The New Puritans

[Valin]

National Review/The Corner

Yuval Levin

July 12, 2022

Critics of the rigid and imperious ideological extremism of the modern Left now often reach for the vocabulary of religious fanaticism to explain what has happened to progressives. Sometimes that vocabulary is deployed metaphorically — I’ve done that myself on occasion, as have many smarter and abler people. And sometimes it’s intended more literally, as in John McWhorter’s fascinating recent book. I think there is something to learn from such arguments, but I’ve always found myself feeling like none of them quite puts its finger on the kind of religious impulse we are witnessing, so that too many such efforts end up being needlessly simplistic and insulting either about genuinely religious people or about the progressives being described in these terms.

Or at least, I’ve always felt that way until now. In his new book The Rise of the New Puritans, Noah Rothman (associate editor of the great Commentary magazine) has finally made sense of this facet of the character of the woke Left. It is, he notes, a form of Puritanism, for good and bad.

(Snip)

Those excesses of today’s woke progressivism, in their different forms, are Rothman’s subject. He classifies them persuasively, and shows how they are connected by linking each to a distinct facet of the Puritan framework. The result is a book brimming with clarifying insights and illuminating formulations.

If there is one theme I might have liked to see explored a bit more it is the simple but peculiar fact that today’s Puritanism makes its home on the cultural left. This tells us something about the New Puritanism as a doctrine. It means for one thing that it is not rooted in a Christian ethic, at least not explicitly, and therefore that its worldly severity is not moderated by humility before the divine — it is, in a word, prideful, and its pridefulness (unlike that of the original Puritans) is not hypocritical and is therefore utterly shameless.

(Snip)

 

[Valin]

July11 2022

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July  23 2022

[Valin]

Aug 17, 2022 Noah Rothman, author of ‘The Rise Of The New Puritans,’ details just how ‘miserable’ the lives are of today’s progressives. And the worst part? They don’t even REALIZE IT! But these progressive ‘puritans’ are ‘pursuing a moral framework and have imposed it on EVERY ASPECT of life,’ Rothman explains, just like the totalitarian philosophy on which their ideology is based. Glenn and Rothman discuss how this kind of moral absolutism — that takes no prisoners — could cause our society to cease to function normally…

[Valin]

And THIS is why They Will FAIL.

 

They don't see this as Funny.

[Valin]

Sep 7, 2022 In The Rise of the New Puritans, Commentary Magazine associate editor Noah Rothman explains how, in pursuit of a better world, a relatively new and fervent strain of progressivism, in a “burst of moral enthusiasm” is ruining the very things which make life worth living by attempting to craft a society full of verbal trip wires and digital witch hunts. Football? Too violent. Fusion food? Appropriation. The nuclear family? Oppressive.

As the social scientist Yuval Levin wrote in a review of the book, what’s interesting about this New Puritanism is that “it is not rooted in a Christian ethic, at least not explicitly, and therefore that its worldly severity is not moderated by humility before the divine.”

In response to this phenomenon, Rothman encourages us to spurn a movement whose primary goal has become limiting happiness. The book uncovers the historical roots of this war on fun and reminds us of the freedom and personal fulfillment at the heart of the American experiment.