Since the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump swung through the walls of conservatism almost a decade ago, there has been a desperate attempt to either rebuild the wall or fill the void left by the old conservatism. The Never Trump project was mostly an effort to chase the barbarians out of the city so the good people can rebuild the wall and restart the old politics. For the most part, this project has failed as the massive hole in the wall remains.

A good recent example of this is this post by neoconservative writer Mathew Continetti in Commentary Magazine. He claims that the populists supporting nationalist policies and candidates are actually Marxists. This has become a popular theme with the East Coast Straussians, of which the neocons are a part. It is a hilariously insane line of thought, owing to the steep decline in the human capital we see everywhere in politics, but especially in the neoconservative subculture.

On the other hand, the project to recreate the old dynamic of Left and Right, has quietly plodded along with a new generation looking to create a New Right. Many are just the hucksters we have come to expect in this age. These are the people who live on social media and front-run whatever is happening at the moment. Others are rejects from the old conservative rackets hoping for a fresh start. These are the buzzards that arrive at the end of every movement.

Then you have the more professional and perhaps sincere players who operated on the fringes of conservatism but now see a chance to spread their wings. The Claremont crowd, for example, is working hard to create a New Right based on the primitive notion of natural right, supplemented by appeals to the classical liberalism of the Framers along with large dollops of Lincolnism. Claremont subscribes to the apocryphal version of the founding and Lincoln promoted by Harry Jaffa.

It is from this world that we get Chris Rufu, the guy best known for waging jihad against critical race theory in the schools. He also has waged campaigns against the sexual exploitation of children in the schools. He worked in support of the Florida bill to ban child pornography in grammar schools. He now has a book out titled, America’s Cultural Revolution, which describes the New Left and how it gained power. Paul Gottfried reviewed it here and Charles Haywood here.

Most of what Rufo describes in his book has been kicking around dissident circles for the last decade, mostly due to it kicking around paleo circles for decades. Contrary to the claims of conservatism, the New Left was never an economic or purely political movement, but a cultural and spiritual movement. With the collapse of 20th century conservatism and the cultural revolution of the last decade, this reality has become clear to everyone except libertarians.

Rufo is not without his critics. In fact, Rufo-ism is a very modern political phenomenon in that it is as much about its critics as its content. Thanks to the cultural revolution and the internet, we now live in a purely Schmitt-ian world, as in the German philosopher Carl Schmitt. Politics is only about friends and enemies, so Rufo-ism is becoming one of those points of the friend-enemy distinction. In a follow up post, Paul Gottfried talks about some of Rufo’s critics.

One of the interesting things about the critics of Rufo, as well as his supporters, is the dog that never barks. That dog is race. This is odd, given the material at the heart of his current project. Critical Race Theory is about race. Then there is the fact that Rufo spent much of his early time on this protect lecturing white people that the real victims of CRT were black kids. He put most of his effort into shooting down the idea that CRT is antiwhite, on the grounds that the term is “racist.”

This is an important part of Rufo-ism and the milieu that spawned it. These are people who are opposed to any discussion of race. It is not that they oppose the New Left’s view on race but that they embrace the New Left’s view on race more completely and sincerely than the Left embraces it. Rufo does think race is a social construct and it must be eliminated from all discourse. This New Right imagined by Rufo, Claremont and others is not just colorblind, but colorless.

It is tempting to assume this is just the old conservative two-step. They embrace the moral claims of the people they oppose but they have a different and more lucrative proposal for how to achieve them. Of course, there is the constant fear of being called “racist” which has haunted conservatism since the Old Left declared discrimination the greatest sin and diversity the greatest good. In other words, it is tempting to think Rufo’s act is an effort to avoid the R-word.

This is a reasonable suspicion, but it does not appear to be the case with Rufo nor the other popular figures from Claremont. Rufo married outside of his race and has mixed-race children, so unlike his New Left critics, who live like White Nationalists, Rufo’s “lived experience” comports with his stated views on race. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in this subculture. Further, the Claremont view of politics leaves no room for race or even natural inequality.

There is another reason for the aversion to race. Rufo is a science-denier. He rejects biology as we know it. He worked for the Discovery Institute, which peddles crackpot theories like intelligent design. Of course, the Claremont people largely reject the last two thousand years of scientific progress. They instead embrace the Straussian belief that nature comes with a secret code book on how humans should act. If you say Aristotle’s name enough times, the secret is revealed.

The starting place for the New Right is the assumption that humans are infinitely malleable in terms of character. What you are as a person is determined by the society into which you are born. If you get the moral code of society right and enforce that morality through the institutions, you end up with virtuous citizens. Since virtue in their view is a life lived to the benefit of the polis, there can be no place for things like race, because that undermines their idea of virtue.

If this sounds a bit like Marxism, it should, because this is the basic assumption of Marx and most radical thinkers. Once you assume that morality is an objective truth that lies outside of collective agreement, it means there can be only one truly moral way to organize human society. The goal of politics, therefore, is to discover it and then ruthlessly enforce it. Instead of historical materialism as the moral authority, the New Right embraces their interpretation of classical philosophy.

Putting aside the underlying philosophical reason for their embrace of colorless politics, it sounds a lot like the colorblind politics of the old conservatism. In the 1980’s conservatives were sure America was ready to move beyond race. Everyone had the same opportunity and society would finally escape the long shadow of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Race would still exist. It simply would not matter in our behavior as citizens and as a society.

The New Right is more reactionary, but the idea is the same. Instead of the optimism of the 1980’s, they are informed by the pessimism of the present. While they agree that discrimination is the worst sin, they see the antiracists as bad as the racists they claim to oppose. The New Right wants to use any means necessary to remove any discussion of race and biological reality from the public square, mostly because they see it as a tool of the people they claim to oppose.

From a dissident perspective, this New Right seems doomed to failure because reality is undefeated, but that view suffers from a flawed view of success. The New Left, like the Old Left and it antecedents since the Mayflower needs a dancing partner, one that shares its ultimate goal. That means something will rise up to take that spot now that the old Buckley-style conservatism is caput. Rufo-ism is a good bet to be what fills that void on the New Left’s dance card.

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