The Review: Christopher Rufo's confused new book

The journalist and activist can't decide between propaganda and history. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. Christopher Rufo, the architect of the conservative legislative campaign against perceived left-wing indoctrination in schools and colleges across the country and a member of the Board of Trustees of Florida’s revamped New College, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s experiment in the right-wing usurpation of higher education, has written a book. From its title on, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything is an ungainly blend of intellectual history and right-wing political propaganda. As intellectual history, the book is a sometimes useful and sometimes exasperating popular genealogy of the origins of contemporary activism in the radical politics of the ’60s and ’70s. As partisan propaganda, it is a sort of conspiracy theory about how the spirit of the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, and Herbert Marcuse has, after half a century of apparent quiescence, taken over not just the activist left but mainstream institutions from the universities to The New York Times. There is a genuine story to tell here, and Rufo knows enough to be able to tell it. But he cannot keep his inner propagandist quiet; the result is that the would-be intellectual historian is constantly degraded by the shrill ideological bully. The book represents Rufo’s bid for intellectual seriousness. “Over the past two years,” Rufo announces in the Preface, “as I fought against left-wing ideologies in the political arena, I was also studying my adversaries through deeper research.” This sounds unpromisingly bug-eyed, but in fact each of the book’s four parts — on the lives and ideas of Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell — are well-researched and sometimes even sympathetic accounts of their subjects. It is common among academics on the left to dismiss Rufo and his allies as know-nothings. That’s incorrect. Although he tends to overstate the direct influence of thinkers like Marcuse on contemporary politics — an idealist tendency not unheard of in intellectual history — Rufo has done his homework, and he is not an ignoramus. NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. But Rufo the Intellectual mainly matters because of the other Rufos that precede and accompany him: Rufo the Muckraker, surfacing what he sees as the excesses of DEI-training programs in public and private institutions; Rufo the Exhorter, sermonizing apocalyptically on the terminal condition of the woke West; Rufo the Politician, joining forces with DeSantis to fire the leadership of New College and replace it with their own. The latter Rufo infamously, ridiculously, summarized this last achievement thus: “We are over the walls, and ready to transform higher education from within.” [Read the rest of my Chronicle Review essay on Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything](. UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Bootcamp for Future Faculty Leaders] [Join us in September]( for a professional development program tailored to the needs of midcareer faculty. Experienced academic leaders and faculty members will provide insights on the diverse professional paths that might be taken by faculty members in this one-day virtual program. [Register today!]( The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Humanities Matter When We Make Them Matter]( By Elisa Tamarkin [STORY IMAGE]( Literary studies is not being ignored because it is irrelevant. It is irrelevant because it is being ignored. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [Police Academies Are Part of Higher Ed]( By Davarian L. {NAME} and Joshua Clover [STORY IMAGE]( Why the controversy over Atlanta’s “Cop City” development should concern academics. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Thin Line Between ‘Postliberalism’ and Theocracy]( By Jason Blakely [STORY IMAGE]( Patrick Deneen redefines conservatism as a revolutionary movement. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Chris Rufo Can’t Decide Between Propaganda and Intellectual History]( By Len Gutkin [STORY IMAGE]( The journalist shaped the conversation around higher ed. How’s his book? Recommended - “The books are like ritornellos, variations on recurring questions, arguments and themes that as they go from discovery to discovery never sound the same way twice.” In The Point, John Palattella writes [on the works and life]( of poetry scholar James Longenbach, who died last year. - “Something about Crook Manifesto, expertly executed as it is, suggests a certain ennui at the heart of the historical novelist’s enterprise.” In The New Republic, our own Evan Kindley [reviews]( Colson Whitehead’s new novel. - “French, like Du Bois before him, seeks to refute the idea that first Arabs and then Europeans, rather than Africans, brought the continent into global commercial networks.” In The New York Review of Books, Adom Getachew [writes about]( Howard French’s Born in Blackness. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. 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