I’ve never really written a book review before, but got so annoyed by this book I went on a bit of a rant. I thought maybe it might be of interest to this subreddit in case anyone is considering reading it. (TLDR: don’t).
In “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History,” journalist Nellie Bowles displays an unerring ability to peer beyond underlying structures of organized power and wealth in order to indict a random collection of misguided leftists for all of society’s many ills. In her book, Bowles describes her transition from card-carrying member of the left intelligentsia to a free-thinking skeptic. While her skepticism comes through loud and clear, you will have to take her word for the free-thinking part of the transition, as the book displays a depressing roteness of thought, travelling over ground already well-trod by the many writers whose various similar paeans to heterodoxy have all come out in an eerily identical mold, as if mass produced in some factory of free-thought.
With titles like “The Identity Trap,” “The Canceling of the American Mind,” and “Woke Racism,” the sheer number of books decrying the new era of political correctness would, to the untrained eye, seem to undermine the claims of their authors of an all-powerful and censorious leftwing regime, but, undeterred, these brave dissidents continue to sound the alarm. In mass-market books published by mainstream presses, from stages on multimillion dollar Netflix specials, and through slickly produced Spotify podcasts, these oppressed minority voices boldly defy the odds to provide us with their harrowing tales of cancellation.
Morning After the Revolution is a tiresome entry in a tiresome genre, and while Bowles takes great delight in settling scores and carefully constructing strawmen to then gleefully set-alight, for a book that purports to provide a first-hand account of leftist thought, readers will learn surprisingly little of substance about what the left believes or how it operates. Like other books of its ilk, Bowles resorts throughout to dark references to an insidious “they” who hold certain absurd beliefs and will punish any who dare to question the received wisdom. The makeup of this amorphous “they” is never really defined, who are among its members, what groups and organizations it comprises, how it wields power, this is all left out of the book. Instead, Bowles is largely content to focus on fringe beliefs and figures and assert, without any attempt to substantiate these claims, that they speak for the left broadly.
Early in the book, Bowles tells a story of receiving a warning from a fellow journalist at the New York Times based on his concern that she was beginning to cover topics best left alone. When, at a point a little over half-way through the book, after Bowles has spent pages detailing the minutia of Tumblr forums populated by asexual teens, she turns to provide a hard-hitting expose of a minor Spotify account with less than 300 followers run by three young women, one begins to wonder if the colleague wasn’t simply providing well-meaning advice rather than warning Bowles of the danger of provoking such powerful enemies.
The extensive space devoted to such fringe and relatively insignificant movements and figures is even more curious given the total absence in this expose of the new left movement of any mention of income inequality, or class politics. Indeed, while Bowles does describe episodes of backlash against several public figures for their hostility to unions, she, somewhat confusingly, frames this as further reinforcing her central claim that the left has become too distracted by niche identity politics issues to focus on core progressive goals.
One may think that support for unions and hostility to entrenched capital is a defining feature of progressive ideology, and the rise of support for unionization a key part of any telling of the progressive movement of the 2020s, but this view does not comport with Bowles’ sense of what the goals of progressivism should be, which, while never explicitly stated, appears to consist mostly of a laserlike focus on issues which personally affect Bowles, such as a disregard of any transgender issues in order to provide unflagging support for white, upper-class lesbians, and the ability of wealthy Los Angelenos to enjoy the parks near their multimillion dollar homes without the intrusion of any visible homeless people.
In a telling passage, Bowles at one point criticizes Planned Parenthood for acknowledging its past failure to address transgender health issues and pledging to do better going forward. This statement, Bowles darkly notes, came a mere two years before the Dobbs decision revoked the federal right to an abortion. The implication, as I understand it, is that Planned Parenthood allowed its focus on important core issues to slip, and this resulted in its failure to adequately safeguard the right to abortion. Of course this telling completely sidesteps the role of politics, treating the conservative movement that campaigned on a goal to overturn abortion rights, and delivered on that promise via the appointment of three Supreme Court justices, as some force of nature that Planned Parenthood was negligent in not containing.
This elision of the power and unrestrained radicalism of the conservative movement in favor of a circumscribed focus on the threat posed by Extremely Online leftwing twitter users who have hurt the feelings of the authors is a feature of books of this type. It is notable that in a book that sets out to document the overweening power of the new left, Bowles does not name a single national politician seeking to implement the goals she assigns to it, nor does she point to any enacted legislation, federal or state, that has attempted to force obedience to progressive social doctrines using the coercive power of the state. It goes without saying that the situation is quite different if one strolls across the aisle to take a look at the conservative movement, which has passed laws banning books, proscribing doctrines to be taught in schools, outlawing abortion without exception, banning fertility treatment, and which contains national figures openly advocating for the deliberalization of divorce laws and a purge of the civil service.
That Bowles and her fellow travelers decline to focus the firepower of their avowed zeal for truth and justice on the actual and immediate threat imposed by right-wing revanchism is predictable, yet striking. One would think that in books about the dangers of a rising culture of censorism, actual laws censoring books and ideas would merit mentioning, but that is rarely the case. It may be impolite to wonder whether financial consideration has played a role: the market for books that take a lurid look at “cancel culture” and woke politics by a chastened liberal, and this specific flavor of contrarian who is "just asking questions" (albeit somehow rarely of those who actually wield power) appears thus far to have carved out a significant niche in the market. If you, like me, are approaching this book in the hope of encountering substantive and well-argued critiques of leftist thought, I would suggest looking elsewhere.
by bleepbloop1990