2025 reboot: Antifa and Ranters
What this blog page is for
I’ve uploaded a few old posts from my defunct business blog, but now it’s December 2025: a new era for me as I move full time to personal writing.
Of course this blog will evolve. But this first new post is a sort of mission statement for what you can expect:
My own perspective, not using AI.
Academic grounding, contemporary relevance, and hopefully a new perspective you’ve not considered before.
Posts that I don’t obsess over for days on end.
Today’s idea: Insults create groups (the case of the Ranters)
There’s a comparison to 1640s England, where technology had changed printmaking, press censorship had broken down, and as a result far more people could say far more of what they wanted to say, to a comparatively wide audience. This led to a distressingly familiar print culture, though that’s a post for another time.
Other important things were going on, but this was also the setting for series of moral panics about different religious groups: Arminians, Anabaptists, Diggers, Familists, Levelers, Muggletonians, Socinians and many (many) more. Lines between doctrines were blurry and much ink was spilled trying to establish the contours and exclusions, but the general implication was something like “filthy crypto-papist scumbag.”
So in this tumultuous climate, some possibly insane and certainly antisocial writers published inflammatory tracts arguing that the “elect” of God could do whatever they wanted, leaning heavily on Titus 1:15 (“to the pure all things are pure.”) Abiezer Coppe’s “A Fiery Flying Roll” is the most famous of these tracts, and they kicked off a roughly 9-month public freakout about the scourge of Ranters in London.
Anti-Ranter tracts proliferated—each one claiming to identify Ranter beliefs and behaviors, but each muddying the waters further. But here’s the thing. In another phase of my life, I wrote a prizewinning essay about the Ranter panic, and I don’t think there were any Ranters. No one self-identified as one. Individuals accused of being “Ranter” leaders had quite varied ideas and priorities, and didn’t see themselves as part of a group. “Ranter” was an insult hurled at someone you didn’t like (or someone you imagined to be doing bad things) and used to sell pamphlets that would help readers identify and avoid that opponent.
This had real consequences: anti-sectarian fervor roiled the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, and backlash to the backlash was certainly a factor in the destabilization of that Commonwealth and restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Then, as now, persecuting religious dissent is hugely popular with some and enormously tiresome for everyone else.
375 years later
Does this sound familiar? I think “Ranter” was the “antifa” of its day - a term that might have some connection to a type of belief, but which implied an organization that never existed, and got thrown around so much against so many different people that it lost any specific meaning beyond “I think it’s bad”.
These insults tell you about the user, not the target. And they actually impair understanding: the term comes to mean whatever bunch of negative things I believe it means and the underlying reality—whether there actually are many (or any) people who believe or do those things—is lost. This isn’t a new problem, but it’s a problem that’s particularly keenly felt right now, as many terms are used almost as their own opposites. How else could you get to a point where “traitor” means “reminded soldiers to follow the law”?
Note: this phenomenon of using insults to create an enemy group doesn’t always work the same way: “Quaker” started out as a very similar insult leveled against devout Protestants in about this same period—they would meet in silence and, supposedly, tremble or “quake” when moved by the spirit of God—but over time it came to mean a specific set of beliefs and behaviors that adherents claimed, advocated for and passed on.