The Rise of the New Puritans
Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun
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Commentary editor Noah Rothman takes aim at the "woke left," comparing them to stern, joyless Puritans who seek to make every daily choice a matter of life or death and break society down into the saintly or sinful. In Noah Rothman's view, the left used to be the party of the hippies and the free spirits. Now it's home to woke scolds and humorless ideologues. From entertainment to food to comedy to family life, there's no area of society the new leftists don't want to control, he argues. These new joyless progressives only dislike witch hunts when they're not the ones running them. Like their puritanical forebears, new leftists do not abide forms of pleasure that distract from the great work of our time--righting the wrongs of America's white patriarchal heritage. As Rothman sees it, Progressive Puritans are committed to waging a war on decadence, frivolity, and pleasure for its own sake. In pursuit of a better world, these people are making fools of themselves and impoverishing their compatriots. In this hard-hitting critique, Rothman shows no mercy as he uncovers the historical roots of the left's war on fun and counsels us to rediscover the freedom and joy at the heart of the American experiment.
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There are a couple of assumptions made in this book that make it hard for me to give it full marks.
a) In the beginning, the author asserts that the moderate progressive issues we've fought over since the 60s are settled and progressive causes won. He points at abortion, gay rights, and racial injustices as basically being settled in a moderate manner and that now the progressive left, the new puritans are just going into moral panic mode because they have nothing substantial to fight for anymore. Given recent Supreme Court decisions and the presumptive GOP front-runner's crusades in Florida, this strikes me as ignorant and ill-founded. It is the basis of the argument that things are going to far and people should just be happy with their moderate victories, and it is not true.
b) The author points at very real flaws in the actions and rhetoric of people in the progressive movement. I fully agree so much that is being held up for ridicule and I agree with the idea that it is gone too far in some ways. However, the author repeatedly links the idea that the progressive left going overboard to correct social behavior to the stated goal (e.g. racial justice, LGBTQ justice) as being overboard or overreaching on the part of the people with these goals. I do not agree with this chain of reasoning and find it disingenuous.
Those problems aside, the author does raise many points of basically mob justice gone wrong. Almost all of the things pointed at are some BS found on social media, by people that have no real power without a mob whipped up, but still. I found the connection between social coercion today and in New England during the heights of puritanism to be very interesting.