You may first encounter the animal in its larval stage, when it is blue-haired and broad-minded. Soon, however, it undergoes a kind of political puberty, at which point it outgrows its naive radicalism and embraces the sensible dictums of its elders. It moves to the suburbs; it laments “polarization”; and at the end of its development, it begins to muse that both sides have a point.
This fantastic account of the life cycle of Americans who are radical in adolescence has captured the conservative imagination for decades. William F. Buckley invoked it when he dismissed Vietnam protesters as “young slobs” in 1965; Joan Didion conjured it more politely when she described loopy hippies as so many pampered children two years later. And in 1970, Tom Wolfe mocked the proletarian affectations of the cultural elite in his classic romp of an essay about “radical chic.” In his eyes, the would-be bohemians of Park Avenue were behaving like overgrown teenagers.
Wolfe is hard to hate, even in his most derisive mode, mainly because he has an anthropologist’s eye for social detail and a novelist’s vivacious voice. Alas, contemporary heirs to the American tradition of reactionary scolding present no such temptations. The denizens of the Free Thought Industrial Complex continue to rail against the old (but somehow always present-tense) enemy — kids these days — in publications like Quillette and UnHerd, but they lack the patrician gravitas of a Buckley and the stylistic assurance (and moral imagination) of a Wolfe or a Didion.
None among them is more exemplary in the flat hackishness of her delivery than Nellie Bowles. Her new book, “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History,” is a kind of ideological autobiography, tracking her development from bratty liberal to freethinking what-about-er. It begins with her origin story. Bowles was once “a successful young reporter at the New York Times, a New Progressive doing the only job she had ever wanted.” She gleefully toed the party line, canceling wrong-thinking colleagues and basking in her righteousness. “When Hillary Clinton was about to win,” she recalls, “I was drinking I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar.” Then, she fell in love with former Times opinion editor and writer Bari Weiss, to whom she is now married. Bowles grandiosely characterizes Weiss as a “known liberal dissident,” as if she were a renegade in a Soviet prison — not a canny businesswoman who left the Times vocally but voluntarily in 2020 so as to earn a purported $800,000 from an aggrieved newsletter the following year.
In the gulag that is life after the New York Times, the pair founded the Free Press, an outlet that designates itself as a stronghold of “fierce independence” and that specializes in sneering at the alleged excesses of progressivism. (“Camping Out at Columbia’s Communist Coachella,” reads a representative headline about a student protest that has since been disbanded by swarms of police in full riot gear — not the sort of characters usually in attendance at a music festival.) With Weiss’s help, Bowles suggests, she abandoned her youthful follies and entered true adulthood.
Hers is a familiar narrative, and one for which there is an eager audience. Publications like the Free Press, which boasts 77,000 paid subscribers, often publish confessionals in which newly minted centrists detail their conversions. Books abound with such stories, too. In a recent screed about the pitfalls of the sexual revolution, self-proclaimed “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington explains that she pivoted rightward after a bout of hedonistic philandering in her 20s; the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari, in a 2021 memoir, admits that he arrived at college convinced of the wisdom of liberalism, only to be disillusioned as he came of age.
What is the function of this genre, the conservative memoir of political awakening? And can it vindicate the contention that progressivism is simply a rite of passage, rather than a seriously considered platform? For my part, I suspect that maturation is not always a boon. “Morning After the Revolution” demonstrates that, if leftism is a hazard of adolescence, conservatism is all too often an unfortunate symptom of aging, not unlike senility.
Now that Bowles is employed by the Free Press, a bastion of free thought, what free thoughts is she thinking? Very few, as it turns out. In fact, it can be difficult to discern any at all in her book.
Bowles’s scorn is unmistakable enough. Her dispatches from various protests and anti-Whiteness seminars are full of bloggy jibes, the sort of zingers that circulate widely on X (formerly Twitter). She never misses a chance to discredit protesters by commenting on the color of their hair. At an anti-police rally, there is a “petite white person with purple hair”; at a pro-trans demonstration, she spots a woman “in pink hair” and “a man in a purple wig.” Attempts at scene-setting — a feeble homage to Didion’s magnificently visceral vignettes — fall flat. “It was a warm sunny day, and it smelled like LA, a little acidic, a little like grilled meat,” Bowles writes of a protest in Los Angeles. I was underwhelmed by the insight that the city smells like itself and, I must confess, perplexed by the claim that it smells like grilled meat.
The book’s ambient contempt for progressives is legible; its actual thesis much less so. Its chapters are short, flitting and digressive. In one of them, Bowles ventures into the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a short-lived and ultimately disastrous experiment in anarchist living in Seattle; in another, she sits in on a tense school board meeting in San Francisco. From her perch at the Times, she writes, she witnessed “the arc of the movement as it rose, remaking our institutions from the inside, transforming the country.” But it is unclear what “movement” she means, or if the many diverse phenomena she tackles in her book really belong together.
Some of the anecdotes Bowles shares are indeed about movements, albeit distinct ones: In a chapter titled “Whose Tents? Our Tents!,” she scoffs at the anti-homelessness movement in Los Angeles, and Black Lives Matter is a recurrent fixation. But some of her reporting treats isolated incidents that are not plausibly cast as part of any broader campaign. Is an irritating podcast about asexuality with fewer than 300 ratings on the App Store “remaking our institutions from the inside”? Are the three professors who pretended to be people of color for academic clout really “transforming the country”? (Given that there are 1.5 million college faculty members in America, the tendency these outliers represent appears to be less common than the rarest forms of cancer.) And what, if anything, do diversity, equity and inclusion workshops have in common with doctors who treat trans children? “Morning After the Revolution” is, at best, a grab bag of Bowles’s pet peeves.
Her irritation is not always misplaced. Some of the figures she surveys are ridiculous, or worse. The BLM leaders who mismanaged hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations really are reprehensible; the 1999 paper proposing that punctuality and perfectionism are uniquely White values (and hallmarks of “white supremacy culture”) really is silly and offensive; Robin DiAngelo’s insistence that anti-racist activism should be recast as effete therapy for White people really is counterproductive. But are these cherry-picked embarrassments representative of “the revolution” as a whole? It’s a question a good journalist would pose, yet Bowles doesn’t even think to ask it.
Indeed, “Morning After the Revolution” is an object lesson in irresponsible reporting. “My cohort took it as gospel when a nice white lady said that being On Time and Objectivity were white values,” she writes. But the paper in question has been roundly criticized, including by the avowed socialists at the magazine Jacobin. In a snide chapter on police abolitionism, Bowles insinuates that crime increased in 2021 because of defunding initiatives. “When the crime wave came — and it did — it baffled leaders,” she writes in a passage implying that progressive politicians should have known what defunding the police would yield. Needless to say, she makes no mention of the studies demonstrating that there is no causal relationship between criminal justice reform efforts and the crime wave (which did, after all, occur alongside economic unrest during a global pandemic). Perhaps Bowles is skeptical of these studies, but a careful, comprehensive reporter would have at least mentioned that they exist.
Bowles’s biggest omission, however, is more general and more damning. She is not a liar or a peddler of outright misinformation, but she is fatally incurious about her ideological adversaries and their motivations. At no point does she exert any effort to understand the doctrines she is so quick to dismiss, and she turns a blind eye to examples of sane and effective progressivism, which are ample. The admittedly absurd anecdotes in “Morning After the Revolution” are presented as stand-ins for leftism as a whole, but anyone who searches for inanity in a large enough crowd is sure to find it. What mass movement — massive by design and definition — has no ridiculous constituents? Certainly not the movement of brave “free thinkers” who liken the harsh feedback they receive online to public humiliations in Maoist China, as Bowles does at length.
Besides, there are worse things than being a little ridiculous. Being completely uninterested in the perspectives and suffering of others, for one.
Ultimately, the details that Bowles bungles are beside the point. Her book is another salvo in the culture war. Its intent is to pander, not to persuade, and it’s a mistake to argue with a book that contains no arguments.
The real question is not about whether there are “Narrative Enforcers” at the New York Times, as Bowles alleges, but why there is a market for so many books like this, even though they are all so predictably indistinguishable from one another. Bowles’s book appeals for the same reason that other conservative memoirs of political “growth” do: because they reassure their readers that progressivism is not a genuine political philosophy but an almost biological byproduct of youth, like acne. Bowles and her ilk are thereby absolved from contending with the principles of those who oppose them, or from seeing their political nemeses as rational moral agents.
The more extreme incarnations of this strategy are — and have always been — downright conspiratorial. In the 19th century, opponents of women’s suffrage claimed that the movement was the work of an elite coterie of women plotting to undermine the interests of their working-class sisters; in the 1960s, members of the ultraconservative John Birch Society contended that communists were inciting the nationwide civil rights demonstrations; more recently, a number of right-wing commentators — along with several of their more gullible liberal counterparts — have converged on the groundless suggestion that campus protests against Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza are funded by George Soros or provoked by the perennial phantom of “outside agitators.”
Bowles’s nominally milder claims are on a continuum with these more extreme pronouncements. Her less overtly paranoiac insistence that progressives are bratty children springs from the same deficiency: an inability to see a mass movement as an expression of the public will. “Morning After the Revolution” is not just an affront to the practice of public intellectualism, which is premised on respect for the public, but a deeply anti-democratic document. After all, how is democracy possible if we write off everyone who disagrees with us as an entitled teenager whom we don’t need to bother to understand — if we refuse to see any of our adversaries as our equals?
It is telling that Bowles is not entirely above the more openly conspiratorial approach. At one point, she writes that BLM gained support “primarily thanks to the warm embrace from glossy magazines and CEOs.” It takes a conspicuous lack of humanity to see a man murdered by police on camera and conclude that protesters took to the streets en masse because “glossy magazines” put them up to it. For the average person, it isn’t so hard to conceive of being moved by an injustice.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”
Morning After the Revolution
Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History
By Nellie Bowles
Thesis. 242 pp. $30