"Why has Queer Theory succeeded? I think, in part, because it’s successfully deployed a stigma against the articulated defense of the normative society. It’s considered taboo to provide an explicit intellectual defense of heterosexuality, biological sex, the gender binary, the two-parent family, and psychological integration."
This stigma, the taboo against defending the normative society (or "squareness" if you don't mind) is the result of the '60's cultural revolution that begat radical academic feminism, which I believe to be the font of all the schools of what might be called applied neo-Marxism. Bashing the establishment gradually became a way of gaining instant moral rectitude, and demonstrations became a sort of rite of passage for university students. It did not take long for conservative professors (once the majority) to retire out of service and be replaced by academics who consciously sought to advance the destruction of social norms and who created the first courses to apply neo-Marxist cultural criticism in its various iterations (women's/latino/black/queer/fat "studies"). The so-called ivory tower became a secular Minaret calling the faithful to revolution.
This is why "you see very little intellectual output defending those systems and hierarchies [targeted by critical studies as the "hegemony" to be "subverted"]; people have simply tacitly accepted them." This acceptance has been helped along by the stamp of intellectual authority and by the millions who have earned university degrees in the Humanities since around 1980.
Apr 26, 2023·edited Apr 26, 2023Liked by Christopher F. Rufo
"They are taking an almost Marxist categorization of oppressor and oppressed along the axis of gender and sexuality, which must be inverted in order to achieve liberation. "
According to James Lindsay, who has dedicated his life for the past several years to, as he puts it, "reading the left's literature and taking them seriously," Queer Theory absolutely is a completely Marxist-based theory/worldview. In some ways, I think of it as today's all-encompassing version of a pure Marxist/Hegelian/dialectic approach to society and reality. It can be summed up as dedication to the belief that "All that exists deserves to perish."
Yes, they do want to completely deconstruct and destroy absolutely everything, because only in doing so can humankind be truly "free." It is this impulse which ultimately drives radical Leftism, and why it Just. Won't. Die. Whatever there is---whatever exists---is wrong. They know it's "wrong" because we haven't reached Utopia yet.
Queer Theory doesn't just want to expand categories relating to sexual behavior and gender identity; it explicitly wants to eliminate all norms and distinctions in everything you can imagine. This, I think, can be seen as encapsulating Marxist/Radical Leftist thought and identifying the ultimate goal of its continual (often disguised) iterations. Queer Theory is the Universal Solvent the Left is currently using to dissolve, disrupt, dismantle so as to allow the emergence of a Utopia unfettered by not just society, but by Reality itself. THAT's why they are so insistent that they can make biological facts conform to their politics---at its heart it's a religious belief that they truly can bend reality to their will.
Very interesting article. What I find fascinating though is how many of these 'Leftist' movements which you name are clearly in fact driven by capitalism and the political theory of capitalist modernity, liberalism (used, of course, in the classical sense). The pressure to commodify all aspects of human being are so systemic and pervasive because they emanate from the very center and heart of our culture as dictated or emerging out of the political-economic process which reproduces society (capitalism). We see in all these movements aspects of commodification... the commodification of identity. The commodification of mental health as a 'branding,' along more obviously with sexual/'gender' identity. And of course, the entire idea of this perversely total(itarian) 'negative liberty' lies at the heart of the theory of liberty ensconced in the whole Enlightenment project.
As sci-fi writer Phillip K Dick said: "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away." If your society's is built on a false model of man, the real world will eventually intrude and force a reckoning. And the longer you've been following that false model, the more disruptive the reckoning will be.
Two things can be true at the same time:
1) Social norms are oppressive to those who have a hard time (for whatever reason) fitting into them.
2) Social norms are necessary for a functioning society.
In a broad sense, a society with no definition of "normal" is nonfunctional because it can't do the one thing every group of mammals (human or otherwise) must do: produce and raise the next generation and train them to be capable of doing the same.
Social norms tend develop because they are effective at achieving that end. Sometimes they require adjustment, but conservativism is simply a recognition that altering social norms must be done slowly and carefully, lest you accidently discard the wisdom of centuries. The vast majority of people are instinctually conservative even if they've never heard of Burke, perhaps because those who wantonly reject past wisdom tend to damage society and thus not reproduce very well. Conservatism is evolutionarily beneficial.,
An iconoclastic radical can never understand the idea that social conventions distill the wisdom of the past. They live always in Year 0, looking to build a brave new world. Today's iconoclasts have, in just 3 generations, discarded the wisdom of sexual ethics that has taken millennia to build.
God help us -- literally, because He's probably the only one that can.
From a philosophical standpoint postmodernism is pure idealism. Because in the minds of postmodernists material reality is only a "social construct" which actually means a construct through language, "discourse". Material reality may or may not exist we will never know because all we have is language they argue. Post-structuralism developed out of linguistics. And naturally many linguists are tempted to pretend that everything is language as it makes their profession look much more relevant than it really is. Thus empiricism is discounted and thrown out of the window. While the "original postmodernist" were radically critical (which basically means they didn't even believe their own sh*t) the new postmodernists are absolutely certain that the enlightenment got everything wrong and is downright "evil". Social marginalization must always be condemned and is without fault a sign of "oppression" which leads directly to the madness that we see today – many "social justice warriors"
seriously believe it's wrong to ostracize even the most horrendous and devious sexual behavior and even if it involves children and instead society should normalize it and punish those who do not partake in it. It's the world as we know it "inverted". Suddenly "drag" in front of children becomes "a human right". The 21st century has truly lost its head.
Our modern world faces a conundrum. We learned from Darwin that human value systems are based on no reality that is independent of the social interactions of humans as a species. The logical conclusion from this is that cultural values are relative. The entire educated secular class that is institutionally dominant worldwide has no coherent argument against this worldview.
Meanwhile, the religious people point to their belief in God as the source of moral norms and social stability. From the evolutionary perspective, the coalitions formed around these shared beliefs have been the organizing principle of societies. But as the traditional God retreats in the face of the Darwinian worldview, social cohesion searches for some replacement foundation. It’s why wokeism feels like a sort of half-baked residual religious impulse of secular society.
My mother observed in the 60s that amorality was much more threatening than immorality. I didn’t quite understand why at the time but I now see that it is the pseudo intellectual libertarian appeal of the pied piper.
"The goal here is not to create a “non-normative society”—meaning a relativistic society in which no one system has any more value than another—but to create an “anti-normative society.” And this is a key distinction because they’re reducing the idea of normativity to a plastic conception of power."
The social/political goal well-summarized in a very few common-sense words - and explains why in each category, the "supply" of persons fitting the new "ideal" (i.e. new type of citizen - a subject, actually) must be increased. In each domain, the number of said persons (or enemies/incidents) must be exaggerated/augmented so as to "normalize" (statistically) what they are advocating.
Your explanation of the public bad-faith is equally succinct. The entire language is "recoded" in the mirror-world of ideological (pseudo) reality.
Nobody in this movement seems to have really thought-through their nihilism - the destination is not where they seem to think. Given (for a moment - it is not a given) that they fully subjugate all dissent, the result will be utterly unstable. The "Warre of every one against every one" will issue forth - is now manifesting. As it must: in what way are any of us now "fellow-citizens?" Of what? In what way? Millions of people are privately saying "I know you not."
A society of sexually deviant and mentally ill fat people is a bizarre goal to say the least!
Intellectually, a lot of this seems to result from the philosophical ‘breakdown’ of the classical Subject--the Kantian categories that allowed for the unity of the subject (apperception) are replaced with sexual or political ciphers/signifiers and the Hegelian Subject/Spirit is lost in the sewage of a difference that can never be appropriated (aufgehoben) into a larger unity and identity. Derrida’s essay on “From a Restricted to A General Economy” is interesting in that regard. Postmodern philosophy is full of this stuff.
I think the displacement of the Subject/Ego (an idea fundamental to all religion but *especially* Christianity btw) is the motive behind this current attempt to valorize mental disease.
Destruction of all that is normal, traditional, historical or stable is a key Marxism tactic. In the case of critical queer theory, the goal is to destroy the nuclear family. Why? Marxists see the nuclear family as the smallest decision-making group that can threaten total government control (totalitarianism). For more about the top Marxism clues, see my Substack article at https://2026.substack.com/p/top-7-marxism-clues
"Why has Queer Theory succeeded? I think, in part, because it’s successfully deployed a stigma against the articulated defense of the normative society. It’s considered taboo to provide an explicit intellectual defense of heterosexuality, biological sex, the gender binary, the two-parent family, and psychological integration."
We could substitute "Wokeness" for "Queer Theory" and the statement would remain generally true. A stigma against an articulated defense mimics biological defense mechanisms that are deployed against predators. Bacteria and viruses have properties which render them immune to bodily attack. Drug development seeks to get around these defenses, but novel ones emerge over time. Like the leapfrog of computer hackers and anti-virus software. The defense mechanism being employed today in "woke" ideology and all its offspring is an overt rejection of rational inquiry. The assertions are taken out of the realm of intellectual debate by explicitly rejecting the Aristotelian pillars of classical logic -- identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, and causality. Subjective truth IS TRUTH for them, regardless of its collision with reality. This renders their beliefs unfalsifiable - a perfect defense mechanism, bypassing rational debate. These ideas are elegantly developed and explored by Mark Goldblatt in his book "I Feel, Therefore I Am", and discussed on a recent Substack podcast by Glenn Loury -- (https://open.substack.com/pub/glennloury/p/john-mcwhorter-and-mark-goldblatt).
The understanding that no amount of rational/logical/intellectual argument will even be entertained, much less change the views of these true believers is depressing but freeing. Any attempt to reach an "ah-ha" moment for them by adequately demonstrating how woke views ultimately collide with reality may be a fool's errand. Perhaps we can for some -- but I'm less certain. It is a religion, and religion is a priori unfalsifiable.
Eh its "non-whatever the current normality and current hegemony is.." i.e. its just a political ploy to tear down the existing power. That's all it is. Just a game, just an excuse to delegitimze whatever currently exists, so everyone will support their notional, undefined "new" thing.
I'm in complete agreement with your position regarding the fundamental tension self-referential incoherence of the anti-relativism position. However, it's counter-productive to toss around flippantly terms, as Jordan Peterson does as well, like "Marxism". The oppressor/oppressed unit is hardly unique to Marxist thinkers. In fact, under self-application, the argument you're making also has an oppressor/oppressed structure. Given that no ONE view of Marxism dominates, I don't understand why thinkers keep using it beyond a boring scare tactic that serves as a fist-pound on the table. The more accurate view is that a newish moralist ontology has emerged in which everything is reduced to a moral hierarchy advocated by "Culture." If anything this emerges as an interesting kind of Marxism in which "ownership of the means of production" is who owns the common infrastructure for ideological propaganda to repeat the cultural scripts for Identity. But again ownership of the memes of production isn't anything unique to Marxism. Even being skeptical of neo-liberalism or global capitalism, it doesn't follow that one is a Marxist. I don't get why we still fear this spectre and use it as some rhetorical unit. Its use seems ineffective and a neologism that more accurately depicts the situation. Not trolling. Enjoy the piece and the tone. From your other work, there's respect for the ideas. Appreciate that.
"Why has Queer Theory succeeded? I think, in part, because it’s successfully deployed a stigma against the articulated defense of the normative society. It’s considered taboo to provide an explicit intellectual defense of heterosexuality, biological sex, the gender binary, the two-parent family, and psychological integration."
This stigma, the taboo against defending the normative society (or "squareness" if you don't mind) is the result of the '60's cultural revolution that begat radical academic feminism, which I believe to be the font of all the schools of what might be called applied neo-Marxism. Bashing the establishment gradually became a way of gaining instant moral rectitude, and demonstrations became a sort of rite of passage for university students. It did not take long for conservative professors (once the majority) to retire out of service and be replaced by academics who consciously sought to advance the destruction of social norms and who created the first courses to apply neo-Marxist cultural criticism in its various iterations (women's/latino/black/queer/fat "studies"). The so-called ivory tower became a secular Minaret calling the faithful to revolution.
This is why "you see very little intellectual output defending those systems and hierarchies [targeted by critical studies as the "hegemony" to be "subverted"]; people have simply tacitly accepted them." This acceptance has been helped along by the stamp of intellectual authority and by the millions who have earned university degrees in the Humanities since around 1980.
"They are taking an almost Marxist categorization of oppressor and oppressed along the axis of gender and sexuality, which must be inverted in order to achieve liberation. "
According to James Lindsay, who has dedicated his life for the past several years to, as he puts it, "reading the left's literature and taking them seriously," Queer Theory absolutely is a completely Marxist-based theory/worldview. In some ways, I think of it as today's all-encompassing version of a pure Marxist/Hegelian/dialectic approach to society and reality. It can be summed up as dedication to the belief that "All that exists deserves to perish."
Yes, they do want to completely deconstruct and destroy absolutely everything, because only in doing so can humankind be truly "free." It is this impulse which ultimately drives radical Leftism, and why it Just. Won't. Die. Whatever there is---whatever exists---is wrong. They know it's "wrong" because we haven't reached Utopia yet.
Queer Theory doesn't just want to expand categories relating to sexual behavior and gender identity; it explicitly wants to eliminate all norms and distinctions in everything you can imagine. This, I think, can be seen as encapsulating Marxist/Radical Leftist thought and identifying the ultimate goal of its continual (often disguised) iterations. Queer Theory is the Universal Solvent the Left is currently using to dissolve, disrupt, dismantle so as to allow the emergence of a Utopia unfettered by not just society, but by Reality itself. THAT's why they are so insistent that they can make biological facts conform to their politics---at its heart it's a religious belief that they truly can bend reality to their will.
Very interesting article. What I find fascinating though is how many of these 'Leftist' movements which you name are clearly in fact driven by capitalism and the political theory of capitalist modernity, liberalism (used, of course, in the classical sense). The pressure to commodify all aspects of human being are so systemic and pervasive because they emanate from the very center and heart of our culture as dictated or emerging out of the political-economic process which reproduces society (capitalism). We see in all these movements aspects of commodification... the commodification of identity. The commodification of mental health as a 'branding,' along more obviously with sexual/'gender' identity. And of course, the entire idea of this perversely total(itarian) 'negative liberty' lies at the heart of the theory of liberty ensconced in the whole Enlightenment project.
As sci-fi writer Phillip K Dick said: "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away." If your society's is built on a false model of man, the real world will eventually intrude and force a reckoning. And the longer you've been following that false model, the more disruptive the reckoning will be.
Two things can be true at the same time:
1) Social norms are oppressive to those who have a hard time (for whatever reason) fitting into them.
2) Social norms are necessary for a functioning society.
In a broad sense, a society with no definition of "normal" is nonfunctional because it can't do the one thing every group of mammals (human or otherwise) must do: produce and raise the next generation and train them to be capable of doing the same.
Social norms tend develop because they are effective at achieving that end. Sometimes they require adjustment, but conservativism is simply a recognition that altering social norms must be done slowly and carefully, lest you accidently discard the wisdom of centuries. The vast majority of people are instinctually conservative even if they've never heard of Burke, perhaps because those who wantonly reject past wisdom tend to damage society and thus not reproduce very well. Conservatism is evolutionarily beneficial.,
An iconoclastic radical can never understand the idea that social conventions distill the wisdom of the past. They live always in Year 0, looking to build a brave new world. Today's iconoclasts have, in just 3 generations, discarded the wisdom of sexual ethics that has taken millennia to build.
God help us -- literally, because He's probably the only one that can.
From a philosophical standpoint postmodernism is pure idealism. Because in the minds of postmodernists material reality is only a "social construct" which actually means a construct through language, "discourse". Material reality may or may not exist we will never know because all we have is language they argue. Post-structuralism developed out of linguistics. And naturally many linguists are tempted to pretend that everything is language as it makes their profession look much more relevant than it really is. Thus empiricism is discounted and thrown out of the window. While the "original postmodernist" were radically critical (which basically means they didn't even believe their own sh*t) the new postmodernists are absolutely certain that the enlightenment got everything wrong and is downright "evil". Social marginalization must always be condemned and is without fault a sign of "oppression" which leads directly to the madness that we see today – many "social justice warriors"
seriously believe it's wrong to ostracize even the most horrendous and devious sexual behavior and even if it involves children and instead society should normalize it and punish those who do not partake in it. It's the world as we know it "inverted". Suddenly "drag" in front of children becomes "a human right". The 21st century has truly lost its head.
I just subscribed because of this cogent essay!
Our modern world faces a conundrum. We learned from Darwin that human value systems are based on no reality that is independent of the social interactions of humans as a species. The logical conclusion from this is that cultural values are relative. The entire educated secular class that is institutionally dominant worldwide has no coherent argument against this worldview.
Meanwhile, the religious people point to their belief in God as the source of moral norms and social stability. From the evolutionary perspective, the coalitions formed around these shared beliefs have been the organizing principle of societies. But as the traditional God retreats in the face of the Darwinian worldview, social cohesion searches for some replacement foundation. It’s why wokeism feels like a sort of half-baked residual religious impulse of secular society.
My mother observed in the 60s that amorality was much more threatening than immorality. I didn’t quite understand why at the time but I now see that it is the pseudo intellectual libertarian appeal of the pied piper.
"The goal here is not to create a “non-normative society”—meaning a relativistic society in which no one system has any more value than another—but to create an “anti-normative society.” And this is a key distinction because they’re reducing the idea of normativity to a plastic conception of power."
The social/political goal well-summarized in a very few common-sense words - and explains why in each category, the "supply" of persons fitting the new "ideal" (i.e. new type of citizen - a subject, actually) must be increased. In each domain, the number of said persons (or enemies/incidents) must be exaggerated/augmented so as to "normalize" (statistically) what they are advocating.
Your explanation of the public bad-faith is equally succinct. The entire language is "recoded" in the mirror-world of ideological (pseudo) reality.
Nobody in this movement seems to have really thought-through their nihilism - the destination is not where they seem to think. Given (for a moment - it is not a given) that they fully subjugate all dissent, the result will be utterly unstable. The "Warre of every one against every one" will issue forth - is now manifesting. As it must: in what way are any of us now "fellow-citizens?" Of what? In what way? Millions of people are privately saying "I know you not."
A society of sexually deviant and mentally ill fat people is a bizarre goal to say the least!
Intellectually, a lot of this seems to result from the philosophical ‘breakdown’ of the classical Subject--the Kantian categories that allowed for the unity of the subject (apperception) are replaced with sexual or political ciphers/signifiers and the Hegelian Subject/Spirit is lost in the sewage of a difference that can never be appropriated (aufgehoben) into a larger unity and identity. Derrida’s essay on “From a Restricted to A General Economy” is interesting in that regard. Postmodern philosophy is full of this stuff.
I think the displacement of the Subject/Ego (an idea fundamental to all religion but *especially* Christianity btw) is the motive behind this current attempt to valorize mental disease.
Destruction of all that is normal, traditional, historical or stable is a key Marxism tactic. In the case of critical queer theory, the goal is to destroy the nuclear family. Why? Marxists see the nuclear family as the smallest decision-making group that can threaten total government control (totalitarianism). For more about the top Marxism clues, see my Substack article at https://2026.substack.com/p/top-7-marxism-clues
"Why has Queer Theory succeeded? I think, in part, because it’s successfully deployed a stigma against the articulated defense of the normative society. It’s considered taboo to provide an explicit intellectual defense of heterosexuality, biological sex, the gender binary, the two-parent family, and psychological integration."
We could substitute "Wokeness" for "Queer Theory" and the statement would remain generally true. A stigma against an articulated defense mimics biological defense mechanisms that are deployed against predators. Bacteria and viruses have properties which render them immune to bodily attack. Drug development seeks to get around these defenses, but novel ones emerge over time. Like the leapfrog of computer hackers and anti-virus software. The defense mechanism being employed today in "woke" ideology and all its offspring is an overt rejection of rational inquiry. The assertions are taken out of the realm of intellectual debate by explicitly rejecting the Aristotelian pillars of classical logic -- identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, and causality. Subjective truth IS TRUTH for them, regardless of its collision with reality. This renders their beliefs unfalsifiable - a perfect defense mechanism, bypassing rational debate. These ideas are elegantly developed and explored by Mark Goldblatt in his book "I Feel, Therefore I Am", and discussed on a recent Substack podcast by Glenn Loury -- (https://open.substack.com/pub/glennloury/p/john-mcwhorter-and-mark-goldblatt).
The understanding that no amount of rational/logical/intellectual argument will even be entertained, much less change the views of these true believers is depressing but freeing. Any attempt to reach an "ah-ha" moment for them by adequately demonstrating how woke views ultimately collide with reality may be a fool's errand. Perhaps we can for some -- but I'm less certain. It is a religion, and religion is a priori unfalsifiable.
Eh its "non-whatever the current normality and current hegemony is.." i.e. its just a political ploy to tear down the existing power. That's all it is. Just a game, just an excuse to delegitimze whatever currently exists, so everyone will support their notional, undefined "new" thing.
Excellent insights 🎯
I am pretty sure human nature is basically evil, not good. To me that makes the likelihood of this culture rot failing is not good.
The physical brain damage, from vaccines (starting at birth to now) to social media to porn, is going yo be so hard to deprogram this generation from.
But the highest praise I can offer, Chris, is that I feel more calm after listening to you. That is actually priceless. Thank you for the work you do.
I'm in complete agreement with your position regarding the fundamental tension self-referential incoherence of the anti-relativism position. However, it's counter-productive to toss around flippantly terms, as Jordan Peterson does as well, like "Marxism". The oppressor/oppressed unit is hardly unique to Marxist thinkers. In fact, under self-application, the argument you're making also has an oppressor/oppressed structure. Given that no ONE view of Marxism dominates, I don't understand why thinkers keep using it beyond a boring scare tactic that serves as a fist-pound on the table. The more accurate view is that a newish moralist ontology has emerged in which everything is reduced to a moral hierarchy advocated by "Culture." If anything this emerges as an interesting kind of Marxism in which "ownership of the means of production" is who owns the common infrastructure for ideological propaganda to repeat the cultural scripts for Identity. But again ownership of the memes of production isn't anything unique to Marxism. Even being skeptical of neo-liberalism or global capitalism, it doesn't follow that one is a Marxist. I don't get why we still fear this spectre and use it as some rhetorical unit. Its use seems ineffective and a neologism that more accurately depicts the situation. Not trolling. Enjoy the piece and the tone. From your other work, there's respect for the ideas. Appreciate that.