With a band new virus (that we weren’t allowed to speculate on regarding its origins), a lockdown that went on far longer than it should have (which, if you protested about, you would be beaten up by police) and the rising tensions online over issues of identity, history, racism and education, we were furloughed from our jobs and glued to the internet for breaking news. And in that moment, most people began to realise that there was a seismic cultural and philosophical divide between the average person and those elevated into a higher cultural sphere.
This split had been evident for a number of years but it was largely dismissed as ‘online drama’. Now that the world had nowhere else to look, the situation worsened with some decrying wokeness and others citing postmodernism as a factor.
While being interviewed in 1997, Sisters of Mercy front man Andrew Eldritch discussed how postmodernism is born of a culture which has lost ambition for itself, has no sense of the future and doesn’t understand history:
If the reference points for our whole belief system are forgotten, we find it that much harder to understand a shared belief system, or even to disagree coherently with a shared belief system. We end up in a vicious circle of incoherent, half-baked individual utilitarianism where nobody has any belief system at all and we lose the ability to communicate with each other. I think that's one reason why football is so popular again - it's a game which the citizen can focus on, where the rules are defined. Unlike his life. The citizen is becoming a pawn in a game where nobody knows the rules, where everybody consequently doubts that there are rules at all, and where the vocabulary has been diminished to such an extent that nobody is even sure what the game is all about. Hence the concomitant rise of fads like astrology, spiritualism, and generic "I want to believe"-ism. I'm a humanist. I believe people should be able to sort themselves out, as does the Judeo-Christian tradition, obviously, but for rather different reasons. Even for Western-European humanists, it's helpful to know about Isaac and Abraham for any discussion of belief/hope/obligation, especially if we wish to join a discussion which has been developed over two thousand years. It's a bit tedious to have to start the discussion from scratch every time by mulling over yesterday's soap-opera with the few people who actually watched it.
It was a tense situation. All that was needed was a spark to light the tinder.
And that spark was the murder of George Floyd.
Immediately, the likes of MSNBC chose not to publicise that Mr. Floyd did have a history of violent crime, which conservative media did. However, the latter chose not to discuss that a video was widely circulated of Mr. Floyd pleading for black youths to stop the violence. These examples of how dishonest and partisan media (directly or indirectly) exacerbate desperate situations infuriated both sides of the aisle.
And one person who was in a prime spot to see this was Nellie Bowles.
Formerly of the New York Times, and a former Hillary devotee, Bowels was very much the sort you imagine that works at the Gray Lady: young, urbane, sophisticated, liberal and with a self-righteous attitude. As she writes:
The first time I was consciously part of canceling someone, it felt incredible. I do remember the pleasure….I told a lot of friends about that. I was proud. People said I’d done the right thing. To do a cancellation is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck. 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, but like tending the warm fire of community. You have real power when you’re doing it, and with enough people, you can oust someone very powerful.
However, when the madness of 2020 hit, her journalistic curiosity would find her getting bitten on the arse with her colleagues towing the party line as well as indulging in some Mean Girls whispering network behaviour which drove her and her partner (Bari Weiss, a big fan of Israel) out of the paper.
Written in a deadpan manner, even while describing some of the more blatantly absurd aspects of the culture wars, it captures the speed at which events moved that year and how, when the opportunity arose, how the ordinary people fought back through lawsuits and school district elections.
The main emotion that came over me when reading this book was anger. Anger at how a formerly powerful and egalitarian political mindset has devolved into divisive identity politics. Time and time again, Bowles cites examples of wealthy people imposing their views on the working class with devastating consequences (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Defund the Police, Black Lives Matter, Robin DiAngelo) while fellow NYT journalists tell her that they’re not important.
Unsurprisingly, the woke have been caustic in their reviews of Morning After the Revolution, with some deriding her for links to Condolezza Rice and others comparing her to William F. Buckley Jr. These are stupid and reveal just how little certain commentators have learnt since 2020. Likewise, some right-wing commentators have accused her of fence sitting. Likewise, this is stupid and demonstrates that her ‘crime’ is that she retains something of a liberal view.
There’s no doubt that cabin fever was a thing in 2020. So for those who lectured others about how we should never tell black people how to behave (i.e. not riot and loot stores), those who discussed the ‘triggering’ effect of statues and those who believed that incels were a genuine threat to democracy, it’s not hard to imagine that Bowles’s book is the equivalent of reading excerpts from their teenage diaries: an unwelcome, embarrassing reminder of past thoughts. Hence the vitriol flung at her.
As she plainly states:
It happened. I was there. People did argue to abolish the police, that toddlers know their true gender and that 15 years old is fine to begin cross-sex hormones, that accelerated math is racist.
Nellie Bowles, 2024, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History. Swift Press ISBN-13: 978-1800752719
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist.
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