The prominent conservative organization C-PAC has seemingly embraced the nativist, racist and xenophobic rhetoric of Hungarian President Victor Orban. The Republican Party has evolved into a cult. For the first time in American history the U.S. capitol was under assault because of a rogue president.
The Supreme Court has struck down Roe V. Wade and Justice Clarence Thomas thinks the decision upholding gay rights and affirmative action should be revisited. His wife was involved in the insurrection of January 6th and thinks Biden should be arrested.
Across the nation schemes are being implemented to make it more difficult for people to vote and candidates are running for office by touting Trump’s big lie.
Mass shootings are rampant across the nation.
Militias are threatening violence as a result of the FBI searching Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
Historians believe American democracy is at its most fragile since 1860 because of right wing extremism.
Against this backdrop conservative commentator Noah Rothman has written the “Rise of the New Puritans” a diatribe against what he considers progressive’s war on fun. The book is an interesting one, well written and easy to read. Nonetheless, its juxtaposition between today’s progressives and American Puritans from the 17th century while creative is a flawed comparison.
The problem is that Mr. Rothman thinks the progressive sense of wokeness and political correctness is a major problem for the nation. Given what the United States is presently experiencing, his sense of what ails the nation seems trivial and reminiscent of someone whose worldview is based in white grievance. Mr. Rothman comes across as someone who seems to miss the so-called good old days when slights against marginalized groups was acceptable even in polite company. To be fair, Mr. Rothman is right to suggest that progressives can go overboard as all political philosophies do. There is no doubt that some on the left have sometimes taken extreme positions when it comes to their definition of being woke or politically correct. He is also correct in asserting that the cost paid by some for what may be deemed as an indiscretion is excessive.
Nonetheless, as he rails about identity politics, Mr. Rothman, as many in the conservative camp often do, seems to conveniently forget history. Identity politics was not created by those presently utilizing it for political power but by those who used it to marginalize people who were not white, heterosexual, Protestant males.
The issue is not his conservatism. Both conservatism and progressivism act as mitigating factors on each other. Conservatism acts as a check when progressives go too far and progressivism mitigates against conservatism when it becomes ossified.
Mr. Rothman is quite erudite but like many he takes license with his examples in supporting his thesis. In his opening example he speaks about how the Holy Land Bakery and Grocery in Minneapolis had been targeted for a boycott because of racist comments made by the owner’s daughter several years earlier. As Rothman criticizes the boycott he leaves out the fact that the owner of Holy Land had himself boycotted Danish stores because of a depiction of Allah. He also leaves out the fact that employees of Holy Land spoke of discriminatory practices against them in regards to salaries and relaying examples of staff following black customers around the store. Many African Americans can tell stories of being followed by store employees. Rothman leaves out comments about “people coming forward with stories about racism at Holy Land.” While Rothman can make a case about overreacting, the issue of race in the country is too complex to be treated with his simplistic sense of indignation.
On the issue of excessive lethal police force against African-Americans, Rothman states “Harvard professor Roland Fryer published a surprising study that dispels the narrative preferred by anti-police activists. The notion that black Americans are more likely to be fatally shot by police than whites he found had no empirical basis” Here is what Dr. Roland Freyer actually says “The issue of police violence and its racial incidence has become one of the most divisive topics in American discourse. Emotions run the gamut from outrage to indi↵erence. Yet, very little data exists to understand whether racial disparities in police use of force exist or might be explained by situational factors inherent in the complexity of police-civilian interactions. Beyond the lack of data, the analysis of police behavior is fraught with difficulty including, but not limited to, the reliability of the data that does exist and the fact that one cannot randomly assign race. With these caveats in mind, this paper takes first steps into the treacherous terrain of under- standing the nature and extent of racial di↵erences in police use of force and the probability of police interaction. On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial di↵erences – sometimes quite large – in police use of force, even after accounting for a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction. Interest- ingly, as use of force increases from putting hands on a civilian to striking them with a baton, the overall probability of such an incident occurring decreases dramatically but the racial di↵erence remains roughly constant. Even when ocers report civilians have been compliant and no arrest was made, blacks are 21.2 percent more likely to endure some form of force in an interaction. Yet, on the most extreme use of force – ocer-involved shootings – we are unable to detect any racial di↵erences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls.” Interestingly enough Professor Fryer who is African American, was suspended from Harvard due to allegations of sexual harassment. Even more interesting is the fact that Professor Fryer advised that the reason he was being accused was perhaps because of his skin color. How convenient.
Mr. Rothman also ignores a more recent study by Dr. James Buehler of Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health in Philadelphia. According to a New York Times artivle “Dr. Buehler turned to death-certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.From 2010 until 2014, death certificates identified 2,285 legal-intervention deaths in the U.S., 96 percent of them fatal shootings and 96 percent of them deaths of males.Though white males accounted for the largest number, blacks were 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than whites, the study found. And Hispanic men were 1.7 times more likely than whites to be killed by officers.“The fact that there’s nearly a three-fold greater likelihood that a black man is going to die from lethal intervention as a white man is striking,” Buehler said in a phone interview.”
The problem is that Mr. Rothman in his zeal to dispel notions of discrimination minimizes the impact and source of excessive police violence by misusing a black man’s report simply to make a point.
What Mr. Rothman ignores whether out of ignorance which he clearly isn’t or malicious intent which is highly doubtful is that much of what he complains about is a reaction, albeit extreme at times, to past and current discrimination, sexism and misogyny. It is, although sometimes wrongheaded, an attempt to avoid reverting to a time, seemingly cherished by conservatives such as Mr. Rothman, when those who experienced bigotry were ignored. When one looks at how those within the GOP have seemingly become more nativist one can understand how people of various groups are anxious about today’s culture. Just ask the police officers of color who were trying to protect the capitol on January 6th and how the N word was repeatedly hurled at them or those who felt threatened during the infamous Charlottesville march with its repulsive chant “Jews will not replace us”
In speaking about derogatory and racist aspects of literary classics, Mr. Rothman quotes his colleague from Commentary magazine Abe Greenwood who said. “American consumers of literature are frequently confronted with discomfiting portrayals of their coreligionists in history’s greatest works. “If you have any love for Shakespeare, Dickens, Edmund Burke, Dostoyevsky, whoever, it’s endless,” … “It’s in the pages. It’s woven through all of it.” Yet, we would be so much poorer for throwing it all out because of the bigotry of the authors involved,” Greenwald added. “That is part of the history of being Jewish, having to come up against those portrayals and those ideas. Who would want that erased? That’s something that was overcome “ While the banning of books seems to be a trend of many right leaning proponents these days, Leaders who share his political philosophy in school districts across 26 states are planning or actually banning books including books about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. In Virginia the present Governor called for the banning of the late Nobel Peace Prize recipient Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” Nonetheless, Mr. Rothman seems to be saying to progressives and especially people of color to get over it and be more like the Jewish community. Mr. Rothman is quite aware that the Jewish community similar to progressives are rightly hyper-sensitive at even the perception or hints of anti-semitism.
He is right to point out that progressives are of a meliorist nature. Nonetheless, meliorism is not a characteristic restricted to progressives but of all great faiths, as well as people who are not religious but believe the world may never be perfect but can be better.
Unfortunately, the book while enjoyable at times seems to be a cathartic exercise undertaken by Mr. Rothman who seems to be suffering from white grievance syndrome. While he rightly manages to point out some excessive aspects from the left, the reality is that the existential threat to America is not from progressives despite their excesses. The threat stems from a toxic politics fomented on the extreme right which if not addressed will lead the nation down a path of no return.
For decades and centuries marginalized groups were subjected to social and political oppression with little opportunity to fight back. Now the pendulum has swung towards those who experienced this oppression or are progeny of those who did. Mr. Rothman has apparently decided to cast his lot with those who somehow feel abused by those who will no longer tolerate slights whether real or perceived. Perhaps the pendulum will swing towards the middle although the right seems to want to take the country towards authoritarianism.
The sub title to Mr. Rothman’s book is “fighting back against progressives war on fun.” While Mr. Rothman is concerned about fun perhaps he should be more concerned by those on his side of the political aisle who are hellbent on destroying the political and social fabric of the nation.
If Mr. Rothman feels his “fun” has been impinged on by the actions of progressives perhaps he needs to get a life.