to occupy a place in a Great Bureaucracy, where you will be rewarded with rank and largesse. Your only charge will be to toe the line and inculcate the masses with the message of the One True Way.

The activist must not forget that he is doing politics, not literature, and balance his desire for intellectual purity with institutional reality. He must work to legitimize his language in an environment that is often hostile to his wishes and resistant to any change. At times, he must conceal his radicalism in the mask of respectability.

Well, looky here. The sinister signs of the Left-Hand Path. You’d think Rufo had just finished reading The Prince or Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power. Those who find inspiration in a passage like the above will soon be on their knees fellating a jackboot.

In the end, the work of politics is the work of practical statesmanship. Those who ignore this reality by appealing to abstract principles always limit their effectiveness. When Thomas Paine wrote The American Crisis, he felt the breath of British soldiers at his neck. He understood that the Revolution had to defeat enemies on the battlefield and he looked to General Washington as the only man who could do it.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence, it was full of appeals to abstract principles. Of course, he also had to practice statesmanship, but power politics without wisdom is Boy Pharaoh dick swinging. Activism without ideals is an application to lead the Praetorian Guard when your favored Emperor is installed.
Here is Jefferson’s most important appeal to abstract principles:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (Emphasis mine.)

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In our time, some conservatives believe it is enough to lay claim to “individual rights” and “limited government” as a substitute for managing the state. I, too, support individual rights and limited government, but the decisive political question concerns securing those rights. Who will do so? And, even if it is limited, what is the proper role of government? These are the issues which are ultimately at stake.

“I, too, support individual rights and limited government, but…” That’s an awful big but. If you really believe there is no substitute for “managing the state,” which is a euphemism for managing the timid herds with redistributed feedstock and the threat of violence, you are either a fool or a despot. One can scarcely “support” individual rights and limited government and think that “managing the state” has no substitute. We have to stop being suckered by Hobbes.
It should be obvious: My own call is to apply Nietzschean master morality and a principled vision against state managers as a class. Self-sovereign people know that political authority has no adequate justification beyond “If we don’t, they will.” Yet Rufo’s contradictions come at no cost to him whether he wins or loses. But they always come at a cost to the people, particularly those noble few who view self-sovereignty as a mission, self-government as a means, and subversive innovation as a superior alternative to activism and power politics. If questions such as “Who will secure our rights?” are indeed the questions at stake, and he has no other answer but political authority, Rufo must answer those questions without equivocation.

We can agree with Locke that humans enter into society and institute government to secure their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We could agree with Locke, but we shouldn’t. Locke was a pamphleteer, too—a philosophical one, but nevertheless a pamphleteer. I think Rufo and I would agree about this point. The trouble is, there is still too much Hobbes in Locke, and there is power in the pamphlet. The Second Treatise was, after all, the vision behind Jefferson’s Declaration. And Jefferson learned, after his own dealings with practical politics, that he should never have abandoned his own radicalism. Now, Rufo rightly pillories conservative Pillar Saints, but he can’t shake that Boy Pharaoh archetype and the perpetual failure of imagination that comes with it. Indeed, that’s what is so great about the Founders. They were Renaissance Men and Warrior Monks with a set of ideals in one hand and a musket in the other. Locke, Paine, and Jefferson knew how to inspire. Rufo’s shtick, quite sadly, seems to be, “Watch me as I bring down Claudine Gay!” “Now it’s your turn!” And man, that’s good TV. Many of us were turgid with Schadenfreude. But activism without a vision is power for its own sake. Yes, bring down more tenured radicals! Bring down more scumbag journalists and politicians! Don’t forget, though, to hoist your standard.

But the twentieth century disrupted this arrangement: the state became engaged in a project to reshape society in its own image. For a hundred years, conservatives have tried and failed to reduce the size of government: as a percentage of GDP, the American state today is larger than the Chinese Communist state, with no sign of reversing course. Nineteenth-century liberalism is dead and cannot be restored. 

The diagnosis is right. The remedy is wrong: “The state became engaged in a project to reshape society in its own image,” so today, it must become a project to reshape society in its other false face? No sir. No thanks.

The activist must begin with status quo reality: the institutions which today shape public and private life will exist for the foreseeable future. The only question is who will lead them and by which set of values. The New Right must summon the self-confidence to say, “We will, and by our values.”

Put that boy on the board of a small liberal arts college in Florida and watch it go to his head. Self-confidence without wisdom is brutishness. Wisdom without self-confidence is inert. It’s not wrong to install more people of character and wisdom to bureaucratic roles in the “foreseeable future,” but Rufo needs to remember opportunity costs. We have to build parallel systems now. (Remember that the powerful are going after our money now. We can’t trust either team with that.) I think about the world that would have existed if Robert Luddy hadn’t set about starting Thales Academies. This low-cost private school franchise, started in North Carolina, is growing like a fungus around the Southeast. Thales schools offer a realistic alternative to government schools. If Luddy had become a “statesman of practical affairs,” he would not have created something so novel and beautiful out of nothing. He might have helped gut some DEI crap from state standards, but he might have wasted his time in trench warfare over said standards and their attendant Skinner-box testing regime.

Conservatives can no longer be content to serve as the caretakers of their enemies’ institutions, or as gadflies who adopt the posture of the “heterodox” while signaling to their left-wing counterparts that they have no desire to disrupt the established hegemony. Rather, the New Right needs to move from the politics of pamphlets to the governance of the institutions.

Come on, now. Heterodoxy is just intersectionality for the non-woke. It lets Rufo get on a podcast before James Lindsay and after Michael Shellenberger. There is unity in heterodoxy. Rufo might think taking over the New College of Florida is better than building The University of Austin, but I say the latter is more ambitious and experimental. It’s too early to tell. The New College of Florida might sweep its new functionaries out in an election cycle or two. The University of Austin might not become profitable. But UATX symbolizes subversive entrepreneurship, at least, which I’d put up against activism and Gramscian infestation of the “institutions” any day.

We must recruit, recapture, and replace existing leadership. We must produce knowledge and culture at a sufficient scale and standard to shift the balance of ideological power. Conservative thought has to move out of the ghetto and into the mainstream. And we must be capable of resisting, and perhaps even embracing, a constant barrage of media coverage, with a hundred negative stories for every positive one. In other words, we must risk ruin in pursuit of victory.

“Recruit, recapture, and replace”? What if the powerful had replaced existing leadership in the Federal Reserve and NSA with Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, and Adam Beck in the years leading up to 2008? I’m not saying these guys were Satoshi Nakamoto, necessarily, but I am saying that Satoshi would not have been able to stitch together the genius of those innovators to create Bitcoin.

“Balance of ideological power”? Is that balance meant to tip to the people or to different political authorities? I have watched in horror at the infestation of institutions by social justice fundamentalists since I was in college in the early 90s. But their power is negligible compared to that of the banksters, their supplicants, and the ruthless sociopaths running the Deep State. It ain’t even close. Not only does Rufo need to realize that at the highest echelons of power are people who would flick him like a tick on God’s forearm. He must realize that even if Team Red gets into power for an election cycle or two, a bigger enemy is still out there calling the shots.
Ask JFK. Ask MLK. Ask Nixon. Ask Epstein.

Why would anyone embrace these risks? Fame, revenge, and power have all been powerful motivations in political life in the past, and they remain powerful today. But in order to realize the ultimate promise of the political, there also must be something higher — a telos. 

Finally! Sweet Jesus, we’ve been waiting for the telos. This is what an old editor like me calls “burying the lead.” You gotta tell us your Why before you tell us your What. Otherwise, you’re gonna spend too much time on the means and not enough time on the mission. So let’s see…

The language of ends has almost vanished from American life, and this disappearance supplies the greatest opportunity for the New Right. Because of its religious adherence, the Right still has access to the language of ends — the language of God, or, in its more contemporary form, “Nature and Nature’s God.” My conviction is that ends will ultimately triumph over means; men will die for truth, liberty, and happiness, but will not die for efficiency, diversity, and inclusion.

Not bad. I was hoping for something a little meatier, but men were once at least more likely to die for “truth, liberty, and [the pursuit of] happiness” than economic efficiency or DEI. Still, the question remains: Are the New Right activists gonna deliver truth, liberty, and the freedom to pursue eudaimonia when they get into power? Or are they going to find that they love the office, to dispense the largesse, and to wear the Ring of Sauron? I feel like Gandalf the Gray here, warning people that Rufo wants the Ring more than he wants truth, liberty, and blah blah. Because one really who wants these latter things doesn’t want to occupy and preserve coercive institutions. He wants to raze them. That’s the difference between a revolutionary and a reactionary. Thomas Jefferson didn’t want to be crowned in Westminster. He wanted to start a nation of free people. I suspect Rufo is more Hamilton than Jefferson, and more Machiavelli than Aristotle.

The best way to counter the degradations of American institutional life is to remind the public of the fundamental purpose of those institutions, and to communicate that purpose. What is the purpose of the university? What is the purpose of a school? What system of government will guide us toward human happiness? These questions provoke doubt and anxiety in the current regime. And no wonder. The idea of happiness, properly understood, can be revolutionary.

Well, shoot. Here’s where I disagree with my hero Jefferson. By TJ’s lights, the purpose of the university was to help educate voter-citizens so that they could affect the fate of their country by participating in representative democracy. Public education would be designed to churn out reasonable citizens instead of crazies because nobody wants crazies voting. This theory failed in practice, though, and contradicts Jefferson’s more radical (but more correct) views. Setting up any centralized, tax-funded institution—like setting up a Central Bank—is dangerous. Whether the University of Virginia or the first state university in my home state of North Carolina, the incentives will be capture, coopt, and corrupt. When you set up any centralized institution and feed it with coerced taxes instead of sovereign choices, you will see perpetual political antagonism and partisan warfare over the spoils. Does Rufo truly think that the social justice warriors are going to sit idly by while the New Right staffs the highest echelons? The “left” is not the problem per se. Centralization is the problem. It creates a conflict magnet. And it doesn’t matter whether the purported purpose of the university is meant to be “happiness” or “truth.”

The current regime has poured trillions into welfare programs, ideological production, family recomposition, and psychotherapeutic intervention, but Americans are more miserable than ever. To again demand happiness — Aristotle’s eudaimonia, Jefferson’s Declaration — cuts straight through all our postmodern dilemmas. Our regime has lost all sense of why it exists.

Jefferson didn’t demand happiness, and neither did Aristotle. For the former, happiness was to be pursued in freedom, not delivered from on high. For the latter, eudaimonia was the by-product of contemplation, realizing one’s telos, and living a life of virtue. Government authorities can’t do any of that for you. Indeed, government authority runs on vice. Think about it: Are government authorities more likely to threaten violence or practice nonviolence? Do they act with integrity or corruption? Are they compassionate or callous? Protect pluralism or project monomania? Operate with stewardship or negligence? Use reason or casuistry? And what about those powerful people working in the shadows behind them? Maybe Christopher Rufo isn’t as authoritarian as he comes across. Maybe the only path he can imagine is for people to vote harder and men of practical affairs to rule harder. Or, maybe he just forgot there are “no angels,” that men are fallen, and that political animals are almost always wolves.

The men who can rediscover this North Star will have everything they need to motivate others to pursue political life: a motivation which may be obscured but cannot be extinguished. They will begin the great process of recapturing the language, institutions, and ends of American life.

Power makes sociopaths happy, I guess, but the pursuit of political life looks nothing like the pursuit of happiness. Besides, the days of the citizen legislator are over if they ever existed, and the incentive system of politics rewards sociopathy. When Vivek Ramaswamy says that young people are “hungry for purpose and meaning,” he doesn’t tell us how his presidential aspirations would sate that hunger. Meaning is not manna from Washington. I don’t see how Rufo’s trumpeting is any different. The best we can hope is to liberate people to pursue happiness and find some measure of happiness in that pursuit. Functionaries can’t inculcate virtue. Lobbyists can’t find your telos for you. Bureaucrats can’t serve up eudaimonia for you like middle-school meatloaf.
Government can only get in the way.

The most important virtue of our time is courage. In America, there is plenty of grumbling, anxiety, and quiet opposition to the capture of the culture. The activist must accept that he cannot make men courageous, but he can change the system of incentives so that those in quiet opposition — to put it bluntly, the cowardly — make different decisions. The activist must accept the inevitable frustration of victory: those will adopt his positions after it has become safe. This is the price of courage, which sometimes only his closest compatriots will understand.

Was it Churchill who said courage is the virtue upon which all other virtues depend? I can’t disagree. Still, I don’t think engaging in rabid political activism or governing with a red velvet glove is particularly courageous. Courage is not what you’re willing to do with power but rather what you’re willing to do about power. That’s the difference between a reactionary and a revolutionary.

For every Paine, Washington, and Jefferson, there are a hundred nameless men who spilled ink, and blood, for the fight. In our time, the Right will soon be confronted with a choice: to submit to the current regime, to revitalize the vision of the Founders, or to forge ahead into an unknown order. My commitment is to the old means and the old ends, as much as we can rescue them. This will require the spirit of brotherhood, sacrifice, daring, and selflessness. As the battle begins, we will learn and adapt. But one thing is clear: the fight is here.

Finally, a silver lining? A glimmer of hope? The Founders’ vision is my vision, after all. Is there enough in Rufo’s stirring final passage that will allow us to shed our concerns, overlook our qualms, lock our arms, and gird our loins? No. The “old means and the old ends” are not the way of the Grays. Besides, it looks like Rufo is leading a musket-bearing band into the wrong fight, to which the real enemy says, “Yesssssss.” The real enemy wants us all to clash upon the quads of institutions public and private. The real enemy wants us to wear ourselves down on the streets of Portland or beneath the Capitol Rotunda wearing Viking horns or pussy hats or Hamas head scarves. The real enemy wants us to send our prayers up in the voting booth, so we continue to invest in the illusion that some special statesman, loutish outsider, or descended angel will deliver salvation. Alas, elections are a great spectacle. They distract us from the machinations of true power, which will crush the aspirations of Rufo’s practical politics like a moist Dixie Cup. If we continue “the fight,” understood as simple left versus right, we will become too poor and innervated to fight the real enemy. The Gray Tribe knows this.
They know the real fight is between the centralists and decentralists.