So, what are Rufo’s theory and strategy? In the most important parts of the speech, Rufo discussed what he thought was “the Achilles heel of this cultural revolution”:
Critical theory… is entirely a creature of the state. It was born, and nurtured, and raised within publicly financed and publicly subsidized universities and it now survives only in this vast constellation of publicly supported and publicly subsidized bureaucracy; It also gives us a tremendous opportunity because what the public giveth the public can take [ ] away… We should never fight directly. It’s very hard. We should fight indirectly, in a more sophisticated way, to start slowly chipping away at these bureaucracies and institutional powers.
Rufo may be the most intellectually coherent and theoretically sound activist in the right to right of center, since perhaps Phyllis Schafly. And one can be thoroughly curious to find out that his strategy verges on a mix of libertarianism with political reaction—a sort of libertarianism that seeks to further reactionary aims. Perhaps that is why he constantly refers to his strategy as “counterrevolution,” and not “reaction,” as reaction might have a negative connotation in American politics.
Consider his strategy for freeing the country’s institutions—including higher education—from the pernicious ideology of critical theory. First, he argues that the right should “cripple the critical ideologies within the federal agencies through executive order; defund the left by blocking, delaying, and stalling federal grants that support the critical ideologies in universities, schools, and nonprofits; force all agencies to run any identity-based programs through OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] and strangle them in red tape.”
The fundamental aim would be to disrupt any federal financing of the cultural revolution for four or eight years, during which time Congress could pursue a longer-term strategy to destroy centralization. However one may wish to label this strategy, it is not “reactionary;” reactionary policies, tend to heavily focus on wielding state power. And Rufo’s goal is to take away the federal government’s power, not transfer it to another political party.