Do Blame Me, I’m From Massachusetts
9th March 2019
An analysis of progressivism as a modern form of classic Puritanism.
Today’s intolerant divorce themselves from the intolerance of their political ancestors by imagining them as the political ancestors of their political opponents. So, eugenics, prohibition, and so much else enthusiastically supported by progressives become, in the telling of modern progressives, the work of reactionaries. This enables followers of an intellectual tradition to not learn from past mistakes.
Margaret Sanger, for example, started Planned Parenthood because there were too many black babies being born.
William Blaxton, the city’s first settler who dwelled alone on Boston Common, invited the Puritans to settle on the Shawmut. They soon encouraged him to leave. “I have come from England because I did not like the Lord Bishops,” the first Bostonian lamented. “I cannot join you because I would not be under the lord brethren.”
In the next generation, the Puritans, who depicted themselves as paragons of religious freedom (a bit of propaganda so effective that most fall for it today), executed four on Boston Common for the crime of Quakerism.