Don Quixote and the Bobs
A review of Patrick Deneen's "Regime Change" and Christopher Rufo's "America's Cultural Revolution"
Deneen, Patrick. Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future( Sentinel, 2023)
“Conservative” Catholic and Notre Dame philosopher Patrick Deneen is woke as fuck and he's not going to take it anymore. He is here to deconstruct the shit out of some legitimizing narratives, give those status quo power structures a good hard problematizing. Step up or step aside, the new long march through the institutions begins now.
Of course, Deneen isn't marching for the benefit of racial and sexual minorities, or some other marginal group, he's doing it on behalf of what he perceives of as normal people and against an elite culture he sees as hostile to their interests. “The few vs. the many.” America's ruling class has imbibed and enforces an individualistic ethos which relieves themselves of the noble obligation to teach, model or legislate the kinds of virtues that benefit most people. They are happy to feed their subjects no-fault divorces, porno, estrogen pills, trash TV, and other nuggets of corrupting pleasure if it will keep them quiet and not violating the harm principle.
This is the first of Deneen's two salient observations. Meritocracy has created an elite where the only qualification for membership is having a high-productivity skill or prestigious talent, even the pretense of being some kind of pillar of the community is no longer required. You don't even have to go to church on Christmas or Easter. The SJWs were clever to recognize the space that elites had vacated around etiquette and public morality at the tail end of the libertine 2000s and they moved to seize it. They pushed at the door and it swung open. Deneen seeks to fight them for this space.
This is what Deneen means by “regime change.” A few good men are needed to conquer the educational and cultural institutions, boot the blue hairs, and mold the minds of the young people in a community and virtue based direction. Deneen is very much a “politics is downstream from culture” guy. A new priestly class is needed o shape culture not policy changes. His actual policy proposals are stuff that has been kicking around conservative circles for decades and won't change any regimes[1]... but that isn't the point. Storming the Bastille is for virgins, chads storm the dean's office.
It's striking how little value Deneen finds in the present or the past, American history is nothing but the unfolding logic of a terrible idea whose conclusion, the current condition, is hopelessly shitty and stupid. Deneen is no kind of conservative but, rather, a radical inspired by Catholic Europe and what he thinks will benefit the average person.
The terrible idea is Lockean liberalism, the Protestant demon's most hideous face. 17th century political philosopher John Locke had no need for the priestly classes. Man belongs to God alone, there is no intermediary. God has given man the natural purpose of survival and man has a right to what is necessary for survival. Thus, he has a natural right to life, liberty, health and property.
Locke's meme found it's way into the American founding and has been, in Deneen's view, expanding like a fungus ever since. In particular, it likes to grow on social elites who become increasingly individualistic, self absorbed and cosmopolitan and who are happy to rule their populations but refuse to minister to them. This culminates in a signature, delegitimizing evil which is high rates of out-of-wedlock births.
So Deneen's debt to wokeness goes beyond the shallow, will-to-power, “maybe if berate people on Twitter and get a job in HR, I'll get whatever I want” that every fringe political group has seen in SJW success. Deneen sees the woke model more expansively – as the proof of concept for reorienting liberal arts education towards the creation of his new priestly class. One trained to recognize the evil entwined within the roots of our own history and to destroyed the poisoned fruits no matter how appetizing they may appear.
Deneen, of course, claims that this is how liberal arts education used to work. Which is hot nonsense. The liberal arts have always been oriented towards the creation of individuals and self-absorption. The liberal arts rejoinder to “it takes a village” is “what if some of the villagers are busy?” Deneen joins SJWs in the desire to dismantle traditional education and replace it with a giant college of social work. You do not deserve number theory, absurdist theatre, and Elizabethan poetry while illegitimacy and deaths of despair exist.
This is authoritarianism of a haphazard and localized variety. A phalanx of busy bodies released across the country and empowered to set aside liberal rights when they contradict some notion of the “common good.”
What's the warrant for this? Trump's election. Deneen dislikes Trump but sees a yearning for a strong, patriarchal hand in his success. The fraud Trump can, at best, strike various fatherly poses for the cameras and needs to be replaced by the real thing.
But is this reading accurate? The grifter right is, by far, the most accomplished of the right wing groups to rise up during the 2010s – both electoral and mainstream media success. Deneen's integralists can only attract the attention of acerbic bloggers. The post-liberals and white nationalists don't fair much better. And the grifter right's most endearing feature is that they refuse to lead. They don't lecture and if they tried it would be laughable.
This seems more like straight forward cynicism than some misplaced desire for the paternal embrace of the state. If all politicians are crooks, liars, and disloyal, why not go with ones that make zero effort to cover this up and have so discredited themselves with every other group that they can't possibly betray you? This isn't a desire for authority, it's acting out America's national myth of Animal House in the face of bogus authority. The voice of the “I'll drive an SUV, wear a sombrero and move to an all white school district if I want to” populists.
Deneen's belief that “the many” secretly desire the control of “the few” seems like psychoanalysis. Basic assumptions about politics would lead one to believe that the many would seek to rid themselves of elite control to the maximum extent without causing the collapse of society. The latter is what's supported by empirical observations.
And why not? America's populace has given us rock & roll, hip hop, block buster movies, taco bell, monster dunks... Pretty much everything actually. America's low culture is it's culture. And much of this has occurred despite the opposition of elites trying to elevate the place.
What if America's meritocrats aren't betraying an obligation to teach virtue but are sticking to what they do well? There's a romance to the idealizing lens of the mid-20th century camera, the period Bret Easton Ellis calls “empire.” The famous were able to manage their personas and create projections of themselves that could function as archetypes. Some, like Humphrey Bogart and JFK, could even obtain a god-like status.
But, in reality, these were hardly perfect people. And the internet paints you warts and all. Maybe that's losing something, I don't know. Why would Deneen's priests be wart free? Because they have a classical liberal arts education? That's what the people in charge now got.
Deneen avoids checking his woke influences. In fact, he ceaselessly vilifies them. Narcissism of small differences and what the audience wants, I suppose. But it also avoids the conversation about how the woke priesthood has done an excellent job of enriching themselves but it's harder to see what their parishioners have gotten out of the deal.
The woke elite have gotten university, government, and corporate jobs. The “I'll take estrogen pills, wear fish nets and walk around Wal-Mart if I want to” populists have been led into a homophobic backlash thanks to an extremist ideology that isn’t necessary for the average alphabet person to go about their daily life. Ibram Kendi is better off than he was 10 years ago but is black America?
How would Deneen's priests avoid this variety of self-absorption? Chanting “John Locke was a very bad man” every morning? Look, it's easy to empathize with Deneen, teenage single mothers and deaths of despair are hard to see. Deneen's authoritarianism comes from a place of sympathy rather than cruelty. His urge to do something about injustice has blinded him to what is good about the present and the pitfalls of his own plans.
Deneen's second salient observation is that those who attend liberal arts colleges and those who do not is a fundamental bifurcation in American life. Those who receive a late-adolescent, beer fueled bouncy castle and those who receive the harsh realities of life. His solution to this is loopy and authoritarian because he does not believe that the “many” are capable of understanding their real self-interest or participating meaningfully in their own governance. So “the few” must come out of the bouncy castle and do their Christian duty.
But why not put more people in the bouncy castle. Trade certificates should be turned into liberal arts degrees. Maybe it's like three years and you halve the electives or something, but still, a bachelors degree. This may not be equity but it would be diversity and inclusion - and not just in rumspringa but in the ability to identify self-interest and to participate in governance. This would also increase social trust. “The many” can see “the few” for the well meaning dorks they mostly are.
So how bout it, Patrick. The Notre Dame College of Plumbing. I'd hardly be a red cent out of that $23,300,000,000 endowment. I'll handcuff myself to the President’s door if you will.
This book is tedious. It's 200 pages feel like 500. I-read-this-so-you-don't-have-to/10.
Rufo, Christopher. America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything( Broadside Books, 2023)
How did a gaggle of academic misfits find themselves at the center of the American culture war even though they have been dead for decades? Herbert Marcuse the batty, Marxist exile, Angela Davis the sociopathic victim of childhood terrorism, Paulo Freire the stubborn Brazilian ideologue, and Derrick Bell the cussid contrarian of Harvard have racked up citations that blow past Nobel prize winners and even eclipse titans of the old left like Noam Chomsky. And their influence is felt in the mainstream with debates around the term “critical race theory.”
Rufo's book is a pop history that seeks to explain this. It's also a polemic, but Rufo is a conservative/classical liberal type and he assumes that he represents the mainstream of American life. The audience that matters is emotionally on his side and his polemic can operate by showing rather than telling. He makes little effort to prove that his subjects are wrong, and he doesn't see them as having won some kind of argument. The misfits have snuck their way into the body politics by attaching their memeplex to masters degree types who seek to be both rebels and middle class office workers. The misfits provide the warrant for creating DEI type jobs programs within universities, the government and corporations.
Rufo does not envy the misfits and their long march through the institutions, which turn Deneen preposterous and innovative shades of green, and he does not seek to imitate them. Rather, Rufo points to the weakness in the long march strategy – the misfits can just be fired. The team, stadium, and parking lot do not belong to them and they can simply be ejected.
There's a tendency to point out that people like Rufo exaggerate the influence of intellectuals. The history of black America was bound to produce some militancy, even in a post-Christian meritocracy corporations need societal guidelines to provide them with lawsuit free pleasantries. The apples are noticeable and their different tastes and flavors are endlessly interesting but they are still a product of the mundane tree that bears them.
There's a lot of truth to this. But ideas come from somewhere and will have an easier time of it if they appeal to the people who tend to pass along and promote information. This is true of good ideas and bad ones.
After all, Karl Marx was not the only 19th century communist, there were lots of them. Edward Bellamy's 1888 utopian novel, Looking Backwards, sold an eye popping 500,000 copies, spawned hundreds of “Nationalist Clubs,” and even a short lived “Nationalist Party.[2]” Yet Bellamy is forgotten. Marx combined a cynical examination of society, quantitative analysis, and a utopian dream. Marx created the basis for a research program and he appealed to the sentiments, Bellamy wrote a story that either resonates with you or not.
Marx died in obscurity but he outlasted his competitors on the far-left because the ideas appealed to intellectual types. Rufo's book can't be dismissed as a just-so-story or survivors bias. His book is a competent history of a group of thinkers that has a striking and, in Rufo's view, malevolent influence over American society despite seeming primed for the margins. His forays into trumpy hysterics and conspiracism are minimal. And he presents a practical solution – schedule the pink slip guy some over-time.
Rufo's faults stem, to get a bit woke, from his assumptions and biases. Normie America, which Rufo represents better than Deneen, is seen as being under sustained assault from a fifth column of cranks infected with a peculiar, European variety of ass cancer brought to America's decent and God fearing shores by Herbert Marcuse and is now metastasizing everywhere. It strikes Rufo as impossible that the misfits could win genuine sympathy or be seen as useful. The misfits have only succeeded through subterfuge and mesmerism.
America is a country founded by violent political extremists and has a capacity to produce radical ideas of its own. Americans often treat these ideas with smiles if not agreement. America's gun culture is seen as insanity in many other countries. No one thinks that tales of black militants like Nat Turner or white allies like John Brown are nothing but woke indoctrination. These can be embraced as a part of America.
And it's not like the woke invented doling out jobs to constituents based on ethnicity either. The practice is was standard for the boss politics regimes that run used to run American cities. Jobs at the police station for the Irish, jobs at the firehouse for the Polish.
Rufo's narrative sees woke politics as a foreign infection alien to the American body politic. This makes sense as a practical matter, the campaign against CRT will probably succeed. His book fits solidly within the center-right/classical liberal tradition of anti-Europeanism. Anti-German and anti-French in particular. But Rufo's assumption that America is whatever Rufo is creates blind spots in his analysis.
Rufo's most obvious omission is the LGBTQ+ movement which is ignored. The most radical of the woke coalition. What's more status quo than the sexual binary? What's more revolutionary than declaring war on xir own physiology? And there's no insidious outsiders here, no Marxist vanguardism. These are middle/upper class white kids breaking Bowie. The Daughters of the American Revolution becoming its sons. Maybe you could fire them from DEI type jobs but you're not going to eject them from the mainstream of American life to which they possess a birth right.
And they mostly operate through retail politics and pressure campaigns. Institution marching has not been necessary for their successes.
And the SJW style of sexual politics is very American. The Quakers, who settle the Delaware Valley in the late 17th century, practiced sexual norms that were both ideological and dogmatic. The debate isn't just about how to best enforce sexual norms but also about what those sexual norms should be. This is opposed to New England's Puritans who endlessly discussed the best implementation of sexual norms but never questioned the norms themselves.
The Quakers promoted gender equality and love marriage. They also condemned sex even within marriages that was not purposely procreative as a release of “animal passions” and forbade women from wearing clothing that might arouse men.
The Quakers were, by the standards of their day, both total freaks and absurd prudes. Self-righteous perverts. The Quakers were widely persecuted. But all of this was in service to their conception of early modern rationality, it was progressive. They were not rejecting tradition because it got in the way of a good time. Money marriages and animal passions need to go because they, upon critical reflection, do not serve the ideal of Christian love and piety[3].
Maybe Rufo omits the alphabet people because he approves of them, who knows. Probably not. I guess Rufo is to be congratulated for not forcing some loopy narrative about trans-rights coming from the Nazis or something. But the emotional ground would be harder for Rufo here, he can’t just portray suburbia’s children as an invasive species.
Rufo also ignores that it takes two to tango. He is right to point out that the CRT people are operating software that enables long marches through the institutions, but he ignores the fact that they still need the embrace of the center left. Woke was able to succeed because it received this embrace, and is now failing because it is being let go. The radicalism and cynicism of Rufo's subjects explains why they were at the front of the line when the center-left was ready to try out some radical ideas, but not why the center-left was in an experimental mood.
The center-left has a concern for the plight of black America. Both out of genuine sympathy and out of a need to honor the black vote. Democrats were willing to try out CRT to close the black-white achievement gap and address mass incarceration because they had tried everything else first. Many on the right are willing to shrug their shoulders at these problems, but the left is both emotionally and politically unwilling to do so.
Corporations now have to operate in a globalized and mutli-national environment. The winner cannot just sell products to white people but must sell to the globe. It's not crazy to think that having a work force that represents the customers would help. A new etiquette for co-workers and customers was needed. The woke provided a solution irregardless of whether it was a good one or not.
Look, it's Bud Light's hell and they can burn in it. But American white men drink less and better beer than their fathers did[4]. The woke don't think that white dudes should be the sole object of Anheuser-Busch's crude manipulation tactics and the shareholders agree with them. This is irritating coming from a company that has spent decades relentlessly associating its product with the characteristics and tastes of it s customers. Of course they've also irritated their new customers... Which is great, fuck them.
Rufo's book was more interesting than I expected, I wasn't bored. But it has a lack of actual arguments. I read the whole thing and I'm still not sure why CRT is actually wrong. Rufo relies too much on the alien nature of the misfits to make his argument for him. They're not like us. But how does this work when the in-group, or their children, are clearly involved? Rufo promises a broad program for stopping the “top down management of American life” by “a unity between the university, the media, the state, the corporation” but delivers a narrow attack on the contents of a few school books.
Fine-for-what-it-is/10.
1. Expanding the House of Representatives is a good idea though. The average number of constituents each member of congress.
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/17/books/looking-back-at-looking-backward-we-have-seen-the-future-and-it-didn-t-work.html
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America( Oxford University Press, 1989). The chapters “Delaware Marriage Ways:The Quaker Idea of Marriage as ‘Loving Agreement’” and “Delaware Sex Ways: ‘Not to Go into Her but for Propagation’” in particular. This is a top 10 American history book BTW.
https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/surveillance108/CONS15.pdf
https://www.statista.com/chart/17622/market-share-of-small-and-independent-brewers/