Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, by Nellie Bowles (Thesis, 272 pp., $30)
If your family’s group chat is anything like mine, you may have developed a set of abbreviations and idioms to help process the madness sprayed in all directions in the year 2020. “TPAN” stood for “These People Are Nuts,” and could refer to anything from a sportswriter-turned-essayist tweeting that she had concluded that the United States was “as bad as Nazi Germany” to prominent lawmakers genuflecting with Kente cloths draped around their necks—masked and socially distanced, of course—in the Capitol. “We have gone to the zoo!” was the catchall expression for feeling like we had entered a bizarro world, full of supposed experts who waived all Covid restrictions for antiracism protests, supposed journalists who droned in unison that the New York Times’s choice to publish a senator’s call to have the National Guard quell riots “puts Black NYTimes staff in danger,” in a nation suddenly unsure that the concepts of “man” and “woman” had any real meaning. Many of us were cooped up in our homes during those Two Weeks to Stop the Spread that turned into months, with little to do but follow the news and social media, which transfixed us in any case, filled as they were with fuel for outrage and disbelief, a mixture of contradictions, provocations, and insanities.
We owe gratitude to Nellie Bowles, formerly of the New York Times, who left the Old Gray Lady in the middle of this mania after, among other things, her coworkers repeatedly referred to her partner, Bari Weiss, as “a Nazi.” (Weiss and Bowles have since launched The Free Press, where Bowles writes the “TGIF” column, recapping each week’s events in her lively style.) You could say Bowles was in the middle of things. And she has used that perch, her journalistic training, and her keen eye for absurdity, to produce Morning After the Revolution, a debut that doubles as a crucial first draft for the history books.
Most of us did not have time to process each piece of madness before the next one showed up in our feeds. Bowles has done the service of compiling her observations into a series of reported vignettes that provide a 360-degree view of a tumultuous year. She takes her reader into homeless encampments and autonomous zones, the parallel universe of gender theorists and transgender-rights activism, and (perhaps most memorably) racial sensitivity trainings, where white Americans are commanded to nod along with crackpot social theories proving how evil they are. If the well-meaning idiots who voluntarily attend these sessions fail to maintain a stiff upper lip, of course, they will be scolded for “weaponizing” their “white tears.”
It's all great fun. At least it is for me, because I come from a world of “TPAN” and trips to the zoo. It confirms nearly all my biases by affirming that Bowles, too, sees what we non-revolutionaries are seeing, and she thinks it’s more than a little nuts, too. Morning After the Revolution is not a conservative book, and Bowles is clearly not a conservative, but her work is vindicating for those of us on the right. The agitators and activists who serve as Bowles’s subjects really are, on the whole, who we thought they were: ideologues, imbeciles, and ingrates. They are mostly unserious people itching for revolution here in America, mistaking unprecedented comfort for oppression.
Reading about the inane ways they try to scratch that itch is addicting. Bowles’s comic timing is impeccable. Altogether, her book is delicious. The trouble, though, is that Bowles’s presentation relies on readers sharing a certain moral frame. Because, with a few exceptions, her reporting does not veer into analysis of why what she describes is absurd, Bowles counts on her readers recognizing madness when they see it. Many readers likely won’t.
Bowles posits early on that she wrote her book to help people not keyed into the finer points of revolutionary theory understand the developments of the last few years. Certainly, she has provided useful case studies, with specific observations—like the way certain transgender activists talk about what it means to be a woman—ripe for analysis and critique.
But to really make sense of 2020, and to help regular Americans digest its lessons, applying some analytical pressure may be necessary. Two questions stick out for the reader trying to pull broad themes from Bowles’s dispatches. First, why did all these things seem to go together? In other words, what unifies the effort to revolutionize our collective understanding of race, gender, poverty, economics, and so much more? Perhaps it is a coincidence that these all caught fire at the same time, but Bowles doesn’t think so. How the strands tie together may tell us something about our national psychotic break, and how we might work to recover our sanity.
Second, why did Americans fall for it all? Why do they continue to believe in mistaken factual premises undergirding the Black Lives Matter movement, and to accept metaphysics about race and gender they once would have identified as laughable? If the revolution’s component parts are all so self-evidently ridiculous, how did it get so popular?
Perhaps it would have benefitted Bowles to answer these key questions in tandem. What ties the elements of the revolution together is the steadfast confusion of truth and untruth. The movement’s central commitment is to the proposition that nothing is inherently true or false; what we accept as correct, normal, and real is constructed by social consensus, and you will be intimidated into forming that consensus by repeating falsehoods until they no longer seem absurd.
If that’s the case, then maybe Bowles is not derelict in letting the stories speak for themselves, but displaying an advanced understanding of how best to deal with a movement predicated on insisting there is no difference between truth and lie, man and woman, America and Nazi Germany. Such a movement succeeds when a critical mass of people loses the will to fight such an absurd fight. By choosing not to explain the joke, Bowles suggests that her subjects are just that—a joke. They are unserious, and thus unworthy of grappling with seriously. They should be mocked and scorned, briefly but thoroughly, regarded less as revolutionaries and more as children in need of a time-out until they are ready to behave themselves.
It’s still not clear whether this is Bowles’s meta-message, and whether she would agree with the cultural and policy upshots of thinking about the movement she describes in this way. If not, one can only hope a follow-up effort is forthcoming to draw out some lessons from the scenes she memorably describes.
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