From a must-read interview with Christopher Rufo:

Daniel Miller: One of the persistent issues faced by opposition activists is the problem of defining the contemporary regime. You’ve successfully popularized the term Critical Race Theory to characterize the current regime ideology, but how do you see the relationship between this ideology and the big corporate and political forces promoting it? Do you view them as motivated by sincere ideological commitments?

Christopher Rufo: There are the true believers, but for most people, it is a rationalization. The executives at Xerox and Walmart are not sincerely committed to CRT, but the entire incentive structure that surrounds them creates an enormous pressure to adopt these beliefs, at least as status markers or reputational insurance policies. It is much easier to bend the knee for George Floyd and write a $10 million check to BLM than to say “no.” For conservatives, we have to realize that the game is not to debate the epiphenomenon of ideology, but to relentlessly unearth, attack and dislodge the broader structural phenomenon that underpins it. This means attacking it on moral, aesthetic, financial, legal, and bureaucratic grounds, in addition to the more straightforward style of intellectual debate. Governor DeSantis understands this better than anyone. He demonstrated in his fight against Disney that conservatives have leverage against corporate power, as long as they are willing to use it. The trick is to replicate that strategy across multiple domains and to shift incentives by changing the law.

More:

Mark Granza: You’re often credited with single-handedly convincing President Trump to issue an Executive Order against CRT. Many Trump supporters today wish he would have been harsher against the Left during his time in office. Where do you think the next Republican candidate should improve on Trump’s policies with regard to the larger fight against Progressivism?

Christopher Rufo: President Trump was a wrecking ball to American politics. This was salutary. It shook conservatives out of an old consensus and opened up new possibilities for public policy. Trump listened to my call on CRT in the federal government and took immediate action against it. Unfortunately, this was in the final months of his term and President Biden reversed it on his first day in office. But more importantly, Trump changed the precedent and validated bringing the culture war to the federal bureaucracy. I have spent the past year thinking about how to expand on this campaign for the next time a Republican assumes the presidency. As we approach 2024, I will be publishing a policy paper on “eliminating left-wing ideologies in the federal government,” using the power of the presidency to fundamentally reshape the bureaucracy with a six-part program targeting budget, content, personnel, grantmaking, and oversight. The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it. We could easily wipe out a significant portion of the infrastructure for the left-wing ideologies within the federal bureaucracy and within the network of federal grantees and contractors, which would shift American politics in the right direction.

Read the whole thing. Rufo is one of the most important political actors in America today. If the US conservative movement is going to have a future, it’s going to be created by Chris Rufo and those in his mold.

I’m in Budapest now, getting my visa situation for the European Union sorted. What Rufo says above reminds me very much of the strategy of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. I say that because I’ve been reading a book called Orban Land, by a Danish journalist, Lasse Skytt, who is based in Hungary. I haven’t finished the book yet, but Skytt seems sympathetic to Orban, though at times is critical. Skytt writes in the beginning of the book that it took living here in Hungary for him to understand why so many Hungarians like Orban. Skytt quotes the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, who says that in the modern world, “freedom” has become emptied out. We are free, but for what? All that’s left is technocracy.

Orban’s Hungary rejects that. Skytt talks about the 2015 migration crisis, and what he saw it did to the eastern Hungarian city of Debrecen, where he was living. It was a disaster, with a massive brawl spilling out of the refugee camp there, with mobs running through the street shouting “Allahu akbar” and starting fires. The riot police had to be called in. This was the kind of thing that turned Orban into an anti-migration hard-liner. And his people approved.

He goes on to say that Western Europeans criticized the Hungarians for having a “lack of solidarity” with the migrants. This is true, says Skytt, but that doesn’t mean they lack solidarity. It’s just a different kind of solidarity than is held by western Europeans. Hungarians, like others in Central Europe, believe in solidarity, but they believe that their primary solidarity should be with their neighbors — that is, with each other. The Bulgarian social scientist Ivan Krastev calls this a “clash of solidarities.”

Skytt’s book came out in 2019, long before the Ukrainian war. In it, he says western Europeans were asking back in 2015 why Hungarians, who benefited from the charity of European countries welcoming them as refugees after the 1956 Soviet invasion, were being uncharitable to the migrants. The answer is simple: because not all migrants are the same. The 2015 migrants weren’t fellow Europeans seeking shelter. They were people from Africa and the Middle East who hold a different religion (in most cases) and a very different culture from the Hungarians and other peoples of Central Europe. Large numbers of migrants threatened their social stability and even their identity. Remember: clash of solidarities. You could see this again with the Hungarians welcoming Ukrainian war refugees this year. Christian Europeans can integrate much easier in Hungary than Afghani Muslims.

Skytt, quoting Krastev again, says that the general Hungarian approach is also a reaction to the 1960s and 1970s European liberal program focusing on expanding the rights of minorities. The Hungarians under Orban rather “are attempting to restore the rights of majorities.”

That strikes a resonant chord in me regarding our situation in the US. The American Left has so much contempt for the values of the majority in its own country. It has gone so far in pushing gender ideology and Critical Race Theory that now ordinary Americans are afraid to send their children to public schools, because they don’t know what kind of malignant nonsense they are going to be fed there. The Left has created a situation in which 58 percent of the US population — non-Hispanic whites — are demonized within elite networks and institutions. They do not believe in solidarity, the Left thinkers; they believe in building solidarity by demonizing races and groups that they hate — and call the attempt of those people to defend themselves and their interests, as any other ethnic group would, intolerable bigotry.

The US president famously called transgender rights “the civil rights issue of our time.” What this means in practice is that parents now have to worry about their children being taught queer theory in first grade. Now we have to face the fact that this weirdo is the new normal:

It’s official. As of June 19th, I now serve my nation as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy in the Department of Energy. pic.twitter.com/zLq3Bf97X2

— Sam Brinton (@sbrinton) June 29, 2022

Don’t like it? What are you, a bigot?! Off with your head!

Last year, Mary Harrington, a self-described “reactionary feminist” and one of the most exciting thinkers and writers around, penned this essay about how the Sexual Revolution killed feminism. In it, she writes:

The transgender writer Jennifer Finney Boylan recently observed that the campaigns for medical abortion and transgender surgeries have a great deal in common. This is correct. Both causes champion the right of atomised individuals to exert absolute mastery over their bodies. They are not feminist but bio-libertarian.

I disagree with Boylan only on whether this is desirable. Because conditions have now changed again. And our norms and laws haven’t caught up yet.

Bio-libertarian causes may have appeared in women’s emancipatory interests, in a broadly democratic consumer society. That era retained some shared social and cultural norms, along with a sincere belief that things could go on getting better, richer, freer, more comfortable forever. As such, working loose those old-fashioned social norms and physiological givens seemed an unalloyed good.

That world is gone. There are no shared norms. We’re past peak oil. Living standards are falling. So is life expectancy. Variously in the name of economic progress, digital disintermediation, Covid, net zero or the Great Reset, the middle class is being methodically cannibalised to shore up the 1%. Pluralism has birthed a Hobbesian moral anarchy, held together only by the technologies that mediate our meme wars.

This is the new normal and it’s not going away. Against this backdrop, the interests of men and women no longer align with the bio-libertarian agenda of mastery over the body.

There’s a reason I called Viktor Orban earlier this week “Defender of the Normies.” In his latest Substack newsletter (subscribe, you!), my podcasting colleague Kale Zelden writes about the absence of norms:

Norms are models, patterns, and standards. Not to be too cute, but they are normal, as in typical and everyday. But even “typical” evokes type or typos: a model for action or emulation. Norms are those exemplars from which we model our own behavior. They “rule” us, both in our ability to create and to judge. Rulers rule.

My first claim is that norms are inevitable.

Despite the cry of the various “alt” crowds, we have norms, we need norms, we cannot escape norms. We are living through an extended period in which norms are not only questioned and undermined, but that norms are somehow malignant or even “fascistic.” All the talk of “dismantling and disrupting systems and structures” is in essence norm-bashing. The very idea of norms is considered by a majority of our cultural manufacturing class as colonialist and patriarchal and evil. These norms are some nasty “legacy code” that needs to be rooted out and forgotten, banished into the void of forgetting. “If we are to make progress,” the thought runs, “we must free ourselves from the shackles of outmoded norms.” Norms are the enemy.

My second claim is that norms are necessary.

In our attempts to transcend or supersede these alleged fascistic vestiges of a bygone era, we render ourselves incapable of genuine living. We are unable to flourish nor are we able to create or pass on. We are unable to complete the puzzle. Without norms we cannot act. Or, to put it another way, norms are culture, and culture is an inheritance.

There has been a great breakdown in transmission. Instead of passing on an inheritance we have settled for impotent rebellion. That which must be “given” has not been granted. To be technical, we have taken for granted that which has been withheld. The gift has been both withheld and refused. This is a perilous situation. Absent transmission, we are unable to transition to maturity in all senses of that word.

In our current time, we are transitioning. We are always transitioning. Technically. You can only transition from something if you know where you are, and you can only transition to something if you have some sense of where you are hoping to arrive. Without norms—standards—we do not have a realizable sense or picture of what we are aiming for.

Orban unapologetically defends what was normal until the day before yesterday — and what still is normal in Hungary. And he doesn’t only defend it in his rhetoric; he acts — usually, Rufo-like, by understanding that the anti-normal forces are systemic, buried deep within institutions and elite networks.

Did you read Viktor Orban’s speech at CPAC Hungary? Here’s the full transcript. These excerpts bring Rufo’s strategy to mind (and, for that matter, Matt Walsh’s: what could be better than asking these liberal elites, “What is a woman?”, and watching them sputter?):

The first point in the Hungarian formula is to play by our own rules. The only way to win is to refuse to accept the solutions and the paths offered by others. As Churchill said, having enemies is a sure sign that you are doing something right. This is why we should not be discouraged by being defamed, by being branded as deplorable, or by being treated abroad like troublemakers. In fact, it would be suspicious if none of this happened. Please remember that those who play by their opponents’ rules are certain to lose.

The second point: national conservatism in domestic politics. The cause of the nation is not a matter of ideology, nor even of tradition. The reason that churches and families must be supported is that they are the building blocks of the nation. This also means that one must remain on the side of the voters. We decided to stop migration and build the wall on our southern border because Hungarians said that they did not want illegal immigrants. They said: “Viktor, build that wall!” Three months later the border barrier was up. The secret is not to overthink things: the Hungarian fence is a simple chain-link structure with motion detectors, watchtowers and cameras; but this is enough, provided people want to protect their country. The Achilles heel of progressives is precisely that they want to impose their dreams on society. But for us that danger is also an opportunity, because when it comes to important issues, in reality people do not like left-wing fever dreams. One must find the issues on which the Left is completely out of touch with reality and highlight them – but in a way that can be understood by people who are not eggheads.

Another:

Fifth point: expose your opponent’s intentions. As a condition for victory, media support is necessary, but not sufficient. We must also break down taboos. Perhaps I do not need to introduce this to my American friends, because what breaker of taboos is greater than President Donald Trump? But one can always raise the bar: we must not only break down today’s taboos, but also tomorrow’s taboos. Here in Hungary we expose what the Left are preparing before they even take action. At first they will deny it, but success is all the sweeter when it emerges that we were right all along. For instance, there is the issue of LGBTQ propaganda targeting children. This is still a new thing over here, but we have already destroyed it. We brought the issue out into the open and held a referendum on it. The overwhelming majority of Hungarians have rejected this form of sensitization of children. By revealing at an early stage what the Left were preparing for, we forced them on the defensive, and when they attacked our initiative they were eventually forced to admit the reality of their plan. Allow me to quote General Patton again: “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

Read the whole thing and you’ll understand why I believe so strongly that the rising generation of American conservatives who actually want to change things have a lot to learn from the Orban Way.

Meanwhile, what of the Left? David Brooks, who very much sympathizes with the Democratic Party these days, is aghast by how badly they’re blowing it. He writes in his column today:

The Democratic Party as a whole became associated with progressives who saw policing simply through a racial injustice lens. That’s an important lens, but progressives ignored the public safety lens and were unprepared for the widespread public anger over the increase in crime.

Similarly, many progressives argued that cancel culture wasn’t a thing or was being severely exaggerated. Americans who are afraid to think out loud think the left has become too censorious, and the Democratic Party once again is held guilty by association. Progressives have also largely failed to address the shortcomings of their governing model. The rampant inequality, homelessness and other social ills plaguing San Francisco and other cities are there for all to see.

We are living in an age of menace, an age when people feel unsafe on a variety of fronts. These are ages when voters tend to flock to conservative parties, which they associate with law and order.

And then there is the underlying problem, which has gone unaddressed sinceDonaldTrump surged to his unexpected victory in 2016, which is that while Democrats support many popular policies, progressives are associated with a series of social and cultural values that are unpopular with most Americans. According to a new More in Common survey, 69 percent of Americans believe that America is a country where if you get a good education, develop your talents and are open to innovation, you can do anything. Only 36 percent of progressive activists agree with this.

That’s just a basic difference in how people see the country, and time and time again Democratic politicians have been punished for the messages that come out of progressive educational and cultural institutions.

There will be no Sister Souljah moment from a Democratic politician today. They can’t do it. He, or she, would be massacred internally by the Left. If Joe Biden told Sam Brinton to put on a damn suit and tie to come to work running a major government office, he would be drawn and quartered in the media.

The conservative politician who understands his goal is to promote solidarity with the nation’s normies — you know, the ones with the standard norms — of all races (including rights of majorities), and that to advance the interests of normies, he has to go at structural progressivism with laser like focus, as well as with hammer and tongs, could be a truly transformative leader. Those GOP politicians who aspire to that should start learning from Christopher Rufo and Viktor Orban. The dogs of the liberal media will bark, but the caravan will move on.

If you want to see Rufo’s work, and understand why he is so effective, check out his website.

The post Chris Rufo, Another Defender Of The Normies appeared first on The American Conservative.