Opinion | The hard left took over American institutions. It doesn’t have to last. (2024)

Now, another conservative writer, Christopher F. Rufo, has joined those ranks with “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.” The book, a New York Times hardback bestseller, is a valuable excavation of the past 60 years of the American left’s views, showing how they spread in the nation’s universities and eventually took them over, before similarly commandeering much of the news media, public education bureaucracies and many large corporations.

Rufo’s book is a spectacular work of research and precision, which obliged him to retrace the steps of such influential leftists as German American political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Marxist feminist Angela Davis, Brazilian education philosopher Paulo Freire and Kimberlé Crenshaw, the civil rights activist who, more than 30 years ago, was a prime mover behind the birth of the terms “critical race theory” and “intersectionality” so dominant in left-wing circles today.

Rufo is focused on how the rest of the country also ended up in the grip of those terms, along with their cousins “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, and “environmental, social and corporate governance,” or ESG. By book’s end, readers know.

Simply assuming that his readers are familiar with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and other leftist titans, Rufo begins his book with Marcuse, whose Marxist- and Freudian-inspired critical social theories had an astonishing, lasting impact on the American left.

The importance of Davis, Marcuse’s onetime student, in this account might surprise readers on the center-right, who have long dismissed her as an ultimately marginal figure in the violent upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Davis was notorious in that era because of her association with a deadly episode at a Marin County, Calif., courtroom in 1970, when an abortive attempt to free three murder suspects resulted in the deaths of four people, including a judge. Davis, accused of complicity, eluded capture for two months and was later acquitted of charges including murder and conspiracy.

Yet as Rufo recounts, Davis, upon resuming her academic career, faded from prominence but began exerting a powerful and lasting influence among the hard left. Others in that ideological constellation included Harvard Law School’s first Black professor, Derrick Bell, another exponent of critical race theory.

In the 1970s, Marcuse, Davis, Bell and countless other hard-left academics pounded home their message in higher education, as Rufo shows, producing a generation of indoctrinated students who disseminated it widely in academic and corporate cultures.

But it is perhaps in public K-12 education where the radical left’s bleak vision of the United States has taken deepest root. The repudiation of the Founding’s ideals has been comprehensively internalized among those who administer public education bureaucracies and devise what is taught to students.

Having laid the groundwork by exploring leftism’s rise, Rufo then shows with disturbing clarity how it has been manifested in recent years. The ghastly murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 seems to have started a stampede toward identity politics. If they hadn’t already embraced the leftist prescription for racial and social divisiveness, leaders in business, sports, the media and other segments of society rushed to pledge their allegiance.

It is shocking to review how quickly the harvest of anger and recrimination came in. But the colossal retreat from the idea of equal opportunity, in favor of demands for reparations and even the formerly radical and now increasingly mainstream assaults on property rights, is best understood only when leftists’ “long march through the institutions” since the 1960s is grasped in its details.

Grim though its story might be, “America’s Cultural Revolution” is not an autopsy: Rufo proposes an ambitious counteroffensive in the war of ideas. “The most urgent task for the enemies of the critical theories,” he writes, “is to expose the nature of the ideology, how it operates within the institutions,” adding that “the opposition must ruthlessly identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of the revolution, then construct its own logic for overcoming it.”

Could it be that a counterattack is already underway — and showing signs of success? Recent news reports suggest that DEI and ESG are in flight. The question for the center-right isn’t whether to fight; the conflict is in progress. The question instead might be: When to announce victory?

I’d say the moment will come when the counteroffensive can establish and hold defensible lines on campuses, in the media and boardrooms, and especially in K-12 schools. There will be a certain irony if that moment does arrive: It would resonate with an idea expressed in August 1963, on the eve of America’s cultural revolution, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned a society that judges individuals solely by the content of their character.