Title: A Quiet Revolution, Not Politics as Usual
Original CoS Document (slug): a-quiet-revolution-that-we-must-resist
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Created: 2023-07-26 12:47:26
Updated: 2023-08-08 03:00:03
Published: 2023-08-01 00:00:00
Converted: 2025-04-14T21:26:05.710613393
I’m reading Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. It is a story of Marxist destruction and counter-revolutionary hope.
The “revolution” in America, Rufo says, began, like most corrosive things here, in the 1960s. The names may or may not be familiar: Bernardine Dohrn, Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, Bill Ayers: the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and Students for a Democratic Society.
Marcuse is the central early figure. He hoped for a revolution that would undercut and dissolve everything about the West, especially in America. Late in his career, after what he had hoped would be a quiet revolution turned instead to riots, bombings, and street violence, he turned to transforming America’s institutions, principally education.
By the 1970s, as I was beginning my journey through higher education, his followers had infiltrated the Ivy League and the elite state institutions, the University of California system, in particular, and upper-tier universities on both coasts.
“Beginning in the late 1970s,” Rufo writes, “the entire constellation of New Left Radicals, from the graduate students of Herbert Marcuse to the urban guerrillas of the Weather Underground, shed the trappings of the counterculture and returned to the place where their activism had once begun: the university campus.” (Rufo's chapter titled, “The Long March through the Institutions” is especially informative about this strategic shift.)
Marcuse had urged his followers to move past the childish “rebellion of the [early] radical movement and turn to the education system as their primary ‘counter-institution.’”
“This transition was nearly invisible.” Their success was overwhelming. They became “idealistic students” who ultimately became ideologically committed professors.
This is not a matter of traditional partisan politics. The influence of Marcuse and his kind is pervasive, and we must resist it with an Article V Convention of States.
“According to survey data, 24 percent of college professors in the social sciences self-identify as ‘radical,’ 21 percent as ‘activist,’ and 18 percent as ‘Marxist.” The total proportion of radical professors to others in this field is 63 percent, a strong majority.
“In another study of faculty partisan affiliation at forty leading universities, one researcher found . . . the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty reaching 8:1 in political science, 17:1 in history, 44:1 in sociology, 48:1 in English, and 108:1 in race and gender studies.”
This data is current, and “the American university is now a ‘counter-institution’ driven by the ideology of the New Left and the critical theories.”
The result is the suppression of conservative speech on campuses. And as most of us know, the result more broadly is to be felt in the government’s efforts to use its powers to control the flow of information to consumers of social and popular media.
Allow me to state the obvious: universities influence everything about American society.
A corollary: since a majority of professors are Marxists, their activism deriving from Marcuse and his ilk, Marxism influences everything about American society, however quietly, however violently.
A further corollary, perhaps also obvious: since Marxists are revolutionaries, they aim to destroy American institutions from education outwards.
A deduction: they aim to destroy America, and have the means to do so through the pervasive influence of at least three to four generations of graduates in every academic field: politics, medicine, law, education, communication, business, the social sciences, and the whole regime of critical studies that have grown up in university departments–critical legal theory, critical race theory, queer theory, critical gender studies, and so on and on.
Graduates enter the professions, and in positions of influence push for radical change.
The point is the disintegration of every distinction and the inversion of every value from the separation of powers to the innocence of children in traditional families. Male and female, adult and child, good and evil, education and indoctrination, law and lawlessness exchange places.
There is a “perverse spirit” afoot in our country (Isaiah 19:14).
While I moved from undergraduate study in English to graduate study in theology and later to a doctorate in nineteenth-century English literature, the university as a cultural influence was moving to the Far Left. I knew little of this. I was learning, on the contrary, to love fine writing and to admire the greats of Western literature. I was studying the Bible and striving to understand it with more depth and intensity. University culture was moving in one direction, and I was going in the other.
Thanks be to God.
It is important for people of goodwill and like mind to resist the insidious destruction of American ideals and liberties, to affirm equality, the dignity and value of individuals, and every protection offered by The Bill of Rights.
Join the Convention of States movement. When enough of us move together, we will have the power, granted by Article V of the Constitution, to call a convention apart from Congress, to amend the Constitution with hedges against abuses of federal power. We have the power to diminish the power of federal agencies, curtail budgetary excesses, and set limits on the length of time elected and unelected officials can be in office.
It is necessary to resist, to be counter-revolutionary. We have the power to resist, consciously, actively, and legally. We have the Constitution as our ally, which the leftists attempt to set aside. Let us all lean into the work of resisting America’s Cultural Revolution.