Christopher Rufo has done vital work exposing the truth about Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the insidious ways it has infiltrated America’s public schools. For that he deserves the thanks and congratulations of all patriotic Americans. Having achieved notable success at a relatively young age, however, Rufo may be tempted to overestimate the impact of his victories. In many ways—not the least of which is the re-election of Donald Trump—the left does seem to be in retreat today. But this poses a tremendous hazard for the right, which is that it might decide to “declare victory and go home.”

Rufo seems to be encouraging this unfortunate error with his essay, “America’s Verdict,” at IM1776. The essay argues, correctly, that the acquittal of Daniel Penny in New York City is a vindication of common sense and the rule of law. But then Rufo jumps to an unwarranted conclusion, claiming that “Americans are finished with the failed regime of the Left.” “Today’s verdict,” he continues, “marks the end of an era. BLM, which seemed unstoppable four years ago, is finished…. [A] brutal and stupid decade of moral and judicial corruption has come to a close.”

As much as we might want this to be true, it is dangerous wishful thinking. Does Rufo really think that CRT or wokeism is America’s first and last confrontation with radical politics? Can he really believe that leftism as an intellectual and political force has been defeated? No one on the right should be so naïve as to forget one of the oldest lessons of politics: there is no final answer to “the human problem”—at least not here on earth. Conservatives, especially, should always reject the utopian temptation, which holds that the perfect society and “the cessation of all evils” can be achieved if we are just radical or revolutionary enough—if we just show sufficient commitment. Wiser thinkers from Plato to James Madison, by contrast, understood that we can aspire, as the Constitution says, to a “more perfect” Union; but we must never forget that some men will always want to tyrannize others, and the institutions of self-government must tirelessly guard against that threat.

To his credit, Rufo acknowledges that there are still challenges ahead. We now have the opportunity to “truly confront the problems that have plagued American cities for a generation,” he writes, by dismantling the whole system of social justice “in academia and media, where it generates its alibis, but above all in criminal justice.”

That’s good advice. But Rufo seems to think that while there remains practical work to do, the theoretical or intellectual war has been won. In terms of ideology or the battle of ideas, Rufo intimates that we can now sit back and relax. Fixing the broken system, he seems to say, should be easy, since the left no longer has any intellectual credibility.

It would be especially unworthy of American patriots to fall into this error, since we already made this mistake twice within living memory. In 1952, the great scholar of political philosophy Leo Strauss wrote: “It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived the conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.” What he meant is that while the Nazi Wehrmacht had been destroyed in World War II, we had not vanquished German philosophy—represented especially by Friederich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, the original sources of academic postmodernism who continue to shape the thought of our intellectual class even today.

Forty year later, at the end of the Cold War, Strauss’s student Harry Jaffa would repeat the same warning when he saw the same mistake being made. The “so-called victory of liberal democracy over Communism being trumpeted in Washington, London, Paris… is a delusion,” Jaffa wrote in 1991. “The defeat of communism in the USSR and its satellite empires by no means assures its defeat in the world. Indeed, the release of the West from its conflict with the East emancipates utopian communism at home from the suspicion of its affinity with an external enemy.”

Therefore, Jaffa predicted, the “struggle for the preservation of Western civilization has entered a new—and perhaps far more deadly and dangerous—phase.”

Isn’t woke/CRT ideology just the latest iteration of this more treacherous phase Jaffa warned us about? If that’s true, it means that while the left may appear crippled now, its underlying pathology—the age-old desire to tyrannize over others—will re-emerge in some new form in the not-too-distant future.

Complacency in the face, first, of German nihilism, and then cultural Marxism, is what allowed the woke/CRT ideology to become so powerful in the first place. Now that the left has suffered a temporary setback, we cannot rest on our laurels but must press forward and continue to wage the intellectual and philosophical battle on behalf of government by consent and the metaphysical freedom of the human mind. 

It would be unfortunate indeed if American lovers of liberty were to relax into a self-satisfied sense of triumph, and thus make the same mistake three times in less than a century.

I strongly suspect that Rufo will respond by claiming that I misunderstood or misrepresented him. But this simply emphasizes the need for clarity in language and thought. Rufo ends his essay by asserting that the “correct moral attitude, as well as the right social policy” would lead to “holding the attorneys responsible for this shameful prosecution accountable [and] returning to the system of ‘broken windows’ policing that made New York under Giuliani the safest big city in America.” I agree with this goal, but how does he expect this policy change to come about?

The ordinary citizens on the Penny jury evidently still have some moral decency, but what about the political establishment in New York City and elsewhere? Have they learned anything from this episode? I doubt it.

If Rufo thinks I misunderstood him, I would ask him whether he thinks the elites feel any regret about what happened to Penny. If they do not, we are still a long way from “dismantling” the social justice system. It will not happen by itself simply because it is the “correct moral attitude.”