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Refusing the “Great Refusal”


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The American Mind

Daniel J. Mahoney

Sept. 6 2023

An anti-woke manifesto.

As the disciples of the New Left gained purchase over the great bureaucracies, they advanced the revolution through a process of relentless negation; it gnawed, chewed, smashed, and disintegrated the entire system of values that came before it. And their strategy was ingenious: the capture of America’s institutions was so gradual and bureaucratic, it largely escaped the notice of the American public, until it burst into consciousness following the death of George Floyd. – Christopher F. Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023)

o paraphrase Karl Marx, a specter is haunting the United States and the Western world more broadly: the specter of woke despotism. Most disturbingly, its epicenter is in the United States, a land once gloriously immune from the ideological and totalitarian temptations that so haunted and deformed European politics in the 20th century. As Christopher Rufo demonstrates in his indispensable new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, the woke revolution has been gaining traction for a very long time and is now on the cusp of “controlling everything,” from our universities and corporations to the prestige media to the increasingly censorious network of “social media” that stands in for civic discourse in the United States today.

The summer of 2020 brought the nihilistic face of this cultural revolution into the open by means of its frontal assault on what was left of the Old America. Statues of the great and good (among them Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, St. Junípero Serra, Teddy Roosevelt, and Quaker abolitionists) were toppled or defaced, as were those of men deemed hopelessly evil—foremost among them the Confederate generals who, while fighting for an unjust cause, often displayed impressive courage and personal integrity. Cities burned as radicals, much of the political class, and almost all the Democratic Party demanded the “defunding” of the police, an idea at once preposterous and profoundly immoral because of the harm it wreaks on the weak and vulnerable. The United States was denounced as “systematically racist,” as fundamentally unjust and indeed genocidal, and thus beyond political repair. Civic courage to confront this scandalous falsehood was in woefully short supply as intellectuals, journalists, and politicians competed to mouth revolutionary slogans worthy of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks, excusing violence and mayhem on a mass scale. Too many who knew better remained silent.

(Snip)

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