The Rise of the New Puritans

There are a couple of assumptions made in this book that make it hard for me to give it full marks.

a) In the beginning, the author asserts that the moderate progressive issues we've fought over since the 60s are settled and progressive causes won. He points at abortion, gay rights, and racial injustices as basically being settled in a moderate manner and that now the progressive left, the new puritans are just going into moral panic mode because they have nothing substantial to fight for anymore. Given recent Supreme Court decisions and the presumptive GOP front-runner's crusades in Florida, this strikes me as ignorant and ill-founded. It is the basis of the argument that things are going to far and people should just be happy with their moderate victories, and it is not true.

b) The author points at very real flaws in the actions and rhetoric of people in the progressive movement. I fully agree so much that is being held up for ridicule and I agree with the idea that it is gone too far in some ways. However, the author repeatedly links the idea that the progressive left going overboard to correct social behavior to the stated goal (e.g. racial justice, LGBTQ justice) as being overboard or overreaching on the part of the people with these goals. I do not agree with this chain of reasoning and find it disingenuous.

Those problems aside, the author does raise many points of basically mob justice gone wrong. Almost all of the things pointed at are some BS found on social media, by people that have no real power without a mob whipped up, but still. I found the connection between social coercion today and in New England during the heights of puritanism to be very interesting.