A talented propagandist takes a kernel of truth and cultures it into a mountain of lies. By denying the kernel of truth, his opponents effectively do his job for him by destroying their own credibility and thereby implicitly validating his mountain of lies.
Christopher Rufo is a champion propagandist and much of the Progressive Left his u…
A talented propagandist takes a kernel of truth and cultures it into a mountain of lies. By denying the kernel of truth, his opponents effectively do his job for him by destroying their own credibility and thereby implicitly validating his mountain of lies.
Christopher Rufo is a champion propagandist and much of the Progressive Left his useful idiots. It’s just excruciating to watch him operate. Like a slow motion car wreck.
What is the antidote to the Rufo phenomenon? As you say, it is to cop to the kernel of truth and fight the exaggerations. If you look into the sources Rufo cites, they only rarely support his broad claims. People must scrutinize Rufo like the right wing did Gay. They will find much worse.
I think much can be attributed to the utter unsophistication and dogmatism of the Left. They have forgotten how to argue the facts. And they are so damn loud.
Thank you for being a voice of reason and fact. Maybe you are the first of many!
"By denying the kernel of truth, his opponents effectively do his job for him by destroying their own credibility and thereby implicitly validating his mountain of lies."
This whole comment is a fantastic breakdown of the situation. But I think the above is best of all.
Funnily enough, it reminds me of Gay's apology after her congressional hearing. She admitted that she'd gotten drawn into a combative stance where she refused to give ground instead of giving the obvious answer that of course calling for the genocide of Jews was absolutely unacceptable.
I feel like a lot of people on the Left are in the same bind. Instead of just giving the obvious answer that of course kids shouldn't be segregated by race, of course children shouldn't be having their breasts cut off or being given cross-sex hormones, of course societies need police, they argue these brain-dead points because they don't want to feel as if they're giving ground to the "enemy."
The Left continues to “argue these brain-dead points” NOT because “they don’t want to feel as if they are giving ground to the ‘enemy’”. It is not “the enemy” they are worried about, but rather their own kind.
They are terrified of being outed as not “pure” enough, or as being “disloyal.” Dogmatists are harshest on apostates. That is why change from within the Left is virtually impossible. They are banished to the cold with no clothes.
Thanks for your comment Steve. I always enjoy conversing with you.
Yes. The extent to which the “successor ideology” has percolated into the mainstream of everyday public school instruction around the country. Rufo will claim “it’s everywhere” in an essay and when you look up the cite it’s an isolated power point presentation at some irrelevant administrators conference. It’s laughable. I will go back and find specific examples for you.
In Canada where I live, I would say it has percolated into the mainstream of everyday public school instruction. It is even on the provincial ministry of education website (over 2 million students) with topics such as SEL. It is a "lens" through which topics are taught and that is how it is everywhere. Not all teachers subscribe to "successor ideology" and others to a lesser degree, but I personally know many teachers who do fully subscribe to it. I do not think it is a lie that he suggests it is everywhere in K-12 schools, at least not where I live.
That is very sad news and I have no reason to doubt it. I do believe that most teachers are still pretty sane and generally in control of their classrooms. But there are certainly a minority of teachers and administrators who spread this toxic nonsense.
Miguelito, I would like to ask 3 questions to explore this: more specifically what you believe about current prevalence, what direction you think the numbers are moving, and what evidence inspires your belief.
First let's explore the belief about today's prevalence; I hear you believe:
(1) more than 50% of teachers ("most") do not allow "the successor ideology" into their classroom (ie: are sane & in control), and
(2) less than 50% of teachers ("a minority") and administrators actively spread the successor ideology.
Would that be a fair approximate quantization of your beliefs, or would you like to tweak the (estimated, approximate) numbers, like 70% keep it out of the classroom while only 15% actively push it into the classroom? (The remainder perhaps not actively pushing it themselves, but not in control to keep it out either)
I fully recognize that you can't provide exact numbers, I just want to get a rough sense of how large or small your feel the proportions to be, since for example "a minority" could be 1% (very rare) or 49% (common but still a minority today), but you probably have in mind something between those.
Secondly: do you think the numbers are increasing or decreasing, as new teachers and administrators replace older ones in the system?
Thirdly: what evidence inspires your belief? Not asking you to "prove it", just what suggestive indications you have seen to form your beliefs on this.
Excellent questions. Here are the bases for my guesstimates, because that is the best we can do.
1. This new anti-racist, gender ideology, etc. actually hit the mainstream quite recently. If you go back 10 years, very few people talked like that. The gender stuff took off in earnest after SCOTUS legalized gay marriage and hit overdrive more recently. Anti racism gradually moved from the fringe and splattered onto the mainstream only in 2020 after the Floyd murder. So, all this is very recent, and it is top down, ie coming from elites into the culture. This takes time. So, what you see at the school board and administration level may or may not be reflected in everyday classrooms. I think the majority of everyday teachers are "normies" for the simple reason that they are probably only just a little left of center on average as the population at large.
Obviously, there are going to be regional, and especially class, variations. The percolation will be most complete in affluent, blue areas and especially private schools in places like NYC and my hometown of LA, many of which are thoroughly hopeless.
This process will happen much, much slower, ironically, in the 'hood. My daughter taught HS in West Newark and then in a really tough area in Irvington, NJ from about 2017 to 2022. This stuff was COMPLETELY absent there. Now she teaches in an affluent DC high school, and it is EVERYWHERE. Even though she is a Lefty, she hates it and the micro-managing that comes with it. She has been convicted of a "name-based microaggression." She is heading back to the 'Hood next year.
2. I made a habit of checking Rufo's sources. They did not reflect the pervasiveness he claims. A lot of times he would point to a power point at some conference and then the articvle he wrote made it seem like every teacher was a Red Guard or something. I;m not saying it's not around and influential, I just saying that he did not satisfy my burden of proof that it's "everywhere." Maybe soon, but not yet.
So, on these bases I think that a substantial minority of teachers in Canada and the US have drunk the Kool-Aid, but I believe a majority (over 50%) haven't. Hopefully the backlash we are seeing now will prevent its further spread.
That is the best I can do to answer your excellent question.
It's VERY hard to get a grasp on this. Not only is there no national survey, but if there were a lot of the infected schools would hide it, I believe. To get a firm answer, investigators would pretty near need to physically observe a representative national sample - which would be not even remotely possible. So the kind of thoughtful guesswork you present is nearly all we have.
I think we may need to be a bit more generous in interpreting "everywhere" tho. I think you are interpreting it as "in close to 100% of classrooms", which would not be true now (and might never be true).
I would take "everywhere" more like "it's widespread, with examples in every state, most large cities", many smaller cities, and even some rural areas". Like - most of the population lives within a short drive of an example, if not their own school district. Sort of like how ants are everywhere - not in every house, but in a substantial portion of houses in all parts of the country. Or the way that Covid infections were everywhere - but did not infect every person. And that lesser claim about CSJ ideology might be more true than false. It's quite compatible with your guestimate that less than 50% of classrooms have been captured - if the ones that have are widely distributed.
I appreciate your efforts to check Rufo's linked sources, and that gives me some pause if he's playing too fast and loose. But I also think that in part, you might be expecting him to prove "nearly 100% of classrooms" when all he's asserting is "extremely widely distributed". Remember that as described above - there will be no source which can factually assess the percentage of classrooms, so no commenter will have solid evidence of that - at most they can show that examples are widely distributed geographically (albeit not with a single link).
We just had an interaction with a professor of speech and debate at the local Jr College, who was very "woke". He got his PhD from Louisiana State, in a deep red state. (Just a suggestive datapoint, not proof of anything)
I was somewhat blindsided by the sudden widespread appearance of CSJ ideology, bursting into view relatively recently. But since then, I've been seeing information which makes me believe that there are deep and pervasive roots which have been widespread in higher education for quite a while. And from what I've heard, one of the first departments at many universities to adopt this ideology (besides the xxx studies ones) were the Schools of Education where K12 teachers are trained. After which, they migrate literally to every nook and cranny of the nation; if the local cultures isn't yet into it, they know to avoid attracting attention.
I can see how that might be a fertile breeding ground - with a lot of idealistic young teachers wanting to help improve society as well as educate kids. And it's heavily dominated by females (statistically more likely to adopt CSJ), and liberals (need I say more about the prime recruiting ground of the successor ideology?). And the following may be controversial - but I have been dismayed by the intellectually quality of a surprising number of teachers. It goes way back too; long ago I was a math major in college (before getting seduced away from theorems by those alluring computers), but I switched briefly to "Math Education" and the classes I took were atrocious; my fellow math ed students (& profs) were NOT actually *on average* very competent in mathematics; I got out quickly. (It was obvious that I would be evaluated on things other than merit, so I was not inspired to seek a career there in order to improve the average, but I respect the few who do). My point here is not to put down on teachers (despite my anecdotal experience), but to say that a combination of idealism and (possibly) limited reasoning power might provide fertile soil indeed for CSJ Ideology in the decades since.
By now, I'm seeing the recent upsurge in public profile more like the fruiting bodies of mushrooms (eg: mushroom caps), sprouting only after the forest is deeply saturated with underground filaments. The groundwork has been laid for decades, mostly out of sight of the public. I hear students who went to college in the 2000's saying it was already being widely taught in many classes on campus back then. And I've heard younger folks talk about how this was becoming evidence in a number of high schools long before George Floyd etc.
All that mostly stayed mostly in classrooms back then - but the hiring committees were in many cases already infested, and selectively hiring like minded folks over many decades (ie: who agreed in their analysis of society and concept of social justice as a primary value). University faculty is dramatically left of the population today.
So I am holding the hypothesis that it was for decades growing exponentially while staying on the down low.
One of the major factors in regard to the recent controversy over CSJ in K12 education was that during the lockdown and school closures/telelearning, many parents for the first time HEARD for themselves what had been taught for years in the local schools without coming to their attention.
Having been on the left for a lifetime, I was astounded by how quickly trans ideology became dominant in society- it did not take a decade or three of campaigning, as most of our issues had. Very suddenly anything labeled "transphobic" (using a wide and loose definition) became a cancellation target, and the Overton window shifted dramatically in a short time. I think that in large part that was because the field was already ripe with CSJ ideology, beneath the public surface - so to some degree it was more about reaching a critical point where it could flex and assert control, after spreading less publicly for literally decades (in growing strength).
I think that Rufo, if not interpreted as saying that nearly every teacher in the country is enrolled in CSJ ideology but only that it's widely distributed among a large minority around the country, has not been disproven any more than he can prove his case (given the limitations discussed above). It can be easy to discover anecdotal evidence either way (places that have been converted and places that have not), but the relative prevalence is, as I say, unknown and difficult to estimate solidly. (And will vary geographically and demographically as you note)
I suspect that it may indeed be very widespread, while still involving less than half of all classrooms in the country. So I think there is truth in both your well stated estimates, and in (my interpretation of) Rufo, and those two are not incompatible.
Rufo is of course more of a polemicist than neutral analyst, and I take that into account. I don't think he's implicitly trustworthy in his assessments, but I also have not yet seen evidence that the deserves the degree of scorn that Steve appears to feel towards him (in my understanding). More evidence might shift that, of course; Steve may be aware of more solid evidence that I am.
Anyway, it's a pleasure to engage with an active and thoughtful mind, so thank you Miguelito.
I think we met at the same place even if we came from somewhat different starting points. I agree with most of your articulate reply. And I like the quality of our back and forth--what a good dialectic ought to be.
Yes, schools of education have been repositories of fuzzy ideologies and even more fuzzy minds for decades. In the 80s, my first wife got her certificate at Cal State LA and a Masters in Education at UCLA. She was educated in India and then at Pomona College where we met and she was appalled at the claptrap and the dim people who espoused it nearly 40 years ago. Of course, in her decades of teaching in South Central LA she ignored all this junk. My guess is that many others also did. Like the ersatz “racial sensitivity training” of yore. Only dupes took it seriously.
Or maybe it's still only the dupes, but their number has multiplied.
I suspect that the kind of individual strength and clarity needed to stand up to a widespread moral ideology may not be widely cultivated in young folks before they go to colleges of education (or anything else). That is, to "ignore all this junk" and carry on.
While I'm alarmed at the effects of (mostly well meaning) CSJ ideology on our society, I'm more alarmed at what I'm hearing from teachers about the current K12 students who are not learning, not behaving, and causing chaos. There are many intertwined roots of this sea change, of course (and CSJ might be one of them). But I fear our society will crash before the saner fraction could have any chance to right the ship. When we have a generation coming up that is often not able to understand the outlines of the world they live in (eg: don't even know what state they live in, or whether Africa is a state, nation or continent), doesn't have the attention span for a 3 minute movie, cannot take even reasonable direction, and constantly expects immediate gratification - how can we build a more functional democracy on that base? The themes of resentment of "the system" and guilt for any success (underpinnings of CSJ) can still spread easily in an ignorant population with no attention span or self-regulation - but critical thinking to inhibit their passionate emotion drive excesses will not flourish.
I'm coming to question my own assumptions and beliefs about humans and society. A structure like a building can be much more complex and functional than it's components, like bricks. But the quality of the bricks also limits what kind of structures can be built and sustained. How many solid bricks does one need to sustain a tall building comprised of many dysfunctional ones - especially if the dysfunctional ones are constantly picking at the successful ones who keep the society functioning?
And atop that negative news, I recently read Theodore Dalrymple's "Life at the Bottom", a collection of essays mostly from the 1990's by a British doctor working with the underclass in London. Whew, it's a pretty strong argument that the abstract theories of the progressive elites filter down to the underclass in ways that create more misery than liberation. And this was long before the current excesses of CSJ ("wokism").
My spouse and I have had a lively ongoing discussion and exploration of ideas for nearly half a century, each reading and watching many things which we bring to our search for truth. We had some idealistic concepts of how a society should be structured to create a more optimum balance of freedom and social harmony. (One root was the concept of a "partnership society" which first seeks a win/win, versus a "dominator society" which defaults to win/lose even when that's not necessary).
Alas, at some point we had to admit that we were thinking of a society in which people like ourselves would flourish - in cooperation with other people who would be acting from a similar level of reflection and understanding and self-regulation even when they had different ideas. What we had to face is that we are highly atypical. And our vision of a kinder gentler society (creating and fostering kinder and gentler citizens in a productive feedback loop) was not going to work for most of humanity, present or past.
The substance of your post deserves a far longer response than I should give here. My brand of liberalism has always been tempered by a respect for human agency. That implies a deep respect for individual potential and a deep suspicion of group identity. The State's role should be creating the conditions where individuals may thrive, creating accountability for the negative externalities of unbridled capitalism, and attempting to level the playing field by removing impediments to succeed for those who take the initiative to better themselves. While libertarianism is the default for me, life experience has taught me that there is still a robust role for state intervention, but it must be justified—e.g., I spent much of my legal career as a lawyer for environmental nonprofits.
In many ways, my brand of “classical liberalism” is what might now be called “conservative” in contrast to MAGA radicalism. Our society and polity will never be better than the sum of individual effort, so that the role of the state is to create conditions where such individual and group effort is incentivized and rewarded at all levels. The State should also foster "radical tolerance," where Christian cis-het people can live side by side with atheist trans pansexuals because they mutually agree on a regime which enables each to thrive within their respective private spheres.
To your point, a corollary of this view is that when a critical mass of individuals within a polity is unwilling or unable to make productive effort, or to tolerate difference, the whole edifice will eventually fail. Unwilling due to a culture that glorifies victimhood independent of effort. Unable because declining expectations and misallocated resources deny individuals the tools they need to make their effort worthwhile.
You are a fan of Theodore Dalrymple? I am a HUGE fan. I just love his writing, even if I agree with only most of his views.
The other thing aside from his deep literary and auto didactic education is his deep experience, much of which I identify with. He traveled and lived for years working and slumming in the poorest places in the world before his years as a prison psychiatrist in Manchester I believe. I did much the same, living for years in India and Mexico, as well as shorter times in Brazil and more recently in China—2002 to 2004. He has a deep understanding of humanity that is truly rare.
I will respond to the bulk of your excellent message in the next hours after giving it some thought, but I’m glad we share the liking for Anthony Daniels— Dalrymple’s real name. You might be amused to know that Dalrymple's father was a Communist. Figures.
A talented propagandist takes a kernel of truth and cultures it into a mountain of lies. By denying the kernel of truth, his opponents effectively do his job for him by destroying their own credibility and thereby implicitly validating his mountain of lies.
Christopher Rufo is a champion propagandist and much of the Progressive Left his useful idiots. It’s just excruciating to watch him operate. Like a slow motion car wreck.
What is the antidote to the Rufo phenomenon? As you say, it is to cop to the kernel of truth and fight the exaggerations. If you look into the sources Rufo cites, they only rarely support his broad claims. People must scrutinize Rufo like the right wing did Gay. They will find much worse.
I think much can be attributed to the utter unsophistication and dogmatism of the Left. They have forgotten how to argue the facts. And they are so damn loud.
Thank you for being a voice of reason and fact. Maybe you are the first of many!
"By denying the kernel of truth, his opponents effectively do his job for him by destroying their own credibility and thereby implicitly validating his mountain of lies."
This whole comment is a fantastic breakdown of the situation. But I think the above is best of all.
Funnily enough, it reminds me of Gay's apology after her congressional hearing. She admitted that she'd gotten drawn into a combative stance where she refused to give ground instead of giving the obvious answer that of course calling for the genocide of Jews was absolutely unacceptable.
I feel like a lot of people on the Left are in the same bind. Instead of just giving the obvious answer that of course kids shouldn't be segregated by race, of course children shouldn't be having their breasts cut off or being given cross-sex hormones, of course societies need police, they argue these brain-dead points because they don't want to feel as if they're giving ground to the "enemy."
The Left continues to “argue these brain-dead points” NOT because “they don’t want to feel as if they are giving ground to the ‘enemy’”. It is not “the enemy” they are worried about, but rather their own kind.
They are terrified of being outed as not “pure” enough, or as being “disloyal.” Dogmatists are harshest on apostates. That is why change from within the Left is virtually impossible. They are banished to the cold with no clothes.
Thanks for your comment Steve. I always enjoy conversing with you.
OK. So if there is such a mountain of lies coming from Rufo, can you name one ?
Yes. The extent to which the “successor ideology” has percolated into the mainstream of everyday public school instruction around the country. Rufo will claim “it’s everywhere” in an essay and when you look up the cite it’s an isolated power point presentation at some irrelevant administrators conference. It’s laughable. I will go back and find specific examples for you.
In Canada where I live, I would say it has percolated into the mainstream of everyday public school instruction. It is even on the provincial ministry of education website (over 2 million students) with topics such as SEL. It is a "lens" through which topics are taught and that is how it is everywhere. Not all teachers subscribe to "successor ideology" and others to a lesser degree, but I personally know many teachers who do fully subscribe to it. I do not think it is a lie that he suggests it is everywhere in K-12 schools, at least not where I live.
That is very sad news and I have no reason to doubt it. I do believe that most teachers are still pretty sane and generally in control of their classrooms. But there are certainly a minority of teachers and administrators who spread this toxic nonsense.
Miguelito, I would like to ask 3 questions to explore this: more specifically what you believe about current prevalence, what direction you think the numbers are moving, and what evidence inspires your belief.
First let's explore the belief about today's prevalence; I hear you believe:
(1) more than 50% of teachers ("most") do not allow "the successor ideology" into their classroom (ie: are sane & in control), and
(2) less than 50% of teachers ("a minority") and administrators actively spread the successor ideology.
Would that be a fair approximate quantization of your beliefs, or would you like to tweak the (estimated, approximate) numbers, like 70% keep it out of the classroom while only 15% actively push it into the classroom? (The remainder perhaps not actively pushing it themselves, but not in control to keep it out either)
I fully recognize that you can't provide exact numbers, I just want to get a rough sense of how large or small your feel the proportions to be, since for example "a minority" could be 1% (very rare) or 49% (common but still a minority today), but you probably have in mind something between those.
Secondly: do you think the numbers are increasing or decreasing, as new teachers and administrators replace older ones in the system?
Thirdly: what evidence inspires your belief? Not asking you to "prove it", just what suggestive indications you have seen to form your beliefs on this.
Excellent questions. Here are the bases for my guesstimates, because that is the best we can do.
1. This new anti-racist, gender ideology, etc. actually hit the mainstream quite recently. If you go back 10 years, very few people talked like that. The gender stuff took off in earnest after SCOTUS legalized gay marriage and hit overdrive more recently. Anti racism gradually moved from the fringe and splattered onto the mainstream only in 2020 after the Floyd murder. So, all this is very recent, and it is top down, ie coming from elites into the culture. This takes time. So, what you see at the school board and administration level may or may not be reflected in everyday classrooms. I think the majority of everyday teachers are "normies" for the simple reason that they are probably only just a little left of center on average as the population at large.
Obviously, there are going to be regional, and especially class, variations. The percolation will be most complete in affluent, blue areas and especially private schools in places like NYC and my hometown of LA, many of which are thoroughly hopeless.
This process will happen much, much slower, ironically, in the 'hood. My daughter taught HS in West Newark and then in a really tough area in Irvington, NJ from about 2017 to 2022. This stuff was COMPLETELY absent there. Now she teaches in an affluent DC high school, and it is EVERYWHERE. Even though she is a Lefty, she hates it and the micro-managing that comes with it. She has been convicted of a "name-based microaggression." She is heading back to the 'Hood next year.
2. I made a habit of checking Rufo's sources. They did not reflect the pervasiveness he claims. A lot of times he would point to a power point at some conference and then the articvle he wrote made it seem like every teacher was a Red Guard or something. I;m not saying it's not around and influential, I just saying that he did not satisfy my burden of proof that it's "everywhere." Maybe soon, but not yet.
So, on these bases I think that a substantial minority of teachers in Canada and the US have drunk the Kool-Aid, but I believe a majority (over 50%) haven't. Hopefully the backlash we are seeing now will prevent its further spread.
That is the best I can do to answer your excellent question.
Thanks for a very balanced answer.
It's VERY hard to get a grasp on this. Not only is there no national survey, but if there were a lot of the infected schools would hide it, I believe. To get a firm answer, investigators would pretty near need to physically observe a representative national sample - which would be not even remotely possible. So the kind of thoughtful guesswork you present is nearly all we have.
I think we may need to be a bit more generous in interpreting "everywhere" tho. I think you are interpreting it as "in close to 100% of classrooms", which would not be true now (and might never be true).
I would take "everywhere" more like "it's widespread, with examples in every state, most large cities", many smaller cities, and even some rural areas". Like - most of the population lives within a short drive of an example, if not their own school district. Sort of like how ants are everywhere - not in every house, but in a substantial portion of houses in all parts of the country. Or the way that Covid infections were everywhere - but did not infect every person. And that lesser claim about CSJ ideology might be more true than false. It's quite compatible with your guestimate that less than 50% of classrooms have been captured - if the ones that have are widely distributed.
I appreciate your efforts to check Rufo's linked sources, and that gives me some pause if he's playing too fast and loose. But I also think that in part, you might be expecting him to prove "nearly 100% of classrooms" when all he's asserting is "extremely widely distributed". Remember that as described above - there will be no source which can factually assess the percentage of classrooms, so no commenter will have solid evidence of that - at most they can show that examples are widely distributed geographically (albeit not with a single link).
We just had an interaction with a professor of speech and debate at the local Jr College, who was very "woke". He got his PhD from Louisiana State, in a deep red state. (Just a suggestive datapoint, not proof of anything)
I was somewhat blindsided by the sudden widespread appearance of CSJ ideology, bursting into view relatively recently. But since then, I've been seeing information which makes me believe that there are deep and pervasive roots which have been widespread in higher education for quite a while. And from what I've heard, one of the first departments at many universities to adopt this ideology (besides the xxx studies ones) were the Schools of Education where K12 teachers are trained. After which, they migrate literally to every nook and cranny of the nation; if the local cultures isn't yet into it, they know to avoid attracting attention.
I can see how that might be a fertile breeding ground - with a lot of idealistic young teachers wanting to help improve society as well as educate kids. And it's heavily dominated by females (statistically more likely to adopt CSJ), and liberals (need I say more about the prime recruiting ground of the successor ideology?). And the following may be controversial - but I have been dismayed by the intellectually quality of a surprising number of teachers. It goes way back too; long ago I was a math major in college (before getting seduced away from theorems by those alluring computers), but I switched briefly to "Math Education" and the classes I took were atrocious; my fellow math ed students (& profs) were NOT actually *on average* very competent in mathematics; I got out quickly. (It was obvious that I would be evaluated on things other than merit, so I was not inspired to seek a career there in order to improve the average, but I respect the few who do). My point here is not to put down on teachers (despite my anecdotal experience), but to say that a combination of idealism and (possibly) limited reasoning power might provide fertile soil indeed for CSJ Ideology in the decades since.
By now, I'm seeing the recent upsurge in public profile more like the fruiting bodies of mushrooms (eg: mushroom caps), sprouting only after the forest is deeply saturated with underground filaments. The groundwork has been laid for decades, mostly out of sight of the public. I hear students who went to college in the 2000's saying it was already being widely taught in many classes on campus back then. And I've heard younger folks talk about how this was becoming evidence in a number of high schools long before George Floyd etc.
All that mostly stayed mostly in classrooms back then - but the hiring committees were in many cases already infested, and selectively hiring like minded folks over many decades (ie: who agreed in their analysis of society and concept of social justice as a primary value). University faculty is dramatically left of the population today.
So I am holding the hypothesis that it was for decades growing exponentially while staying on the down low.
One of the major factors in regard to the recent controversy over CSJ in K12 education was that during the lockdown and school closures/telelearning, many parents for the first time HEARD for themselves what had been taught for years in the local schools without coming to their attention.
Having been on the left for a lifetime, I was astounded by how quickly trans ideology became dominant in society- it did not take a decade or three of campaigning, as most of our issues had. Very suddenly anything labeled "transphobic" (using a wide and loose definition) became a cancellation target, and the Overton window shifted dramatically in a short time. I think that in large part that was because the field was already ripe with CSJ ideology, beneath the public surface - so to some degree it was more about reaching a critical point where it could flex and assert control, after spreading less publicly for literally decades (in growing strength).
I think that Rufo, if not interpreted as saying that nearly every teacher in the country is enrolled in CSJ ideology but only that it's widely distributed among a large minority around the country, has not been disproven any more than he can prove his case (given the limitations discussed above). It can be easy to discover anecdotal evidence either way (places that have been converted and places that have not), but the relative prevalence is, as I say, unknown and difficult to estimate solidly. (And will vary geographically and demographically as you note)
I suspect that it may indeed be very widespread, while still involving less than half of all classrooms in the country. So I think there is truth in both your well stated estimates, and in (my interpretation of) Rufo, and those two are not incompatible.
Rufo is of course more of a polemicist than neutral analyst, and I take that into account. I don't think he's implicitly trustworthy in his assessments, but I also have not yet seen evidence that the deserves the degree of scorn that Steve appears to feel towards him (in my understanding). More evidence might shift that, of course; Steve may be aware of more solid evidence that I am.
Anyway, it's a pleasure to engage with an active and thoughtful mind, so thank you Miguelito.
I think we met at the same place even if we came from somewhat different starting points. I agree with most of your articulate reply. And I like the quality of our back and forth--what a good dialectic ought to be.
Yes, schools of education have been repositories of fuzzy ideologies and even more fuzzy minds for decades. In the 80s, my first wife got her certificate at Cal State LA and a Masters in Education at UCLA. She was educated in India and then at Pomona College where we met and she was appalled at the claptrap and the dim people who espoused it nearly 40 years ago. Of course, in her decades of teaching in South Central LA she ignored all this junk. My guess is that many others also did. Like the ersatz “racial sensitivity training” of yore. Only dupes took it seriously.
Until more recently as it spread more widely.
Or maybe it's still only the dupes, but their number has multiplied.
I suspect that the kind of individual strength and clarity needed to stand up to a widespread moral ideology may not be widely cultivated in young folks before they go to colleges of education (or anything else). That is, to "ignore all this junk" and carry on.
While I'm alarmed at the effects of (mostly well meaning) CSJ ideology on our society, I'm more alarmed at what I'm hearing from teachers about the current K12 students who are not learning, not behaving, and causing chaos. There are many intertwined roots of this sea change, of course (and CSJ might be one of them). But I fear our society will crash before the saner fraction could have any chance to right the ship. When we have a generation coming up that is often not able to understand the outlines of the world they live in (eg: don't even know what state they live in, or whether Africa is a state, nation or continent), doesn't have the attention span for a 3 minute movie, cannot take even reasonable direction, and constantly expects immediate gratification - how can we build a more functional democracy on that base? The themes of resentment of "the system" and guilt for any success (underpinnings of CSJ) can still spread easily in an ignorant population with no attention span or self-regulation - but critical thinking to inhibit their passionate emotion drive excesses will not flourish.
I'm coming to question my own assumptions and beliefs about humans and society. A structure like a building can be much more complex and functional than it's components, like bricks. But the quality of the bricks also limits what kind of structures can be built and sustained. How many solid bricks does one need to sustain a tall building comprised of many dysfunctional ones - especially if the dysfunctional ones are constantly picking at the successful ones who keep the society functioning?
And atop that negative news, I recently read Theodore Dalrymple's "Life at the Bottom", a collection of essays mostly from the 1990's by a British doctor working with the underclass in London. Whew, it's a pretty strong argument that the abstract theories of the progressive elites filter down to the underclass in ways that create more misery than liberation. And this was long before the current excesses of CSJ ("wokism").
My spouse and I have had a lively ongoing discussion and exploration of ideas for nearly half a century, each reading and watching many things which we bring to our search for truth. We had some idealistic concepts of how a society should be structured to create a more optimum balance of freedom and social harmony. (One root was the concept of a "partnership society" which first seeks a win/win, versus a "dominator society" which defaults to win/lose even when that's not necessary).
Alas, at some point we had to admit that we were thinking of a society in which people like ourselves would flourish - in cooperation with other people who would be acting from a similar level of reflection and understanding and self-regulation even when they had different ideas. What we had to face is that we are highly atypical. And our vision of a kinder gentler society (creating and fostering kinder and gentler citizens in a productive feedback loop) was not going to work for most of humanity, present or past.
The substance of your post deserves a far longer response than I should give here. My brand of liberalism has always been tempered by a respect for human agency. That implies a deep respect for individual potential and a deep suspicion of group identity. The State's role should be creating the conditions where individuals may thrive, creating accountability for the negative externalities of unbridled capitalism, and attempting to level the playing field by removing impediments to succeed for those who take the initiative to better themselves. While libertarianism is the default for me, life experience has taught me that there is still a robust role for state intervention, but it must be justified—e.g., I spent much of my legal career as a lawyer for environmental nonprofits.
In many ways, my brand of “classical liberalism” is what might now be called “conservative” in contrast to MAGA radicalism. Our society and polity will never be better than the sum of individual effort, so that the role of the state is to create conditions where such individual and group effort is incentivized and rewarded at all levels. The State should also foster "radical tolerance," where Christian cis-het people can live side by side with atheist trans pansexuals because they mutually agree on a regime which enables each to thrive within their respective private spheres.
To your point, a corollary of this view is that when a critical mass of individuals within a polity is unwilling or unable to make productive effort, or to tolerate difference, the whole edifice will eventually fail. Unwilling due to a culture that glorifies victimhood independent of effort. Unable because declining expectations and misallocated resources deny individuals the tools they need to make their effort worthwhile.
You are a fan of Theodore Dalrymple? I am a HUGE fan. I just love his writing, even if I agree with only most of his views.
The other thing aside from his deep literary and auto didactic education is his deep experience, much of which I identify with. He traveled and lived for years working and slumming in the poorest places in the world before his years as a prison psychiatrist in Manchester I believe. I did much the same, living for years in India and Mexico, as well as shorter times in Brazil and more recently in China—2002 to 2004. He has a deep understanding of humanity that is truly rare.
I will respond to the bulk of your excellent message in the next hours after giving it some thought, but I’m glad we share the liking for Anthony Daniels— Dalrymple’s real name. You might be amused to know that Dalrymple's father was a Communist. Figures.