Any rational person will readily agree that life in America has become slightly insane. This was true especially of COVID time and its consequences, be they medical, political, or existential. But even before that, much of America had endured the tyranny of “political correctness”—a term that has gone out of fashion, replaced by “woke” or “wokeism.” But this, too, appears to be reaching its end stages. No matter what one calls the current condition, it is punctuated by disorder, lawlessness, and metaphysical confusion. As the saying goes, the insane are running the asylum, but it is the sheer variety of insanities that is making life in America increasingly stressful.
In her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, Nellie Bowles reports on and explores the meaning of recent events in America that have added to the anxiety over where this country is going. A former New York Times reporter, Bowles comes at the issue from a liberal/left perspective that mostly has not been marred by the emergence and absurdity of the New Left. Part reportage, part memoir, Bowles wonders where she fits in this “new world order.” As she writes, “I owe a lot to my life to political progressivism, and I bristled at the alternative, which certainly wouldn’t want me.”
Bowles goes on to single out political and ideological issues that have plagued America in the past few years, and continue to do so. She reports on Black Lives Matter, ANTIFA, media narrative control and distortion, and the transgender movement, among others. For this effort alone, Bowles’ book deserves attention and recognition because she is a witness to many events we see and hear about in the news but that are often distorted or downright lied about.
Bowles writes about the Black Lives Matter movement that overtook most American cities. Part of the movement a push to defund the police, or abolish it altogether. In Seattle, ANTIFA took over a particular zone in the city, designating it as autonomous. They set up barricades, declared themselves “the law,” and did not allow the police or anyone else to enter the area.
Despite that particular neighborhood being quite urban, peppered with establishments that catered to the liberal demographic, no amount of “green grocer” signs satisfied the anarchists. Soon businesses (and the people who lived there) found themselves attacked. Given the fact that the city’s officials (who are all on the left) sided with the anarchists, who prized violence over dialogue, the autonomous zones resulted in the loss of many of those businesses.
One would think that those business owners would have understood who the enemy in this case was, but Bowles reports a curious case of cognitive dissonance. Bowles writes, “Almost exactly three years after the neighborhood was first taken over and renamed CHAZ, the ice cream shop owner Molly Moon Neitzel filed a lawsuit against the city. She wanted to be really clear that she still supports the police-free utopia. But also the city needs to pay her for having abolished the police in the police-free utopia.”
What to make of this? Is this woman out of her mind? Is she supporting the people who are essentially domestic terrorists and who ruined her life? Is she still genuinely committed to the “movement” or is she offering her continued support mainly out of fear?
This is not the only instance of such self-contradictory behavior. Portland, Oregon, was another site of violence and destruction. Bowles reports on the absurdity of the protests there as well as the little details we never saw on cable or broadcast news. Every protest demanded preparation. In Portland, organizers “opened folding tables and supply booths. …There was a food table overflowing with protein bars and Monster energy drinks. There was new body armor, motorcycle helmets right out of the box, shields and umbrellas, all free.”
It sounds like a satire, something out of a book written by Evelyn Waugh or Tom Wolfe, but alas it is real. Obviously, the violence and destruction were well-funded by seemingly unknown organizations. (Many of these were later linked to the Soros Foundation and organizations tied to it.)
Just like with the ice cream shop owner, we see upper-middle- and middle-class citizens supporting the violent movement. During the protest,
One white man stepped onto his patio clapping and hollering in support of the passing march. The group called for him to join. He smiled and waved them on, still clapping. They began to chant that he was spineless. He looked worried. Eventually the march moved along, and he went back into his house. “You’ll never sleep tight, we do this every night,” the protesters chanted.
Although Bowles manages to maintain her journalistic distance, she cannot help but comment on the absurdity and stupidity of these situations. She generally uses humor and light sarcasm to point out that most of these leftist groups fail to make any sense. At some point, though, things went from political to personal. Bowles “started dating a known liberal dissident on the Opinion side of the paper.” (The dissident in question is, presumably, Bari Weiss, a critic of cancel culture who left the Times and founded The Free Press, although Bowles is coy throughout the book about mentioning Weiss explicitly, except in the acknowledgement section.) While trying to write about the “revolution,” Bowles was falling in love.
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem; however, it turned out to be a big issue for New York Times management. “One early evening,” writes Bowles, “I was having drinks with an editor and a group of colleagues. The editor, who I liked a lot, heard I was dating this very bad liberal. … He wanted to know: How could I do that? ‘She’s a f—ing Nazi, Nellie,’ he said. I tried to laugh it off and he kept going.”
Laughing about matters like these is not advisable if you’d like to keep your position. Eventually, Bowles left the Times,but one wonders about the tipping point—that one thing that finally led her to do so. Apparently, it was not a matter of principle. She admits that the personal ended up winning over the political. All that commitment she had to leftism and leftist activism dissipated once she entered the relationship with that “very bad liberal.” However, there is something odd about that, because it is a theme throughout the book. In fact, it is the thing that renders her book a disappointment.
On many occasions, Bowles mentions that she didn’t have the courage to step up and defend the people that got caught in the midst of the woke insanity. But this doesn’t read as a confession of someone looking to mend her ways, but as a “by the way, this is what happened at the protest” story.
Similarly, and more disturbingly, Bowles writes about the “joy of canceling ” someone, and how she engaged in it. To do a cancellation
is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck. Everyone brings what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends. It’s a positive thing, what you’re doing, and it doesn’t feel like battle so much as nurturing the love for one’s friends, tending the warm fire of a cause. You have real power when you’re doing it. And with enough people, you can oust someone very powerful.
It’s not at all clear that this is meant to be humorous sarcasm. Instead, the reader encounters a person who has no metaphysical constitution of her own. She relies on others for her identity—in this case, others engaged in a cause. In leaving the Times, it is as if Bowles had to make minor decisions to extricate herself from a particularly uncomfortable situation.
It is unreasonable to expect Bowles to have morphed into a conservative, especially when conservatism itself is quite lost. However, it is strange to see that she hasn’t really let go of her previous ideology, and remains a committed liberal, if not leftist. The usual statement by many on the left like her (Bill Maher, for instance) is that there is no “reasonable” liberalism anymore and that insanity has taken over. We could accept that, but it is precisely the constant if incremental movement toward revolution—the uprooting of “liberal” values—that liberalism is susceptible to that has led American society into the very chaos these more “reasonable” liberals decry.
Although Bowles should be commended for her superb reporting, supported by incredible and important details (the book should serve as a kind of historical artifact of all the chaotic things that occurred), it is ultimately an insular work. It represents only certain urban areas of America and only describes what it sees from one perspective. Of course, thankfully, America is not this monochromatic. To be sure, cultural and metaphysical disorder exists, and Bowles points to these, but she never seems able to take a step back and assess to what extent she is may be part of the problem, and that leaving more than just the New York Times may be in order.
