Chris Rufo and the Anti-Fact Right

For some damn reason or other, Ezra Klien decided to interview Chris Rufo for his podcast and his New York Times column. It's not a very pleasant read, but it is a window into the thinking of the culture panic crowd. I'm not going to walk you through the whole thing, because it's hot and humid and I don't want to spend a second more with Rufo than I need to.

Klein is harkening back to another piece by Rufo, and pulls up Rufo's rejection of the old "facts don't care about your feelings." I'm old enough to remember when conservatives were particularly committed to facts. But Rufo's reply (which employs the royal "we") calls this a "rationalization for losing" before flipping it entirely on its head.

But look, while we should have the facts on our side, and while we should use logic, by itself, it’s insufficient. And, in fact, politics operates on a deeper level, an emotional level. And politics occurs on the field of sentiment and public opinion — much more on the field of abstract argumentation at the top.

Screw the facts. Rufo's argument here recalls JD Vance explanation for telling lies about Haitian immigrants:

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

This is, of course, a critical part of Rufo's strategy, all the way back to the days when he announced that he would simply use his own definition for terms so that he could harness everyone's bad feelings about things they don't like:

The goals is to have the public read something crazy in the news and immediately think 'critical race theory.' We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.'

Klein moves on to question Rufo's argument for more conservative use of "agitprop." That's usually a term to refer to bad propaganda, points out Klein. But Rufo makes a distinction that really deserves our attention:

If you’re conducting, say, propaganda on behalf of a falsehood or evil or an unjust cause, it’s bad. My point is that’s not always necessarily true if you are pursuing a cause that is good and true and beautiful.

Not a word about how one determines if a cause is "good and true and beautiful." In other words, propaganda is good for my side, and bad for the other side. Time to roll out Wilhoit's Law one more time:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

This can apparently be expanded to include not just codified laws on the books, but more universal laws like "tell the truth" or "don't bullshit people."  

Rufo argues that persuasion is just rhetoric, and "rhetoric at an industrial scale" is propaganda. And that's a Good Thing if deployed in service of Our Side and bad for Your Side. Which is as good an explanation of why, as a culture, we go through periods when we are drowning in bullshit. I get the reasoning-- we are in pursuit of a Good and Noble End, so using any means at our disposal is Good. It's a seductive view; it's also wrong. Because we rarely get all the way to our ends, so it tends to be our means that define us. 

Rufo argues that his guiding "telos" is the restoration of the principles of our republic" which he defines thus:

You want to have the principles of liberty and equality. You want to have a functioning, healthy republic, and you want to have a culture that is organized according to virtue and, in particular, the virtues of our Western, Anglo-American civilization.

AKA white nationalism. It's the right wing conservative culture project-- a nation in which the dominant culture is white, male, Christian, straight, healthy, and wealthy and all others sit in the back where they belong, subservient passengers. 

Some parts of the MAGA world seem to believe that such a goal is actually achievable, that we can somehow regress to the 250-year-old past (except, of course, that those folks were trying to look forward and imagine a better way to be a country-- so maybe MAGA would skip that part). That goal is unattainable, so the MAGAs and the Rufos are ultimately defined only by their means, and their means lack honor and integrity and simply focus on flooding the zone with bullshit.

How much damage to society is done by these tactics. Rufo once claimed that "You have to be ruthless and brutal in pursuit of something good" and "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust." But what do you get in a society, particularly a post-facts society, when you sow so much ruthlessness, brutality, and distrust? 

I try to imagine how Rufo's ideas would translate to a classroom. Should the teacher use whatever it takes to whip students into a passion for the content (as long as, of course, it's the right content). What would a school look like if a central principle was that facts just don't matter as much as a narrative, and the narrative should be judged not on accuracy but on how well it advances "good and true and beautiful" ends. And what the heck does something "good and true and beautiful" look like if facts don't really matter.

Rufo might argue that all of the above is about political stuff and that within the schoolhouse walls there should be no politics--just truth and beauty and the classic thoughts of great dead white guys. But if the goal is to prepare students to become useful members of society, and society is built on political gamesmanship, how the heck do we make that connection?

Rufo has always displayed some honesty about his intentions and tools, but he also does things like later in the interview when he argues that because Trump wiped out DEI policies and the Department of Justice has "taken a buzz-saw to so-called disparage impact doctrine (which means that a policy is only racist if the writers explicitly announce their racist intent) so therefore "you can make an argument that liberty, equality and virtue have been restored." So, "liberty, equality and virtue" mean, apparently, "white folks are in charge." 

I just don't know how "there are opposing sides and you need to do whatever you can to win--but only if you're on the side that deserves to win" can be transferred onto a school. Or maybe I do and I'm just reluctant to wrap my eyes around such an ugly vision.