BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE

As opening sentences go, ‘You f*cking Nazi c*nt,’ takes some beating. This was the charge made against Andrew Doyle not by some faceless internet troll but by an old friend to whose son he is the godfather. A left-wing homosexual with a doctorate in early Renaissance poetry, Doyle makes an unlikely flagbearer for fascism. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone to whom the accusation would be more comically absurd. So, what caused his friend to make it? What deranging force separated an otherwise sane man from his senses?

That is what The New Puritans seeks to answer. In it, Doyle succeeds in doing what few writers have managed: he gives form to that nebulous movement known as woke.

‘What is woke?’ obscurants will often ask, safe in the knowledge that it is a question to which there is no fortune cookie sized answer.  Even among right-wing literary circles, the term is now regarded with a kind of eye-rolling disdain. ‘Woke’ seems silly, shop-worn and carries with it the noxious whiff of a fad. It is felt within such circles that culture war issues should be constrained to the lower reaches of the Sun or the Express – words that live in the tabloid lexicon are dead to the writer. But have a care, dear writers, for these issues aren’t going away, so why should their critics?

In Doyle’s submission, there is a kind of mass hysteria at play similar in shape to that which swept 17th-century Salem, with a difference in doctrine, but none in maniacal zeal.

‘In the throes of victimhood, these children had found the means to become the most powerful members of the community. They could see their fellow citizens executed on the basis of “spectral evidence” alone, what we might today refer to as “lived experience”.’

The parallels between the Salem witch trials and the modern ones of cancel culture are inescapably valid. To be seen in the wrong company – in Doyle’s case, presenting on GB News and writing for publications such as Spiked – is now to be seen with the devil, and all that is required to prove one’s guilt in the New Puritan’s court. These people conjure up phantom bigotries and attach them to ideological foes in much the same way as accusations of witchcraft were used to settle personal disputes.

According to Doyle, The New Puritans’ inquisitions are justified not by religious scripture, but by mutated forms of 60s postmodernist theory. ‘Foucault’s ideas have been misapplied and twisted into forms he would not recognise.’ The minimally gifted parrot a pick and mix of these once fashionable theories as if they were a surrogate for an intellect. ‘Educate yourself,’ they snarl, while taking away the very means to do so. Doyle gives the example of how a Canadian branch of Penguin Random House demanded that one of Jordan Peterson’s books be cancelled, with some of the staff even ‘bursting into tears’ at his very mention. Again, one sees the revenant traces of the Salem girls. That Peterson’s name can send people into convulsing fits of tears is seen as proof of his malignant power.

‘The screams of the children of Salem never really stopped; they simply found other ways to reverberate.’

Doyle’s critics will undoubtedly accuse this book of being some cynical jeremiad against ‘PC gone mad’. It is nothing of the sort. The fact that he believes 90s PC culture ‘achieved some genuinely progressive outcomes in terms of social consciousness’ should put paid to that notion. No, it is merely an appeal to reason made with unfailingly reasoned arguments. That the world should not be seen as one of absolute good and evil. And that those of us who oppose this regressive movement should do so by engaging in more critical thinking and ‘resisting the temptation to interpret our opponents’ motives in the least charitable manner’.

The New Puritans is a sucker punch of truth rendered in a seductively rhythmic prose. Indeed, the first thing that strikes one about this work is the quality of its writing; anyone with an ear for it will enjoy the book on that merit alone. But its real power lies in removing that babyish benignity that social justice activism has been allowed to acquire. So long as we remain numb to its poison, it will continue to work itself into every imaginable institution and profession without so much as a whisper of objection.

The antidote? The New Puritans. You can purchase it from Waterstones.com

James Bembridge is Deputy Editor of Country Squire Magazine.