The Conservative case for revolution – UnHerd

Regardless, America s Cultural Revolution reads like a pivot point in American political discourse. I would have liked a glimmer or two of reflection on why leftist ideas gained such traction; Rufo s facility for material analysis would surely stretch to this, and the findings need not be in his opponents favour. Ultimately, though, reflection is not what the book is for. Rather, it s a multifaceted political intervention. For while those who enjoy culture war content may enjoy it simply as partisan red meat, its accessibility means those on the Right still bewildered by how they came to be so dispossessed no longer have an excuse for ignorance. And those conservatives with a serious interest in how knowledge and power operate in post-liberal politics can read it as an instruction manual.

Members of the Old Left, meanwhile, can mourn the theft of their movement by bourgeois nihilists, who commandeered the institutions of power in their name and are now retooling them into a shamelessly partisan bureaucracy of weaponised prejudice. As for those nihilists, should any take the time to read it, America s Cultural Revolution is a shot across the bows. It declares, first and centrally, that the politics of negation will devour itself through negation. Troy may be sacked, but Clytemnestra waits at home, with a smile on her face and a dagger in her belt.

And it declares, further, that conservatives (or some of them, anyway) have belatedly grasped the new rules of engagement and are mobilising in turn. The citadel may have fallen, the temples looted. But in America s Cultural Revolution, Rufo declares to the victorious New Left: we are the besiegers now. It s your turn to try to hold the walls.

via unherd.com

Fight fire with fire. (But sometimes that burns down the whole town.)