We have become accustomed to speaking of ‘culture wars’ to describe the growing tendency - encouraged by those social networks that connect us full time with the great theatre of other people's behaviour - towards moral censorship of others. Flashback: in a liberal society folded in on itself after the fall of Soviet communism, the coexistence of the differences became a central theme of political philosophy and a regular subject of public debate and judicial decisions: how can we live together despite our disagreements?

Thinkers such as Rawls, Rorty, Habermas or Taylor presented their recipes for the construction of a ‘well-ordered society’, while post-communist globalisation extended the challenge of mutual understanding beyond the borders of the West.

However, the financial crisis of 2008 and the emergence of populism brought back the spectre of illiberalism; the challenge to democratic institutions goes hand in hand with the attack on free personal choice.

So while some urge you to have children, others demand that you abandon your car to save the planet; the former would like to save Christianity and the latter argue that only a black translator can translate a black poet. And while the perception remains that this anti-liberal revolt is mainly led by the right, which includes conservatives nostalgic for a more homogeneous world and reactionaries bent on turning modernity on its head, it is the prominence of the left that has generated the most surprise: that young activists are flying the flags of criminal punitivism, the culture of cancellation or the restriction of freedom of expression does not seem to fit with the image inherited from the emancipatory movements born in the 1960s.

Needless to add that the moralising impulses of the political and social right, where they manifest themselves, hold fewer doctrinal secrets; in the world of modernity, characterised by change and the dissolution of traditional values, the conservative does not feel at ease and the reactionary experiences a lively indignation.

On the contrary, how is it possible that we have moved from the ‘68 “to prohibit it is forbidden” and the sexual revolution that promised free love to a society where both the artist and the neighbour must exhibit a blameless personal life, on pain of civil death, and where an influencer who enjoys cooking for her boyfriend is lambasted or a person who dared to wear a blackface to the fancy dress party she attended as a teenager is condemned to civil death?

In other words, at what point does the quest for human emancipation, the defining ideal of those social movements that erupted in Western societies in the late 1960s, take on a regressive character and lead to an attempt to curtail the exercise of others’ personal autonomy?

Note that this role reversal has allowed a certain more or less libertarian right wing to claim to be punk, confronting a new cultural establishment dedicated to setting limits on what everyone can or cannot do with their lives: the obscenities that the sixties-eighties heroes used to utter in order to shock the bourgeoisie, a practice initiated in the inter-war period by the artistic avant-garde, would now be the heritage of their enemies.

It goes without saying that political correctness or awareness of a certain kind of injustice, a defined phenomenon of what has come to be called ‘woke ideology’, have positive aspects. The greater respect with which previously discriminated against or at least stigmatised minorities are treated is to be welcomed as does a change in language that should be counted as a widening circle of moral consideration. But when sensitivity turns to dogmatism and those who believe they are in possession of the truth arrogate to themselves the power to decide what is right and what is wrong, claiming the right to ban ways of life they dislike, the so-called social justice warriors become victims of their own excesses. And while this undesirable disposition - which finds in social networks the breeding ground for its development - can be explained in many ways, I would like to link it here to post-Marxist ideology as it takes shape in post-industrial societies during the second half of the Trente Glorieuses.

Let us start from a thesis: only those who believe they are in possession of an unquestionable moral truth that excludes alternative points of view, would behave like aggressive puritans. However, it happens that liberal society is defined by the coexistence - constitutionally protected - of alternative points of view. Hence, the activist is brought to convince him/herself that liberal plurality is a false plurality; the individual who operates in it is only apparently an autonomous subject, since his life lacks the necessary authenticity. Subjectivity has been captured by the forces of the system; we are back to Marx's worker suffering from a ‘false consciousness’ inoculated by the bourgeois state. We are not free! Even if we seem to be more free than ever; this is where Foucault's incongruous thesis that the birth of liberal societies leads to the reduction of individual freedom comes in. This is an invisible subordination, which only the trained eye - the eye of the awakened and woke - can detect.

And since one cannot be tolerant of the true freedom’s enemies, as Herbert Marcuse proclaimed, the revolutionary has the right to suppress the false freedom of the other. His purpose, of course, is edifying: to procure the emancipation of the oppressed who believes himself to be free. Thus the neo-Puritan may be said to be saving the alienated individual when he pushes him to live an authentic life, just as the old Puritans rescued the soul of the reprobate.

There is thus a thread that connects the apparent libertarianism of the 1960s with contemporary neo-puritanism: since the masses were unable to join the revolution, the correct way of life must be imposed on them in the name of the progress of humanity. If we continue to pull on the thread, we find ourselves with Robespierre - public health demands sacrifices - and even with Lenin: freedom for what?

In a democracy, fortunately, there are limits to what can be done to others: the neo-puritan barks and often cannot bite. Let us make sure, therefore, that democracy is still in place. If they are going to lecture us, let them at least not punish us.

Read, Los nuevos puritanos