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.
THE RISE OF THE NEW PURITANS:
Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun
by Noah Rothman
Broadside Books/HarperCollins, July 2022
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 idealogues. The New Puritans can judge a person’s moral character by their clothes, Netflix queue, fast food favorites, the sports they watch, and the company they keep. No choice is neutral, no sphere is private.
Not since the Puritans has a political movement wanted so much power over your thoughts, hobbies, and preferences every minute of your day. In the process, they are sucking the joy out of life.
In THE RISE OF THE NEW PURITANS, Noah Rothman explains how, in pursuit of a better world, progressives are ruining the very things which make life worth living. They’ve created a society full of verbal trip wires and digital witch hunts. Football? Too violent. Fusion food? Appropriation. The nuclear family? Oppressive.
Witty, deeply researched, and thorough, THE RISE OF THE NEW PURITANS encourages us to spurn a movement whose primary goal has become limiting happiness. It uncovers the historical roots of the left’s war on fun and reminds us of the freedom and personal fulfillment at the heart of the American experiment.
Noah Rothman is the associate editor of Commentary Magazine, author of Unjust, and an MSNBC/NBC News contributor.
Cancel culture. Chances are you’ve heard about this a lot lately, but what really is it? Blacklisting celebrities? Censorship? Up until this point, this has been the general consensus in the media. But it’s time to raise the bar on our definition—to think of cancel culture less as scandal or suppression and more as an essential means of democratic expression and accountability. THE CASE FOR CANCEL CULTURE offers a fresh progressive lens in favor of cancel culture as a tool for activism and change. It will help readers reflect on and learn the long history of canceling (the Boston Tea Party was cancel culture); how the left and right uniquely equip it as part of their political toolkits; how intersections of society wield it for justice; and ultimately how it levels the playing field for the everyday person’s voice to matter. Why should we care? Because in a world where protest and free speech are being challenged by the most powerful institutions, those without power deserve to understand the nuance and importance of this democratic tool available to them. Rather than seeing cancel culture as a nasty byproduct of the digital age, it should be seen as a powerful instrument for change. Ernest Owens shows readers exactly how with examples from politics, pop culture, and his own personal experience. Readers will walk away from this first-of-its-kind exploration not despising cancel culture but embracing it as a form of democratic expression that’s always been leading the charge in liberating us all.
People living in democracies have for decades drawn comfort from the notion that their form of government, for all its flaws, is the best history has managed to produce. SURVEILLANCE STATE documents with startling detail how even as China’s Communist Party pays lip service to democracy as a core value of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” it is striving for something new: a political model that shapes the will of the people not through the ballot box but through the sophisticated―and often brutal―harnessing of data.
Viktoryia Andrukovič, the Belarusian human rights advocate and political activist, was born in 1994, the year that Lukashenko came to power. She knows her homeland only as a country under the yoke of an increasingly autocratic regime, and she spent her deprived and precarious adolescence there hoping for a better, freer future for her country. An opposition activist both before and after the 2020 presidential elections, she now works with Belarusian NGOs in exile.
Human rights organisations and governments speak of a crime against humanity, a « cultural genocide ». Mihrigul Tursun has repeatedly been a victim of Chinese efforts to totally assimilate the Uyghur minority. She experienced the so-called « re-education camps » in their indescribable cruelty, the physical and psychological violence, first hand. In a way that remains unexplained to this day, her young son died while she was imprisoned. Today, despite the threat that has not disappeared even in exile, she has the courage to speak openly about what she experienced and to describe from her own experience what the Uyghur minority in China has to endure. A significant eyewitness account that brings the reader closer to the people behind the news from China.