During the immigration debate in the summer of 2018, Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California told a crowd:
For these members of [President Trump’s] Cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store. The people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them…. If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them! And you tell them that they are not welcome, anymore, anywhere.1
In other words, a member of the U.S. Congress openly advocated the harassment of political opponents. While some tried to distance themselves from this rhetoric, others took up the cudgel. Both elected officials and high-profile staffers who dared to oppose the left were harassed in public places by hostile and threatening activists, who were absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their cause.
The contentious debate over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court provoked similar expressions of fury on the left. Annie Shields of The Nation tweeted, “I’m starting a National @DemSocialists working group to follow [Senator] Jeff Flake around to every restaurant, Café, store, etc. he goes to for the rest of his life and yell at him.” She followed up with, “If they knew they would get yelled at for the rest of their lives maybe they would act right.”
Professor Christine Fair of Georgetown University’s security studies program contributed her own incisive analysis with this tweet:
Look at this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.
Not to be outdone, the activist Alexis Grenell began a New York Times column titled “White Women, Come Get Your People”2 with this sanguinary sentence:
After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
She continued with a racially-charged condemnation of Judge Kavanaugh’s supporters:
These women are gender traitors…. We’re talking about white women. The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades.
Grenell’s main target was white women who refused to jump on the “destroy Brett Kavanaugh” train. Aghast at the irrational evil of women who demanded corroborating evidence of sexual assault, she wrote:
The people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.
In case you missed it, Ms. Grenell and her hopeful uterus are angry. Very angry. Her ire was focused on Senator Susan Collins, who happens to be a woman (but is, alas, also white) and cast a crucial vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Here’s Grenell:
Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. Her mostly male colleagues applauded her.
It should be noted that Ms. Grenell is herself a white woman, but she is clearly woke to the unfortunate realities of her identity.
What’s going on? While no faction has a monopoly on extremism, a certain kind of behavior and rhetoric has become a hallmark of the left, especially among the so-called “elites,” who fancy themselves the vanguard of the revolution against the straight, white patriarchy. Not convinced? Imagine a male professor’s fantasizing aloud about the slow deaths of his female opponents, complete with the mutilation of their bodies. Does he keep his job? (He shouldn’t.) Or imagine the New York Times’ publishing an op-ed piece in favor of white nationalism or the subjugation of women or any other atrocious notion commonly attributed to everyone on the right. It is inconceivable. Although some on the right hold deplorable ideas, they are consigned to the fringes, while the radicals on the left enjoy positions of cultural and political influence.
The ascendancy of radicalism on the left is a threat to American society. All who believe that rational debate is the best means of identifying and achieving the common good—and this includes old-school liberals—must take this new radicalism seriously. These activists are willing to take extreme measures to achieve the paradise of justice and equality of which they dream.
Something is clearly wrong. Americans are on edge. Political differences have hardened. Discourse has become crasser, positions more extreme. Political opponents are seen as enemies to be destroyed rather than fellow citizens and neighbors. Has it always been this way? To be sure, politics has always been a contact sport. Political differences have frequently provoked sharp words, occasionally accompanied by the wielding of sharp objects. But today our political differences have spilled over into daily life, spreading rancor and crowding out the common decencies that keep civil society civil. The American Dream, an image that has loomed large in the past, seems to be fading. The very definition of citizenship is being questioned. What does it mean to be an American? What binds us together? A common creed? A common history? A common religion or culture? None of these seems adequate today. And it goes without saying that mutual disdain is an inadequate binding agent.
Various thinkers have attempted to make sense of our condition. Some blame it on the 1960s—everything was fine until the Beatles showed up, Vietnam went down, and Woodstock got crazy. But that explanation is superficial. After all, if the 1960s brought about the decline of society, what brought about the 1960s? Ideas have antecedents as well as consequences. Perhaps the New Deal is the root of the problem. Or the despair and alienation precipitated by World War I. Or maybe we need to blame progressivism. Or the Industrial Revolution. Or slavery and the oppression of women. Perhaps the West was built on the systematic oppression of minorities by a white patriarchy that will release its hold on power only if compelled to do so.
Power may in fact lie at the heart of the story or at least be an indispensable feature of the tale. It was Friedrich Nietzsche—the great prophet of our age—who asserted that all of life is merely the will to power. If so, perhaps we should not be surprised that the patriarchy, if there is such a thing, asserts itself. Nor should we be surprised that the oppressed assert their own power by attempting to overthrow the oppressor and establish new ideals and a new power structure.
There is, of course, another way to reckon with the facts. Perhaps the West in general, and America in particular, has lost the courage of its convictions. No society can long survive if it no longer believes it deserves to survive. Could it be that the greatness of the West is rooted in a commitment to truths now deemed untenable by many? I use the term “greatness” realizing that many will scoff, but their scoffing only demonstrates what I am asserting: We have lost faith in the very ideals that made us who we were. We are attacking our roots. But if the branches attack the roots, the tree will be devastated. Branches, despite their noble intentions and self-righteousness, do not fare well in such an enterprise.
What ideals formed America? What notions have shaped the way Americans think about the world and themselves? Alexis de Tocqueville noted that if you want to understand a nation, you need to consider its infancy, its formative moment: “Peoples always feel [the effects] of their origins. The circumstances that accompanied their birth and served to develop them influence the entire course of the rest of their lives.”3 And America, according to Tocqueville, is at its heart a Puritan nation. Even though most of us have long ago abandoned any conscious affiliation with Puritanism—and perhaps vehemently deny any sympathy with it—we have inherited habits, ideas, and institutions deeply influenced by our Puritan past.
To put it more broadly, America continues to be profoundly shaped by its Christian heritage. Even those who most emphatically reject any allegiance to Christianity remain deeply implicated. The language of rights and the ideals of equality and democracy that pervade our political discourse are unimaginable apart from Christianity. Nietzsche understood this, and he was deeply dismayed by the nearly indelible fingerprints of Christianity on the Western consciousness.
There is a dramatic difference between a pre-Christian society and a post-Christian one. Pre-Christian pagan societies look radically different from societies formed by a prolonged encounter with Christianity. It is not easy to shake off the lingering effects of a Christian past. The residue is nearly impossible to eradicate. Although citizens may deny the faith, ignore the churches, and make every effort to ignore the social and moral teachings of the church, the fact remains that we live in a Christ-haunted culture. Our institutions, our language, our habits, the very shape of our consciousness, are Christian. Even in denying the faith, Americans in many respects see the world through Christian eyes.
Puritanism, of course, has become a term of disparagement, in part because of an increasing suspicion of Christianity and in part because of a distorted view of Puritanism going back at least to the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Puritans had a keen sense of human sinfulness and were deeply concerned with fostering social and political institutions that encouraged virtue and discouraged vice. They sought personal holiness made possible by God’s unmerited grace and a life of spiritual discipline. As fidelity to orthodox Christianity has waned, however, concepts such as sin and holiness have become distorted. Our culture retains a profound sense of sin, but secular progressivism limits it to a strong awareness of the sins of others—especially the perceived sins of institutions and social structures—losing the sense of original sin that infects every human being. Purity, therefore, can be attained or restored if compromised institutions and the persons complicit in those institutions are cleansed or, if necessary, eradicated. Holiness becomes a purely human endeavor. There is no need for divine grace, so there is no need for Christ. Divine redemption is replaced by human effort, forgiveness of sins by a purely human demand for punishment that the righteous can mete out on those who sin against the new secular but thoroughly moralistic order.
In this book I will argue that the unrest and sense of impending crisis we all feel are the result of a strange fusion of two seemingly incompatible ideas. Today’s social justice warriors of the radical left embody a toxic combination of the Nietzschean will to power and Puritan moralism, secularized but no less rigorous than its earlier religious instantiation. Some will be inclined to dismiss this account as a typically academic effort to blame social and political problems on the musings (and often mutterings) of obscure thinkers few have read and even fewer have understood. Fair enough. But bear with me. Ideas matter. Ideals matter. We are all moved by our deepest beliefs, even if we haven’t taken the time to articulate them—indeed, even if we don’t recognize them. Consider, for example, the ideal of diversity. Most people today take it for granted that diversity is good, more diversity is better, and anything that thwarts the expansion of diversity is evil. This is an axiom of our age. But is it true? Even asking the question smacks of heresy, and indeed it is a heresy against the reigning orthodoxy.
But hold on, you might say, words like “heresy” and “orthodoxy” are religious terms. We dispensed with that outdated mode of thinking long ago when we disavowed our embarrassing Puritan past. Did we? Perhaps the story is more complicated than that. Perhaps we have abjured fidelity to ancient religious beliefs only to commit ourselves with equal ardor to a new faith, a new set of ideals, a new orthodoxy. Like those religious enthusiasts of old, our cultural leaders know that heretics are dangerous and that orthodoxy must be guarded by the faithful.
At the same time, how are we influenced by Nietzsche? Most Americans have not read him and might not even know how to pronounce his name, let alone spell it. Is this an indication of the failure of his ideas? Not necessarily. I want to suggest that Nietzsche’s ideas have so permeated our world that we generally don’t even notice them. A victorious ideology is as invisible as it is ubiquitous. It loses its aura of novelty and becomes the furniture of our minds. Some of Nietzsche’s basic ideas have become just that. And they have been combined with certain Christian ingredients with one notable omission—Christ.
Of course, I have admittedly overstated the case in an important way. Not everyone has bought in to the reigning orthodoxy. There are still some on the outside who resist what many think is inevitable, who pit themselves against “the logic of history,” as the enthusiasts like to put it. But even these holdouts have at times adopted the strategy and rhetoric of their opponents, not out of calculation (“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”) but because Nietzsche’s thought has permeated virtually every quarter of our culture. Even those who think they oppose the radical ideology of the left too often find themselves embracing at least some of its tactics, terminology, and assumptions. This should comfort the partisans of this brave new ideology, for when your opponents have adopted your underlying assumptions, victory is all but guaranteed.
This book attempts to make sense of our current malaise, especially the impulses driving identity politics and the social justice warriors of the radical left. For Nietzsche, life is nothing but the will to power: the attempt to assert oneself against others who are motivated by the same headlong drive. The Puritan is motivated by a quest for moral and political purity. By analyzing this odd combination, we can understand what is at stake and how to respond.
First, however, it might be helpful to take a brief look at Nietzsche’s life. It is tempting to say that, above all else, he was a lonely man. Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, Germany. He described his father, a Lutheran pastor, as “the perfect picture of a country parson! Endowed with a good spirit and heart, adorned with all the virtues of a Christian, he led a quiet and simple but happy life.”4 Years later, Nietzsche wrote, “I consider it a great privilege to have had a father like this: it even seems to me that this explains any other privileges I might have—even apart from life.”5 Nietzsche was five years old when his father died. Six months later, his two-year-old brother died. The family, reduced to Friedrich, his mother, his younger sister, and two unmarried aunts, left Röcken and settled in Naumburg, living on savings and a modest pension.
Nietzsche was a sensitive and studious child. His fellow students called him “the little pastor” because, as his sister later wrote, he could recite “biblical verses and spiritual songs” with such emotion that “you almost had to cry.” At the age of twelve he wrote his first philosophical essay, “On the Origin of Evil.” He loved music, became proficient at the piano, and filled notebooks with his poetry. Nevertheless, he was aware of a profound absence. “By and large, I am in charge of my own upbringing…. I have had to do without the strict and senior guidance of a male intellect.”6
A brilliant student, Nietzsche was awarded a place in an elite boarding school, where he received a superb education in the classics. He enrolled at the University of Bonn, intending to study theology, but his interests soon turned decisively toward philology—the study of language.
In 1865, while visiting Cologne, he asked a porter to take him to a restaurant. As a joke, the porter instead took him to a brothel. Nietzsche later recalled, “I found myself suddenly surrounded by half a dozen apparitions in tinsel and gauze, looking at me expectantly. For a short space of time I was speechless.” Nietzsche touched nothing but the piano, an indication of the powerful pull music had on him. “I made instinctively for the piano as being the only soulful thing present. I struck a few chords, which freed me from my paralysis, and I escaped.”7 Some, including the novelist Thomas Mann, speculate that he later returned and touched more than the piano, in the process contracting syphilis. The evidence that he returned is inconclusive, however, and scholars debate whether he suffered from syphilis.
When he returned home for the Easter holidays in 1865, Nietzsche caused his mother much grief by expressing an unwillingness to attend church, and he refused to take communion on Easter Sunday. Nietzsche’s younger sister, Elisabeth, who admired her brother almost to the point of worship, was powerfully influenced by his wavering faith. She sought out pastoral counsel but found it unsatisfying.8
Nietzsche spent a year in military service, during which he was injured in a riding accident. Continuing his studies, he so impressed his professors that he was recommended for a professorial position at the University of Basel even before he completed his dissertation. A tireless worker, energetic teacher, and prolific writer, he was nevertheless physically weak. Declining health forced him to resign from the university in 1879. He was granted a small pension that afforded some independence but few luxuries. A biographer provides a vivid description of Nietzsche’s life after the university:
He is shy, about five-foot-eight, but a little stooped, almost blind, reserved, unaffected, and especially polite; he lives in modest boarding houses in Sils Maria, Nizza, Mentone, Rome, Turin. This is how Stefan Zweig brings him to life for us: “Carefully the myopic man sits down to a table; carefully, the man with the sensitive stomach considers every item on the menu: whether the tea is not too strong, the food not spiced too much, for every mistake in his diet upsets his sensitive digestion, and every transgression in his nourishment wreaks havoc with his quivering nerves for days. No glass of wine, no glass of beer, no alcohol, no coffee at his place, no cigar and no cigarette after his meal, nothing that stimulates, refreshes, or rests him: only the short meager meal and a little urbane, unprofound conversation in a soft voice with an occasional neighbor (as a man speaks who for years has been unused to talking and is afraid of being asked too much).
“And up again into the small, narrow, modest, coldly furnished chambre garnie, where innumerable notes, pages, writings, and proofs are piled up on the table, but no flower, no decoration, scarcely a book and rarely a letter. Back in a corner, a heavy and graceless wooden trunk, his only possession, with the two shirts and the other worn suit. Otherwise only books and manuscripts, and on a tray innumerable bottles and jars and potions: against the migraines, which often render him all but senseless for hours, against his stomach cramps, against spasmodic vomiting, against the slothful intestines, and above all the dreadful sedatives against his insomnia, chloral hydrate and Veronal. A frightful arsenal of poisons and drugs, yet the only helpers in the empty silence of this strange room in which he never rests except in brief and artificially conquered sleep. Wrapped in his overcoat and a woolen scarf (for the wretched stove smokes only and does not give warmth), his fingers freezing, his double glasses pressed close to the paper, his hurried hand writes for hours—words the dim eyes can hardly decipher. For hours he sits like this and writes until his eyes burn.”9
For ten years after his resignation, Nietzsche wandered Europe, ill and ill at ease, yet producing a steady stream of books, notable for their provocative arguments and an energetic and idiosyncratic style. Titles include Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, and The Anti-Christ.
Perhaps it is little wonder that a man who declared that all of life is the will to power found his greatest satisfaction and delight in improvising on the piano. The freedom, creativity, and power of the artist is a theme running throughout Nietzsche’s work. This is not limited to the creation of art, as such, for the artistic impulse governs all who are powerful, including those who command: “Their work is an instinctive creation and imposition of forms; they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are—wherever they appear something new soon arises…. [T]hey appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too ‘different’ even to be hated” (GM, II, 17). Lightning, creativity, power, freedom—these go together. Once after hiking near Leipzig, he described a storm: “How different the lightning, the storm, the hail, free powers, without ethics! How happy, how powerful they are, pure will, untarnished by intellect!”10 When he describes the Overman, Nietzsche employs the image of lightning: “Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this lightning, he is this frenzy” (Z, prologue, 3).
At times, Nietzsche’s work seemed to produce adverse effects in his own psyche: “My doctrine that the world of good and evil is only an apparent and perspectivist world is such an innovation that sometimes I lose my ability to hear or see.”11 He proposed to two women, both of whom declined. He repeatedly wrote of his solitude, noting in 1888 that “I have gradually broken off almost all contact with other people, out of disgust that they take me to be something other than I am.”12 In the same year, he wrote, “The fact is ‘that I am so sad’; the problem ‘I don’t know what that means.’ ”13
In 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in the streets of Turin. He never recovered. He spent the next decade in the care of others, physically ill and mentally insane. He died in 1900 unaware of his growing fame and the spreading influence of his writing.
What follows is an exploration of a curious union of Nietzschean thought and Puritan moralism in our central cultural institutions and practices. As we go, it will become increasingly evident that the ideas of Nietzsche have touched, and in some instances completely transformed, certain aspects of our society. Furthermore, we shall see how those ideas have been incoherently combined with Puritan moralism to produce in their adherents a self-righteous conviction of their own moral purity. This unholy marriage of power and purity has given birth to the social justice movement led by a peculiar breed that we might call Nietzsche’s Puritan Warriors.