B owles sticks narrowly—chronologically if not topically—to the 2020 racial reckoning following the police murder of George Floyd and its aftermath. One gets the impression that prior to 2020, Bowles wasn’t especially plugged into cancel-cul- ture–type debates, and fair enough—most were not. Brodsky, for her part, goes back earlier, to the 2017 #MeToo movement and the proto-‘woke’ 2010s—also a solid choice, given that 2020 was itself merely the latest and most intense (due in part to lockdowns and corresponding online-ness) incarnation of something dating to roughly 2008, with a precursor in 1990s political correctness. Despite enjoying Bowles’s writing, a part of me was resistant to Morning After the Revolution . It looked like the latest in a seemingly inexhaustible supply of accounts from people who were present for summer 2020 drama at the New York Times opinion pages and are, for related reasons, no long- er working there. Former editor James Ben- net wrote an Economist essay, “When the New York Times lost its way,” the length of a short book. A lower-rung ex-staffer, Adam Rubenstein, penned I Was a Heretic at The New York Times for The Atlantic . There was also Weiss’s own resignation letter. I feel as though I was there, even though I know full well that I was in Canada looking after a toddler at the time. Times-specific reminiscences thankfully make up little of Morning After . Much will nevertheless be familiar to those who’ve been following heterodox media (especially the Blocked and Reported podcast). Other stories Bowles recounts are based on her own on-the-ground report- ing from the fleeting, police-free Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, in what had been a liberal but not radical gay neighbourhood of Seattle, and similar locales elsewhere on the U.S. west coast. The anarchist-led micro-neighbourhoods heralded as the end of oppression did not, she finds, work out so well for, for example, racialized small-business owners within their boundaries. Similarly, according to Bowles, the movement to defund the police, supposedly about dis- banding a racist institution, is sometimes a cause white people embrace on behalf of racialized people who see things otherwise. Indeed, Pew polling from 2021 showed that “among Democrats, Black (38%) and Hispanic (39%) adults
were merely low on the list of social justice priorities. Bowles describes agonizing over her “wonderful synagogue” having a drag-queen-led Tot Shabbat, but then kind of coming around to it. She compares the drag queen posing for photos with joyous toddlers on her lap to “Santa,” which one could either take at face value as a com- ment on children having lighthearted fun playing with a costume-wearing adult, or as a dig at the synagogue-appropriateness, in her view, of the event in question. As the title, The Morning After the Revo- lution , spells out, Bowles is documenting a moment from which the world has moved on. (Was the reckoning a “revolution” or is this rhetorical flourish? Hard to say.) She argues that some left excesses have just been normalized, particularly in human resources, and now go unremarked. That said, she allows that not all of society has internalized 2020-style progressiv- ism, and concludes with references to newly ascendent phenomena. One is the edgy “New Right,” with its embrace of “tradwives” and “imagined Bronze Age traditionalism,” rife with sexism and homo- phobia. The other, a left whose pro-Hamas bent is similarly unwelcoming to the sort of woman who would marry Bari Weiss and convert to Judaism. It’s enough to make a contrarian Jewish lady nostalgic for 2021- era ‘wokeness.’ Indeed, contrary to what I expected of the book, this far from a burn-it-down mockery of left-wing ideals. “I owe a lot of my life to political progressivism,” writes Bowles, “and I bristled at the alternative, which certainly wouldn’t want me.” Nor is this a personal story about having fallen out with a crowd. “I wasn’t canceled,” she writes. “Never have been.” But as Bowles began to question progressive orthodox- ies, such as the wisdom of defunding the police, she faced pushback. Colleagues warned her that she was on “the wrong side of history” (hence the subtitle) and that Weiss, author of How to Fight An- ti-Semitism , was a “Nazi.” These days she is less worried what others will think. “We entered an era of apologies,” writes Bowles. “This may seem strange to you now, but we all got used to it. To stay in good standing required relatively frequent apologizing.” That it did. Instagram featured little else. She adds, “It was also notable that these apologies did not help save jobs or stop criticism.”
are more likely than White adults (32%) to say spending on police in their area should be increased.” Bowles describes a meeting in Oakland, Calif. where two groups clashed: “The black families start- ed giving up. ‘The fuck you talking about,’ one man said to a petite white person with purple hair.’” A pattern emerges, one that’s worth paying attention to if you are, say, trying to make sense of why left-wing politicians can’t always take the votes of marginalized communities for granted. The usual book-reviewer thing would be to say that the parts with Bowles’s original reporting are stronger than her analytical recaps. And for a reader like me, who is familiar with the stories she’s telling second-hand, they are. But a future reader, or a contemporary one less plugged into these topics, would benefit from the context.
“We entered an era of apologies,” writes Bowles. “To stay in good standing required relatively frequent apologizing.”
Bowles has written elsewhere about her conversion to Judaism, but in Morning After , Jewishness comes up only intermittently. In the months since she finished writing the book, subtext has become text where Jews’ relationship to progressivism is concerned. Jews—no, not all Jews, just the vast majority of Jews worldwide, the ones with some sort of pro-Israel sentiment—now stand accused of being white supremacist colonizers. Some have responded by asking why North American Jews don’t get “safe spaces.” Others insist upon the importance of free speech, even speech very critical of Israel. Still others are the ones harshly criticizing Israel. My point is not that there is just one thing Jews today are saying about the relationship between Jews and post-Oct. 7 North American left-wing activism, but rather that a Jewish-authored book written about 2023-2024 would almost certainly have more of a Jewish angle. The story Bowles is telling, however, centres on a moment where antisemitism
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