I Interview Chris Rufo
*America's Cultural Revolution* and beyond
As promised, here’s my very fun interview with Chris Rufo on his best-selling America’s Cultural Revolution.
During the conversation, I mostly let the author have the floor. But I wound up disagreeing with him more than I expected. Details tomorrow!
Rufo was surprisingly weak. You were gently asking some sharp questions, and he didn't have good answers or even seem to have thought about them before.
If Marcuse enjoyed the benefits of living in the West all his life but couldn't even say that the US was better than the Soviet Union (good question!), that would seem to disqualify him as an honest thinker and writer. If Marcuse could not or would not try to persuade or at least honestly rebut the arguments of political opponents, in what sense was he an intellectual at all? And it's weird to call the author of "Repressive Tolerance" a "libertarian socialist;" that might possibly apply to Chomsky, who at least forthrightly stands up for free speech, whatever else you might say about him.
Rufo seemed to be walking a bizarre line of defending the intellectual acumen and integrity of his subjects and denying they were evil while also saying their ideas were horrible and always lead to mass murder, as should have been obvious to them. It seemed like a version of the starry-eyed progressive notion that only intentions (or purported intentions) matter. I'm beginning to understand why the NYT gave him editorial space.
Maybe Rufo was having a bad day. But he came across as much more of a lightweight than I expected.
But for you, great interview.
The big difference between Caplan and Rufo seems attitudinal rather than intellectual.
- Caplan wants to hold sources and methods to a high standard.
- Rufo takes a broad church approach, happy to find value in all kinds of different sources and methods.
- Caplan thinks that if someone was highly culpable for doing bad things, they're a bad person. I can almost hear him wanting to ask Rufo, "What else could it mean to be a wicked person?"
- Rufo reserves moral judgement on men's souls, even as he finds fault in their actions.
An extremely interesting interview, and highly productive.