Christopher Rufo: How to Recapture America’s Institutions From Neo-Marxist Revolutionaries

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “There is a discrepancy between the desires of voters in a democracy and a republic, and the ideology of the bureaucracies that are supposed to serve the public interest.”

In this episode, I sit down with Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He has played a key role in bringing the fight against Critical Race Theory into the public consciousness.

“In the 1960s, the radicals of the West took that idea of cultural revolution from China, and they appropriated it and retrofitted it to fit the conditions and the politics of the West,” says Mr. Rufo. “They believe that you first have to go after a culture of a country, like the United States, and then, only then, can you change the politics of the country.”

We dive into his new book, “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything,” which explores how the ideology of four 20th-century thinkers profoundly impacted our institutions, and culminated in the 2020 George Floyd riots.

“These are figures of death. And yet they see themselves still, despite all the evidence, as figures of life,” says Mr. Rufo. “Conservatives cannot merely retreat to private business, private life, and think that they’re going to have a country that reflects their values. Conservatives have to get out of the corner.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Christopher Rufo, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Christopher Rufo:
It’s good to be with you.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve been enjoying reading your book, America’s Cultural Revolution, but many Americans are not even aware that there’s a cultural revolution happening, or they certainly wouldn’t call it that. Why don’t we start there? How is this a cultural revolution?

Mr. Rufo:
Many Americans, if not most Americans, have the intuitive sense that there is something happening, that our institutions are off kilter, and that our culture is somehow under attack from ideological forces. But it’s very hard for most people to describe exactly what that is, to define it, and also to get at its origins. Where did this come from? It’s important to know that a cultural revolution is, of course, an allusion to China and its own cultural revolution in the 1960s under Mao Tse-tung.

But in the American context, and really in the Western context more broadly, in the 1960s, the radicals of the West took that idea of cultural revolution from China. They appropriated it and retrofitted it to fit the conditions and the politics of the West. They believed that you first have to go after the culture of a country like the United States, and only then can you change the politics of the country. Whether it’s race, gender, identity, religion, or science, all of these great themes have been undergoing significant changes, and that accelerated in 2020 after the George Floyd summer. The book is an attempt to explain what this is, define it, and then explain where it comes from and trace its origins.

Mr. Jekielek:
It was really fascinating to me to learn about Herbert Marcuse and his beginnings and his thinking and how profoundly influential he has been in fomenting everything that we’re seeing today. You identify four different people that are the godfathers of this whole ideology.

Mr. Rufo:
Yes, the book is separated into four parts. It covers the theory of revolution, race, education, and power. Each of these four parts is anchored with the biographical portrait of one of the key thinkers from the 1960s that really drove the Left’s ideological development along those themes. Marcuse is the first. He really deserves that primary placement because he was a German American philosopher, and the leader of a neo-Marxist school of thinking.

He became the grandfather for the so-called New Left, which was a coalition of student activists and Black Panther activists and communist party activists that were gaining in power and gaining an influence in the late 1960s. He was their father figure. He was the person who legitimized and rationalized their ideas and impulses, and then tried to guide them towards revolution in the West. Everything comes from him, and then trickles downward.

The chapter on race is anchored by Angela Davis, who was actually Herbert Marcuse’s graduate student. Paulo Freire had some related but different ideas on how to apply neo-Marxist ideology to education. Finally, there is Derek Bell, the founder of Critical Race Theory. Critical race theory is a nod to Herbert Marcuse’s original critical theory.

These four figures give you a sense of where BLM [Black Lives Matter] ideology comes from, and where much of the Left-wing ideology in university departments comes from. It’s important to put a human face on these ideas because these aren’t just abstractions. These are actually real people from a specific time and place that are doing this intellectual work that has had such an influence on our society.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want to go back for a moment to my initial question, because I do talk to a lot of people out there. But they see this ideology as more of a weird fad, rather than something that has been systemically growing over time, and now is so deeply embedded that we’re seeing the surface manifestations.

Mr. Rufo:
That’s exactly right, and that’s so important. That’s really the goal of this book; to give a reader a sense that this is not just a fad that spontaneously emerged in the summer of 2020 as people were posting their black squares on Instagram. But in fact, this is part of a very conscious plan. It developed over the course of a half-century. It has thousands of activists scattered across the United States, embedded in our institutions for decade after decade after decade. They built this movement up to its culmination point in 2020.

By no means was it by chance, by accident, or by spontaneous design. This was implemented and was well thought through. Unfortunately, even though it may have receded in the public consciousness, as we’ve moved further away from that summer of George Floyd, it’s still deeply embedded administratively and bureaucratically in almost every major institution in the United States.

Mr. Jekielek:
Is this just communism in a different form?

Mr. Rufo:
It’s slightly different, and that’s not quite accurate. Because the old Marxist vision was to mobilize the proletariat, to seize the means of production, and then to create a classless society governed by the proletariat. That’s a very basic one, two, three playbook of orthodox Marxism. By the 1960s, the smartest Marxist theoreticians understood that was not going to happen. The proletariat was not an adequate revolutionary subject. They had no interest in seizing the means of production. They had no real serious plans to seize the Ford factory, the steel mill, or the other methods of industrial production.

They knew that they would not be able to overthrow the government and install a classless society that was governed horizontally by the people, because the people, the working class and middle class in the United States, were not revolutionary. They were anti-revolutionary. They could not be trusted with that. Therefore, they developed a totally new theory. That theory, if you boil it down to its basics, has two parts. Their strategy was, by the mid 1970s, no longer an armed revolution.

Their strategy was the long march through the institutions, meaning that they wanted to take influence over existing institutions by burrowing into them, and then bringing the ideology in from the outside. Then their theory of revolution no longer necessitated seizing the means of industrial production, but instead it required seizing the means of cultural production. This is the shift from a total revolution like in the Soviet Union to a more limited, but also very insidious cultural revolution, by taking over the means of cultural production and transmission.

Does it have lineage in Marxism and communism? Yes. Were some of the figures actually members of the Communist Party USA? Absolutely. But is their vision today one of unreconstructed or orthodox Marxism and Communism? Not at all.

Mr. Jekielek:
People believe that a lot of our traditional social structures have disintegrated to a greater or lesser extent, and that is portrayed as a natural aspect of progress. But you make the case that this is a deliberate feature of this whole revolutionary process.

Mr. Rufo:
That’s right, and it’s the first part of a cultural revolution. Chairman Mao knew this and explicitly wrote about this. Certainly, today’s cultural revolutionaries in the United States and in the West understand this more broadly. You have to dissolve something before you can replace it. Marcuse said very explicitly that we need to charge the negative side of the dialectic. We need to disrupt, dismantle, and destabilize all of those institutions that keep the status quo in place.

This is not just the economy, but it’s the law, it’s the family, it’s manners and mores, and it’s sexual habits. He believed that you should even be freeing yourself from all inhibitions on sex. This was part of the plan. To say that it is an unintended consequence would be incorrect. Some people say, “This is what they want. They just want to destroy everything.” That’s actually not quite true either.

This is really just a means to an end. They believe in what Marcuse called the power of negative thinking, which actually is an ironic and humorous phrase. It is the idea that first you have to destroy in order to yield a utopia beyond. Of course, that turns out not to be true. Their utopia is unattainable. Their theory of human nature is unrealistic, and it is false. Their methods actually don’t get us to a utopia. But in a very real way, as I document in the book, at every turn, their methods yield something profoundly unintended and profoundly disastrous.

Mr. Jekielek:
A number of writers have written about how there is an obsession in our culture with radical libertarianism in terms of behavior. For example, the reason why you can’t help a drug addict on the street is because you don’t want to infringe on their rights by actually preventing them from taking the drug that’s most likely going to kill them very shortly. That’s just one example. But this phenomenon is replicated again and again. How does that fit in here?

Mr. Rufo:
Yes. That’s certainly a pattern that I’ve seen over and over, especially with those issues like homelessness, addiction, and street crime. It also applies to some of these other broader processes. If you look at the four figures that I profile in the book, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire and Derek Bell, the godfather of CRT, there is a great disconnect between what they profess as their ideal, and then the practical consequences of their ideas once they reach implementation.

Defunding the police is the little brother of Angela Davis’ broader idea of abolishing prisons. You are taking away the carceral system, and then consequently taking away the policing system, and living in a society beyond police and beyond prisons. That sounds fantastic.

I would love to live in a society that had moved beyond policing, beyond prisons, beyond punishment, beyond guilt, and beyond sin. But those who understand human nature and don’t seek to deny human nature, but actually to conform society to human nature, understand that sin, violence, injustice, the necessity of restraint, the necessity of separating the violent from the peaceful is baked into the nature of human society itself. Yes, we don’t have to have prisons organized in the exact same way that we do today. They were certainly different in the past. They will certainly be different in the future.

But there is some necessity of what Foucault called discipline and punishment. This is a universal human theme. Can we say, “Empty the prisons and abolish prisons and everything will be fine?” After we have done that, you find out that the criminal, the transgressor, the felon, and the violent one liberated from prison becomes tyrannical once he’s unleashed back into society. They have no understanding of this.

For them, it’s just collateral damage. It’s a worthwhile expense in pursuit of this dream. It’s comforting to these ideologues that Angela Davis’ abstract scheme might lead to something better. But I often think of those people who get their family members butchered, murdered, shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned upon the release of these criminals.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s a bizarre misplacement of priorities. I’m thinking about this in the context of someone identifying as a woman, but they are actually a convicted rapist. They say that they’re a woman, so they can get put in a women’s prison. This has happened multiple times. Predictably, you can expect what will happen under these circumstances. That is considered, by people who are ideologically for this, as collateral damage. Why would people accept this, unless the purpose is purely to disrupt?

Mr. Rufo:
This is a good question you’re asking, “Is this cynical and intentional, or is this unintended and tragic?” I wrestled with this in the research for the book. Look at all these figures. They celebrate the prison breaks. They celebrate the murder of their opponents and the execution of police officers in cities. They planted bombs in the U.S. Capitol, in military headquarters, and in police departments. They said the Chinese cultural revolution was a phenomenal great success.

Of course, it led to the death of millions of people. These intellectuals who are ensconced in very privileged positions in our society seem to have no problem celebrating these things, as if they were intellectual objects of fascination and not actually a trail of death and destruction unleashed upon many innocent people in China, the Soviet Union, the Marxist-Leninist third world countries, and even in American cities, as we saw in the aftermath of 2020.

Is it a question of evil? It’s very tempting to say, “These people are evil. These people are bad. These people are destructive elements.” There’s something more complex and more human happening. These people are idealists who have been bruised and damaged by the experiences in their lives. They’ve clung to these ideologies as panaceas or cures for whatever is ailing them and whatever they see projected onto society,

It truly is a tragic turn, when their ideas spoil everything rotten, when their ideas unleash chaos, and when their ideas end up in mass graves. You look at these figures and ask them, “What happens now, when you’ve seen the consequences of your ideologies?” In most cases, what you see is contemptible, pitiable people who seek to deny and blind themselves to the consequences of their ideas. They then seek to maintain their own social status in a very cynical and self-serving way.

At the end of the book, you come away with this sense of horror and pity and really a macabre feeling that these are figures of death. Yet, despite all of the evidence, they still see themselves as figures of life.

Mr. Jekielek:
Not everybody in these institutions is as you describe, although you do see the types of people that you’re talking about. How did that happen exactly?

Mr. Rufo:
We can answer that by looking more into their practical theory. They have the theoretical side that they try to operationalize, and then their actual practical political goals. To be honest, they were remarkably successful at doing so. They said, “We’re going to march through the institutions. We’re going to find the weak and vulnerable points within those institutions. We’re going to take them over, establish dominance, and then work outward from there to impose our ideology on the other component parts of those institutions.”

First, they captured the faculty lounge in the social sciences and humanities, the soft places of the university where they were able to gain entry. Next, they captured the graduate schools of education that train all of the K-12 teachers and issue certifications. Then they said, “Let’s go into private life. Let’s get into government and corporate bureaucracies through the HR departments, and then through the newly created diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] departments. That’s a perfect vehicle through which to smuggle our ideology.”

They found all of these vulnerable points in American institutions. They captured them, dominated them, saturated them with ideology, and then imposed their will on the individuals, programs, and processes of these institutions, which were unfortunately unable to resist. Because the radicals of the new Left train themselves in the streets with knives, guns, bombs, disguises, sticks, and batons. These were tough people. They had been trained for Marxist-Leninist revolution.

They were able to really bowl over your genial HR director who has a wife and kids and some hobbies on the weekend. They were able to brutalize the weak and passive humanities professor that was occupying some third-rate department at a second-tier state school. That guy is easily pushed aside. Then they hire their friends, they hire their friends’ friends, and then it becomes an orthodoxy. That process over decades creates an orthodoxy and a mechanism for enforcing the orthodoxy. That creates a snowball effect where they are then able to take over some of the higher positions within these institutions.

Even if they don’t take them over directly, they’re able to exert enough pressure on these fundamentally weak leaders in American institutions. Their will is done either directly or indirectly through their proxies.

Mr. Jekielek:
Of these four characters that you profile, in educational circles, Paulo Freire is very well known. He’s the most cited educational scholar in various texts, but he’s not known to be a revolutionary figure by the people who have been reading his work.

Mr. Rufo:
Paulo Freire, for those who are not familiar, is a Brazilian neo-Marxist theoretician of education. He was a critical pedagogist, applying the critical theories to pedagogy or the practice of teaching, in this case, in K-12 schools. He was born in Brazil, and he was ejected from Brazil after a military coup. Now, Paulo Freire is the third most cited author in the social sciences.

He’s the number one most assigned text in graduate schools of education. He is the single most influential theorist for American scholars of education that train classroom teachers, and that is a shocking thing. But what’s really lost, and what I tried to convey in the book in great detail is the middle part—he’s a Brazilian neo-Marxist. He has the theory of critical consciousness, the theory of knowledge with the oppressed/oppressor distinction, which educates students about their own oppression, so that they can take revolutionary action.

Okay, great. That’s his basic theory. Today, in 2023, he’s very influential on college campuses in the United States. But his life story is very interesting and very revealing. After he fled Brazil, over the course of multiple decades, he traveled through third world countries in Latin America and Africa, advising Marxist-Leninist revolutionary fighters and governments on how to design their education programs.

In the late 70s and early 80s, well after the record was known, Paulo Freire said that the cultural revolution in China was the most genial solution of the century. After the bodies were counted and after the mass violence was documented, he still said it was good. In his work in Africa and the third world, working with Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries who had revolted against the colonial powers, he was their lead education propagandist.

In the one country where he worked most extensively, and for which we have the greatest documentation, a country called Guinea-Bissau on Africa’s west coast, he was in charge of the educational programs. He traveled the country and advised its revolutionary dictator. He designed the pedagogical materials and trained the teachers at their rudimentary schools of education. Today’s scholars went back into the archives and said, “Did Paulo Freire’s theories actually work?”

They discovered something shocking, or maybe poetic. They discovered that, in effect, his theories didn’t teach anybody how to read. They were totally unsuccessful in teaching any of these poor people in this third world country how to gain basic literacy. His work functions as propaganda, but doesn’t provide knowledge, doesn’t provide education, and doesn’t even provide basic literacy.

He’s working with third world Marxist -Leninist dictators, and he has total control over the system. If he implements this system, and it teaches nobody how to read, why are we following his ideas in the United States today? That’s a very important question that has to be answered.

Mr. Jekielek:
Not only are we following them, they are the bedrock of our educational system.

Mr. Rufo:
In some ways, you could say that. This is the implicit ideology of many of the graduate schools of education, and it has absolutely trickled down into the pedagogies and curricula in many K-12 systems around the country. To this day, he’s still directly cited in California’s model ethnic studies curriculum. At one time, during certain drafts, he was the first citation as the inspiration for California’s new statewide racialist curriculum. He is a pivotal figure in American life, and he is a hidden figure in American life.

Maybe Angela Davis was the most well-known for people of a certain age, but these are what I think of as the hidden rulers of American life. With the exception of Angela Davis, they’re all deceased now, but their ideas live on with our institutions. It’s important to actually excavate them. With the exception of Freire in a certain academic text, none of them have received biographical treatments, which is quite strange.

For the first time, I’ve packaged their biographies, I’ve packaged the intellectual transmission of their ideas, and I’ve packaged the reporting, showing how they’ve impacted American society today in a cohesive story that outlines the spread of these ideas, the influence of these ideas, and the consequences of these ideas.

Mr. Jekielek:
How many people actually believe this or just cynically participate?

Mr. Rufo:
It’s a very small percentage of people who are true believers. I would estimate that somewhere between two and three percent of people are really true believers in these sets of ideas. There’s another 20 to 30 percent that are sympathetic towards it, and maybe somewhat hesitant or cautious with its implementation. But they are more or less aligned in a passive sense, supporting it, and agreeing with it while maybe not fanatically engaged with it on a day-to-day basis. Depending on the season, there’s another 20 to 30 percent who are agnostic, maybe sympathetic and hesitant in equal parts, but in moments of great cultural pressure they will conform to it. Then in those key moments, especially in big cities, they get 50 to 60 percent of the people, if you want to segment it out to urban metro areas.

BLM took on prominence with these massive marches in 2020, and that’s why you get these institutions pledging their support, and all of the local institutions conforming to it. It’s not that all of these people are true believers. It’s that the true believers can persuade a significant minority of passive believers. They can get them activated in key moments where the narrative is driving that support, and then they can essentially bully, coerce, intimidate, or force conformity among that middle section of the population that is maybe not even supportive, but under the required pressure, under the necessary pressure, would shift and at least signal support.

That’s really how this concentric circle works, and how much of it is true believer vs. cynical believer. The further we get from the 1960s, the greater percentage is actually cynical believers. By looking at the evidence, and by talking with people, I’m persuaded that most of the people occupying elite institutions that advocate for these ideas are doing so with a strong mixture of cynicism.

Mr. Jekielek:
The other piece is bureaucracy. We live in a much more bureaucratized society than we did decades ago. This ideology fits well and works well with bureaucracy. Did you notice this?

Mr. Rufo:
Absolutely. That has really been their greatest success—to figure out how to manipulate bureaucracy, how to saturate bureaucracy with ideology, and how to transform bureaucracy from a neutral arbiter of the public good to a partisan political force. They’ve done that with universities, they’ve done that with government agencies, and they’ve done that with K-12 schools. They’ve done that with parts of corporations, although not all of corporations, meaning the DEI apparatus within corporations. They are savvy and sophisticated in shifting those incentives to make it more likely that people will support their political objectives.

You can see this in a very rudimentary, obvious, and visual way with faculty hiring in universities. Now, they have explicit documents that say merit is a white supremacist myth, and that objective measurement of candidates perpetuates white normative society and should be subverted. You should award faculty designations, at least in significant part, based on the group identity characteristics of individual applicants.

It is all about affirmative action and racial quotas, whatever you want to call it. This is a very obvious system of incentives. If you look this way and if you think this way, no matter how bad your scholarship is and no matter how poor your credentials are, we are going to tip the scales in your favor. What you get is people who otherwise might not even try to identify as such, or present themselves as such ideologically.

This is obvious to anyone who has been through academia. You think, “If I want to get this job, I have to write a diversity, equity and inclusion statement. The people reading this statement are going to be uniformly Left-wing. If I’m a disfavored racial category, sex category, or a European or American male, I’m at a huge disadvantage demographically for these jobs. Therefore, I have to write a groveling DEI statement professing my worship to the totems of intersectionality.”

“If I do that, and if I profess the faith, then I might be able to say pretty please and get the job.” This situation is rampant, widespread, and significant. This is actually immensely destructive for our society.

Mr. Jekielek:
In your book, you propose that there needs to be a counter-revolution, which is a bold statement. You identify two Achilles’ heels in this ideology. A lot of people might not be aware that there is a cultural revolution, but they think something has really changed in society. What are the two Achilles’ heels?

Mr. Rufo:
There are two critical vulnerabilities here. One is that whenever these ideas gain power, their practical consequences are visibly counterproductive or visibly yielding negative results. When BLM says, “Defund the police,” and it gains power in institutions with that message, and then they actually pull back policing or reduce police force or shut down a jail, you will see an explosion in crime, violent crime, murder, mayhem, and fear. The public feels that these ideas are not working. Ultimately, these ideas don’t work. That’s an important thing, and that creates an opportunity.

The second Achilles’ heel, and really the most important on the solution side, more often than not, these ideas are not obtained democratically. When there’s a massive DEI bureaucracy in public universities in Texas, when they’re teaching critical race theory in K-12 classrooms in Oklahoma, the voters have not approved this. They have not asked for this. They have not elected representatives who have advocated for this.

All of this is achieved undemocratically in an extra-parliamentary manner. They’re marching through the institutions and imposing their ideology without the consent of the governed and without expressed support through the democratic means. There is a discrepancy between the desires of voters in a democracy and a republic, and the ideology of the bureaucracies that are supposed to serve the public interest. Savvy conservative politicians will highlight this discrepancy, ruthlessly attack this discrepancy, villainize the bureaucracy, and elevate stories that illustrate this phenomenon in a compelling way for the public.

Then they will marshal the majority and democratic sentiments, translate it into legislative language to reform these institutions, getting rid of CRT, gender pseudoscience, DEI bureaucracies, and Left-wing racialist ideology within the public institutions. They will pass those pieces of legislation, those reforms, and those methods of institutional recapture and reorientation. Through the democratic process, they’ll have the democratically elected executive sign it.

In a republic, the people decide what the public institutions will be doing. The people have now decided, through their duly elected legislators, that this is not a priority. The government does not consent to this kind of system of public administration. Now, through democratic force, we’re going to reform these institutions and make sure that they serve the public interest and reflect the values of the public.

Mr. Jekielek:
Is this really a counter-revolution?

Mr. Rufo:
Yes, it is. It is because of something quite simple, even if it’s just a verbal mirror or verbal symmetry. We are really facing America’s culture revolution. After reading the book, most readers would be persuaded that that is the case. That’s what is happening. You can’t merely oppose a counter-revolution with incremental reforms, with small changes to policy, and with a single election.

You actually have to have a political movement that takes the counter-cultural revolution seriously and has a solution that matches the scope, scale, and force of the revolution. In my view, that only can be accurately summarized or encapsulated in the phrase counter-revolution.

Mr. Jekielek:
You advocate for a vanguard of people to guide the rest of society. That reminds me of this other system we’ve been talking about, and it makes me suspicious of that approach. I want to hear what you think about that.

Mr. Rufo:
This is how politics has always worked, how it works now, and how it will always work. The big Marxist myth is that somehow the proletarians will spontaneously rise up as a group and take over and govern the society totally horizontally without a hierarchy and without leadership. That’s just not how societies work on either the Left or the Right. We have congressmen that lead their districts, and they’re elected by those citizens.

We have the president who runs a campaign to convince the entire country, 300-plus million citizens, to support his program and vision for the country. He chooses 4,000 people to staff the administration, so we need leadership. Vanguard is a dirty word because it’s associated with Lenin, who used a vanguard to abuse the population and terrorize the population. He was espousing some truly vicious and horrific ideologies. Leadership, taken as a more neutral term, is required on the Right—new ideas, new platforms, new campaigns, new policies, new think tanks, new education programs, and new universities.

These are not going to be found springing up from the ground. These are going to be conceptualized by talented, motivated, high-capacity people with high tolerance for risk and confrontation, with strong backbones. Those are the kinds of people that we need to cultivate, that we need to be training and recruiting, and that we need to be putting into positions of leadership if we’re going to have a chance to create the institutions that are going to do justice to the people who really deserve good institutions.

Mr. Jekielek:
I was recently speaking with Matt Taibbi on the show, and he said something that concerned me a lot. He said that the changes in our institutions are a possible dying of the American spirit.

Mr. Rufo:
Definitely, yes. These are related phenomena, because these ideologies, these bureaucracies, these institutional changes are antithetical to the American spirit. I’d like to see institutions that support the American spirit, that conform to the American spirit, and that provide the means of expression of the American spirit. To me, these are questions that go hand in hand. You can’t have all of your major institutions be enemies of the American spirit, and then be surprised that that the American spirit is somehow diminished. This is something that is very concerning, and deeply related.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve become very aware of how powerfully we are affected by various tools out there that create the perception of consensus around issues. You have these new powerful tools of media, social media, and AI. This is a very new phenomenon. Those of us who are looking for a free future based on rule of law and the American spirit, how can we counter that?

Mr. Rufo:
We have to go in and recapture the institutions. Conservatives need to summon the spirit of governance and statesmanship again. We need to actually have the strength and the confidence and courage to govern. We have been lulled to sleep by libertarian fantasies, that somehow the moral choice is to not govern, but to seek the end of governance, to opt out of institutions, to condemn the government as something that must be diminished in size and that does not merit our active participation. This is insanely destructive.

We need people who are going to run companies, run the functions of government, and run universities and colleges. Conservatives cannot merely retreat to private business, private life, and think that they’re going to have a country that reflects their values. Conservatives have to get out of the corner. If they really want to have AI or tech companies that are advancing or at least consonant with their values, they have to start venture capital firms. They have to speak out more loudly. They have to found new companies. They have to pass laws within legislatures.

At the end of the day, I don’t believe that the Left is the greatest problem for the Right. I believe that the Right is the greatest problem for the Right, and it’s only self limitation, which is our ultimate limitation, really. Conservatives who want to see a certain kind of future must be willing to actually take the risks and have the courage to build that future.

Mr. Jekielek:
Chris Rufo, any final thoughts as we finish up?

Mr. Rufo:
I hope everyone who has been listening might purchase a copy of the book. It debuted last week on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s driving conversation, and it will really give you a key to understanding the origins of the modern Left and how it has deranged our institutions in recent years. I appreciate the time, Jan, and it’s great to talk to you again.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Christopher Rufo and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.