Posted BY: Jack Cashill
In my 2015 book, Scarlet Letters, I spoke of the emergence of a Neo-Puritan movement in America. But not until Biden’s “climate envoy” John Kerry began pontificating at Davos did any prominent member of the Neo-Puritan elect speak specifically to the cult’s existence.
“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we — a select group of human beings because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives — are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” said Kerry.
Before getting to the sillier part of his homily, allow me to explain what Neo-Puritanism is and why it has surfaced. The concept is implicit in the very word “progressive.” In the last decade or two, that word has replaced “liberal” as self-definition among the Left. On the Right, we shorthand the Left’s shifting semantics into the more useful “woke,” a word that on the Left originally meant someone who had awakened and seen the light.
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At the risk of tautology, progressives, by definition, progress. Unlike old-school liberals who could content themselves with a status quo, progressives move forward. They refuse to rest, refuse to reflect. That much said few among them have any clue as to what their ultimate destination might be. For instance, who ten years ago thought that “trans rights” would be a hill on which the woke would be willing, if not to die, at least to pout?
