Confessions of the Queen of Snark

Review: Morning After the Revolution by Nellie Bowles

Nellie Bowles: Fugitive from the camp of Wokedom & maker of small humans

---

The inimitable Nellie Bowles impinged upon my consciousness by way of The Free Press, of which she and her spouse Bari Weiss are the cofounders. Early on I became a fan of her weekly feature, “TGIF,” a sometimes snarky, frequently hilarious roundup of the good, the bad, and the ugly—mostly the latter two. In days of yore, she would have been described as a writer wielding a poison pen. But though that‘s something of a dead metaphor in these digital days, it seems applicable to Ms. Bowles, a recovering Woke progressive. Reality has sandbagged her, and with the help of that poison pen she’s working through the pain of estrangement.

All this is by way of preface to my recommendation that you should read her just-published book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History. It’s one thing for a lifelong conservative like me to mock and revile the absurdities and atrocities of postmodern progressivism—what else would you expect me to say? But Nellie Bowles is a fugitive from the camp of Wokedom. Hers is an inside account of the Revolution, and the picture she sketches of it is both comical and sinister.

There’s a certain pathos in Bowles’ critique of postmodern progressivism. Despite her understanding that the movement took a radically wrong turn, she still professes faith in such antique liberal principles as “universal health care.” If this is a failure of the imagination, an inability to acknowledge that contemporary progressivism has no real interest in such practicalities, it’s an understandable failure. But here and there in her book, Bowles drops hints that the price of universal health care might be intolerably high.

There are oddities. Early on, Bowles remarks that the Revolution—which she dates from the death of George Floyd—was premised on the belief that “people are profoundly good, denatured only by capitalism, by colonialism, by whiteness and heteronormativity.” I doubt whether it’s really true that anybody on the Left believed in this “heady, beautiful philosophy,” as she calls it. The revolutionary cadres never behaved as if they did. They behaved, rather, as revolutionaries have always behaved: intolerant fanatics, gripped by the lust for power. In witness whereof, we have Bowles’ own account.

She was well placed to bear such witness, for in those days Bowles was working as a reporter for The New York Times. This was, as she confesses, the realization of a dream—to be a journalist. But alas, at the NYT, journalism was not the point. Indeed, it was beside the point. Bowles came to realize that she had joined a revolutionary cell. She came to see that the Revolution was in the newsroom, and that its demands were merciless. This was the genesis of Nellie Bowles’ personal Thermidor.

Morning After the Revolution opens with a stage-setting introduction followed by four parts treating the great themes of the Revolution, which I will call (with thanks to Mr. Huxley) Community, Identity, Stability. These, to be sure, are overlapping categories. What is more, they contradict one another at every turn. Community by no means implies that all human beings are siblings. On the contrary, it’s a divisive concept. For instance, where race is concerned there are “communities of color” on the one hand and that amorphous blob called “Whiteness” on the other. One of the most arresting passages of Bowles’ book is her description of how this works out in practice.

“The Most Important White Woman in the World” tells how the Revolution helped white progressives—white progressive women in particular—get in touch with the existential evil of their whiteness via “antiracist” indoctrination. Tema Oken, a middle-aged white woman, was that voice crying out in the wilderness: Make crooked the way of the Woke. In 1999 she wrote an article titled “White Supremacy Culture,” and it was off to the races. Though Bowles tells the story in a deadpan manner, there’s no disguising the fact that Tema Oken is a lunatic. Nor can it be doubted that in America today, lunacy sells.

Now that they’ve gone mainstream it would be superfluous to describe the arcane dogmas of “Whiteness Studies,” to call the thing by its academic title. Suffice to say that it has evolved into an ideology or, if you will, a secular religion. “White supremacy and racism,” says Tema Oken, “are designed to disconnect us from the earth, the water, the wind, the sky, the sun.” And that, really, is all you need to know: Whiteness is a negative, alienating force that prevents people from experiencing true humanity. This is twaddle, of course, a kind of perverse mysticism. But progressive white women just eat it up.

The antiracist craze culminated in 2020 with a summer of mostly peaceful riots, looting, arson and general mayhem. It was also a summer of bad ideas, of which the most destructive was “defund the police.” The progressive politicians who govern so many of America’s big cities seized upon that one—with predictable results. Police department budgets were slashed, assorted bad behaviors were decriminalized, light-minded notions like abolition of bail and restorative justice were in the air. Is there any need to describe what happened next? To put it shortly: Since human beings are not in fact “profoundly good,” chaos ensued.

These and other atrocities against decency and common sense led Nellie Bowles to question the claims of postmodern progressivism. But what drove her out of the movement were the demands of cancel culture. This she relates in the closing chapter of her book, whose opening sentence runs as follows: “The first time I was consciously part of canceling someone, I do remember the pleasure.” What follows is Bowles’ confession of some truly bad behavior—and all honor to her for sharing the unpleasant details with us. But finally there came a day, as she says, when she just couldn’t bring herself to join in a cancellation. That was the day she left progressivism behind.

Bowles has not morphed into a conservative, of course. She still has the instincts of a liberal; recall that continuing attachment to the idea of “universal healthcare.” But she’s no longer a postmodern progressive, having seen for herself the monstrousness of progressive dogma. This raises the interesting question of whether progressivism can shake off its nihilism and recover its sanity. Probably not. The broad Left as it exists today is irredeemably corrupt. But a fresh start might be made by people like Nellie Bowles, whom I would describe as a progressive libertarian. It would be refreshing to hear a pitch for universal healthcare unaccompanied by a jeremiad about the evils of capitalism or a denunciation of “White Supremacy.”

Un-Woke in Indiana recommends Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.