MAUREEN DOWD, ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW: “Progressives Are The Modern Puritans:”
After I interviewed Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, The HuffPost huffed that we were Dreaded Elites because we were eating chocolates and — horror of horrors — the speaker had on some good pumps.
Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins.
I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously painted as decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette when we should have been knitting like Madame Defarge.
Yo, proletariat: If the Democratic Party is going to be against chocolate, high heels, parties and fun, you’ve lost me. And I’ve got some bad news for you about 2020.
The progressives are the modern Puritans. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is alive and well on the Potomac and Twitter.
All the best people pointed out to me on their sandwich boards that the world is coming to an end in 14 months. As doomsday approaches, there’s no room for heretics to the revolution, let alone chocolate, high heels, parties, or heck, even plastic straws.
(As H.L. Mencken wrote in 1949, “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” But why did it take this long for Maureen to discover that her fellow leftists were the new puritans?)