This weekend, Bari Weiss hosted a debate between me and Johns Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk on “the right way to fight illiberalism.” There were points of agreement, but ultimately, the debate diverged as we considered the practical necessities for winding down repressive DEI bureaucracies. My approach was more aggressive; Mounk’s was more cerebral. The consensus in Bari Weiss’ comments section was that I had the upper hand, but you can listen and make your own determination.
The following are highlights selected by The Free Press:
On how to describe DEI’s capture of higher education:
Bari Weiss: Some people call it wokeness, which sort of automatically brands you as being on the right. Other people call it critical theory or identity politics or postmodern neo-Marxism. There’s a lot of disagreement about how we actually describe this thing that all of us are witnessing. So I want to start there. What is it that we’re actually talking about?
Christopher Rufo: I think it’s an ideological syndrome. So it’s a cluster of traits, ideas, concepts, narratives, and bureaucratic arrangements that have really revolutionized American society over the past 50 years. I trace the immediate origins back to the year 1968, and the argument that I make in my book, America’s Cultural Revolution, is that all of the ideas from the radical left of that era—the late 1960s, early 1970s—have infiltrated universities and then started to move laterally through bureaucracies in the state sector, in K–12 education, in HR departments, and even the Fortune 100 companies. And what you see over the course of this process is some very multisyllabic, complex ideological concepts from the originators of these ideas in that period. And now they’ve filtered out through bureaucratic language, through euphemisms, to become what we now know as DEI. That’s the ultimate bureaucratic expression of these ideologies.
You can call it—any of those labels that you just suggested, I think, are correct in general, at least facets of this ideology. But at this point, it’s not just an idea. It’s actually an administrative, cultural, and bureaucratic power that has manifested itself and entrenched itself as a new, let’s say, hegemonic cultural force in American life.
Yascha Mounk: I think the best way to boil down the ideas of this ideology is in three propositions. Number one, that identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation are the key prism for understanding society. But to understand how we talk to each other today, or to understand who won the last election, or to understand how political revolutions happen, you have to look at things like race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Number two, that universalist values and neutral rules, like those enshrined in the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are just meant to pull the wool over people’s eyes, that they actually were always designed to perpetuate forms of racist and sexist discrimination, that as Derrick Bell, the founder of critical race theory, claimed, America in the year 2000 remained as racist as it had been in 1950 and 1850.
