Hosted by Ross Douthat
Ross Douthat is an Opinion columnist and the host of the ‘Interesting Times’ podcast.
Below is a transcript of Ross Douthat’s conversation with Christopher Rufo. It has been edited for clarity and length. We recommend listening to the conversation or watching it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the video player above, the audio player below, on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
Editors’ note: This episode originally aired on the “Matter of Opinion” podcast on Mar. 7.
Ross Douthat: So this week we’re going to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion — a vision of social justice that took elite America and its institutions by storm during Donald Trump’s first term and a vision that is now in full-scale retreat. In part, that’s because of the actions of the Trump White House, which is doing everything it can to eradicate the D.E.I. programs and initiatives that proliferated inside the federal bureaucracy over the last 10 years.
But it’s not just the Trump White House. Companies like Google and Walmart and Paramount and Bank of America are also shedding diversity-related efforts that they had celebrated just a few short years ago.
And even universities, a bastion of progressive ideology, are suddenly backing away a bit, or treading carefully. Almost all of this shift happened because of the work of one man who is arguably the most important activist in American politics since the days of Ralph Nader and Phyllis Schlafly.
That man is our guest today, Christopher Rufo. And we’re going to be talking to him about how he won — for now — what it means for the second Trump administration, and what his vision is for America after D.E.I.
Chris Rufo, welcome to the show.
Christopher Rufo: It’s good to be with you.
Douthat: Thanks so much for being here. So, I imagine that a big part of our audience first heard of you around the same time that they first heard about critical race theory, an academic term of art that your activism successfully adapted and used to frame the D.E.I. debate.
We’re going to talk about that today. But first, I want to understand how you became yourself, and an activist. You grew up in Northern California, and now you live in the Pacific Northwest. These are not hotbeds of right-wing activism and conservative opinion. Were you always some kind of conservative?
Rufo: No, not at all. I started as a young man very much on the left, even the far left. My family members on my father’s side in particular are unreconstructed communists in Italy.
Douthat: Oh, the real communists, not Bay Area communists.
Rufo: Correct, not cultural communists, but actual economic, card-carrying, party-member communists. And so that was the politics that I inherited growing up. And it’s interesting because California now is not a hotbed of America’s right wing, but I would say it produced the best 20th-century conservative leaders.
My own experience is totally at odds with the historical experience of the state. I started out left, moved right, whereas the state was much more right wing in the past and moved left.
Douthat: And you were a documentary filmmaker, right? How did you get into that?
Rufo: I got into that right after school. I graduated from university in 2006 and then took a job doing production for a small ramshackle company. I had a chance to travel around the world, and then I started producing my own films in my mid-20s, which I did for another five or 10 years.
Douthat: Tell me about your view of politics back in the early 2010s. And you can use that lens on American politics as a documentary filmmaker.
Rufo: It’s really interesting. The work I was doing in documentaries at that time was not political. They were more social, cultural and human interest stories. But the industry was hyperpolitical. And what we now think of as wokeness or left-wing race and gender ideology was already the dominant system of belief in the documentary world in the late 2000s, and early 2010s.
The documentary world is not a business. It survives on the prestige of philanthropic institutions that provide grant funding. I don’t know if that kind of economy attracts left-wing people or if left-wing people produce that kind of economy, but it really raised red flags.
And I had been rejected for some grants and told explicitly: This grant is restricted for minorities and women. And it was like: Oh, interesting. That’s quite odd. That doesn’t seem fair. But you kind of deal with it and figure out alternative opportunities. I remember joking with a producer of mine saying, we really need to get this grant. We’re going to mark you down as bisexual to give us the edge that is needed to compete in this new identity landscape.
We didn’t actually do it, but the joke became very real. And after 2020, which is when I moved into politics, journalism and then activism, that ethos had captured all of the major institutions.
Douthat: And so was there a moment of radicalization at that time? Something that was the pivot point from being a right-leaning documentary filmmaker to being an activist? What changed on the left from your perspective in 2018 through 2020?
Rufo: You see it growing really from 2014 to 2020, slowly building after the Great Recession was over and the Occupy Wall Street and 99 percent narratives had subsided. The narratives that were really gaining energy and traction were all related to race and sexuality.
You could see the local B.L.M. chapters or racial justice activists gaining power. And then all of a sudden in 2020 these movements that had been growing catapulted into prominence.
The moments that are points of radicalization for me were all in the wake of George Floyd 2020, observing and even doing on-the-ground reporting in Seattle, and the period surrounding the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone protests. Those moments encapsulated the politics of that time and the entire derangement that would then happen everywhere.
If you remember the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone during the 2020 riots, the mayor of Seattle instructs the Police Department in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, famously the most left-wing neighborhood, to abandon their department building and then cede multiple blocks of territory to the left-wing radicals. And then it all goes into an immediate and calamitous decomposition.
All kinds of academic theories were put into this little miniature model of governance, and what happens? Vandalism, crime, destruction, chaos and then people start getting killed. You have this autonomous zone in the name of Black liberation, and who ends up getting murdered? Young Black kids, including a young boy whose father I interviewed as part of the reporting I was doing.
It was this poetic miniature, accelerated timeline of what happens when you give governing power to these ideas. It ends in heartbreak, disaster and destruction.
Douthat: The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone is one of the most extreme manifestations of left-wing radicalism. But for the most part, people weren’t setting up those kinds of armed camps.
It was mostly the case that you had various self-conscious or unselfconscious ideological indoctrination programs as part of the ordinary work of universities and big corporations. When we talk about wokeness as a phenomenon, most Americans experienced it that way, right?
Rufo: Yes. But, I think that the comparison is actually really important because the two and a half weeks of the autonomous zone is the same story of what happened over a five-year time horizon in America’s institutions. As a metaphor, they’re really the same process.
My first foray into this world came from a tip I got from a City of Seattle employee who sent me documents from their race and social justice initiative. A kind of human resource training on race and social justice.
It was white privilege, white fragility, systemic racism, unconscious bias, disparate impact. It was Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, the leading lights of the George Floyd moment. And they were doing it in the city of Seattle in a racially segregated manner.
I thought it was going to be a one-off story. But what happened was really interesting. It not only took off publicly, but I started getting leaks and materials from dozens and then hundreds and thousands of other places around the country.
And so the opportunity presented itself to say: This is a really interesting thread. I’m going to chase this thread and see where it leads.
I think now in retrospect it led to — you could call it “antiwoke,” you could call it “a backlash,” you could call it “a conservative counterrevolution.” It really set the stage, but what was happening at that time was a derangement. I think people who participated in it are now embarrassed to admit their participation.
Douthat: But one of the things you did from the start was naming it, trying to associate the specific term “critical race theory” with all of these elements of left-leaning ideology. And it’s an interesting phenomenon because almost everyone at this point agrees that there was a big ideological shift in American institutions in the period you’re describing.
No one has quite found a consensus on what to call it, partly because the terms that activists often use, like “antiracist,” were terms that their critics weren’t likely to use. You don’t want to concede the argument that one side is the antiracist side.
Instead, you get “social justice.” You get “wokeness.” You get conservatives using phrases like “cultural Marxism.” So why did you decide that “critical race theory,” which is an academic term of art for a particular discipline and way of looking at the world, was the right term to use? And what does that term mean from your perspective?
Rufo: The simplest reason is, it was correct. What I was seeing was essentially boilerplate, coming from all different corners of American society: big companies, human resource programs, universities, humanities labs to public schools. And in every case, I could trace it back. This all seems to come from a discipline of critical race studies, critical race theory, and critical whiteness studies. And the universities have formalized it under these disciplines and subdisciplines. I thought it was actually the least loaded and the most accurate way of framing it.
But as we started fighting it out, I realized by accident it was also the most rhetorically effective framing. Because as you said, it was not an obvious pejorative. It was the name that these folks gave to their own discipline, but it had the connotations that could then be used as a focal point, which gave us a concept to use for political ends.
Douthat: Is there a form of critical race theory that you take seriously?
Rufo: I take it all seriously.
Douthat: But if you had said to me 10 years ago, before we entered fully into this era, what is critical race theory all about? I probably would have said something like, it’s a view that racism isn’t just about personal animus, right? It’s about structural realities, impersonal realities, and that you have aspects of American society handed down from slavery and Jim Crow that still affect America today that we should take seriously.
And that’s a left-of-center view. But it’s one that I, as a conservative, would have taken seriously. I don’t always agree with it, but it makes some reasonable points. It also seems to me that there’s a difference between that view and holding seminars organized around a kind of psychological retraining of white people to get at the core of their personal racial guilt and racial animus.
So, do you think structural racism exists as a category that’s worth describing?
Rufo: Yeah, it’s a good question, but I think that your description is euphemistic. If you actually read the critical race theory literature, it is Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo and all of the excesses of left-wing racialism, you have arguments for seizing land and wealth and redistributing it along racial lines. You have these long pseudoscientific studies about racial microaggressions and ferreting out racism in the subconscious of white people. You have the whole concept of whiteness itself, which is reducing the race to an evil essence and then trying to create re-education programs to erase and replace so-called whiteness.
It’s all there. It was all there in the 1980s, in the 1990s, in the early 2000s. It was just not taken seriously beyond the academic circles for good reason. The criticism that I got at the beginning was, Oh, we just want to talk about the legacy of redlining and Jim Crow.
And we should talk about that. That’s totally fair. We had systemic racial discrimination in this country for a very long time. It’s had an effect on how our society has developed. It’s had negative consequences for the people who were on the receiving end of that discrimination.
There’s a reasonable argument to be had there. I’m happy to have that. I’m not on the side of We solved the problem in 1964 and now everyone has to shut up forever.
There is a strain of conservatism that takes that tack. I don’t. It’s not only at odds with the actual substance of not only the woke and Black Lives Matter movement, but also with the underpinnings of the theory itself.
Douthat: It seems to me like wokeness, or whatever term you want to use, peaked in 2021 or 2022. And then your activism began to create a backlash, and public opinion started to turn. So wokeness was in retreat far before Trump’s re-election. Is that how you see it?
Rufo: Yes. I think probably 2021 was the fever pitch. It was still relatively strong in the spring of 2022. Then the political turn was when Ron DeSantis was re-elected as governor in 2022. He was the key political figure in the war on woke.
And they said: You can’t fight Disney. You can’t fight gender. You can’t fight C.R.T. You can’t abolish D.E.I. You can’t take over a public university. You’re going to pay a price.
And then, he won by 20 points. That was an indicator of how the political calculus was changing. I felt safer operating and taking bigger risks in 2022 and 2023 than in the years prior, but it was still by no means assured. And if Kamala Harris had won in 2024, we would be having a very different conversation right now.
Douthat: Yeah, well, she didn’t, right? So let’s have the conversation about Donald Trump and his administration, which is formally aligned with your strategy and goals, at least to some extent, and is even applying some kind of anti-D.E.I. effort across all federal agencies.
What do you think of the progress of that effort from your perspective as an activist?
Rufo: In the transition period, I laid out a counterrevolution blueprint that outlined my strategy for how the president and the administration could take decisive action in the war against these left-wing ideologies. And to my great enjoyment, five out of the six recommendations have been put into action.
Some even more aggressively than I thought was likely or even possible at the time. We have now the beginnings of a very successful administration on these questions. The action on D.E.I. was perfect, fantastic, strong, decisive. Abolishing the D.E.I. departments in all of the federal government. But then taking the second step was: If you are a federal contractor and you receive federal funding, then the prohibition on D.E.I. also extends to you institutionally because we’ve determined that it’s a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
So they’re pushing that pressure outward to all of the institutions in American society, stripping the left-wing patronage from the federal government.
The first Trump administration was funding tens of billions of dollars a year toward left-wing causes. I remember being in the White House in October of 2020 and one of the discussions we were having was: Look at all this money that is going to left-wing NGOs, left-wing academic research, left-wing activism. How can we actually just stop the flow of funding completely?
It was an idea that seemed impossible at the time. A lot of moving parts, a lot of chaos, a lot of conflict and drama. Four years later, the same people are now back in the White House, ruthlessly going through the budget line by line and actually eliminating left-wing waste, fraud, abuse and patronage.
We’re six weeks in, more or less, and the opening salvos have been very strong, and I think that it’s time now to push deeper and go after some of the more systematic reforms that are possible but will take a lot of follow-through.
Douthat: Let’s talk about the plan of action you just sketched out, starting with civil rights, because one of the things the Trump administration has done is it rolled back the affirmative action executive orders, which go back to Lyndon Johnson.
Those orders involve advantages for minority contractors with the federal government that are considered the point of origin of modern affirmative action programs. These are things that past Republican presidents haven’t touched. This is not just a rollback, but an actual kind of counterrevolution.
I’m assuming that you obviously support those moves. What aspects of the post-1964 civil rights bureaucracy do you support?
Rufo: This is a real tension on the right and I’m very cognizant of this tension. You have two competing schools. There are some on the right that have the kind of Christopher Caldwell thesis that the Civil Rights Act is really a second constitution. It has usurped authority over the original constitution. It has created this regime of state intrusion on private life, social life, civic life, etc.
That, as a factual matter, is true. And so what I think the president has done that is salutary, at least as an opening step, is to say we’re going to try to do not only what other Republican presidents haven’t touched, but they’ve actually assented to, agreed to, expanded and strengthened.
President Nixon expanded the affirmative action programs of President Johnson. And kind of all the way down the line you see this kind of consensus because Republicans have been so scared of anything involving civil rights, race, sexuality. They have, I think, been kind of pressured or in some cases hoodwinked into expanding this regime that we’re talking about.
Douthat: But just to pause, it’s also that corporate America at a certain point somewhere in the 1970s decided that certain kinds of diversity programs were good for business. My sense is that in the Reagan era, for instance, there was a feeling that Republicans would lose support from parts of big business if they went hard after affirmative action.
Part of the post-civil rights consensus that Republicans at least partially embraced at a certain point was the idea that there were modest forms of diversification initiatives that were good for American society.
And the language and arguments that are being used right now around those initiatives are basically to say that they are, in fact, in tension with the original vision, or at least the letter of the law, of the Civil Rights Act because they discriminate against white Americans. Right?
Rufo: Sure. Yeah. Whites and Asians ——
Douthat: Asian Americans in college applications.
Rufo: Which was not the case in the ’70s and ’80s because the Asian population was so small, but certainly now is the case.
But look, I think you may be overestimating the support in corporate America. It was a tacit acceptance of the fact that we were just 10 years out of the Jim Crow era and that some restitution and some transition is good. So corporations said, All right, this is the tax that we pay, and if we bring up or politicize this issue, there’s probably more risk than benefit.
Even the Supreme Court says this kind of affirmative action is probably a violation of, if not the letter of, then the spirit of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, but it’s a transition period that we’ll have to accommodate and then eventually we’ll let it go. That was the common argument.
But I think that there are really two avenues forward for the right. One avenue that is the most radical libertarian argument, which would be that the Civil Rights Act is a fundamental infringement on civil liberties, freedom of association, freedom of speech, and therefore it requires abolition.
The second argument and the argument that I favor is that the right needs to have its own interpretation of civil rights law and it needs to take over the enforcement of civil rights law. It needs to have essentially an alternative vision, a kind of Spartan system of colorblind equality, that is in my view better grounded in the Constitution and the law.
There is no reward or punishment based on ancestry. And if you do that in admissions, hiring, promotions or contracting you should pay just as heavy a price as if someone was segregating lunch counters in the past.
And I think my position in 2020 and 2021 is now the majority position on the right, with almost no exceptions.
Douthat: Yeah, I think that’s right.
Rufo: I think the left is going to have to face this, because they’re going to have to ask: Do you want to have a kind of colorblind equality, or do you want to have this system of racial spoils, racial favoritism, racial discrimination?
And my goal moving forward is to push that debate as far leftward as I can. The establishment liberals versus the kind of race radicals are going to have to fight it out eventually, and I’d like to see that the establishment liberals win this fight.
Douthat: But from the point of view of, let’s say, establishment liberals, whether you’re in corporate America or running a major American university or dealing with issues of elite formation, there’s always going to be an interest in a diverse, multiracial, multicultural society. In having diverse representation in important slots.
You see this even in Republican cabinets. And I think that to some degree, I agree with you, it may not put a fundamental limit on how far the right wants to go in sort of sweeping all affirmative action programs away.
I think at the very least it puts a pretty hard limit on how far you could get the center-left establishment to go along with your argument. I think that if you’re running a major American corporation, there’s always going to be a world in which you’re going to want to find some way to take racial diversity and representation into account. Don’t you think that’s true?
Rufo: I don’t think so. I don’t think that that’s the case. And I frankly don’t think that that’s how the majority of the population thinks. Yes, in elite institutions people have been conditioned to think in those terms. But I think ——
Douthat: Well, wait a minute. Let’s just stick with politics for a minute.
Representation in politics was a completely normal part of American politics long before we got to the age of affirmative action. It has always been the case.
For example: You’re trying to pick a vice president and you’re trying to balance the country regionally. I know this is an overused example, but all the way down to Antonin Scalia, the great conservative jurist who was picked not only as the first Italian American on the court, but that was a consideration. I just don’t see how you do away with those kinds of considerations.
Rufo: Yeah. I don’t think that people genuinely care about precise mathematical representation across every institution.
Douthat: I completely agree with that.
Rufo: I think most people accept that when they go to the nail salon and it’s being run by almost all Vietnamese people, they’re fine with that. When you go to a programming floor it’s mostly East Asian and South Asian males and white males. Or, let’s say athletes. You have heavily Black representation in the N.B.A.
The world is complicated, and most people have a sense that different groups, different cultures, have different priorities, different interests, different talents, and they don’t mathematically graft themselves in an artificial way onto every institution. And that’s OK as long as there’s a sense that people are being treated fairly and as long as there’s a sense that there’s a path to advancement for people who merit advancement.
Look, we’re talking about perception, and I think that there is, even on the right — I think this is true, you’ve been around right-leaning institutions longer than I have — people do have a sense of this question of representation that you’re bringing up.
I think that’s fine. It’s a fine gut check. I think it’s a normal reaction and I think there’s something to be said about the Scalia example perhaps. I think Scalia absolutely gets it on the merits, but you’re making the argument that OK ——
Douthat: No, he absolutely, he absolutely does. But there is also ——
Rufo: There’s perhaps some Catholic representation.
Ticket balancing all of these questions, yeah, that’s a natural human thing. But what is, I think, the proper approach for that is to submerge it and obscure it. It’s something that may be happening at the margins that maybe people have some heightened sensitivity to, but we don’t talk about it.
It’s done with the appearance that it’s not being done. And I think it’s the most honorable way to do something like that. But what we have is the opposite. We have insane hatred written into the operating manual of our universities.
We have to get rid of all that. And then if there’s some subtle, marginal, tacit kind of representation, provided that everyone meets a threshold of excellence, I think almost everyone can live with that. That’s fine.
But what we have is so far from that it almost seems like a nice dream to have in relation to what we have in real life.
Douthat: Right. I guess all I’m saying is, I hear a lot from populist conservatives who say Ronald Reagan was gutless. George H.W. Bush was a coward. Trump is doing all of these things that they could have done and should have done. And my sense as someone who grew up in 1990s America is that part of the reason that they didn’t try to sweep away affirmative action was because it was widely perceived as a version of what you are conceding is sort of a natural part of elite formation and construction.
I work in journalism. My wife works in journalism. If you run a big-city newspaper and the city is heavily African American and you have an awful lot of white reporters, are you going to want to hire an extra African American reporter? Of course you are.
I think a lot of Americans, including Republicans, perceived that as sort of the way the system already worked and as a thing that was then upset by wokeness and the shift in the 2010s.
So I agree with you that there is this split on the right about how far back we should be going. Some people think this was all built into the Civil Rights Act itself. And you’re in the position of saying if we properly interpret the Civil Rights Act, then it will roll back the excesses of affirmative action. I’m just sort of curious where the stable equilibrium is. Is it 1997 or is it a little bit more anti-affirmative action than that?
Rufo: Yeah, this is a really important debate on the right, and I have, of course, people to my right who say: No, the Civil Rights Act is a problem and it has to be repealed.
Douthat: Right. I think we can both agree that the Civil Rights Act is very unlikely to be repealed.
Rufo: That is the first point. It’s saying, All right, well, this is a nonstarter, so your point gets you nowhere. And I actually think that there’s a way to not go backward. The question shouldn’t be, do we go back to 1997, to 1965, or to 1963?
I think we have an opportunity to go forward. To say: Look, we’ve had this experiment with affirmative action that metamorphosized into woke ideology, into D.E.I., into rampant discrimination that rewards and punishes people based on their ancestry. We’re done with that. We’re going to reinterpret the law, so that we have, for the first time ever, a simple, strategic, colorblind equality through all of our institutions.
If you want to have a government that enforces civil rights laws, we need to have a government that enforces civil rights laws for everyone. Not just the favored groups, but for every individual.
So what does that look like? It looks like what the Trump administration is doing. To say anti-white bigotry should face just as severe a sanction as anti-Black bigotry. And yet, you only see the institutions practicing one of those. So, a true colorblind equality requires equal enforcement.
Douthat: But if you’re the Trump administration, you’re still going to have to make choices about lawsuits and enforcement. The kind of choices that liberals have made in the past.
You’re going to have universities that say, OK, you know, we’re in compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, and you can tell that we’re in compliance because the white and Asian share of our student body went up by 3 or 4 percent and the African American and Hispanic share went down by 3 or 4 percent.
But someone in the civil rights bureaucracy — and maybe now that person is a fan of Christopher Rufo, rather than a critical race theorist — is still going to have to decide whether a given percentage change signals continued anti-white discrimination. A conservative bureaucrat still has to decide where the line is between normal racial balancing and racial discrimination. So, what is the standard of racial discrimination that you’re going to use?
Rufo: Correct. And it cannot go away as long as you have the Civil Rights Act.
Douthat: Right.
Rufo: And so my argument is that conservatives have to live with the status quo, do the best that we can with that status quo and therefore we need an alternative policy.
But there’s an interesting wrinkle here that I think is really important. First, I think the Trump administration should take a maximalist approach. I think they should say, if you have discriminatory D.E.I. programs, if you have discriminatory admissions procedures, or discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, you’ll be stripped of federal funding, which in a sense would mean bankruptcy for many universities.
And they should do it. They should actually follow through on the threat in at least one symbolic fight that will then change the incentives everywhere and send people scrambling to comply with the law.
But the question that I think you’re raising or about to raise is another good one. What happens if Harvard’s admissions numbers change dramatically and fewer Black or Hispanic students are admitted to X, Y, or Z university? You may see some recomposition of the numbers.
Douthat: Well, wait. You have to see a recomposition of the numbers. The critique of all of these programs, the whole point is that these schools don’t have meritocratic admissions, they don’t have colorblind admissions. If they had colorblind admissions, the numbers would look quite different, right?
Rufo: Yes, as a whole. But the top university may be able to reach the threshold even going down a few. Going down more, you’re going to have it even more dramatically. I mean, the answer is quite simple. It’s to say, you either have meritocratic admissions or you don’t, and you live with the consequences.
But conservatives are so eager to solve that problem in theory that they forget an important lesson: Never solve your opponent’s problems for them. Certainly don’t solve them in advance. Create a standard, you enforce the standard, and then let them grapple with the outcomes. That, to me, seems the best course of action. And then as they adapt, then our position can adapt in response.
Douthat: I agree. I guess all I’m stressing is when you say “create the standard and enforce the standard,” the question of enforcement becomes your problem, right? It will be the Trump administration’s problem and there will have to be a set of decisions made about what kind of recomposition of student bodies suggests a good-faith move away from racial preferences and what doesn’t.
There is no getting away from the fact that you are taking over enforcement and decision making about what falls within the bounds and what doesn’t. And I’m just arguing that it is inherently a gray area.
Rufo: Yeah, I think there’s perhaps some gray, like all things, but I think it’s less than maybe you’re suggesting here. I think that there are two things that we could do to help solve this problem or help to even reveal the problem. The first is that every university that receives federal funding should be required to publish disaggregated data for race, sex, G.P.A., SAT scores and class rank at the back end. Publish your numbers. Make them available so that if there is the appearance that there is a large disparity in SAT scores and G.P.A. based on groups and admissions, you then create the opening for a public inquiry. I think that’s a way where increased transparency could lead to kind of automatic accountability.
The other thing to note is that admissions is important, but I would put it down a couple rungs from the most important issues related to discrimination, etc. I think the D.E.I. bureaucracies are a much more fruitful line of attack. And I think we start there because you’re creating a culture that is the problem beyond just the mathematical problem of admissions and statistics and SAT scores.
Douthat: So you mentioned the idea of people in the Trump administration going line by line through grants and programs that are essentially grants to left-wing ideological organizations. But take the biggest thing the Trump administration has put on the chopping block. It’s been U.S.A.I.D., which absolutely contains many programs that fit the description that you’ve offered, but it also contains a lot of other programs.
I think it’s fairly hard to argue that PEPFAR, the program that tries to ameliorate AIDS and H.I.V. in Africa, should be seen primarily as just funding for left-wing groups or a kind of D.E.I. program. The Trump administration approach has been less of a line-by-line elimination of specific programs. It has been more that they consider this whole effort ideologically rotten and therefore cutting programs generally.
There’s a similar question with the Department of Education where the Department of Education contains within it grants and programs that absolutely fit the description of what you’re criticizing. It also does a lot of other stuff, right?
Rufo: Yeah.
Douthat: So to what extent is it defensible for the Trump administration to be essentially shuttering departments or collapsing departments in an effort to get at D.E.I.?
Rufo: Let me take the example of the Department of Education. I know it much better than I know U.S.A.I.D. and PEPFAR and AIDS in Africa, which is not in my area of expertise at all.
So what should happen at the Department of Education is a U.S.A.I.D.-style dismantling. But what I would recommend in particular for that institution is to bracket out those programs that are worthwhile. The ones that are politically popular and that are going to be very difficult to cut even if you wanted to do so.
With the Department of Education, I look at it as three buckets. You have $120 billion a year, more or less, of federal financial aid for colleges and universities, student loans, student grants, etc. I think that number should be reduced over time. I think that the loan asset portfolio should be spun off and privatized.
But in the immediate blitz, I think you have to say that the student loan programs will not change. It’ll be spun off into its own independent agency, and then you can implement the particular reforms, reductions, privatization down the line.
The second area that I think you have to safeguard is specialized K-12 funding. Low-income school districts, special ed programs — these are very politically popular. And you say, We’re going to actually keep this the same or slightly increase it and we’re going to block-grant it to the states so that it can be better utilized for local conditions and for the people who actually run the education systems.
The third bucket, which is numerically smaller than K-12 aid and federal financial aid, is everything else that the department does. The ideological programs, the grants for critical race theory and gender ideology and liberatory pedagogy — whatever you may have, all of that needs to just be burned to the ground.
I mean, really, truly, it needs to be gutted and dismantled. And so what you have at the end is something that is reduced to the essential components, and that can be parceled out and decentralized so that the power is not within the very, very far-left-leaning administration of the Department of Education, but it’s simply granted out to the states so that Governor DeSantis can take that money and do something better than, for example, Governor Newsom.
That, to me, seems defensible.
Douthat: Here’s what I don’t understand about this plan. The Trump administration is in charge of the Department of Education and the administrators of the Department of Education are appointed by the Trump administration. Obviously, the Trump administration wants to claim increased authority to hire, fire and so on. We’ll take that as a given for the perspective of this conversation, right?
Rufo: Sure.
Douthat: First of all, it’s not even clear that you can legally abolish the Department of Education without congressional action. And why would you even want to? Why wouldn’t you just say we’re going to have a Department of Education and it’s going to do the things that you yourself have described? The biggest financial portion of what it does, from special education to student loans and so on. We’re going to continue to do educational research of various kinds, longitudinal research — I personally know more than a handful of center-right wonks who are very happy to do educational research that is not woke or progressive or ideological — and maybe we’re just going to purge the ideological programs that you describe or substitute some other set of right-leaning programs.
Why wouldn’t you want to just run the actual bureaucracy? Especially since, yes, if you send block grants to the states, some things will go to Ron DeSantis in Florida and to conservative-leaning state governments, but it’s not like the educational bureaucracy in the states is super right wing. And obviously there are plenty of straightforward blue states where block granting leads to policies that you would never support in a million years.
So what is the gain to conservatism of doing away with this major tool for federal influence over education policy?
Rufo: The problem and the potential gain is this: The strategy you’re outlining is a strategy that we’ve already been doing. I’ve done reporting on some of the grantees, NGOs, and other institutions that are entirely or almost entirely funded by the Department of Education. They’re monolithically left wing.
And as I’ve done this reporting and brought it to public attention, contracts have been cut for dozens of these NGOs, which would effectively cripple them moving forward. The total amount of funding for these Department of Education programs that has been cut by the DOGE team is now more than a billion dollars.
So, yes, what you’re saying is to purge the bad elements ——
Douthat: I’m saying you could declare victory and you still have the Department of Education doing the popular things that it does. We all know that most education is funded at the local level in the U.S., so you’re not actually talking about a huge part of the budget.
Rufo: Here’s the problem, though: It’s very easy to cut external contracts. It’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution and the permanent bureaucracy of that institution. I know for a fact that at the Department of Education, replacing the management within the building does not really replace the broader culture.
A cabinet secretary in the first Trump administration told me an interesting story. They had a meeting with some of the career staffers, the permanent staff in this agency — this wasn’t with the Department of Education — and the career staff was not complying with what this person was trying to do. They were running circles around him. He couldn’t get anything done, and eventually he said: ”Just tell me what the deal is. Just level with me.”
And the career staffer said: “We know that we’re going to be here in four years or eight years or 12 years or 16 years. And we know that you’re going to be gone in two years or six years, whatever it might be.”
So you have a system that is unaccountable, and when the culture of that system and the vast bulk of the bureaucracy of that system is captured, you get the status quo of the first Trump administration, which was a Department of Education that was radically left wing, funding only radical left-wing causes.
I just think that there has to be a kind of binary choice, agency by agency. Can this agency be reformed or can this agency only be abolished or dismantled to the maximum extent permissible by law? I think the Department of Education is then in the latter camp. I think the F.B.I. could maybe be reformed.
Douthat: Right.
Rufo: Other agencies can be perhaps reformed. But the Department of Education in my view is beyond reform. You have to spin off, liquidate, terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law. All while maintaining your political viability and your statutory compliance for those things that are essential, required by law, and that are politically popular. You always want to maintain the popularity, but can you take those things away ——
Douthat: But it just seems weird to me.
Rufo: Why?
Douthat: Put it this way, Chris. If you can’t find enough right-leaning or centrist people to staff a stripped-down and slimmer Department of Education to affect American education in the way you want, how are you ever going to find enough personnel to do it at the state level?
A big reason that American education writ large is left leaning is that many people who go into it are left leaning. You and I know this very well. Some of my best friends are left-leaning graduates of America’s many fine educational schools. It just seems like it’s sort of pre-emptive despair on the part of conservatives to say, Well, we have political control over this agency that has a certain kind of influence over American education, and we’re just going to give it up because we can’t find enough people. You’re assuming a capacity to fire people, right?
Rufo: Yes
Douthat: But you don’t assume any capacity to hire new people?
Rufo: Well, this gets to another point, and maybe I can answer your question more effectively from the other side. You’re essentially asking, why can’t you just replace the bad folks with the good folks?
Douthat: Well, just to be clear, you are advocating eliminating all of the people who you think are sort of irredeemably left wing, right? Like they will not have jobs anymore?
Rufo: The unfortunate answer is yes. They’re redeemable as people, but they aren’t entitled to lifetime federal employment with no accountability.
Douthat: Absolutely. I’m not making a moral case for their right to a job. You’re saying we can fire them?
Rufo: I believe that to be true as far as part of an overall reorganization. But I think the other problem that you’re identifying is one that I take seriously and the unfortunate answer is, no. Conservatives cannot fully staff the Department of Education. Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things.
So we have to figure out what we can do. Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can’t do those things, then what do we have to shut down? Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy.
Douthat: But you’re not actually shutting down the schools themselves, right? Americans are going to continue to want to send their kids to colleges and universities. I agree with you that if you asked me tomorrow to staff all of America’s colleges and universities with people whose politics are in the Venn diagram between the two of us, I couldn’t do it. But there’s no solution where conservatives like — we don’t have enough academics. I guess we’re going to close down the American university system. And if that were our policy, it would be extremely unpopular.
Rufo: Well, no. I would take issue for two reasons. One is that we can do that at the state level. Governor DeSantis has done it in Florida. Governors in Ohio, Arizona and Tennessee have opened up conservative research institutions within their flagship state universities and other affiliated state universities.
Douthat: I agree. They have set up small institutes and that is a great start.
Rufo: I think it’s very important. It opens up the possibility for geometric growth in the future. But I actually think that your other point is not quite right. I actually think that the corrective that is required is not to say we’re going to shut down all the universities, because that’s not possible. But, by spinning off, privatizing and then reforming the student loan programs, I think that you could put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession. And I think that would be a very salutary thing.
I think that putting the universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets, into a greater competitive market pressure, would discipline them in a way that you could not get through administrative oversight with 150 extra Department of Ed bureaucrats.
A medium- or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror and have them say, Unless we change what we’re doing, we’re not going to be able to meet our budget for the year. We’re going to have to wind certain things down and then make the universities make those hard decisions.
Douthat: You’re on the board of the New College of Florida, which Ron DeSantis took over. Since you’re involved in curricular debates, what is the alternative curriculum? Part of the appeal of everything associated with D.E.I. was that it offered a narrative about America to center-left people. A very critical narrative that posed America as unjust, but a powerful one for a 21st-century diverse society.
Is there a conservative version of that? What affirmative things would you want to see elite or nonelite schools doing when it comes to teaching American history right now?
Rufo: I think that’s what we’re cobbling together at New College of Florida. I think it’s also what some of the reforms in Florida have been designed to do in the other state universities.
Our universities are no longer liberal arts universities. They are these mega complexes that have scientific arms, research arms and financial arms. You can have a classical liberal arts curriculum that takes the ideology out. But if we’re talking about just the humanities, I think we need a total overturning of its ideology, along with a return to the classical understanding of the humanities adapted for modern conditions and popularized for large state universities. What we’re doing at New College is reintroducing the eternal human questions.
Our new college mission statement says it’s a community of scholars and learners that have a shared commitment to a culture of civil debate and inquiry leading toward the true, the good and the beautiful. And continuing the great tradition of the Western civilization that has provided us with these opportunities.
So that is a big, overarching message.
Douthat: But about America? I’m a fan of classical education. I think the rise of the classical school movement in America is one of the healthiest signs in our culture. At the same time, those programs tend to be heavy on the great books. They’re really good at figuring out the right balance of the ancient Greeks and the medievals and the Renaissance and so on. But so much of the debate around critical race theory and D.E.I. is about the story we tell about America.
There is a conservative patriotic education that you and I both encountered which has a certain kind of sterility to it. It teaches that the founders are awesome and Lincoln perfects it. And then you needed Martin Luther King to finish things off.
And America is a big, complicated and messy society. And I feel like certain versions of that conservative patriotic education don’t feel as deep and rich as America deserves.
So a macro question is: Can conservatism become less superficial? And to pick up some of the points that your critics tend to make: If you are setting out to eliminate C.R.T. as an ideological influence on education, what does that mean for the professor at New College who wants to assign Ta-Nehisi Coates or assign figures who are associated with radicalism and wokeness as part of the American story?
What do conservatives think about radicalism? And can conservatives figure out how to teach about radicalism?
Rufo: We actually did this at New College. We had the satirist Andrew Doyle, the artist behind the Titania McGrath satire handle on Twitter, teach a course this past winter looking at the war surrounding woke ideology. And I think his approach was the right one.
He paired Ta-Nehisi Coates with my book, “America’s Cultural Revolution.” And he paired Ibram Kendi with Eric Kaufman, the conservative social scientist. They grappled with this phenomenon of the last 10 years based on the best arguments from both of the major sides or traditions. Then, they related them to these enduring human questions: Does this get us closer to justice? Does this interpretation of American history get us closer to the truth? The kind of questions where you’re not just having a narrow ideological debate but you’re trying to guide people through to the right answer. And so, I think that is a really good way to do it if you wanted to answer those questions.
Your other critique is important. Look, the patriotic education from a lot of these conservative organizations is sterile, one-dimensional and jingoistic. Conservatives need a more arresting, sophisticated, complex story that we tell about the country that still captures the essence of the goodness, genius, talent and virtue of the people of this country. And I think that is a story that is absolutely possible to be told, especially if you reorganize the institutions around that fundamental narrative. Gender studies is out. D.E.I. is out. And, a more complex history is in.
Andrew Doyle’s course on the war of woke is in, and then you go forward from there. So, I think you need a strong alternative to the present, but it’s not there yet. And we haven’t come up with one that’s as big or as sophisticated or as glossy as our opponents. But I think that it can be done and it will be done in the future.
Douthat: Last question: You’re in charge of a curriculum, and you have to include one author you are opposed to, but students can benefit from reading. Who do you pick?
Rufo: Without a doubt, Herbert Marcuse, who was the leading philosophical intellectual light of the new left in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I think you have to read Marcuse for catastrophic errors in judgment and for a kind of repulsive politics in outcome.
There are certain insights that can be salvaged from his work, and it’s certainly the most brilliant and rich defense of left-wing ideologies that have been on the rise in the last half-century. And I think that’s very valuable work that could be taken seriously.
Douthat: All right, we’re going to leave you to plan the Herbert Marcuse seminar at New College in Florida. Chris Rufo, thanks so much for joining me.
Rufo: Thank you.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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