I want to clearly state where I think @christopherrufo has been harmful for American civic life. He has certainly done some good. My concern is that his tactics are a kind of civic poison. They salt the social earth, making trust hard to rebuild and polarization hard to reduce. I'm part of the Ohio civics project. I left an ordinary academic job to throw myself into the work of academic reform, building institutions that serve as a counterweight to left-wing overreach. The academy is in deep need of reform. I am not a beautiful loser asking conservatives to disarm. But this work requires being charitable to people we disagree with, and Rufo's rhetoric is not uniformly welcome among those of us doing it. Consider his own words: "We will eventually turn [critical race theory] toxic, as we put all of the 'various cultural insanities' under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something 'crazy' in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.'" This isn't arguing that a view is false. It isn't trying to remove it from a curriculum. It's category construction. It has always read to me as engineered so the public can't distinguish thoughtful people who draw on CRT from crazy ones. That's not necessary to win the argument, and it corrodes the civic ground any future reform has to be built upon. I'm not tone-policing. I'm saying what Rufo gives with one hand, he takes with the other. Many of us are doing the hard daily work of academic reform, and we do not uniformly welcome his efforts, because his tactics are too bare-knuckled and, frankly, unkind. So to be clear: the academy needs reform. I am giving my career to that project. But I will not thank Rufo for anything as long as his rhetoric salts the earth for rebuilding trust with the left.
