The Left often claims that we conservatives are the descendents of the Puritans because we advocate modesty and sexual restraint, among many other self-restraining behaviors.
Now, when they use the word ‘Puritan’, the Left is saying, ‘Hey, look, these squares are PRUDES!!!; they want to stop us from having any fun’.
Really?
Actually, it is the Left who wants to stop Human Beings from enjoying Life.
On the 80th anniversary of the passage of Prohibition on 05 December, Daniel Flynn reminded us of some U.S. history that the Left would like you to never know:
The diverse strains of the American Left united on prohibition. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, the populist wunderkind of “cross of gold” fame, undiplomatically forbade booze at diplomatic functions. The workingmen Wobblies were wowsers. So, too, were Hull House’s Jane Addams and nearly all of her fellow Social Gospel activists. It’s no coincidence that the Anti-Saloon League got its start in the do-gooder hotbed of Oberlin, Ohio.
Articles published by the New Republic and the Nation overwhelmingly favored prohibition. The downward-eyed muckrakers of Collier’s and McClure’s fixed their ink-pen bayonets on the liquor interests as they had once had fixed them upon the railroad interests. Greenwich Village’s lighthearted Masses wrote favorably of illegalizing libations, and its stern successor The New Masses, with its editorial offices 4,700 miles to the East, hawked Sinclair’s screed supporting the 18th Amendment.
…
Progressive causes seemingly unrelated to temperance somehow were seen as tightly intertwined with it. The fight to make the world safe for democracy in Germany extended to America with Budweiser, Blatz, and Schlitz serving as proxy Kaisers. Suffragette leaders often doubled as temperance leaders. Woman’s rights activist Alice Stone Blackwell explained, “In the main suffrage and prohibition have the same friends and the same enemies.” The campaign to cleanse biology through eugenics naturally embraced the movement to purify man of intoxicating poisons. “We are going to have purer blood as the poison of alcohol becomes eliminated,” William Jennings Bryan argued. “We are going to have a stronger race because of prohibition.”
Eight decades later, progressives, inebriated by the righteousness of their ideology, blame everyone else for the sins of their forefathers. Projecting one’s errors upon others ensures a repetition of those errors. This may not today manifest itself in relation to alcohol. But the crusading spirit to sterilize their fellow man of impurities — of tobacco and transfats, Big Gulps and Big Macs, and so many delights that make life worth living — surely remains.
What we see here is another case of: ‘if you want to know what the Left is doing, see what they’re accusing the Right of doing’.
The Left believes every waking minute must be dedicated to the cause of Immanentizing The Eschaton, of bringing about Utopia through the of re-engineering people’s thinking. A big part of achieving this is to force people to change their habits and to have said habits all be collectively practiced.
All of us must be equal in everything.
But, damn those stubborn individuals: they keep wanting to be individuals.
Therefore, the Left believes there must be a Power that exerts Control over those who would dare think for themselves, those who would refuse to follow The Party Line. So force must be applied, be it legal or physical or, more importantly, mental.
It is the Left who are, in fact, Puritanical in the modern sense of the word.
They do nothing but irritate and annoy those of us who have joy in our souls, who love Life.
Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if they can be sure of their limited enjoyments; but under Progressive Puritanism we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not limitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in the restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict the restriction.
—G.K. Chesterton, Fads and Public Opinion
