The Culture Warrior

What kind of person advances classical liberalism?

The culture warrior is stereotyped as a ridiculous and cowardly figure: hiding behind a screen, often anonymous, posting rhetorical war crimes with the emotional maturity of an embittered crow. To be generous, we should recognize that communicating clearly is genuinely hard work — there is no epidural for the contractions that birth lucidity. And it may be that listening is an even greater struggle.

So some culture warriors may appear more obnoxious than they actually are, simply because they are still learning how to become articulate. But however distasteful the behavior of our combatants, we should not disdain our culture wars as petty or unserious, because their outcome is consequential. It seems that Democrats lost the 2024 American presidential race because they lost the culture war, and now President Trump and Elon Musk are overhauling the U.S. government with astounding fervor.

A recent skirmish on X between

Christopher F. Rufo

and

Cathy Young

is instructive. Rufo is a documentary filmmaker-turned-activist who has been exceptionally effective at dismantling left-wing cultural initiatives that are considered extreme by not just the right-wing, but often centrists, too. Young has produced even-keeled analyses on politics and culture beginning with her 1989 memoir Growing up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood, and currently writes for the Never-Trump publication

The Bulwark

. Their political positions are distinct with some overlap. While Rufo is noticeably further to Young's right, both have been concerned with progressive excesses, and they are both articulate enough to engage in a higher-order culture war — which is not to say a polite exchange.

Last month, Young threw down the gauntlet in her Bulwark article “Trump's DEI Crackdown Is a Bad Solution to a Real Problem":

It’s no surprise that anti-DEI crusader Christopher Rufo — who has made no secret of his eagerness to emulate Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán in using government muscle to crush “wokeness” — has been gloating about the “nightmare” facing “woke” academia as the investigations begin. And it’s not hard to imagine, as some have suggested, that the old DEI bureaucracies will just be replaced by anti-DEI bureaucracies.

To which Rufo hit back:

I'm sorry, but the "DEI is bad, but so is doing anything about it" mentality lost at the ballot box. I hope all of you can see that these "classical liberals" are nagging do-nothings whose sole purpose is to stall, demoralize, and ankle-bite for their meager share of clicks.

Young retorted that he was engaging with her article in bad faith and continuing “the fine tradition of the 1794 Jacobins who made ‘demoralizing the people' a crime.” Then Rufo snarled:

You're a truly repulsive person, inside and out, and your presence in the discourse is a form of intellectual pollution. You're a nagging schoolmarm who hasn't realized that the children you're constantly chastising have all grown up. They don't need you and don't respect you.

An onlooker described the philosophical dilemma underpinning this duel: The writer

Sarah Haider

chimed in to say that while Rufo shouldn't have spat vitriol, she thinks “it matters a lot that [people like Young] are totally ineffective at promoting any of the change they claim to care about” and then shared her 2022 essay “On Effective Activism and Intellectual Honesty” on the tension between activists and thinkers. Incidentally, that piece began with another anecdote about a tussle between Rufo and two other writers, which Haider uses as a case study to describe how:

There is a fundamental disconnect between the functions of two different classes of “discourse participants” — those who use language to think and discover truth and those who use it as a means to power.

In temperament, instinct, and preference I am powerfully predisposed to the thinker camp. And when I look at someone like Christopher Rufo, I have much of the same feelings of frustration as others like me. He is a self-proclaimed partisan with a clear political agenda: he frames his language to ease black-and-white thinking, actively stigmatizes certain groups and institutions, and harnesses the rage and fear of the resulting mob towards his goals.

This all sounds very negative — and indeed, in many ways it undeniably is. But I have been actively engaged in activism for much of the last decade — living amongst the Romans so to speak. I don’t pretend to be incredibly accomplished, but I’ve studied the space closely.

Haider explains the fundamental difference between two types of culture warriors:

The activist game, to sum in one sentence, is about results. The goal of a “good” activist is to achieve the ends as quickly as possible — as ethically as this might allow. Her morality is rooted in the goodness of the ends she works towards, indisputably noble means to attain them are not required.

The thinker game is about truth. The goal is to uncover reality as it is — to achieve a true map of the real world (and hopefully, to be the first to do it). Reflecting reality accurately requires honesty — with oneself and with others — and a strict adherence to principled conduct.

Although all fields have some degree of competition, knowledge-building is inherently not a zero-sum game. Truth builds upon itself.

The activist, meanwhile, lives in a world of scarcity — limited time, limited funds, limited public attention. To her, not winning is the same as losing: every minute in which her goals are not achieved is a minute in which a harm has been achieved. There is a cost to delay.

Meanwhile, from the thinker’s perspective, the only activism that doesn't look like dishonorable demagoguery is, in practice, ineffective activism.

This trade-off between honesty and efficacy is particularly distressing for those who would advocate for the very concept of calm, rational debate in the pursuit of truth, which is ideologically entwined with the classical liberalism inherent to the American experiment. Unlike other forms of government, such as aristocracy, theocracy, or communism, the American system is an outgrowth of Enlightenment values that are uniquely oriented toward the pursuit of truth — it is the ideology that explicitly champions reason and science. You can play the thinker game while sincerely believing in other creeds, if you disagree that the Enlightenment found “a true map of the real world,” but you cannot embrace the Enlightenment tradition that invented America without valuing the thinker game in and of itself.

There are discrete challenges in American life that may benefit more from the activist approach. This is why Haider, who champions liberalism herself, is grateful that activists like Rufo have helped achieve goals that she supports. Yet more than any other kind of thinker, classical liberals cannot feel gratitude toward the cunning activist without discomfort.

But honesty and efficacy have sometimes coexisted within classical liberals. When I last reflected on Haider’s analysis, I explored how Rosa Parks was a hugely successful activist with integrity. Earlier in the history of American race relations, Frederick Douglass fought against slavery through the force of eloquence, not demagoguery. More recently, Milton Friedman both promoted economic freedom and, as Col. Michael Mai writes for the official U.S. Army website, used his “towering intellectual presence” to provide “the analytical framework” for abolishing the draft in America. And today,

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar

has been spreading Enlightenment values in the Arab world, particularly Iraq, through

Ideas Beyond Borders

initiatives like translating classically liberal books into Arabic — in time, we will discover how instrumental his approach may be for advancing classical liberalism in the global culture war.

Back in America, as our culture convulses from the dramatic changes that Trump and Musk are enacting, classical liberals should be asking themselves:

Can you be an activist for the thinker game?