The Long March of the Anti-Woke—and Its Uncertain Destination

Since the mid-2010s, “wokeness,” an evolving but recognizable set of progressive-coded formal norms and patterns of speech and affect, has swept through American institutions with an intensity, sweep, and speed far outpacing that of an earlier generation’s “political correctness.” This cultural shift has had significant effects on the day-to-day operations, on both the public-facing and internal discourses, of everything from public schools to large corporations. Indeed, it can be compared, mutatis mutandis, with phenomena like China’s Cultural Revolution or the contemporaneous upheavals in the West associated with the student movements of the 1960s.

For many years, conservatives were simply baffled, powerless, and outraged as the institutional infrastructure of our common life became captured by a new “common sense” that was alien, and openly hostile, to their own worldviews and to the previous iteration of color-blind progressive liberalism. Right-leaning commentators impotently criti­cized the rise of wokeness as a “moral panic,” a degraded variant of America’s long-standing and episodically re-intensified evangelical relig­iosity, or as the latest depredations of the cultural Left—but they had no effective political means of resisting it. After all, it seemed to bypass electoral politics, spreading through rhizomatic channels of influence outside the state. Neither the chidings of Obama during his last years in office, nor the election of Trump to his first term, were received by the growing cohort of woke white-collar professionals as a rebuke to their increasingly hegemonic outlook.

Conservatives, along with moderate liberals, who were accustomed to thinking of the “private sphere” or “civil society” as a domain of distributed power that moderates the otherwise potentially tyrannical overbearing of the state had little experience making sense of illiberal drives that arose from, and became dominant within, not only academia and NGOs but Fortune 500 companies. They were perhaps more used to waging moral panics and religious revivals than to being their targets. Nor did they have an adequate conceptual vocabulary for opposing the central thematic clusters of wokeness: polemically illiberal understandings of race and gender that justify a range of policy interventions into the most ostensibly personal aspects of our lives, leveraging our self-interpretations as tools for the extension of administrative power. It was not they but their enemies, as Geoff Shullenberger has noted in Ameri­can Affairs, who had read Foucault—but it was they who needed him.

Now, however, there appears at last to be a meaningful opposition to wokeness, one that is politically efficacious and able to target networks of ideas and practices around race and gender in order to generate popular and legislative resistance. This is a good thing. It should be recognized as such by both conservatives and liberals. Whether one opposes wokeness because of objections aimed primarily at its views on race and gender or because of its proponents’ tactics that have diverted countless institutions away from their primary purposes (schools from teaching, NGOs from supporting the arts and philanthropic causes, medical associations from promoting medicine, companies from making profits) toward upholding a shrill polemic and imposing a suddenly omnipresent pseudo-ethical consensus, it is, and it is worth repeating, good to see that it can be successfully fought.

What follows, however, is a consideration of the limits—and perils—of the current trajectory of this resistance, focusing on its most successful and cogent deliverer, Chris Rufo. Rufo’s program for opposing wokeness has been strikingly successful, but it risks deepening the larger social problems out of which wokeness arose. Resolving these problems will require conservatives not only to mobilize tactics that mirror and block those of their woke foes (that is, to learn to fight) but also to develop novel strategies for overcoming the conditions that produce such enemies (that is, to pacify). Or as Joseph de Maistre put it, not a “counter-revolution” but the “contrary of a revolution”—an eventual re‑normalization of institutions on acceptable terms.

Social Conservatism, Old and New

Rufo has become perhaps the most prominent activist on the contemporary American right. He draws on a range of political and epistemic techniques, taken from the repertoires both of traditional social con­servatives and of the contemporary cultural Left. Like the latter, he seems to have correctly understood that the issues that most animate both the electorate as well as political operators and commentators are those connected to “identity,” figured in terms of race and gender—those fictions by which our purportedly intimate interior selves are linked to larger populations imagined to be growing or shrinking, gaining or losing power.

Far more than the theme of immigration and the plight of the working class, by which Trump in his first presidential campaign broke the Republican Party’s moribund and unappealing center-right neo­liberal consensus, culture war topics of race and gender—particularly insofar as they deal with children’s education—appear to speak to Americans’ most personal concerns: whether their values and lifestyles are held in esteem and guaranteed a future. Curricula churn passions in a way that borders and factories apparently cannot.

It is, therefore, not only the case that the Right had to learn to fight wokeness in order to avoid having the entire set of institutions that orient America’s cultural, political, and economic life dominated by a worldview aimed at its marginalization and elimination—but also that, even if the stakes were not existential, it is simply better politics to carry the fight to issues that most animate Americans. People who would not bother to vote for the sake of border security or reindustrialization will throw themselves into activism to resist having themselves, and espe­cially their children, morally humiliated by an ideology that frames them as history’s villains or benighted fools. Insofar as politics is not the ra­tional adjudication of how we all might live most comfortably together but a struggle to impose on others our apparently irreconcilable rival claims to moral superiority, and to thwart their efforts to do the same to us, culture war is the quintessence of “good” politics.¹

Rufo learned this essential lesson from his early days at the Discovery Institute, which promotes “intelligent design” and represents, it could be said, the flagging social conservative vision of previous genera­tions. He has succeeded in vivifying and extending its tactics for oppos­ing identitarian ideas from the progressive secular Left in children’s education, and what parents experience as the humiliating loss of status inherent in being unable to transmit, institutionally, their worldview or to see it granted any legitimacy by the national professional and political class. The shift in application of these methods from opposition to mainstream scientific views on evolution (which necessarily has a limited public, particularly among people Rufo would identify as “elites” and members of the white-collar strata) toward opposition to much more widely resented views on race, gender, and so on, is a potentially “winning” strategy—at least in the short-term, electoral sense, at the state and perhaps national level.

Rufo is a think tank operator at the Manhattan Institute (whose website lists some 150 separate pieces of “content” authored by him), from which he issues both (largely honest and useful) exposés of woke excesses in schools, universities, corporations, etc., as well as (tenden­tious, often wildly inaccurate, and nevertheless—or rather just for that reason—influential pseudo-histories of “queer theory,” “critical race theory” and other constellations of ideas Rufo can combat with such effective energy precisely because he is not too concerned to understand them). He has, moreover, become an influential adviser to conservative politicians such as Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. He is seen to be largely responsible for that state’s still-ongoing stream of legislation aimed at reining in DEI bureaucracies in public universities, primary and secondary public schools, and even private corporations—and, more controversially, at changing curricula to reflect a not-always-coherent assemblage of conservative values.

Recently, he has taken on yet another role. The National Review reported, approvingly, in January of this year that Rufo had been appointed, along with a set of sympathetic colleagues, to the board of trustees of what it described as the “woke” New College of Florida. He announced plans to transform the school into something called a “classi­cal” and “Christian” liberal arts college, on the model of Hillsdale in Michigan (a private school). In order to do so, he and his fellow trustees would be hiring, as he put it, “new professors credentialed in constitutionalism, free enterprise, civic virtue, family life, religious freedom, and American principles” (credentials that, to the ears of scholars with conventional degrees and expertise, must sound every bit as real and reassuring as those displayed in “diversity statements”).

Rufo’s new sort of conservative educational policy has the advantage, in theory, of framing “social conservatism” as resistance to the top-down (and recent) imposition of views perceived as strange, novel, incorrect, and even immoral by most Americans—including many who do not identify as Christian, religious, or conservative. While the Dis­covery Institute and its brand of sanitized creation science could only ever offer a generally unconvincing new spin on the script of Inherit the Wind, opposition to woke excesses could be a potent opportunity to position the cultural Left, for a change, as the intolerant fanatics obsessed with theological bizarreries (the new metaphysics of inherited racial trauma and “gender” as a category that can and should be questioned).

It is not impossible to imagine, even, that such opposition could be an opportunity to refashion something of the Cold War–era alliance between liberal and conservative anti-totalitarians or, mutatis mutandis, the Bismarckian Kulturkampf alliance of German Protestant liberals and conservatives against Catholic influence in schools and the broader culture of the Second Reich. Without agreeing on a substantive vision of the good, liberals and conservatives in both cases could work together against an enemy they each perceived as subverting the possibilities of a free thinking or properly God-fearing society. In these historical cases, they also achieved, for a time, cultural hegemony in the process.

This, of course, would require conservatives and liberals to be able to recognize each other as worthy allies and to recognize the cultural Left as a common enemy. While there may be a bare possibility of such recognitions, the Right, having only lately learned that it must, and can, resist wokeness by political means, has a natural contempt for liberals in the professional-managerial class who proved so incapable over the last decade of blocking—or in many cases even protesting—the ideological capture of everything from medical associations to art museums.

Out of a combination of sympathy for the intellectual and moral orientations of woke colleagues-cum-agitators, and of fear of losing their own jobs and funding or markets for their employers, and of dis­comfort at being seen to align themselves with right-wing critics of wokeness, members of the white-collar classes, from professors to doc­tors to curators to corporate leaders, accepted the imposition of a new moral-political orientation for their organizations. Their surrender was so rapid and total that it must make any serious defender of liberalism—anyone who imagines that the health of our regime depends on the auton­omy of non-state institutions—reconsider his views.

The wildfire spread of wokeness not only revealed the vulnerability of such institutions and their members to a kind of ethical blackmail, but has discredited them in the eyes of the Right. The collapse of faith in “experts,” much discussed in the years of Covid, surely owes much to conservatives’ correct sense that institutions that would have previously been fairly understood as neutral, insofar as they subordinated political and moral aims to such goals as the dissemination of scientific knowledge, the display of art, etc.—even if they were not neutral in the sense of employing individuals with a range of political opinions—abandoned their nonpartisan ideals with astonishing carelessness. (These institutions and tasks are, of course, always in some sense political, since they shape the perceptions and behavior of the public, but previously they were not so explicitly linked to partisan, divisive causes normally called “poli­tics.”) Conservatives’ skepticism—and even conservatives’ desire to punish such institutions—is well-founded and indeed healthy. An im­plicit contract organizing American life was broken.

A Long March to Nowhere

Rufo’s interlinked successes across a variety of domains rest on the power of his storytelling, and particularly of his potent simplifications or distortions of history that legitimate his brand of politics. These consist not only of the sort of genealogies of ideas mentioned above, by which Rufo, in a mirror-image of the woke activist who finds everything she hates about the contemporary world to radiate outward from a Big Bang of “white supremacy,” discovers the origins of asking about pro­nouns, DEI trainings, and the like, in the ideas of a few pernicious postmodern thinkers (whose work, if better examined, would often give grounds for questioning such practices). They also include, perhaps more importantly, stories about how the Left has taken power and what the Right should do about it—and how Trump began, but failed to follow through on, a new kind of politics. While Rufo’s little myths about the history of ideas seem to work well at mobilizing a conservative base and making possible resistance to an otherwise unmanageably diverse field of phenomena now conveniently imagined as manifestations of a single foe, these narratives about recent political history are neither true nor useful, and are likely to lead the Right into the same illusory victories and substantive defeats undergone by the postmodern Left.

In a January 2023 article for City Journal, for example, Rufo situates his ascent and brand of politics within two historical trajectories. The first places him at the end of the Left’s decades-long “march through the institutions” of American society, and at the beginning of a countermovement by which the Right will wrest back control. In Rufo’s vision, the 1960s was a near-revolution in which “the Left” almost managed, but ultimately failed, to take over the country. In defeat, it adopted a strategy of incrementally influencing educational, professional, and non­governmental organizations, until its views became the new “common sense” of knowledge workers, managers, culture-workers, and other sorts of sub-elites.

This strategy, Rufo claims, was derived from the thought of Antonio Gramsci; its subtlety long disarmed conservatives, who were, supposedly, accustomed to thinking about politics in more traditional terms of elections and legislation rather than as something, as the phrase now famous in conservative circles goes, “downstream from culture.” But now, Rufo exults, conservatives have “read their Gramsci” (they most certainly have not) and understand what must be done—reshaping the public and private institutions by which Americans’ worldview (on this account, the fountainhead of politics) is shaped. This conservative restoration will not, however, occur through a “long march” but through a rapid, intense attack that will roll back the Left’s half century of gains and remake the American mind.

This narrative has much to offer. It is simple and straightforward, and offers right-wing listeners the impression of hearing, as if it were something novel, a litany of claims already dear to them. They need to learn from the Left, they are told, by reworking insights from European Marxists, who have the glamor and prestige of the obscure. So much for the novelty. They also need—as conservatives have been telling them­selves, again and again, for decades, but each time with a breathless, first‑time feeling—to fight, to release themselves from the namby-pamby niceties that have held them back.

Until now, the Right has been too timid, right-wingers keep saying, and has avoided paying attention to what really matters: culture. Of course, conservatives since (at least) Pat Buchanan and the Moral Ma­jority have hardly been reticent to talk about culture and indeed to insist we get angrier about it. This topic and this affect have great appeal to journalists like Rod Dreher (an ally and interlocutor of Rufo), who have no experience or expertise that would equip them to think about any­thing else or in any other attitude. Rufo’s narrative allows the Right to misunderstand itself as doing something it has not already been doing, with varying levels of success, for just as long as the “Left” has been, apparently, winning.

It is not, however, obvious that the “Left” Rufo speaks of is in fact left-wing, or that its “Gramscian” strategy should be seen as a success. Rufo’s intellectual engagement with Gramsci and his left-wing readers is shallow, but his analysis echoes some of the key points raised by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their sadly influential 1985 manifesto for a postmodern reconfiguration of the post-’60s cultural Left, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics.

Laclau and Mouffe drew on Gramsci, along with a number of other early twentieth-century Marxist theorists of “hegemony,” to argue that politics, essentially, is an ongoing cultural process of imagining the meaning and boundaries of society. In this process, there are no privileged or a priori important sites of contestation—any issue at all can, by becoming politicized, open possibilities for the reconfiguration of our collective imaginary toward a more inclusive horizon. Therefore, Laclau and Mouffe insist, the Old Left’s focus on classism (seeing the working class as the “agent in which the fundamental impulse of social changes resides”), statism (the “idea that the expansion of the State is the panacea”), and economism (“particularly in its technocratic version”) should be abandoned.²

Rather than forming a cadre of technocratic experts capable of guiding the state into socialism for the benefit of the working class, the postmodern Left would “redimension the revolutionary act” to embrace endless, multifarious cultural contestations issuing from all sorts of social actors, with all manner of demands, many of which would be addressed to civil society at large (that is, to no one in particular—e.g., feminist injunctions to “men”) rather than addressed to, and therefore channeled and disciplined by, the state. The task of politics is not to translate into a rational, actionable, specific, and coherent program the diverse, unwieldly, contingent, and often fantastical desires of the popu­lace—much less to discover how their apparent irrationality has been produced by a distorted socioeconomic system that must be transformed—but to amplify and pursue those demands insofar as they destabilize the current order’s exclusions and hierarchies.

Published in the middle of the Reagan administration and amid the broader turn to neoliberalism throughout the West, Laclau and Mouffe’s book signaled the Left’s intellectual collapse and political surrender. Over the following decades, a constellation of activists framed as “Left,” because of its aesthetic and ethical symbolism, has taken root in many institutions and social movements, linking itself to everything from gay rights to feminism to advocacy for racial minorities, immigrants, and the environment. It has consolidated, in the process, a new moral “common sense” throughout, at least, the college-educated portion of Western societies. It has not, however, offered any substantive response to rising economic inequality, precarity and immiseration for working- and middle-class people, and has steadily lost power over flows of capital, goods, and labor—the levers of the economy. The “Gramscian” strategy represented not the Left’s ultimately successful continuation of its drive for revolution, but the abandonment of that goal, and indeed of the Left, which by relinquishing its vision of using economic power wielded by experts to remake society, abolished itself.

The Forgotten Managers

Rufo also has a second level of narrative, now focusing on more recent political history. In this account, the Left’s “Gramsican” domination of American culture, and thus of American politics, was threatened for the first time by Donald Trump’s initial presidential campaign. Trump’s campaign, Rufo argues, shook conservatives “out of their complacency with instinctual, if sometimes crude, cultural countermeasures.” But Trump’s wild energy now needs to be replaced with a steadier, more focused form of cultural-political struggle represented by Florida gover­nor Ron DeSantis.

Trump and DeSantis have often been subject to such contrasts. In them, Trump appears as the manifest unconscious of the conservative base, breaking through the ineffectual pieties of the GOP leadership—but, with little in the way of a “reality principle,” failing to accomplish more than the noisy expression of wishes (“the wall,” notably, was never built, much less paid for by Mexico). DeSantis, at least until recently, appeared to many of his supporters—and to many Democrats fearing his rise to national prominence—as a more sophisticated and mature version of Trump, someone who could give some expression of his ideas in actual governance.

Rufo’s version of this contrast, however, is revelatory—and incomplete. For him, the significance of Trump in 2016 was not his ability to bypass traditional culture war issues that tethered the Republican Party to a shrinking and aging electoral base. With varied success, for example, Trump courted constituencies long lost to the GOP, such as working-class nonvoters and African Americans, while declaring his disinterest in issues like abortion or, as he put it, where Caitlyn Jenner goes to the bathroom. He refocused attention instead on political-economic issues that had been neglected since the quixotic campaigns of Ross Perot in the 1990s—America’s uncertain place in the global economy, and the dangers of deindustrialization and mass unskilled immigration.

Trump was, of course, in his personal style and public discourse, obscene and offensive, making comments about women, minorities, etc., that to many progressives made him seem more, rather than less, reac­tionary on cultural issues than previous Republican candidates. Yet there did appear to be some reason—perhaps, in retrospect, only ever specious—to hope that he was deliberately disrupting the generation-old terms of America’s culture war in order to more thoroughly shatter the traditional GOP platform and generate interest in his new economic agenda among moderate and independent voters skeptical of Republicans-as-usual. It was not inconceivable that what we might call Trump’s war on official political culture—his manner that so many elites (and indeed ordinary Americans) found abhorrent—might also, notably in its humor, allow him to escape the pull of the official culture war (orga­nized around issues about which Trump—speaking for a large but poorly represented number of Americans—expressed glib disinterest).

What in fact happened, of course, is that Trump, rather than using his shocking cultural performances instrumentally to create a new discursive space through which to advance a policy agenda, was subsumed by his persona. Once elected president, he remained in a permanent cam­paign for attention, with tweeting and grandstanding at rallies becoming ends in themselves (this might well offer a warning to Rufo about the utility of his YouTube channel). His failure to distinguish means and ends, to put the shock-jock crudities in the service of his quickly forgot­ten substantive program, was of a piece with two other signal problems of Trump’s presidency.

First, his economic agenda—even if he had been serious about advancing it—could only ever have been enacted with the support of a large cadre of sympathetic policy advisers from the Beltway and, from civil society, professionals with various sorts of expertise. Such people did not exist, at least in not sufficient numbers. There was Trump, and a Trumpian electoral base, but no class of Trumpian experts from the liberal professions. While social conservatives have over the last few decades had some success in creating their own experts in the domain of the law, chiefly through the Federalist Society, there is little equivalent for other areas of government—they do not have a pool of talent, for example, to reorient the Department of Education or the National Endowment for the Arts along more conservative lines (and indeed the conservative line had long been that these bodies should be eliminated). And given that Trump’s nationalist economic agenda bucked the com­mon sense of the Republican Party, the free market think tanks aligned with the GOP did not offer him their pools of talent, and often did not have any of the sort Trump needed anyway.

The other critical problem was expressed by Steve Bannon, at the time of Trump’s election his chief adviser (the Rufo, as it were, to his DeSantis). Bannon claimed that the central issues on which Trump had been elected were retaking control of America’s borders, restoring eco­nomic sovereignty, and achieving what he called the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

This combination of goals ought to have struck listeners as outrageously contradictory. As Michael Cuenco has observed in a number of essays for American Affairs and the American Conservative, restoring national sovereignty over flows of people, goods, and capital—a worthy goal, and perhaps the most urgent political task as the illusions of a more peaceful world brought about by economic globalization and offshoring unravel—will, obviously, require a reorientation and likely an expansion of central government bureaucracies. Just as Trump’s 2016 agenda would have needed, for its implementation, a cohort of dedicated, pro­fessional, wonkish experts (the sort of people maligned by the “Dirtbag Left,” “Post-Left,” and “Dissident Right” alike as lanyard-wearing nerds), so too would the latter have needed the power and knowledge currently applied to less desirable ends by the federal bureaucratic Leviathan.

Slaying, or at any rate starving, this beast has long been a goal of conservatives who, because they cannot imagine anything like victory in the sense of the old, pre-Gramscian Left’s notion of “revolution” (the reorganization of society from the commanding heights of the economy by experts at the helm of the state), can only express, with varying pitches of rage, their wish to be at a greater remove from the reach of government power—even when they themselves are wielding it.

This small-government mentality is of a piece with cultural conservatives’ desire to retreat from the advance of secularism (and of racial integration in a previous era) into an archipelago of private or home schools. Trump alarmed progressives and liberals with talk (and, in the dismal farce of January 6, 2021, actions) that seemed, as countless com­mentators observed, “fascist”—yet the intellectual horizon of Bannon and others shaping his statements and policies remained bounded by traditional conservative hostility to the state. This represents an intel­lectual self-castration every bit as pathetic as the call to imitate the post-’60s Left in its exchange of real (state, economic) power for the dream-world of cultural victories.

Rufo doubles down on these fundamental errors of Trump and of the cultural Left—both of which can be said to have “won” in what turned out to be self-defeating ways. Like Trump, Rufo energizes an electoral base in ways that exceed and reroute traditional Republican appeals. Like the cultural Left, he pitches his appeals to the takeover of the insti­tutions inside and outside the state responsible for the production of our collective “common sense,” rather than to the commanding heights of economic power. Both of these moves, for all their apparent success, are self-defeating insofar as they neglect the formation and co-optation of the sort of professional cadres who could actually enact conservative policies.

Rufo is not leading the Right into a new, more serious and effective era, rescuing the rational kernel of Trump. He is exacerbating its most unreasoning aspects—and driving away the possibility of an alliance with the classes of people, white-collar knowledge workers, on whom any conservative program for reorienting the current culture would most depend for its success. He is extending into the realm of non-state institutions the error made by Bannon—framing as an enemy to be “deconstructed” the administrative, managerial, professional-expert co­horts whose support is necessary for actually governing the country rather than merely winning elections and securing ostensible culture war victories.

In an April 2022 speech at Hillsdale College, for example, Rufo applied Bannon’s self-contradictory political logic to the culture war in education, claiming, on the one hand, that the power of the state must be used to undo the damage done by un-American elites, even as, on the other, conservatives should weaken it. In his account, “elites . . . are undermining our country” and the task of the Right is to generate “popular support” to force their new political morality out of our institutions, at least in states that Republicans dominate. This populist takeover of institutions is to go hand-in-hand with a campaign to “de­centralize” them: “[i]t is centralization and bureaucratization that makes it possible for a minority of activists to take control.” While stirring up the public’s resentment of woke pedagogies of gender and race, there­fore, the Right must also advance “universal school choice—meaning that public education funding goes directly to parents rather than schools.” Moralist populism on the one hand, and neoliberal decentralization on the other—hardly a novel combination for Republicans!

Bannon, in a pathetic flourish of self-contradiction, had combined a forward-looking critique of neoliberalism, and an agenda for moving into a new economic era founded on a realistic assessment of American interests, with a paleoconservative hostility to the kind of governance that alone could realize his program. Rufo, more coherently, but in some ways more frustratingly, returns Republican energies to an up­dated version of “fusionism,” combining small-government calls for decentralization with the strategic use of state power as a bulwark against woke excesses. This vision is pitched to an aggrieved American people, victimized by “elites,” the professional class that serves them, and the centralized state. Improving conditions for ordinary Americans means, chiefly, protecting the people from the depredations of that elite-managerial-bureaucratic complex that fills our “knowledge-based insti­tutions”—not taking over that complex and using it to advance a healthier vision of the good.

Such a narrative is doubtless useful for organizing both voter turnout and activism against woke school boards—but it has nothing to offer—and only further alienates—white-collar, degreed workers who are members of particular professions whose autonomy and dignity has been threatened by the spread of wokeness. The Right usually sees such people, when it sees them at all, as enemies. Contempt for professors, experts, the PMC, the keyboard class, etc., is rife among conservative pundits (who of course are members, or aspiring members, of the same class). But white-collar knowledge workers—indeed, those who work in higher education particularly—are, for all their supposedly “Left” poli­tics, much closer in class interest and everyday intellectual orientation to a corporatist, solidaristic—and as Nick Burns has put it, “medieval”—mentality than are the transient, rootless, skill-less denizens of political consultancies and think tanks.

From my own experience, I can testify that many of my academic colleagues, although ideologically aligned with the cultural (and in some cases economic) Left, have been disheartened in recent years by the intensification of administrative control over institutions of higher edu­cation, of which the growth of the DEI bureaucracy is only perhaps the most polemically visible expression. There is a great deal of discontent, not only at the general immiseration of faculty caused by long-term trends toward short-term contracts, the decline of tenure, etc., but by the galling spectacle of unscholarly (yet often relatively well-paid) “di­versity” pseudo-experts siphoning resources and exercising power over faculty.

What is true of academics is true, mutatis mutandis, of other mem­bers of the maligned “PMC”—including of many bureaucrats, administrators, and managers. Conservative narratives that frame opposition to DEI or gender ideology as emanating primarily from parents concerned about their children miss the crucial fact that many professionals in bureaucratic institutions themselves see the new moral-political cam­paigns of the cultural Left sweeping through their workplaces as annoying-to-dangerous obstacles to their own work and as offenses against their professional amour propre. Moreover, even as they use state power in top-down, illiberal ways that imitate the woke Left (policing classroom speech, surveilling teachers, subjecting credentialed professionals to the moral demands of political appointees), Republican state governments inspired by Rufo act as if they remain paradoxically convinced that the vast majority of the state’s agents—its bureaucrats and experts—are inveterately hostile to their own constituents’ forms of life. They cannot imagine using state power except as a blunt instrument wielded against government employees.

Rufo and those linked to him often speak in a rhetoric that touches fascist themes, attacking the false and ineffectual neutrality of the modern state—even as they mobilize these themes for the most tra­ditional Republican conservative-liberal purposes. The source of the recent woke moral campaigns, however, is not the existence of an osten­sibly (mythically) “neutral” centralized public administration staffed by routine-following bureaucrats or a “neutral” public university staffed by ideologically perverse professors, but that such professionals are cowed and bullied into postures of polemical non-neutrality by a growing, extraneous class of commissars. The horizon of Rufo’s politics appears to be a changing of the commissars while wishing Leviathan would shrink. Meanwhile, the great untapped resources of our contemporary political moment—the sullen discontent of white-collar degreed experts who feel deprived of the material well-being and collective self-respect their professional paths had once plausibly promised, and harried by culture war shouting-matches from which liberalism had once offered them spaces of refuge—are wasted.

Whatever the local and temporary effectiveness of his appeals, orga­nized around narratives of reversing the spread of operationalized “queer theory” and “critical race theory,” Rufo’s larger strategies rely on a vision of American political history that is dangerously seductive for the Right, insofar as it gives a veneer of difference to its most familiar mistakes: seeing the nebulous domain of “culture” as the primary do­main of political work, confusing the vociferous expression of loves and hates with the securing of cultural power, and attacking—rather than co-opting—institutions and the class of experts who run them.

Liberal Neutrality in Myth and Reality

Part of the problem here is that there has been a misconstruction, across the American intellectual field, of the relationships between a number of phenomena. It has been made to seem that liberalism consists of saying nice, calm things in a gentle voice, and adhering to fictions of neutrality, while the Left subverts or rampages through the institutions. The coura­geous conservative fighters who cast off liberal shibboleths make loud noises, seize the institutions—and then, like the most hidebound classi­cal liberals, try to wind down the state in order to make way for individual families and private institutions such as Christian liberal arts colleges. The state appears as automatically in the service of the cultural “Left,” as a monstrosity that conservatives, however illiberal, can only try to contain, shrink, or disperse—not wield to escape the culture war through the formation of a new cross-class consensus.

But liberalism means, as Paul du Gay reminds us, that the state and its institutions can declare neutrality and indifference to questions of ultimate value—can tolerate, for example, religious pluralism—because it is so powerful, wields such an effective monopoly of violence, and because it can prevent these questions from rising to the dangerous pitch that would make them appear political. Liberalism can only flourish where Leviathan—an irresistible state staffed by a competent and loyal bureaucracy—rules; or rather, liberalism and Leviathan are one and the same. Moreover, as du Gay insists in his neo-Weberian analysis of the “spirit” of state bureaucrats, the professionals who serve public institu­tions, such people have a particular form of life and ethos without which the modern state cannot function.

Non-state institutions, by extension, possess in a liberal regime what could be called secondary or derivative neutrality, downwind from the neutrality-as-hegemony possessed by the state. This secondary neutrali­ty consists in institutions being permitted by the state to pursue dedicat­ed ends—promoting aesthetic, scientific, religious, or similar missions—which are understood to be nonpolitical insofar as they do not rise to the level of partisan intensity that would make the advancement of their correlative worldviews a matter of violent conflict with other, alternative views (the staff of museums of contemporary art do not assault the staff of museums of classical art; nor do Episcopalians drown Catholics in a liberal regime). When the regime is functioning normally, or properly, these two forms of neutrality—the one defined by the state’s monopoly on the use of force, the other defined by non-state institutions’ acceptance of the former—tend to go unnoticed or to be taken as a natural and inevitable feature of the world rather than as a special, historically contingent achievement, one that reverses the general tendency of politics toward the violent clash of insuperably opposed worldviews.

The survival of a liberal regime depends on the continual reproduction of cohorts of professionals who work for the state as public servants and for these non-state institutions as managers of artistic or scientific culture and knowledge production, equipped with their own special, historically contingent mental horizons. The state bureaucrat, the agent of the hegemonically neutral state, must act on its behalf, seeing its continuing supremacy as the good to which his office aims. The non-state white-collar professional, likewise, must see the particular aim of his own institution, whatever it is, as both the paramount purpose of his own office and as distinctly nonpolitical—such that he cannot be seduced into acting either as if his institution were higher than the state or that its purpose was to be coordinated with it and other institutions in an overarching campaign to reorder society. The state bureaucrat is committed to the autonomy of the state vis-à-vis the moral and religious (and potentially violently political) commitments of non-state actors whom the state must dominate; the non-state professional is committed to the autonomy of his institution vis-à-vis the political demands that may issue from the state or the passions of the multitude.

These notions of neutrality and autonomy are the forgotten, underly­ing assumptions that found the modern administrative state and its corollary form of civil society. The wave of wokeness in recent years has exposed their vulnerability. Conservatives are right to seek to roll back this wave but, in a second step—to the extent that they still have any investment in our traditional manner of government—must address these vulnerabilities, which, so far, the only successful forms of anti-woke politics have worsened rather than alleviated. Or they must give an account of how a post-liberal order would offer a way out of the present impasse while improving on the legacy of liberalism.

It is obvious that the professions, including academia, proved inca­pable and perhaps to some extent unwilling to defend themselves from wokeness. Institutions from universities to museums to medical associa­tions overthrew established professional norms, and their commitments to their own autonomy and neutrality, in order to join in a nationwide political campaign aimed at the installation of a new official morality. Many centrist, moderate liberals—and many traditional conservatives—have still not measured the depth of this disaster, which has, rightly, disillusioned many Americans with the foundational compacts of our regime.

Rufo is in that measure correct to apply an assemblage of tactics taken from the cultural Left and social-conservative Right to organize an anti-woke campaign. Tragically, however, his tactics, mirroring those of his enemies, subject the professions to a further round of politicization and top-down assaults on their autonomy—their basic sense of self-respect and capacity to organize and police themselves, as they pursue their legitimate aims. To which he might well, and again rightly, respond that these professions have shown themselves unworthy of autonomy. But the task of ending the culture war, and of escaping a cycle of woke and anti-woke polemical campaigns through our institutions that con­tinually wear away at Americans’ shrinking faith in their legitimacy, requires moving beyond Rufo’s tactics, his visions of history, and his anti-institutional appeals, and toward a re-founding of the basic compact between the state and the professions.

Winning a Culture War

Nearly a decade ago, Trump understood that while the Republican Party leadership was prepared to shift toward what it perceived as the center on immigration, there was an enormous untapped popular dis­content not only with levels of illegal immigration across the southern border, but with the basic neoliberal political-economic arrangements that both Republicans and Democrats had come to accept since the days of Reagan and Clinton. Toward the end of Trump’s presidency, Rufo and DeSantis understood that, in spite of its apparent success at rapidly capturing nearly every significant institution in our common civic life, wokeness, at least in its most extreme forms, remained unpopular with a broad, electorally mobilizable, majority of Americans. The political appeals of Trump, on the one hand, and of Rufo and Desantis, on the other, were made over the heads of supposed elites, experts, and knowledge workers, to ordinary citizens. They were made against not only particular hated policies, but against the whole apparatus of cen­tralized administrative systems bearing down on those ordinary people.

This has been electorally effective (although at least for Trump, not consistently so) and activates legitimate dissatisfaction. But because such platforms cannot mobilize the equally real and legitimate dissatisfactions of professionals who might—if rightly appealed to and incentivized—support a campaign to re-autonomize and re-neutralize our institutions, they are unable to deliver the results they promise. These results, whether building the wall and restoring manufacturing industries, or returning schools and hospitals to competently performing their core missions, cannot be delivered without the support of such professionals. Right-wing hopes of building new, parallel institutions are at best a long‑term solution and at worst a pipe-dream (consider how pathetically ineffective such institutions as Princeton’s James Madison Program have been at preserving a conservative presence in academia) as are aspirations to “decentralize” the problem away.

Effectively mobilizing the until-now largely mute or ineffectively grumbling dissatisfaction with wokeness within the professions will be difficult—particularly for the new brand of conservative politicians and activists who have made attacks on the professoriate and expert class part of their electorally winning brand. Yet Rufo and his allies ought to ask themselves what sort of academics or other professionals would be willing to align themselves with their project in its current form? It is not only ideological hostility to “conservative values” or any substantive commitment to wokeness, or fear of professional consequences (being “canceled”), that holds back such people from working with the Right. The latter explicitly targets them in its moral-political rhetoric, attacks their material interests (e.g., tenure), and threatens to subject them to a new iteration of the humiliations that emanate from DEI and HR de­partments, simply from a different direction. Successful governance, the translation of populist desires into actionable strategies for reshaping the country, will require mobilizing not only an electoral coalition that can be riled up against “elites,” but also mobilizing a large percentage of the professional and expert classes by appealing to their own increasingly thwarted desires for dignity.

So, too, will the survival of liberalism. Ensuring the latter—to the extent that anyone on the right still wishes to do so—is not a matter of calling activists like Rufo to task for the illiberal polemical intensity of their intervention in institutions previously given a wide berth by legis­latures and trusted to govern themselves. These institutions have patently violated that trust, and deserve—need—state intervention. That intervention, however, if the culture war is to be ended, must be calculated not merely to impose on beleaguered professionals an anti-woke version of “wokeness” overseen by “civic literary” experts, but to restore the possibility of professional autonomy and of making institu­tions capable of better resisting polemical campaigns issuing from civil society in the future. It will mean thinking creatively and collaboratively with leading figures throughout American institutional life—with elites—about how to reenergize the self-governing capacities of pro­fessional bodies, to give new life to the implicit and largely unexamined corporatism that has made our liberal regime, until recently, an enduring and popular form of government.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VII, Number 3 (Fall 2023): 206–24.

Notes