The New Puritans

Anne Applebaum has a new essay in The Atlantic entitled The New Puritans. If that seems a little opaque, the sub-title is only slightly clearer: Mob Justice Is Trampling Democratic Discourse. The focus of her concern is not the Trumpist assault on the Capitol in January, nor the recent Supreme Court ruling to allow a Texas law that places bounties on abortion providers. Rather it is a heterogeneous group of "people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago". On Twitter she emphasised that this is not about "cancel culture" (whose alleged victims rarely suffer any loss and often seem to gain in media prominence) or "wokeism" (which is about the critique of institutions more than the abuse of institutional power). Rather she is highlighting "the kind of self-censorship and intellectual timidity we know from authoritarian societies" and the way that this has been fuelled by social media such that "the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums".

Much of her understanding of self-censorship stems from her career as a journalist and historian of the Cold War: "the political conformism of the early Communist period was the result not of violence or direct state coercion, but rather of intense peer pressure. Even without a clear risk to their life, people felt obliged—not just for the sake of their career but for their children, their friends, their spouse—to repeat slogans that they didn’t believe, or to perform acts of public obeisance to a political party they privately scorned". (Some of this will have been coloured by her own disillusionment with right-liberals in Poland and Hungary embracing authoritarianism, as outlined in her recent book, The Twilight of Democracy). Via a brief interlude in Turkey (the chilling effect of lese majesté under Erdogan on writers), she pivots to contemporary America: "But fear of the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob is producing some similar outcomes. How many American manuscripts now remain in desk drawers—or unwritten altogether—because their authors fear a similarly arbitrary judgment?" Manuscripts have remained in desk drawers throughout history because of the fear of social judgement, particularly those that dealt frankly with sexuality or challenged religious or political orthodoxy. There is little reason to believe that this has become more pronounced because of social media, and plenty of evidence to suggest that the Internet has allowed many more to be published.

Applebaum's essay begins with an allegory in the form of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which explains the reference to Puritans. But the parallel doesn't really work. The novel's plot may turn on social ostracism but what it's actually about is how sin and its attendant guilt physically manifests itself, not only in the socially-imposed form of the scarlet "A" sewn onto Hester Prynne's clothing but in the expression of shame though the bodily stigma of the father of her child, the otherwise upstanding Puritan minister Arthur Dimmesdale. It is not about false witness or the absence of due process. Prynne is a saintly, almost Christ-like character, which makes her both sympathetic and utterly unrealistic, but she and her sometime lover are also undoubtedly sinners, both in the eyes of their society and of themselves. Some of Applebaum's examples of supposed mob justice in the present involve individuals whose behaviour has undoubtedly been questionable ("Some have made egregious errors of judgment"), but that is where the parallel with the otherwise impeccable Prynne ends. She has sinned but both atones for that sin and becomes a larger spritual person than her peers as a result. For Applebaum's modern victims the punishment is not only unjust or disproportionate, it diminishes them as persons.

What is odd about this is why Applebaum should chose to make her point through The Scarlet Letter, an American literary classic but hardly a common reference today. A more famous treatment of the theme of ostracism in Puritan Massachusetts, and one that very much addresses false witness and the corruption of due process, is Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The characters are neither simply saints nor sinners, their motives are messy and compromised, and there is a sense of an institutional interest, beyond fussy legalism, that creates an implacable process that ultimately devours everyone. I suspect the reason why Applebaum doesn't use this literary parallel is because it was an overt allegory of McCarthyism and the comparison between the 1950s and today would not be flattering to her argument. That mid-century moral panic saw hundreds of people imprisoned in the US and thousands fired or blacklisted. Today's victims have suffered loss of jobs in a handful of cases and professional embarrassment in a few more, but there's no evidence that this is out of line with historic norms. People are often sacked for presumed misconduct or cold-shouldered for breaches of etiquette. It's also difficult to know where precisely to draw the line that bounds this group. While Applebaum references Ian Buruma, who left the New York Review of Books as editor after publishing an essay deemed dismissive of #MeToo, there is no reference to Steven Salaita, who was denied tenure by the University of Illinois for pro-Palestinian comments that donors objected to.

The determination to avoid any reference to anticommunist hysteria, and notwithstanding her musings on the social psychology of Cold War Eastern Europe, produces a massive elision in Applebaum's essay, namely the twentieth century: "In the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel argued for the replacement of exactly that kind of [Puritan] rigidity with a worldview that valued ambiguity, nuance, tolerance of difference—the liberal worldview—and that would forgive Hester Prynne for her mistakes. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing at about the same time as Hawthorne, made a similar argument. Much of his most famous book, On Liberty, is dedicated not to governmental restraints on human liberty but to the threat posed by social conformism, by 'the demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves.' Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this problem, too. It was a serious challenge in 19th-century America, and is again in the 21st century." Surely the totalitarian demand for uniformity of opinion was at its peak in the middle years of the twentieth century? (Perhaps this period is omitted because its apparatus of repression was obviously intolerant of organic mobs.) Ironically, one could argue that the era of liberal triumphalism, from 1989 to 2003, was a perfect example of "the demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves".

Applebaum's thumbnail history involves another significant elision: "By contrast, the modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums". How could the values of social media (whatever they might be) have come to dominate cultural institutions in such a short space of time? How could the mob have come to exercise such sway over institutions historically dedicated, among other things, to resisting the mob? Applebaum offers no explanation of the dynamic, instead she doubles-down on the image of totalitarian repression: "Heeding public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime. Instead of courts, they use secretive bureaucracies. Instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments behind closed doors." This is all too reminiscent of postwar Eastern Europe, but the equivalence of a university with the Stasi is far-fetched, despite the conservative demonisation of the former as the enemy of liberty and free speech (a feature of the UK as much as the US).

What has changed in cultural institutions over the last two decades is less the advance of illiberal values promoted by social media and more the advance of neoliberal practice. This is where "secretive bureaucracies" and "judgments behind closed doors" are to be found (think of the IMF or ISDS). There is also the management of reputational risk. This is evident in the fact that while social media may get the ball rolling in terms of publicising specific cases and building support for protest ("calling out"), it is often only when those cases reach traditional media that they become causes celebre and prompt institutional action. This is something that has long been understood by the left, who have often found themselves crying in the wilderness about bad (even criminal) behaviour that the establishment has chosen to tolerate or simply ignore. If social media really were so powerful, George W Bush and Tony Blair would have been tried for war crimes long ago, and neither have been ostracised despite popular revulsion (Bush may have retired but Blair is as busy and prominent as ever). Applebaum makes her case as a defence of democratic principles, but this misses the irony that Plato, the original critic of the mob and its enabling demagogues and cowardly institutions, was actually criticising Athenian democracy, and that ostracism was one of its notable characteristics.

Cold War Liberalism is conventionally traced to George Kennan's 1946 telegram from Moscow advocating containment and the subsequent emergence of the more robustly confrontational Truman Doctrine, but this narrative ignores the role of McCarthyism, which could only have succeeded with bipartisan support. It was liberals as much as conservatives who enabled and promoted it. The eventual turn against it was essentially a matter of tone ("Have you no sense of decency, sir?") as much as the rulings of the Warren Court, reflecting the full absorption of the anti-communist mindset into establishment thinking. I think Applebaum traces the weakness and decadence embodied in her vision of the New Puritanism to victory in the Cold War and the disspiation of that mindset. In this telling, believing itself unthreatened, Western society has indulged the moral selfishness of social media and the know-nothing politics of populism. The attempt to substitute the War on Terror for the Cold War has failed. The ignominious retreat from Afghanistan and the end of liberal interventionism are the inevitable corollaries of this empowerment of the mob. I suspect she'll only be happy once Russia has become a credible threat once more. The problem of contemporary liberalism is not new Puritans but old warmongers.