The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

One immediately thinks of the now common intonation that ‘trans women are women’ or ‘trans men are men’. As journalist Helen Joyce has noted, such expressions fall into the category best encapsulated by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton as ‘thought-terminating clichés’, those ‘brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases’ that ‘become the start and finish of any ideological analysis’. How often have we heard commentators intuiting the motives of their opponents through accusations of ‘dog-whistling’, the practice of sending out secret signals that only one’s followers can hear? Or the kind of amateur clairvoyance that denounces people for being ‘on the wrong side of history’? Or dismissals of legitimate opinions as ‘right-wing talking points’? The implication of all such clichés is that there is no further discussion to be had, but those who utter them tend to give the impression that they are determined to evade serious argument. They act as hermeneutic shortcuts which disoblige the speaker from considering carefully whether or not his or her ideas have merit.