The Rise of the New Puritans

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.