Has the Committee come to order, mister Chairman? It has? Thank you. Would the witness care to identity themselves for the record? We haven’t time for statements, a name is enough. Good. Now, I have here before me a piece of writing which this Committee regards as a most dangerous and unnatural subversion to the law and common sense of this great land. Are you the author of the article entitled ‘Can a woke makeover win Barbie and Monopoly new fans?’ Mmhmm. Speak up a little. You are? No, no speeches. Remember: you’re under oath. Are you now or have you ever been a social justice warrior? Excuse me, the witness will answer the question. Order! This committee has heard evidence that you…no, allow me, please…are a consecrated footsoldier of – and here I quote – “a dominant religion that proselytises by force.” As my esteemed colleagues have revealed, this country is entirely at the mercy of a vast conspiracy which has penetrated and violated – here I quote again, if I may – “Hollywood, big tech, all major corporations, academia, the mainstream media, the United States government and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.” No, no, the witness will keep quiet! Mister Chairman, please, the gavel…
OF ALL THE THINGS worth worrying about – the private strife, the public squalor, the heaped injustice of the present age – a special kind of scorn is reserved for those who believe all power in society has been seized by a demonic force called ‘woke’. This term and all of its catty-cornered, scrunched-up meanings have attained a magical quality in a lot of minds that thrive on a lack of proportion. It brings order to their world, gives backbone to their thoughts, excuses all prejudice and hierarchy, and provides convenient cover to knee-jerk opinions. For past generations, different words did the same work: ‘Freemasons’, ‘Illuminati’, Judeobolshevism’.
Combatants can be split into three separate, complimentary camps. There are the politicians – Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, dare we add Suella Braverman? – for whom ‘social justice’ is a decadent perversion threatening the pure primordial soul of the nation and which, along with all mild dissent, must be interrogated and purged. Then there is the bathetic tragedy of the grotesquely rich who, given the chance to lead a life of pure hedonism, choose instead to push aside the yachts, the palaces, the trafficked women, the vast mountain ranges of cocaine, and stay up late stewing about ‘Cultural Marxism’ or the ‘woke mind virus’. Sliding further down the ladder we find those who reckon it their duty to take the blue-hairs very seriously. Though not rich, they are financially stable and firmly jammed in the upper ranks of the media. Their subservient role is to do the intellectual graft: to study and hypothesise and make arguments, to apply their training at elite universities to the task of preserving whatever’s left of the liberal tradition before it’s overcome by what Belize in Angels in America dreamily called “racial impurity and gender confusion.” They are the last noble weary garrison holding the citadel.
Andrew Doyle firmly belongs to this latter group, and he seems quite content with his lot: happy to grub along at the dull coalface of ideas, theories, and facts, perhaps jealously glancing up once in a while to admire the figures far above liberated from responsibility by power and lucre. Doyle recently published a book called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, which is supposed to present the kinder face of the culture war: the best case for opposition, put gently with much appeal to reason, solid research, and a firm empirical grounding. Because most debates about this kind of stuff usually take place online – or in abbreviated, mock-philosophical op-eds – it is a rare and useful thing to have the argument stated at length with at least some sources undergirding it. Only then can we properly judge whether they are living up to their claims of moderation and common sense.
As evidence for just how calm and rational Andrew Doyle’s output is, consider this: the quotes included in the modest lampoon at the top of this essay are taken directly from The New Puritans. Like many of his fellows, Doyle sincerely holds that all the world’s major institutions – as well as the helpless, hapless Sussexes - have been infiltrated and suborned by a “dominant religion.” The woke, Doyle insists, are “nebulous but somehow omnipresent,” and forcing on us a “combat” previously unseen, fought in “our homes, our schools, our places of work.” Lest we get too complacent, Doyle repeatedly warns that social justice is a “destructive force” posing a “threat” to “the ideals of a liberal democracy.”
A failed academic, a failed teacher, and a failed comedian, Doyle’s delicate grip on fame is owed to inventing the Titania McGrath personality, a pastiche of a hyperwoke university professor. Titania’s ‘jokes’ are about as predictable as they come: pithy nuggets about how we ought to support Terrence from Huddersfield because he wishes to identify as a carrot – you know the drill. Doyle deserves at least a little respect for his perseverance because this exhausted schtick ceased being even mildly amusing some time in 2018, and suffers the same problem which plagued satirists of Donald Trump for so many years: he will never be as bizarre, as creative, as ridiculous as the subject he’s trying to mock. Still, Doyle has spun his stunt into a moderately successful career. Recently, he became perhaps the fifth or sixth most charismatic bobble-head on the propaganda network GB News. Soaring heights, indeed.
I still can’t decide whether Doyle is deliberately trying to mimic the tone and timbre of Senator McCarthy, but references to mid-century anticommunism have another connection by way of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Doyle’s great gimmick in The New Puritans – the very frame of his picture – is to measure the woke against the godly of New England who, in a fit of mania, sent several dozen innocents to the hanging tree for the crime of witchcraft in the early 1690s. From the complex circumstances of an isolated settler colony riven with religious fervour and sexual repression, labouring under poor harvests and a theocratic legal system, Doyle derives an analogy for modern ‘social justice activists’ who, not unlike Abigail Williams and Betty Parris, revelled in their authority to accuse, to scorn, to see others strung up on their own whims, and in their turn to be treated kindly for what they ‘endured’. The “spectral evidence” admitted in state courts, Doyle asserts, is exactly like the slogan “lived experience.” The point, when he gets around to it, is thus: we are all residents of a Salem writ large, firmly in the teeth of a deadly hysteria started by children.
This might seem a bit of a stretch, but Doyle has done more heavy lifting here than most Times or Telegraph columnists manage in their lifetimes. Then something strange happens. Having established this analogy as the basis of his book, Doyle completely and openly undercuts it. “The new puritans,” he reveals, “bear little resemblance to the puritans of old.” Well, if that’s the case we can all go home. And yet, like Sisyphus, he trudges on. By “puritan” he doesn’t mean the outraged insurgents of the Reformation, or the strictures of Calvinism, or the ecstatic radicals (Diggers, Levellers, Fifth Monarchists) of the English Revolution for whom social justice really was a goal. What Doyle actually means is ‘puritan’ in the common use - a scold, a prohibitionist, someone in favour of the most austere constraints on moral behaviour. He probably could have started with that and saved his breath.
The great Tobi Haslett once described the pundit playbook as “anecdotes and dazzling inanities draped over an individualist common sense,” but in this case Doyle’s prose – indeed his whole style and affect – might best be described as sub-Hitchensian. He clearly admires the late Christopher Hitchens, quotes him regularly, and in his more solemn moments alone probably imagines being him. Doyle holds that had he not been snuffed out by cancer, Hitchens likely would have joined Douglas Murray (among others) in making the slick transition from critic of Islam to scourge of the woke. The New Puritans, then, is a kind of wish fulfilment in which Doyle gets to don the fantasy costume of a spent public intellectual, hailed as a saviour in an hour of need. Which would be sad enough were it not for the obvious: Doyle is a floundering minnow to Hitchens’ baleen whale in both the capacity of his intellect and the ability of his writing. Here comes clunking, paragraph by paragraph, a great phalanx of howling clichés: “expletive-laden,” “white heat of political tribalism,” “marketplace of ideas,” “climate of fear,” “stark example,” “come from nowhere.” Be as unkind as you like about Hitchens’ bloodlust, his smugness, his fear of being an outsider, but you can never say he wrote anything as dire as all that.
Having firmly established in the first dozen pages of The New Puritans that he is useless as a historian and even more dreadful as a polemicist, what on earth is Doyle going to do for the next two hundred? The book judders along, flubbing and hiccupping through his own personal grievances and gripes. And as for the ‘how’ of the subtitle, the book contains no solid explanation of the means by which social justice culture conquered the West – no exposé of the constellation of conditions which led to these particular people at this particular moment having these particular ideas. Far from drifting loftily above the battleground as a disinterested observer and analyst, in the end Andrew Doyle proves to be just as shamelessly, terminally online as everyone else, just as shackled to the grinding gears of the twittering machine.