The Right Way to Fight Illiberalism

BARI WEISS, FREE PRESS   JAN 27/24

Christopher Rufo, left, and Yascha Mounk. (Illustration by The Free Press; photos via Getty)

In the past few months, many people were shocked to see the moral rot that has taken hold inside American universities.

For example, they were surprised to learn that:

• A tenured Columbia professor praised Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel as “awesome.”
• At UC–Irvine, a professor said “the Zionists have been exposed for the criminals and bloodthirsty animals that they are. This is a gift from Allah to the world.”
• At Virginia Tech, a professor said Hezbollah terrorism is just “a form of anti-imperialism that unfortunately the Western left shies away from too much.”
• And as Francesca Block of The Free Press reported this week, an NYU adjunct professor told students at The New School “we know it’s not true” that Hamas committed rape and beheaded babies on October 7. He even jokes about being antisemitic.

I could go on and on. We’ve covered many of these stories at The Free Press.

As antisemitism has spread at our universities, many started asking how this could happen when campuses are famously sensitive to microaggressions. How could schools that provide students emotional support animals and cry closets allow this kind of thing?

Perhaps DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—wasn’t actually about those words, but about something else. It’s about replacing the principles of good-faith debate and truth-seeking scholarship with an illiberal orthodoxy that puts a premium on identity over ideas.

Well now, it seems, people have finally had enough. States are second-guessing DEI’s place on college campuses and beyond. On January 1, a Texas law shutting down DEI offices at all state colleges went into effect.

In Utah, Governor Spencer Cox—just three years after championing DEI—now rails against colleges that mandate faculty and staff sign diversity statements as a condition of employment. The University of Utah has since eliminated all diversity statements and questions in its hiring process.

In fact, lawmakers in more than a dozen red states have either passed or proposed higher education reform packages that curtail DEI initiatives.

Among them, of course, is Florida, which passed the Stop Woke Act nearly two years ago. Although a court placed part of that law on hold, the State Board of Education this month approved rules that limit public funding of DEI on college campuses.

Our guests on this episode of Honestly, Christopher Rufo and Yascha Mounk, say the DEI ideological overhaul has consumed our schools for quite some time. The question now is: What should we do about it?

Those are not questions with simple answers, and certainly not ones on which Christopher and Yascha agree.

Christopher is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a board member at New College of Florida, and maybe the country’s most influential conservative activist and biggest cheerleader of Florida’s Stop Woke Act. He thinks that using the power of the law to stop DEI is essential.

Yascha, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an international affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University, is on the other side of the political spectrum.

While he thinks that DEI—and woke ideology more broadly—is concerning, he doesn’t think the answer to its illiberalism should come in the form of bans and legislation.

Christopher and Yascha both recently published books that investigate the changing cultural trends of the American left. Christopher’s book is America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. And Yascha is the author of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.

What I appreciate about this debate on Honestly is that while each has a different perspective, they don’t dismiss each other’s arguments (well, mostly anyway).

I talked to them about how we arrived at this new doctrine on power, identity, and justice, and what the right way forward should be. Below are some highlights from our debate, but you can listen to the full version of the conversation here:

The Right Way to Fight Illiberalism: Christopher Rufo and Yascha Mounk Debate The Free Press Episode

On how to describe DEI’s capture of higher education:

Bari Weiss: Some people call it wokeness, which sort of automatically brands you as being on the right. Other people call it critical theory or identity politics or postmodern neo-Marxism. There’s a lot of disagreement about how we actually describe this thing that all of us are witnessing. So I want to start there. What is it that we’re actually talking about?

Christopher Rufo: I think it’s an ideological syndrome. So it’s a cluster of traits, ideas, concepts, narratives, and bureaucratic arrangements that have really revolutionized American society over the past 50 years. I trace the immediate origins back to the year 1968, and the argument that I make in my book, America’s Cultural Revolution, is that all of the ideas from the radical left of that era—the late 1960s, early 1970s—have infiltrated universities and then started to move laterally through bureaucracies in the state sector, in K–12 education, in HR departments, and even the Fortune 100 companies. And what you see over the course of this process is some very kind of multisyllabic, complex ideological concepts from the originators of these ideas in that period. And now they’ve filtered out through bureaucratic language, through euphemisms, to become what we now know as DEI. That’s the ultimate bureaucratic expression of these ideologies.

CONTINUE