In the canon of culture war literature, Nellie Bowles’s Morning After the Revolution may be distinguished from its contemporaries by what it lacks. It does not boast the intellectual rigors of Christopher Rufo or Richard Hanania. (Foucault is mentioned only once.) Nor does it adopt an exclusive, internet-born patois like Peachy Keenan or Bronze Age Pervert. (“Woke” gets only three mentions; “clown world” zero.) It does not offer a Lovecraftian mythos where critical theorists, public school teachers, and civil rights attorneys stalk the Earth turning libraries into brothels or telling you that your Chick-fil-A is actually a prison. Moreover, it lacks a convert’s zeal, let alone the urgency to make more converts. What relevant details do appear amounts to a mass of trivia. A beach read of America’s death throes.
But Bowles is a reporter, not a polemicist. And she is a conscript to the culture war, not a volunteer. Conscripts are less favored among culture warriors, owing to their apparent slow learning and lack of true belief. True enough, much of what Bowles covers is established group chat fodder, and she is unafraid to appear excessively corny in proving her liberal credentials. “[M]y ideal reader,” Bowles writes, “is someone like myself, someone who now feels a little tribeless, a person of curiosity, someone whose politics are more exhaustion than doctrine.” But it requires just such a conscript to concretely convey a new reality to the many who are themselves running out of deferments.
Morning After assesses what Bowles calls the “New Progressive” ideology, a hard, dogmatic rendition of liberalism that is replacing its tolerant and free-minded predecessor. Bowles is not unsympathetic. “The New Progressive is trying to help,” she writes. “They see real problems, real pain. So many of the solutions should work.” As such, it has garnered considerable prestige in mainstream culture. Progressive nonprofit organizations cull millions in donations. Smashed shops are explained away on CNN; “Narrative Enforcers” at Bowles’s former employer the New York Times “wield the pen for justice” and prioritize historical correctness over factual accuracy. Celebrities vouch for its ideals; teachers incorporate them into their curricula. These outlets, like their volunteer critics, focus heavily on why-must and how-to of the progressive agenda, less is said about the what-next. “The ideology that came shrieking in would go on to reshape America in some ways that are interesting and even good, and in other ways that are appalling, but mostly in ways that are — I hate to say it — funny.”
Bowles’s dispatches depict an ideology astonishingly adaptable to any situation and context. New Progressivism is in the streets and in the sheets. It is also in the conference room and in the classroom, among other places. Its adherents clash with police in one city while trying to replace them in another. Individuals themselves are no less flexible, swapping genders and racial backgrounds or adopting sexual-identity neologisms of ever-increasing opacity. They may call for explicitly violent action or look anxiously for violence in the minutest gesture. It’s a way of looking at the world that enables ironies, hypocrisies, and sometimes delusions.
The honorable intentions of Morning After turn away from exposés of journalism’s recent past. Neither Didion’s glacial scorn nor Wolfe’s pyrotechnic burlesque are quite suitable to its purposes. Though spiced with sarcasm and personal anecdote where appropriate, Bowles’s prose has a documentary sobriety that allows people to act and speak for themselves.
Still, the framing of each chapter cannot help but feel as though a satirical sketch is taking shape. The dystopian beach read becomes the picaresque field report. “Speaking order,” by which progressives prioritize who can say what and when by the amount of oppression someone historically carries, finds people shapeshifting their own backgrounds in order to cut in line. An indigenous rights activist claiming a heritage of Metis, Oneida Nation, among other things, until an anonymous blogger corrects the record as German, Swedish, and French Canadian. “On a related note,” Bowles writes, “the self-reported ‘Native American’ population in the US between the years 2010 and 2020 nearly doubled.”
The “violence interrupters,” unarmed community-based alternatives to police patrols, ring quixotic. Her brief chapter on “anti-racism” consultant Tema Okun has a Vatican air to it. “Under Tema, the anti-racism movement could shift from a political movement grounded in facts to an emotional and spiritual one.” The diversity pro speaks to Bowles through protective intermediaries. Her “Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” document reads like a papal bull and has seeped into the Democratic Party and the Smithsonian with the same dogmatic thrust. Adherents await her pronouncements.
A harder polemical edge forms out of Bowles’s ability to quote her subjects back at them with unimpeachable clarity. An antifa leaflet declares that “Police Officers must be killed, the families of Police Officers must be killed, the children of Police Officers must be killed.” During an anti-racism Zoom seminar, one of the several white female participants refers to herself as an “atrocity” and wonders aloud if “it would be better if I weren’t here.” “Most teenagers aren’t eating cinnamon, but some are,” a doctor says. “They’re on YouTube, and that’s stupid. But we don’t put on YouTube the things that are really good decisions.” A good decision, in this context, being chest reconstruction to appear more male.
Ultimately, Morning After’s canonical position is better seen by what it shares with its volunteer peers: a need to direct rather than to guide. Her ideal reader may be curious and politically omnivorous, but it is their rigidity that Bowles appeals to. Their sense that crime is not on a spectrum, that gender is not fluid, that irony should be illegal just to be on the safe side. These are all senses that are likely to direct them well to the right of the liberalism that Bowles is everywhere professing to cherish. To this reality she responds with something close to despair. “We were always like this. We’re monkeys. We get overexcited and irrational and tribal. Satanic panics come and go.” Liberalism and tolerance, alas, are “completely unnatural.”
This concluding philosophical point feels like a surrender. Bowles sees her historical incorrectness more clearly than her liberal peers who still are out daydreaming. And no paean to progressive optimism or appreciation for drag queen story hour can distract from the real possibility that much of what Bowles writes will be echoed in the Republican National Convention and that more than a fraction of her readers will come around to a Republican way of thinking. The beach readers are free to choose their own adventure. While Bowles takes the premier stance of the 21st-century liberal: conceding points to everyone and pleasing no one.
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Chris R. Morgan writes from New Jersey. His X handle is @cr_morgan.
