Radical Chic Redux

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History
By Nellie Bowles
(Thesis, 272 pages, $23)

In January 1970, while visiting his future wife at her office in Manhattan, journalist Tom Wolfe spotted a letter on a nearby desk, inviting the recipient to a fundraiser for the Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein’s penthouse apartment on Park Avenue.  Smelling a story, Wolfe jotted down the RSVP information and secured himself an invite. Wolfe’s nose was keen.  He did find a story, “Radical Chic,” his acerbic essay on the absurdities of limousine liberalism. The piece is full of delicious details: the Roquefort cheese morsels, served on gadrooned silver trays, that the Bernsteins feed the Panthers; the rich white swells — among them Barbara Walters, Otto Preminger, and Robert Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books — fawning over the noble savages in their midst; and the Black Panthers themselves, self-proclaimed Maoist revolutionaries, decked out in leather jackets and dark glasses, bilking the parlor pinks around them out of thousands of dollars apiece. Rarely before had the smart set looked so stupid.

Now, more than fifty years later, we have a semi-sequel, Nellie Bowles’s new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.  To write it, Bowles followed the path that Wolfe forged in 1970, except that, rather than crashing one progressive get-together, she crashed more than half a dozen, from autonomous zones in Seattle and Minneapolis to Antifa rallies in Portland to a homeless encampment in Los Angeles run by a BMW-driving socialist.  The point, as she explains in the introduction, is to show how, in the wake of the George Floyd killing, the American left “went berserk.” Bowles was, until recently, a card-carrying lefty herself:

I ran the Gay-Straight Alliance at my high school, and I was the only out gay kid for awhile, sticking rainbows all around campus … I’ve been to a reading of The Nation writers at the Verso Books office, and, my God, I bought a tote.  When Hillary Clinton was about to win, I was drinking I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar.

But in 2020, Bowles got mugged by reality. Her bosses at The New York Times balked at her desire to report on businesses that were being hurt by the rioting that occurred that summer. When Bowles began dating Bari Weiss, who was then an editor at the Times, her colleagues were aghast.  “She’s a fucking Nazi, Nellie,” Bowles recalls one coworker saying of Weiss, whom, it should be noted, is Jewish, and whom — it should also be noted — is now Bowles’s wife. Both have since left the Times and currently run their own media company, The Free Press, for which Bowles writes a weekly column. (READ MORE REVIEWS: Hunter S. Thompson: American Idiot)

Weiss has called her wife the lovechild of Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe — intellectually speaking, of course. Personally, I don’t see the resemblance to Didion, whose mood, at least on the page, tended to be rather Eeyorish, but the connection to Wolfe is obvious, not so much in Bowles’s prose, which has none of Wolfe’s Madison Avenue pizzazz, with all those ellipses, double-colons, and exclamation points, but in her irony, her cheeky sense of humor, and her obvious delight at mocking leftwing excess.

Like Wolfe, Bowles often stands back and simply lets the people around her hang themselves with their own words.  She quotes the political manifesto of a Bay Area nursery school — “Abolish the Police for the Safety of Our Community” — that charges $24,000 a year in tuition. She quotes a speaker on a panel about “Reclaiming the A in LGBTQIA+” who says that asexuals “may have sexual desire for someone while not being sexually attracted to them,” whatever that means. And she quotes many well-known public intellectuals who supported looting in the summer of 2020.  “Who, really, is the agitator here?” New Yorker editor David Remnick asked at the time.  “Even looting, [Martin Luther King] insisted, is an act of catharsis, a form of ‘shocking’ the white community by ‘abusing property rights.’” New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who gained fame (and a Pulitzer Prize) for creating The 1619 Project, was more explicit.  “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,” she told CBS.

Not surprisingly, Bowles’s book wasn’t given a warm reception by either The New Yorker or The New York Times. The subhead to The New Yorker’s review states: “In Morning After the Revolution the former New York Times reporter sets out to uncover a not-so-forbidden truth — that the left can be somewhat goofy.” In other words, much ado about nothing. If you actually read the book, though, you’ll discover that the final word in that sentence is doing a lot of work.  Goofy sounds innocent.  Goofy sounds harmless. It doesn’t sound like young men with long guns shaking down businesses for protection money in a police-free zone in Seattle.  It doesn’t sound like anti-police advocates screaming insults at grieving families attending a memorial service for people killed by gang violence.  It doesn’t sound like a children’s hospital in Boston that became so trans-affirming that it gave elective double-mastectomies to fifteen-year-olds.  All of these things, which Bowles details in her book, apparently fall into the category of “somewhat goofy.”

The most Didionesque thing about the book is its title, which calls to mind Didion’s 1970 essay “On the Morning After the Sixties.”  In this case, though, it doesn’t quite make sense.  Morning After the Revolution suggests that the revolution has come and gone and that we are now living in the aftermath.  If so, many on the left haven’t gotten the memo.  Simply look at the protests that have erupted over Israel’s war in Gaza.  Bowles could have written an entire chapter about the encampment that sprang up on Columbia University’s quad this spring or about Queers for Palestine or about the thousands of hecklers who, earlier this month, gathered in Manhattan to wave Hezbhollah flags and shout “Long live the Intifada” outside a memorial for the Jews who were raped and murdered on October 7^th.

Bowles’s starting point doesn’t feel quite right, either.  Reading her book, you’d think the revolution she’s describing began in the summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd, but, in fact, it was already well underway by that point.  Just ask Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, who, in the fall of 2015, was accosted by a mob of angry students because Christakis’s wife, who was also a professor at the university, said the school wouldn’t be censoring Halloween costumes that year.  Or ask Bret Weinstein, formerly a professor at Evergreen State College, who was driven out of his job in 2017 because he refused to participate in a supposedly voluntary “Day of Absence,” in which white people leave campus for a day, leading students to riot and seize control of administration buildings.  Or ask erstwhile senator Al Franken, who was hounded out of Congress in 2018 because of a genuinely goofy photograph he’d taken on a USO tour years before, when he was still a working comedian.

In fact, the movement that Bowles describes looks less like a revolution and more like one wave in a tide of social panics that have swept across the nation in the past dozen years.  First, beginning around 2012, there was what we might call the Black Lives Matter panic, which started after the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.  This was followed by the MeToo panic, which kicked into gear after film producer Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a serial rapist in 2017.  Then came the George Floyd panic — the so-called racial reckoning of 2020 — which was, in turn, followed by a transgender panic, and now the ongoing panic over Israel’s war in Gaza.  And those are just the leftwing freakouts.  Anyone who says conservatives aren’t also capable of being whipped into mass hysteria hasn’t dealt honestly with the events that occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Social panics are older than America itself, and some begin with reasonable complaints.  Far too many black men are shot each year.  Women really do face sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, much more so than men.  But anxieties have a tendency to spin out of control.  Is this phenomenon occurring more frequently now or does it only seem that way because we’re all connected through the internet?  What role does new technology play in fueling movements like BLM and Antifa?  Is social media the ignition or is it merely an accelerant, intensifying arguments that would be happening anyway?  These are questions that Bowles neither asks nor answers, which is odd since her specialty at the Times was culture and tech. (READ MORE REVIEWS: Defeating China’s ‘Great Game’ in Cold War II)

Wolfe had a gift for phrase making.  The expression “radical chic” was only one of his additions to the English lexicon.  Others include “catching flak,” “the ‘Me’ decade,” and “the right stuff.”  Bowles doesn’t have that knack.  Nor does she have his eye for evocative details, like those Roquefort cheese morsels, covered in crushed nuts, that the Bernsteins served the Black Panthers.  Instead, she tends to rely on sarcasm to make her points.  “Anti-racism was about unpacking those white values,” she writes.  “Doing so is hard emotional work for white people, deep internal work.  Work that acknowledges that everyone in the room is always rushing so much, is so demanding of ourselves, so exacting, so white.  Work that is best done over some sauv blanc.”

What Bowles does have — or, rather, what she claims to have — that Wolfe didn’t is an insider’s understanding of the movement she’s describing.  “I want you to see the New Progressive from their own perspective,” she writes, employing the singular their favored by proponents of gender-neutral pronouns. Yet, she often struggles to convey that perspective. In Seattle, they (plural) spot her notebook and eye her warily.  In Los Angeles, they notice her chatting with a conservative videographer and unfurl their umbrellas so she can’t see their faces.  When she reaches out to Tema Okun, the author of a popular guide to “white supremacy culture,” a friend of Okun’s, a public radio reporter, responds instead, telling Bowles that it’s “conspiratorial to think Tema is very influential,” declining the interview for her.

The only time that Bowles truly captures the New Progressives from their own perspective is at the end of the book, when she discusses her own time as a “good soldier” for the left. It felt like “a very warm, social thing,” she explains.  “Everyone brings what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends.  It’s a positive thing, what you’re doing, and it doesn’t feel like battle so much as nurturing the love for one’s friends, tending the warm fire of a cause.”

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