We have come a long way — and all in the wrong direction, from religion being protected to being penalized.

How did this happen?  A reading of Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution is most insightful.

Rufo begins by describing a person, totally unknown to me, by the name of Herbert Marcuse, who is behind the cultural revolution that has gripped America since 1967.  Marcuse was convinced that America had become a repressive, intolerant society that  promised freedom of conscience, speech, and assembly while depriving citizens of the mechanism for making those rights meaningful. 

Eventually, Marcuse’s writing became the blueprint for the “New Left,” as the new proletariat substituted race for class in preparation of the revolution, which became an instant success.

The next phase of the revolution became known as the “Long March” through America’s institutions.  What began at the university and college level spread like wildfire and came to encompass virtually all of society, including the corporate and media world, reaching the pivotal conquest of The New York Times. 

Even bureaucrats working in government agencies, unions, and the military have now come under the sway of CRT and DIE as the new ideological philosophy driving our institutions.  Because the long march was subtle, it also went unnoticed.

After capturing the various institutions enumerated above, the long march began to infect the state.  Grant-making in education, humanities, sciences — i.e., the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Arts — also became infected.  This was happening while I was a Board of Advisers member of the state of Georgia’s Museum of Art.  Though I knew we could use the money, I was opposed to the concept because I knew that tax money was being used and would eventually be spent with abandon.  Nothing in government ever stops.  It simply grows, like “Topsy.”

Even worse, the bureaucracy eventually does what it wants because its members cannot be fired.  Over time, politicians come in and out of office, giving “worker bees” power over the “queen bees.”

How did CRT and DIE sneak into the corporate world of capitalism?  Rufo believes that corporations no longer reside in the domain of the conservative establishment.  He writes that culture captures the mind, and politics follows.  Because business always knew there was a cost, executives now treat it as another cost of doing business, but such a cavalier attitude fails to recognize how serious the ultimate effect is when the lines of demarcation are ignored.  As for the university, Rufo suggests that it no longer exists to discover knowledge, which has been replaced by “critical consciousness.”  The profit motive is out the window and has been replaced by “diversity and inclusion.”

My personal view is that directors have failed to live up to their ethical and trust responsibilities.

Image: Praveenp via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).