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.
It is in this respect thoroughly American. In fact, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that Puritanism was the source of some of what is most American about us Americans — the “point of departure” of the entire grand experiment. And Tocqueville added that “Puritanism was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine.” Rothman suggests much the same, and sees elements of the Puritan framework of intense piety, the hunting of heretics, a peculiar austerity and temperance, and ambition for social transformation underlying the Left’s contemporary moral and political ambitions.
This means he doesn’t see it as all bad — or at least he goes out of his way to grant that its intentions are in many instances benevolent, and that even its excesses are generally rooted in what he aptly calls “a burst of moral enthusiasm.” But those excesses have quickly come to dominate the project as a whole, and they ultimately render the contemporary progressive project anathema to the American spirit and a menace to the larger society. “The climate fostered by the New Puritans is both humorless and totalitarian,” Rothman writes. He shows that its humorlessness in particular is more important than it might first appear, and that it opens up a tremendous vulnerability for the Left.
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.
But it also tells us something about the sociology of our politics. In America, though not in England, Puritans have been integralists. They have seen themselves as the rightful owners of society’s institutions, and that has meant that the party in our politics that has exhibited Puritan tendencies has generally been the “inside” party — the one that implicitly assumes that this is its own society and that the threats it faces are threats from outside forces eager to break in and take over. The “outside” party in our politics has always been more wild and disorderly, more fun, but also more inclined to imagine that progress requires blowing up the establishment.
Judged along this axis, you’d have to say that the Left and Right have switched sides a few times in the course of our history. But at least in the latter half of the 20th century, the Right tended to see itself as the “inside” party — the party of propriety and standards, that sought to defend the institutions from invasions by barbarians, vulgarians, and miscreants. This has been the case even when those awful people were for all intents and purposes running those institutions — and so the modern Right has sought to save the courts from the judges and (with much less success) the universities from the professors. The Left, meanwhile, tended to see itself as the “outside” party, shocking the sensibilities of the elites and fighting the establishment — even though the elites and the establishment have voted for the Democrats for decades. In this century, however, the parties have basically switched sides in this respect, or maybe have come to recognize a change in the underlying society. Today’s Right implicitly understands itself as the outside party, oppressed by the powerful and banging on the windows of the institutions. Today’s Left implicitly understands itself as the insider, enforcing norms and demanding conformity.
Think of it this way: When the inside party refuses to face the fact that it lost a close election, it might tell itself the Russians interfered to distort the result. That’s the sort of thing you might have heard on the right in the latter half of the 20th century, but it’s the kind of thing the Left says now. When the outside party refuses to face the fact that it lost a close election, it tells itself that the elites who run the government and the elites who run the corporations conspired to silence the public. That’s the kind of thing the Left might have said in the latter half of the 20th century, but is very much what the Right says now. The outside party argues for free speech on campus — as the student radicals of the 1960s did and the College Republicans of the 2020s do. The inside party tells them they’re betraying the purpose of the university.
A left-wing Puritanism is easier to understand in light of this peculiar reversal. In fact, a huge amount of what’s going on in our political culture is easier to understand in light of it. But for the most part, the effect of the reversal is not clarifying but deeply confusing for everyone involved. So just as the Left risks losing sight of what it’s actually trying to improve or change in American life at this point and becoming mindlessly censorious of all dissenters, so the Right risks losing sight of what is worth conserving in American society and falling into a mindless and inexpiable war with all establishments.
Avoiding this requires greater clarity about the state of our society. And arriving at such clarity first could be a real advantage to whichever side of our politics can manage it. As Rothman ably shows, the New Puritanism is not strong but brittle. It is ridiculous, and is increasingly vulnerable to ridicule. Its folly looks likely to cost the Democratic Party dearly in the coming years. But to make the most of the opportunity its weakness presents, conservatives would be wise to see that what is called for is not an equal and opposite folly but a recovery of sanity and balance — a way of pointing out the absurdity of the New Puritans, yes, but also of offering the country relief from absurdity.
Noah Rothman’s smart, engaging, and wonderfully well-written book is a great place to start on both fronts.