Decoding America's Cultural Revolution

Christopher Rufo channels a voice akin to an unsentimental anthropologist documenting the rise and spread of an ideological pathogen.

The air is thick with the crisscrossing dialectics of culture wars, identity skirmishes, and the perpetual entropy of the American experiment—a landscape both bleak and cacophonous, yet teeming with the mad vitality of a species grappling with its own ideological creation myths. Into this maelstrom steps Christopher Rufo, a man who might just as well be described as a spelunker diving headlong into the dripping caverns of America’s discontent, armed not with a torch but with a laser, slicing through the miasma with the precision of a surgeon who also happens to moonlight as a polemicist of the first order. His book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, is less a work of history than a high-voltage map—a charting of power flows, ideological tributaries, and the subterranean pipelines feeding the roiling geysers of our national unrest.

If one were inclined to dismiss Rufo as a provocateur, his prose stands as a rebuttal—sober yet alive with a tension that suggests he is all too aware of the stakes. This is not the droning monotone of a bureaucratic postmortem, nor is it the fevered screed of a demagogue. Instead, Rufo channels a voice akin to an unsentimental anthropologist documenting the rise and spread of an ideological pathogen, tracing its origins back to the hothouses of academe where critical theory germinated, blossomed, and metastasized into the many-headed hydra now known as "woke culture."

Rufo’s account begins—as all revolutions do—with a cadre of intellectuals, disillusioned yet determined, huddling around the flickering embers of Marxist thought in the wake of its collapse as a viable political project. The Frankfurt School—a name that conjures images of smoke-filled seminar rooms, where terms like "hegemony" and "praxis" waft through the air alongside the bitter scent of over-roasted coffee—is Rufo’s patient zero. He draws crisp, incisive lines from Adorno’s dialectical pessimism and Marcuse’s "Great Refusal" to the postmodern bricolage of Foucault and Derrida, whose influence on the American academy—Rufo suggests with persuasive clarity—acted like a series of detonations, blowing apart the sturdy edifices of liberal democracy and replacing them with the labyrinthine, often self-cannibalizing ethos of identity politics.

But Rufo does not merely tread the well-worn paths of intellectual genealogy. His true genius lies in his ability to illuminate the mechanisms by which these abstract ideas—heady, jargon-laden, seemingly hermetically sealed within the ivy-covered walls of elite universities—cascaded into mainstream culture. Here is where America’s Cultural Revolution achieves a kind of vertiginous brilliance, revealing the conduits by which critical theory seeped into HR departments, public school curricula, corporate boardrooms, and even the military-industrial complex. Rufo's depiction of this infiltration is at once meticulous and electrifying, akin to watching a time-lapse video of vines overtaking a skyscraper.

If Rufo’s narrative possesses a villain, it is not a singular person but a hydra-headed apparatus—the nonprofit-industrial complex, the DEI bureaucracies, the self-anointed priesthood of "experts" who traffic in guilt and grievance like medieval indulgence peddlers. Yet, Rufo’s tone is less accusatory than diagnostic. He seems less interested in hurling invective at the architects of this cultural revolution than in exposing their methods, their playbooks, their ideological DNA. This is where the book ascends from mere cultural critique to something resembling strategic intelligence—a guide not merely for understanding the revolution but for countering it.

Rufo’s prose, while occasionally dense with detail, possesses an underlying rhythm, a kinetic drive that propels the reader forward even as the subject matter grows increasingly complex. His chapter on the "capture" of American public education, for example, reads like a thriller—a step-by-step account of how seemingly innocuous concepts like "social-emotional learning" and "equity" serve as Trojan horses for a wholesale re-engineering of societal norms. Likewise, his exploration of corporate America’s capitulation to "woke capitalism" crackles with urgency, painting a picture of a system wherein power dynamics have been inverted, with CEOs and shareholders genuflecting before activists wielding the cudgel of social justice rhetoric.

And yet, for all its rigor and incisiveness, America’s Cultural Revolution is not a despairing book. Rufo’s closing chapters, in which he outlines a roadmap for counter-revolution, pulse with a quiet optimism. He calls for a reassertion of what he terms "cultural confidence"—a return to the foundational principles of the American project: individual liberty, equal opportunity, and a shared commitment to the pursuit of truth. This is no mere nostalgia for a mythical golden age but a clarion call to rediscover the animating ideals that made the United States, in Rufo’s view, a beacon of freedom in a world too often shrouded in darkness.

The book’s final pages leave the reader with a sense of purpose, a conviction that the cultural revolution Rufo so meticulously dissects is neither inevitable nor irreversible. It is, instead, a challenge—one that demands courage, clarity, and an unyielding commitment to the principles that underpin a free society. For Rufo, this is not merely an intellectual exercise but an existential battle, one in which every citizen has a stake.

In America’s Cultural Revolution, Christopher Rufo has given us a work that is both a mirror and a map—a reflection of the fractures that threaten to splinter the nation and a guide for those who would seek to mend them. It is a book that demands to be read, debated, and acted upon—a clarion call for a nation at a crossroads. And in its pages, one finds not just a critique but a spark—the possibility, however faint, of renewal.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human (Angelico), Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.