Chuffed by his role in forcing former Harvard president Claudine Gay to resign, Christopher Rufo has just penned a call to arms to “new right activists” to “win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends.” He does not tell us what “rightful ends” the state should serve or what those who disagree with them whatever they turn out to be should do. As a manifesto, it lacks the poetry of Marx and Engels. Its fussing over the capture of American institutions by the “far left” is derivative of the anxieties of late 60s and early 1970’s conservatives worried about the anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist youth. And its plea that the right emulate the political left’s strategy of capturing the leadership of major social institutions is ironic, given that many leftists (Srnicek and Williams, for example) have argued that leftists need to take a page from the way the right recovered from their defeats in the 1960 to dominate the 70s and 80s.

In short, the content and tone is predictable and superficial, but Rufo does raise important questions about the purpose of public institutions that are worth thinking through.

Rufo’s screed begins by telling his fellow travellers that both the old (nineteenth century) liberalism and conservatism are dead. Warming the right-wing heart with memories of Reagan will not work; the new right needs a new action plan for new times. He does not mention Trump and I do not know what his position is on MAGA Republicans (they certainly have organizing power, but Rufo is perhaps too much of an intellectual to go in for their manifold absurdities). Rufo focuses on stopping “establishment conservatives” from retreating any further from the core values of the “political tradition of the west– republican self-government, shared moral standards, and the pursuit of eudaimonia.”

I found the inclusion of eudaimonia next to ‘shared moral standards’ in a conservative argument odd. Without saying anything more about what ‘shared moral standards’ he has in mind (Judeo-Christian morality, I presume) the value of flourishing (eudaimonia) pulls in the direction of individual difference and self-creation, not shared substantive values. Aristotle could assume shared moral principles, but in a pluralist country like the United States, shared moral standards are the problem, not the solution. Individual flourishing presupposes access to resources and, therefore, (if you ask me) any society that prioritises flourishing must institutionalise the principle (common to socialism and egalitarian liberalism but foreign to the classical liberalism or libertarianism) that everyone should be able to access the basic resources, relationships, and institutions that the flourishing of their lives requires. But as for religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and the content of the lives people choose to pursue, those would necessarily differ. Without further unpacking his thought, Rufo leaves his position open to questions about its normative and political coherence.

However, as I noted, the essay is a short call to arms and not a political philosophy paper. “The Right doesn’t need a white paper,” he argues, it needs activists willing to go to battle– as he did in the Harvard plagiarism scandal– to take back institutions. Unless the right takes back control of schools and statehouses, all talk of ‘righteous ends’ is just academic hot air.

But a battle against what forces? Rufo provides further support for an argument that I have made for decades concerning the connection between postmodern critiques of objective truth and the right-wing. Rufo argues that “while postmodern theorists who reduced politics to “language games” may have overstated the case, … they were right in one respect: language is the operative element of human culture. To change the language means to change society: in law, arts, rhetoric, and common speech.” Rufo (and the postmodernists) are correct that language is the operative element of human society, but they are wrong to infer that political power is a function of control over language. Power does not stem from control over the OED or the barrel of a gun (Mao), but from control over the resources (natural, technological) upon which everyone’s lives and livelihood depends. Control over the language is often used in a purely ideological way make it seem as though substantive social changes have been made when in reality the class dimensions of political and economic power have not been changed at all.

Such is the case with the language of ‘Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” that drives Rufo so crazy. Let us confine our attention to the universities for a moment. Rufo believes that the leadership of universities has been seized by a far left cabal bent on destroying academic standards and turning America’s halls of academia into madrassas of political correctness. I have worked in universities for thirty years and can assure everyone who is worried that they are not led by far left activists and that the biggest threat to academic freedom is the role of private money (as l’affaire Harvard also proved) and the ubiquitous demand made by public funders that university curricula serve the interests of business by producing “job ready” applicants that can be fed into the most dynamic sectors of the economy.

Anyone concerned with academic standards and freedom should be concerned when any extraneous political agenda is imposed upon academics and students, whichever side of the political aisle it claims to serve. Curricula needs to be determined by the state of the art in the field and not preachy administrators hoping to cure the ills of the world through changed reading lists. At the same time– as Rufo’s own arguments admit– the world has changed. The most important change– in the humanities at least– is the emergence of long silenced voices that demand– rightly– to be heard. The state of the art in the field should determine the curricula in all disciplines, but certainly in the humanities the state of the art means including the works of historically colonised people, critical race theorists, and others who have been demonstrably oppressed by the dominant structures of power and wealth. Including those voices does not mean that they should dominate the conversation to the exclusion of older perspectives, but it does mean that they have to be heard.

Rufo’s intervention does not go into details about how he would reform institutions in general or universities in particular, but the general arguments he does make contradict themselves. He calls out the left for its “euphemistic rule,” but then concludes that the new right must “replace contemporary ideological language with new, persuasive language that points towards clear principles.” Two points are in order: first, persuasive language need not be true, and second, clear principles can be ideological. Rufo intends his readers to conclude that his feet are planted in the soil of objective truth, but he himself admits that he is mobilizing power to prosecute a political– ideologically partisan– agenda.

Rufo’s penchant for making bald faced contradictions perhaps explains why works for a think tank and not an academic institution. If he worked as an academic, he would have to defend his arguments from critics who would expose his contradictions. As a private researcher, he is free to deal in platitudes about the superiority of passion to reason and re-setting the public agenda on the basis of “clear principles.” (He also does not have to fend off charges of plagiarism, which is good for him, because he flat out plagiarises Hume’s argument, from Essay on Human Nature, that reason is the slave of the passions. Maybe Claudine Gay should expose him).

In any case, the problem with Rufo’s criticisms of the “euphemistic left” is that he wants his readers to think that his “clear principles’ are objectively true, while at the same time arguing that all principles are political and that public life is really a Nietzschean battle to impose one’s own preferred ‘truths’ on everyone else. He writes that “no institution can be neutral– and any institutional authority aiming only for neutrality will immediately be captured by a faction more committed to imposing ideology.” If true, it follows that this argument applies to Rufo as well, and that, consequently, his real agenda is not to protect objective truth from the infamies of the ‘far left,’ but just to impose his ideology on everyone else.

But institutions can be neutral, in the partisan political sense, and yet passionately commit themselves to fulfilling their purpose. To speak again only of the universities, the belief that they must serve a cliched left or right wing agenda is simply false. Faculty and students have political positions, which they must be free to defend (not impose) in the context of academic argument, but the university itself, if it is to function as a space for open, free, intellectual inquiry, criticism, and debate, cannot serve any political master. There have been egregious cases of faculty being hounded out of their positions, not had their contracts renewed, or fired, for running afoul of EDI platitudes. I have criticized these violations of academic freedom and integrity and will continue to do so. But the solution is not a “new right” take over of the universities (as has happened at New College in Florida), but a recommitment of all members of the university institution to the discipline and courage of argument. The purpose of the university is not to spread any particular group’s “truth” but to expose every truth-claim to the test of open examination and criticism. The truth will out, but not because one group is more committed to its partisan principles than another. The truth is what survives contestation and criticism. If Rufo is serious about returning institutions to their purposes, he needs to stand on the side of critical engagement and not on the side of forcibly silencing opponents who annoy him.