A former progressive skewers the movement

Nellie Bowles, a former award-winning New York Times correspondent, was once a part of the progressive movement. Then she defected, for reasons both personal and political, including misgivings about the movement’s principles and behavior. Now, Bowles turns a critical and very funny lens on the movement in her new book, “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.”

Bowles stresses that she still appreciates many progressive gains, including opportunities for women and same-sex marriage. But she is scathing about the polarizing, identity-obsessed social justice movement that emerged in the mid-2010s and probably reached its peak in the summer of 2020. She focuses, in particular, on Black Lives Matter, police abolitionism, and the more radical forms of transgender advocacy.

“Morning After” is certainly not an exhaustive study of that movement. It focuses mostly on Bowles’ personal observations, and some of her stories are trenchant — particularly an episode she clearly regrets in which she participates in the “cancellation” of a friend, a fellow writer, who transgressed by quoting a Black female author without permission and perhaps inaccurately. As online outrage mounted, Bowles bowed out of a joint event on her friend’s book tour; the book flopped, and the friend eventually slipped into obscurity. Later, Bowles herself was accused of racism for refusing to join in another public shaming — a practice she has come to regard as a cruel and self-righteous form of bullying.

Another section describes bizarre anti-racist workshops in which white people are taught to explore their inner racism and feel ashamed of their white skin; the sessions are voluntary, but even so, the phenomenon is toxic. Bowles, whom some have compared to cultural chroniclers like the late Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, has a sharp eye for the absurd.

“Morning After” is far from unsympathetic to the disadvantaged, but it casts doubt on whether most left-wing activists have the interests of the disadvantaged at heart. One scene describes a verbal confrontation between young, white, middle-class protesters who want to abolish the police, and local Black residents who are fed up with crime and see the protesters as clueless privileged busybodies. A protest encampment in support of homeless people turns out to be more about clueless activists playing at revolution (and leaving behind a huge amount of waste), not about helping those who are homeless.

In the section on transgender activism, Bowles expresses the increasingly common concern that kids who don’t conform to gender norms are being thoughtlessly steered toward trans identities and interventions without which many of them would have grown up as gay adults like herself. A fascinating chapter explores a 2021 incident in which a male-bodied sex offender whose documents affirmed a female identity caused a commotion by being in a women-only nude area of a Los Angeles spa; many progressives first denied that it happened and then claimed that as a transgender woman, the individual had a right to be naked in front of women and teenage girls.

There are always quibbles; I think the book would have been stronger if Bowles had spent more time on the follies of the far right as well. But some reviews of “Morning After” have trashed it for overtly political reasons, grudgingly acknowledging that Bowles’ targets often deserve skewering but also accusing her of being unfair to the progressive movement. But if the criticism rankles, perhaps it hits close to home.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.