Noah Rothman

“ The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” -H.L. Mencken 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.

There are just two problems with “social justice”: it’s not social and it’s not just. Rather, it is a toxic ideology that encourages division, anger, and vengeance. In this penetrating work, Commentary editor and MSNBC contributor Noah Rothman uncovers the real motives behind the social justice movement and explains why, despite its occasionally ludicrous public face, it is a threat to be taken seriously. American political parties were once defined by their ideals. That idealism, however, is now imperiled by an obsession with the demographic categories of race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, which supposedly constitute a person’s “identity.” As interest groups defined by identity alone command the comprehensive allegiance of their members, ordinary politics gives way to “Identitarian” warfare, each group looking for payback and convinced that if it is to rise, another group must fall. In a society governed by “social justice,” the most coveted status is victimhood, which people will go to absurd lengths to attain. But the real victims in such a regime are blind justice—the standard of impartiality that we once took for granted—and free speech. These hallmarks of American liberty, already gravely compromised in universities, corporations, and the media, are under attack in our legal and political systems.

Devido à virtual capitulação da direita nas guerras culturais convencionais, ativistas progressistas passaram a ocupar a lacuna deixada pelo movimento conservador, antes moralista. Hoje a esquerda moderna engaja-se em uma missão cujos excessos resultam da convicção em princípios nobres, do desejo de aprimorar o mundo, além da crença em soluções precisas, corretas e perfeitas para os problemas da humanidade, tal qual a frustrada e utópica visão do antigo puritanismo sobre um mundo homogeneizado. Mediante a sabedoria popular de que política e religião não se discutem, Noah Rothman se dedica a fazer exatamente o oposto, por meio da exposição dos Novos Puritanos “como as caricaturas absurdas que eles se tornaram”. Este livro pretende refletir sobre a atual visão radical ser não apenas ameaçadora, mas possivelmente hilária.

Devido à virtual capitulação da direita nas guerras culturais convencionais, ativistas progressistas passaram a ocupar a lacuna deixada pelo movimento conservador, antes moralista. Hoje a esquerda moderna engaja-se em uma missão cujos excessos resultam da convicção em princípios nobres, do desejo de aprimorar o mundo, além da crença em soluções precisas, corretas e perfeitas para os problemas da humanidade, tal qual a frustrada e utópica visão do antigo puritanismo sobre um mundo homogeneizado. Mediante a sabedoria popular de que política e religião não se discutem, Noah Rothman se dedica a fazer exatamente o oposto, por meio da exposição dos Novos Puritanos "como as caricaturas absurdas que eles se tornaram". Este livro pretende refletir sobre a atual visão radical ser não apenas ameaçadora, mas possivelmente hilária.

For years, America’s political elite and the institutions in their control have led the public to believe that domestic political violence in the United States is almost solely a rightwing phenomenon. What if they are wrong? In only the last several years, corporate CEOs and conservative influencers have been killed. Republican justices, presidents, and their staffs have been marked for death. Small-cell terrorist organizations have executed sophisticated attacks on law enforcement. And much it has been excused, even sometimes encouraged, by an intellectual ecosystem on the left that is, even now, incubating more political violence. In Blood and Progress, National Review’s Noah Rothman presents a careful examination of leftwing violence in the United States – and comes away with the conclusion that violence designed to advance political objectives is, in our time, more often a project of the left. Indeed, today’s wave of left-wing violence and political terrorism has come to resemble similar waves of leftwing violence. Rothman explores individual episodes of modern political violence, identifies their causes and effects, and considers the psychological disposition that leads thugs and agitators to conclude that violence begets positive social change. He compares those attacks to those committed by the leftwing terrorists during previous waves of similar violence at the dawn of the 20th Century and in the 1960s and ‘70s, finding a number of common threads in the process. This book shines a spotlight on the degree to which progressive activists and prominent Democrats have excused and explained away violence over the decades. It condemns the suite of unworthy historical heroes and martyrs to which progressives genuflect, so many of whom themselves engaged in violence and criminality and encouraged the same from their acolytes. It identifies a troubling trend on the American right, which increasingly clings to the same rationalizations that justify left-wing terror and bloodshed. And it proposes some potential off-ramps that could avert the national cataclysm that awaits us if these trends develop unabated. The book’s objective is to train American political observers to recognize leftwing violence and to apply the same scrutiny and foresight to it that they reserve for violence that comes from the right. We cannot arrest the trend toward political violence in America if we are focused on only one side of the equation. Until we resolve to respond to political violence consistently and with consistent revulsion, we will get more violence.