A young conservative activist may well have just changed the direction of American culture.
Christopher F. Rufo, 39, a modern-day Thomas Paine, has been credited with bringing down the world’s most powerful academic: Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University.
His exposure of serial plagiarism in her thin academic record (only 11 unspectacular articles and no book – and nada at all since 2016) made her tenure as one of America’s best-paid academics untenable. She even copied acknowledgments. But this scandal might not have mattered had it not been built on another.
In bizarre testimony last month, before the US congress, Professor Gay was incapable of condemning, as a violation of her university’s rules on bullying and harassment, calls for genocidal anti-Semitism. She had previously come down hard on accidental misgendering by her colleagues. But advocating for a second Jewish Holocaust was only bad dependent on the context in which it was being made.
“The truth finally broke through,” crooned Rufo. “Ms Gay was a scholar of not much distinction who climbed the ladder of diversity politics, built a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) empire as a Harvard dean, and catered to the worst instincts of left-wing ideologues on campus.”
Like Martin Luther in 1517, Rufo has now nailed his theses to a woke door. His new Manifesto for the Counterrevolution aims to use the victorious battle against Harvard as a strategy for winning the wider and longer culture war. It is a bracing read.
His prescriptions are likely to frame conservative/Republican strategic thinking, and the left’s response, for some time to come.
I have two questions. Is he right? And if he is, can his approach be adapted for Australian conservative consumption?
Rufo has three core arguments. First, the progressive linguistic dominion, from preferred pronouns to trigger warnings, needs to be challenged rather than appeased. “In the beginning was the Word,” argues Rufo, quoting scripture. “Language is the operative element of human culture. To change the language means to change society.”
The left gets this, the right needs to, says Rufo. Stop obeying leftist speech codes for the sake of an easy life. The aim of the left is not to liberate the oppressed, but to silence its enemies. Don’t be silenced.
Second, “institutions are where the word becomes flesh”. Conservatives must not seek an accommodation with the left. Rather, they must work to decolonise left-wing institutions and to seize back control of them.
Yes, even the universities are a realistic target of Rufo’s New Right insurgency. The Harvard saga has shown how hollow their orthodoxy, how ripe for challenge. Who will replace it? “We will, and by our values,” answers Rufo.
Third, ends matter and conservatives must “reorient the state toward rightful” ones. “What is the purpose of the university?” he asks. “What is the purpose of a school? What system of government will guide us toward human happiness?”
The left cannot answer these questions in ways that persuade ordinary people. Social justice is a poor mobiliser of popular support.
Rather, “men will die for truth, liberty and happiness, but will not die for efficiency, diversity, and inclusion”. If conservatives can better articulate these Jeffersonian ends, they will carry the day.
I am persuaded that Rufo has defined the problem afflicting American conservatives. The efficacy of his prescriptions, post-Gay, are so refreshing as to be worth a shot. But would they work here, in Australia? I’m not so sure.
His argument about the power of language resonates with me. One of the greatest successes of the DEI empire is the extension of its dominion across the West. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 was about as far away socially and geographically from Sydney and Melbourne as we can imagine. And yet the left in both cities embraced the episode to lecture Australians about our own racism. This form of American imperialism is the most successful, the most pernicious, and the most in need of decolonising here.
Certainly, Australian institutions, from campuses to corporations, have moved left. But not in lock-step with the US. That nation is ideological. The US experiment is the working out of an idea. What is the Australian idea? We lack the ideological politics that would make the DEI empire as entrenched here as it is there.
Just as we have had no religious Great Awakening of the kind experienced in 18th century America, its current, and even more religious, Great Awokening has a much milder Australian variant.
Take, as a comparison, the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy of the University of Michigan. These 142 staff (“diversicrats”) cost over $US18m ($27m) in annual salaries. As the National Review reported, if this spending was converted into a scholarship fund for in-state students, nearly over 1000 could attend the university tuition-free. What we refer to as “D & I” university spending in Australian universities comes nowhere close to these numbers.
Perhaps we exaggerate, therefore, the leftist hold on higher education in Australia? I’ve argued in these pages previously that campus conservatism here is more silent than it is non-existent. I would not make the same claim of the several US universities that I know. Rufo is articulating a narrowly American cause. A wealthy Australian donor should fund him to fly here, to see if his thesis can be generalised.
What about the ends of conservative activism? What should be Peter Dutton’s telos? Here Rufo has more to teach the LNP.
A great failure of Liberal thinking has been the indulging, not challenging, of progressive nostrums. Dutton campaigned not that the voice pointed toward a dangerous end – the permanent racialisation of Australian politics – but on a tweaked referendum question.
What is the end, the point, the objective of the Victorian Liberals? According to John Pesutto, it is to join Labor’s suppression of women’s right campaigner Moira Deeming. The Victorian Liberal leader should set aside a few minutes and read Christopher Rufo’s manifesto. His state party is about as far away from that New Right as it is possible to be.
The Australian right, so different in tenor, tone and history from its US cousins, could nevertheless usefully engage with this provocative thinker facing down an empire. Growing Paines: a new strategy for the LNP.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne
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