On Critical Race Theory and its Discontents:

It’s been a while since we last talked about anti-racism and Critical Race Theory. The ballad of Jodi Shaw continues and now it has a remix with a long-awaited rap verse. But the conversation has expanded far beyond Jodi and her musical tastes. Critical Race Theory has now entered the sphere of public policy with several Republican states passing laws or in the process of passing laws that would ban teaching it in schools. There is a steady stream of stories concerning enraged parents and concerned teachers pushing back against the indoctrination of school children. Now it’s extremely murky what “teaching critical race theory” in schools looks like and how a state might prevent it from “taking over” curriculum, but it doesn’t really matter. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a culture war. 

In our previous conversation about the popular conception of anti-racism, the majority of the focus was on the flaws in mainstream liberal discourse when attempting to address and ameliorate systemic racism. We used the story of Jodi Shaw and our small part in it to examine where liberalism falls short in applying the conclusions reached by Critical Race scholarship to social and institutional action. We took some time to discuss the right-wing grievance complex, materialized through the auspices of the Intellectual Dark Web, but I think we should dive a bit deeper into the right-wing backlash against Critical Race Theory. For one thing, this fight isn’t going away anytime soon, but beyond its prominent place in our current political discourse, I think it’s important to interrogate the conservative mindset and why issues like this elicit such a reactionary response. 

First, we need to get something out of the way. There is a reason why this fight began to take shape near the end of the Trump presidency and has only ramped up in intensity since Biden took office. This is what conservatives are going to run on in the midterms. Since the birth of modern movement conservatism in the 1960s and ’70s, conservatism has placed culture war at the center of its electoral strategy. The recipe is simple. Identify a change in culture or attitudes, bonus points if that change is centered in marginalized and minoritized communities, then assert that this change is the product of nefarious forces bent on destroying America and its values. After this is firmly ensconced in the American discourse, conservatives promise voters that they will protect them from these dangerous ideas and impulses. 

A quick tour through American political history show’s just how prevalent this is. From pro-segregationists to opposition to second-wave feminism, LGBTQ rights, the very existence of Islam in the United States, satanic cults, rap/pop music, rock music, video games, Ebonics, the war on Christmas, cancel culture and rabid college students, and of course our good old friend anti-Semitism (going both ways). Liberals from time to time have provided useful cover for the movement conservatism to engage in the culture war, but conservatism is just a form of liberalism so this isn’t too surprising. The connective tissue between all these seemingly existential political arguments is that they have very little to do with material issues. Yes, there are questions concerning the redistribution of resources and power that undergird these political fights, but the conservative arguments against these cultural flashpoints are almost entirely moral and values-based. This is important. 

A pivotal innovation in this forever culture war came when conservatives began to wrap up all these disparate calls for social change on the behalf of marginalized people under the umbrella term of “cultural Marxism”. A vaguely (and sometimes not so vaguely) anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that proposes that any call for social change in America on behalf of the marginalized is not the product of genuine frustration at injustice nor is it generated by marginalized people themselves. Instead, these social justice movements are the work of dastardly European socialists (mostly those associated with the Frankfurt school) who seek the completion of Marx’s ultimate project. The destruction of America, through the degradation of its core values. 

This ties into the general theme of existentialism that courses through conservative political thought. This existentialism was created in a primordial sense through the Monroe doctrine. The idea that America has a right to defend its interests outside of its borders. It was given a more concrete ideological form through the reactionary response to the rise of communism in Soviet Russia and China. This existentialist mindset can be summarized as the idea that the America project is rooted in fundamental truths about the human condition and that its values are a direct product of those fundamental truths. Therefore any attempt to interrogate and/or challenge those professed truths and values, any inclination to focus on the contradictions within the American project, is a direct threat to the existence of America. Or as leading CRT antagonist Christopher Rufo put it on Tucker Carlson’s show:

“Conservatives need to wake up. This is an existential threat to the United States. And the bureaucracy, even under Trump, is being weaponized against core American values. And I’d like to make it explicit: The President and the White House—it’s within their authority to immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical-race-theory training from the federal government. And I call on the President to immediately issue this executive order—to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology.”

To bring this back to our current fight over Critical Race Theory, we must remain in the past for just a bit longer to talk about Harry Jaffa and the West Coast Straussian school of political philosophy. Leo Strauss is a very fascinating and complicated figure and pretty much impossible to talk about in sufficient detail within our conversation. We will try anyway. He was a German immigrant who taught political science at the University of Chicago and is credited for being extremely influential to modern conservative intellectualism. Perhaps his most important contribution for our purposes is the rejection of historicism. Historicism is the idea that theories, philosophies, and ideas are rooted in a temporal context. That is that the context of events, cultural norms, and political power within a specific time has an indelible effect on the philosophy that is produced. Strauss practiced and advocated for a deep reading of ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, with the intent of finding universal and non-relativistic truth within their writing. 

Harry Jaffa was one of Strauss’s most prominent students. After Strauss died in 1973, a schism developed within the cohort of political theorists who studied under him. Alan Bloom, another prominent student of Strauss, helped form East Coast Straussianism, which in turn helped to inform the neo-conservative movement. Jaffa founded the West Coast school of Straussianism and helped establish its academic headquarters at the Claremont McKenna College in southern California. A few of his students started the Claremont institute which publishes the Claremont Review of Books, which serves as the primary outlet of West Coast Straussian thought. Again the differences and arguments between these two factions are way too complicated to adequately describe here, but an extremely broad generalization is that the East Coasters became the intellectual backbone of the elite conservative political apparatus and the West Coasters were more associated with the messy religious and populist right. Indeed Jaffa was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater and penned the infamous phrase “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue.”

What we need to understand about Jaffa is that his political ideology placed a religious amount of reverence on the founding of America. The Declaration of Independence and other early writings of the first Americans could be viewed as great works containing universal truths that reflected the universal truths that could be found in the ancient works of Western literature. These universal truths are not just vital to a functioning American society but also form the basis of morality and virtue. The true nature of the human condition cannot be separated from the virtues that allow it to thrive. Thus, according to Jaffa, uncomplicated and unchanging virtues are the bedrock of a healthy and successful society. These truths cannot always be accessed by deliberative bodies composed of the common folk litigating their nature under god. It is at times necessary for great thinkers and leaders (i.e. Lincoln) to distill them for the masses. 

This is the story of how a group of academic philosophy nerds became the intellectual wing of Trumpism. If you haven’t heard of Harry Jaffa, West Coast Straussianism, or the Claremont Institute, you most certainly have heard of their most recent prominent work. The 1776 project. 

Harry Jaffa died in 2015 but his legacy lives on at the Claremont School and its associated publications. When President Trump sought a desperation play to preserve his electoral relevance by starting yet another culture war, he looked to them to respond to Hannah Nicole-Jones' Pulitzer prize-winning 1619 project. The West Coast Straussians had already been in Trump's corner as they saw him as just the sort of singular leader that could restore the virtues present at the hallowed founding and save the country. They were more than eager to respond to the 1619 project's attempt at recontextualizing and complicating the American mythos. The result was a collection of half-truths and lies by omission that sought to present a story of America rooted in uncomplicated goodness, with any missteps in its grand project the fault of progressives and their metastasized relativistic version of liberalism. 

It’s important to note that Harry Jaffa was an ardent defender of equality. If you’ve ever heard a conservative proudly proclaim that they belong to the party of Lincoln, in essence, you are hearing Jaffa’s thoughts through their lips. The tricky part is that Jaffa’s conception of equality is limited by his conception of natural rights. That is the right of an individual to consent to be governed. For Jaffa slavery was antithetical to the founding because it relativistically interpreted the Declaration's call for the consent of the governed. Lincoln’s moral authority to end the institution was rooted in a close reading of the intentions of the founding and the virtues it espoused. However, natural rights were endowed upon those who hewed close to what Jaffa interpreted as the virtues inherent in the founding. These moral truths were discovered through the practice of philosophy and observance of natural law. Specifically, the philosophy and observances made by white men. Agitation for rights that did not uphold these founding virtues, like say the right for women to disrupt traditional gender roles, or restorative justice for Black Americans, or anything that legitimized LGBTQIA+ existence, were based on the same moral relativism that allowed for slavery and, in Jaffa’s estimation, the rise of totalitarian states in Germany, Russia, and China. 

It is here where we find the root of the conservative backlash to Critical Race Theory. If we were to try to boil down conservatism to its foundational essence, we could say that it is the attempt to philosophically resolve the tension between antiquity and modernity. Should we hold the past in reverence, seeking universal truth in the lessons we glean from history? Or should we reject the past for a more dynamic and relativistic modern understanding? Modernity has its advantages, especially when it comes to technology and scientific advancement. However, in the conservative mind, the moral framework and values of antiquity were directly responsible for the ability for modernity to flourish, and therefore to preserve a prosperous modern society, we must always center those values in any discussion about public policy. 

Now there is a problem with this and it goes back to the discussion around historicism. There really isn’t a great reason to conclude that the exact moral framework developed by western civilizations is universal and objective. For one thing, the exact nature of what constitutes “western civilization” is complicated and not easily distilled. It remains a contentious debate among historians. But on a more macro level, history is a politically constructed object. The history that one learns in a society is always politically determined for the purposes of reproducing that society. It’s not a coincidence that the thinkers and philosophers that conservatism claims are the progenitors of unimpeachable and universal truth are largely white men and that the conservative tradition is mostly followed by white men. Even when the West Coast Straussian architects of the 1776 project venerate the work of Black historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass, they praise them for upholding the truths they believe are purely the purview of white western thought. They can’t talk about MLK’s socialist leanings or Frederick Douglass’s excoriation of America, but they also cannot elide them from the conversation because modernity has placed those figures in an uncomplicatedly positive light. 

Critical Race Theory is not without its faults. Its analysis has been used by some to construct a pessimistic and static view of history. Where conflict and struggle are overlooked in favor of telling a mournful story of existential oppression. On a base level, however, it’s concerned with putting history in a counter-hegemonic context. History is indeed written by the winners, but the act of winning doesn’t equal moral superiority. What CRT is attempting to do is to decouple the reading of history from the a priori assumption that a cadre of white western thinkers, whose socioeconomic status was determined largely by the context of their historic moment, had it all figured out. CRT does have its roots in Marxism, even as some Marxists disregard it because some of its chief proponents discount the role of class struggle in the story of race. What CRT gleans from Marx is that the contradictions in society are most important for understanding how society works.

The biggest contradiction in the conservative and (ahem) classical liberal backlash to CRT is that most of the antagonism is based on the idea that CRT flattens individuals into broad racial characteristics and assigns either blame or innocence for the current state of inequality on one's racial demographic. Of course, this is not an accurate representation of what CRT concludes, but even if it were, the counter solution offered by conservatives is for people from myriad socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds to conform to a narrow set of individual values and choices that they have determined to be the causes of success. Broadly speaking their alternative to flattening one's individuality to their racial identity is to advocate the flattening of all individual identities to the hegemonic identity of American whiteness. They must reject any systemic causes of success and/or failure because that would mean their relative success is less a factor of their own inherent virtue and more due to an accident of birth. 

At the heart of all of this is the need for conservatives to derive the basis for their moral outlook from history. Specifically, a certain view of history that prioritizes the rhetoric of white western thought over the material reality that existed alongside it. What they are trying to preserve isn’t a stable and just society, but rather a national identity that absolves white-dominated society from the inequality and injustice that it produces. They need a reason why inequality is natural and morally acceptable and they turn to a euphemistic version of history to justify it. In a way, this is just as much a form of identity politics as the “woke” ideology they despise. They cloak their identitarian interests in the form of objective truth and natural law, but like history, those ideas are also politically constructed to reproduce a certain social outcome. 

There is no point in responding to the criticisms of CRT from the right. Leftists and Liberals often point out that almost none of the conservatives attacking CRT or the concerned parents shouting at beleaguered school officials actually know what it is. But it doesn’t matter what CRT actually is. It never did. Any ideology that questions the noble origins of the American project is an existential threat to their identity. The critics can’t outright call for a particular view of history to be banned because it makes them feel bad so they make up shit about how it’s harming children and causing division. And because CRT is almost by definition exclusionary and so prone to constructing a narrative that inspires shame and demobilization instead of zeal for solidarity and struggle, it makes itself an easy target. The debate we should be having about CRT is whether we should be using a similar framework to center history around struggle and political action rather than the manufactured concept of race. 

Instead, we get to have debates over whether it’s harmful to children to teach them that slavery was bad. 

Solidarity forever.