Patchwork republics and American Caesars
The Tyee has published my new review of:
America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything
Christopher F. Rufo
Broadside Books (2023)
Here’s an except, and then some comments:
As historical analysis, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything is poppycock. But it gives us a very instructive glimpse into the minds of America’s right-wing intelligentsia and the people who generously fund them.
Author Christopher Rufo is a rising intellectual and ideologue of the American far right. Not yet 40, he is a regular on Fox News, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute — a right-wing think tank — and a contributing editor of its magazine, City Journal. He has also been appointed as a board member of New College of Florida, which Gov. Ron DeSantis is converting into a conservative school modelled after Hillsdale College in Michigan, where Rufo often speaks.
Now Rufo has published his first book, with more likely to follow.
In many ways it’s readable and thought-provoking. Rufo is a good writer, well edited. He’s read his sources carefully, and his excitement practically radiates off the page: he’s got a big idea about how America got into trouble over 50 years ago, and another big idea about how to rescue the country.
He is also wrong on both counts.
Rufo and his many think-tank colleagues may differ on many fine points, but they tend to agree on the key points he makes in this book:
• The U.S. has been in moral, political and institutional decline since at least the 1960s.
• The American left has been in control of the U.S. for decades, especially education.
• Concepts like diversity, equity and inclusion, “wokeness,” identity politics and especially critical race theory are the fabrications of the American left and have ruined the country.
Many Americans (and Canadians) would see this as the premise of a bad alternate-history science fiction novel, but Rufo’s views are already becoming part of school curriculum in some Republican states like Florida. They could become the accepted version of American history nationwide, justifying radical political and institutional change.
And their dramatic goals deserve detailed examination. They appear to want either a “patchwork republic” of disunited states, or a post-democratic “American Caesar.”
Back in 1995, Sarah Churchwell published an article in The New York Review of Books on Umberto Eco’s essay on “Ur-Fascism” and its 14 traits. I summarized them in another Tyee piece about five years ago, and it’s striking how many of them emerge in Rufo’s book.
The cult of tradition appears as the evocation of a past America where everything was OK (or at least measurably improving), and the Constitution was sacred. The rejection of modernity is of course the rejection of diversity, wokeness, and any hint that American troubles are built into the system. And so on.
I’m especially struck in Rufo’s book by the patchwork republic, in which communities can effectively secede from one another and pass any laws they like (under their own interpretation of the Constitution). This is largely the state of affairs in the US today, especially since states began writing their own abortion laws and redefining who’s a qualified voter. Some states are even pursuing women who go out of state for an abortion; it’s a clear parallel with the pre-Civil War US, where runaway slaves were pursued by slave-catchers even into free states.
This kind of artisanal secession could, if it continues, reduce the federal republic to a kind of Holy Roman Empire, nominally ruling countless statelets that simply ignore edicts from the emperor. It’s surprising that the administrations of Obama and Biden did not challenge this trend more seriously.
The American Caesar concept is not something Rufo endorses, though some of his thinktank colleagues do. They appear to have realized democracy won’t serve their purposes any more, because people insist on pursuing their own interests and voting for people who will make life better for them. Better, then, to drop the pretense of democracy and hand the country over to a semi-monarch (who will doubtless impose uniform obedience on the patchwork republic).
I don’t expect such ur-fascist ideas will get very far, though it’s upsetting to read them as serious political propositions. They ignore the present reality of climate collapse, economic stress, and multiplying wars; no patchwork republic or semi-monarch will be able to respond effectively to such challenges.
A democracy, I hope, would eventually respond, but the longer it delays, the less likely its efforts will succeed for a majority of its people.