MORNING AFTER THE REVOLUTION: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History, by Nellie Bowles
Activists! Attention-grabbing grifters, making everything worse by thinking the world could be better. What’s to be done but slay them with mockery? This is the general project of Nellie Bowles’s “Morning After the Revolution,” a slim collection of polemical reportage that I suspect is meant to be courageous stuff, also funny. Why, Bowles demands, does politics have to be so “deathly serious”?
Formerly a reporter for The New York Times, Bowles quit in 2021 as the paper’s newsroom, she writes, was devolving into a monoculture of utopian progressivism, “so sure everyone was good, except of course, conservatives, who were very very bad and whose politics only come from hate.”
I sense that Bowles is trying to channel Tom Wolfe, who skewered liberal pretension in high style, often by slipping stealthily into his subjects’ points of view. But where Wolfe was a precision-guided stiletto, Bowles is more of a dull blade, ridiculing her former colleagues by saddling them with laughably vacuous thoughts and dreams — their “beautiful vision of the role of journalism for such a beautiful time,” for instance. What twits!
“Morning After the Revolution” transports us to the heady days of 2020 and 2021 when protesters massed coast to coast demanding social change: Black Lives Matter, Seattle’s “autonomous zone,” police abolition marches. But it’s activists for the homeless who really gall Bowles, especially after she buys a house in a gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood of multimillion-dollar properties. A 200-person homeless encampment had recently sprung up in a nearby park; private security costs her nearly $4,000 a year.
Cue the organizers, opportunists and socialists who think “homelessness is a tool of the revolution” — a chance to show the world what a community operating outside the capitalist system might look like, not a problem to be fixed with something simple, such as housing. One activist is from a well-off family and drives a BMW! When the park was finally cleared by the city, 180 pounds of excrement had to be shoveled out, she reports, nose wrinkled. Bowles, who says that she has “always voted yes on every homeless housing supplement I come across,” wishes the unhoused could just have better manners — be less rowdy, perhaps more constipated. More like middle-class homeowners.
Worse than the L.A. activists are their San Francisco counterparts, whom Bowles blames for abetting fentanyl deaths with their empathy-driven progressivism, and driving up homelessness. The issue Bowles seems reluctant to take up is income inequality, even though a major story in the period she’s covering was the $26 trillion in new wealth funneled to the world’s richest 1 percent. When inequality rises, so does homelessness, which seems unfair to pin on progressives. Nor were they the ones who decided that deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill was a great idea. That would be Ronald Reagan.
I was intrigued to learn that Bowles was once an activist herself: a high school crusader for gay rights who has since married a woman. She acknowledges being the beneficiary of a previous generation’s progressivism, and her vestigial liberal heart still occasionally bleeds; she reports tearing up during an antiracism workshop. It’s the crazy activism she’s against — you know, the “fringe” stuff.
By fringe, she means trans. She’s peeved that some trans women are trying to redefine feminism in ways that seem to her to be anti-woman, resents that lesbians risk being erased by trendy all-purpose queerness and fears that as a married lesbian mother she will have her own rights swept away by anti-trans backlash. Given the Dobbs decision, all precedents are possibly imperiled, but the culprit isn’t transgender-rights activists. It’s the religious right and the Supreme Court, both of which get a pass from Bowles, as do Donald Trump and every elected Republican.
I was, of course, eager to read good gossip about The Times. The best nugget: After Bowles started dating a “known liberal dissident” at the paper (the former opinion writer Bari Weiss, whom she wed and now works with at The Free Press, the media company Weiss founded), she says an editor Bowles was friendly with asked how she could be doing this. “She’s a Nazi,” the editor exclaimed about Weiss, which I take to mean he disagreed with Weiss’s politics. Despite Bowles’s own penchant for political gibes — frequently hyperbolic and in questionable taste — she felt hurt.
Her most serious charge is that the editor thought her story ideas weren’t as good after that. The obvious question is whether her heterodox turn has conferred much benefit when it comes to ideas. The ones on display here seem pretty shopworn. I recall admiring a sharp-elbowed profile of the psychologist and anti-identity politics commentator Jordan Peterson that Bowles wrote early in her Times tenure. Nothing in this book hits that level.
Bowles’s rationale for returning us to the early 2020s, she explains in her conclusion, is that the ideas embraced by activists at the time have since become the operating principles of big business and mainstream institutions. To the extent that this is true, what accounts for it? The term “woke capitalism” might be a place to start: Who benefits from social-justice window dressing? Who are the useful stooges? Where does the actual power lie?
What’s frustrating about Bowles’s book is that there are usually better arguments in support of her case than the ones she bothers to make. She seems to be trying to say that the left needs to adopt elements of liberalism — a more robust defense of free speech — and to ditch the moral authoritarians. (Many leftists would agree.)
But the book’s central fallacy is that idiocy on the left requires moving to the right. It doesn’t. It’s eminently possible for people with brains to make distinctions and stick to their principles, if they have any. And, by the way, you’re not going to find any fewer authoritarians and idiots by switching sides.
MORNING AFTER THE REVOLUTION: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History | By Nellie Bowles | Thesis | 242 pp. | $30
