How Progressive Author Nellie Bowels' "Morning After the Revolution" Shows Our Societal Decay
And How It Might Help to Explain Why Harris Lost
Here’s one piece of data that might be difficult for many of my fellow Democrats to swallow: Compared to Joe Biden in 2020, Kamala Harris in 2024 lost ground against Donald Trump with virtually every demographic group except one: Mine. College-educated white people. Although Harris won super-majorities of many demographic groups, she won a smaller percentage of every non-white group (and of all white groups save the aforementioned one) than Joe Biden did. Yet, most mainstream media (and many of its college-educated creators and consumers) blame Harris’ loss on race and gender.
Something does not add up here. Most simply, there is a broad failure to maturely acknowledge that Trump’s 2024 GOP coalition is the most diverse since the Civil Rights Act, and to ask why that might be. How and why do college-educated white people stand apart in rising embrace of today’s Democratic party? Do growing numbers of those in this group, and its preferred politicians, broadly embrace what seem, to growing percentages of people in every other demographic group, to be progressive excesses? Why might rejection of those excesses have led to increased support, across every other group of Americans, for a widely disliked and feared candidate?
Earlier this year, progressive LGBTQ writer Nellie Bowels offered some preemptive insight on these questions in her new book: Morning After the Revolution. I encourage my fellow Democrats to read it. It offers needed insight, I think, into how the gap between the perspectives of the elites and those of everyone else has grown so much wider over the past half-decade. Below is my review of Bowels’ insightful book, originally published at the Ford Forum.
Nellie Bowles, author of Morning After the Revolution (2024), loves San Francisco. Not just for its natural beauty and its glorious weather, but for its idiosyncratic, irreverent progressivism, amidst which Bowles (now a married lesbian mother of two and a writer at The Free Press, which she founded with her wife, Bari Weiss) treasured growing up. For Bowles, San Francisco’s ethos—to let one’s “strangeness breathe”—was worth “every compromise [it] demanded” of its residents by being “always weird, always a bit dangerous.”
Per Bowles, San Francisco has long been “where every progressive idea bumping around America came to be tried out.”
In her deeply reported and vividly written book about just how far outside erstwhile norms of governance and civilization the left flank of the Democratic party has gone over the past few years, Bowles peels back the cover on those progressive ideas bumping around America in and after 2020: tent encampments as a “lifestyle choice” for the homeless; “defund the police” in defiance of what working-class communities of color say they want (i.e., better law enforcement and less crime); “antiracism” so exclusive (and racist) that it costs five thousand dollars a plate for white women to “do the work” (which involves solipsistic self-flagellation and promises of future segregation from people of color); and a total denial of biological sex in deference to “gender identity” that eradicates women’s private spaces.
These ideas, Bowles tells her readers, almost destroyed, first, her beloved San Francisco, and then the nation along with it.
The greatest strength of Morning After the Revolution, though, is that Bowles does not do a lot of telling. She shows. And shows and shows. In reporting so pointed and evocative that it reads in places more like a novel, Bowles depicts the people, the places, and the ideas of 2020 and beyond—about which her former employer, The New York Times, tried to stop her from asking questions.
In Los Angeles, there was an encampment of homeless people where “white rich kids” from other neighborhoods would eat pastries and form human chains to stop city workers from coming in to collect trash. Meanwhile, there were people literally dying underfoot, addicted and unstable, living in conditions so fetid that the decomposing body of an 18-year-old activist was moved from tent to tent for days without detection. In Seattle, there were actual warlords from various movements vying for dominance of an “autonomous zone,” where city services would not go and anarchy (complete with Marx readings by day and constant violence by night) reigned. Each warlord would protect journalist bystanders, for a price.
In Oakland, there were Black families holding a memorial for neighborhood victims of gun violence, in concert with the police, when mostly white “counter-protestors” in masks used a bullhorn to shout profanities about the police over the memorial service. The intruders insisted that “they’re using your pain as a shield” and ignored requests from the Black mourners that they leave. In Los Angeles’ Koreatown, there was a day spa in which a man claiming to be a woman paraded around the women’s locker room naked, in front of a 14-year-old girl. The girl wound up on a witness stand, in front of a courtroom, having to describe in graphic detail what she saw.
And, of course, across the country there was and remains great confusion around how sex and gender should be addressed (or not) in relation to children, with the progressive orthodoxy insisting that young children “know who they are,” and that they should have access to “puberty blockers” and even surgeries if they want them. To deny said access is “adultist,” because it relies on the premise that “adults have some special power or knowledge above children.”
Many of us who do not identify as culture warriors on either side have sunk into a kind of quiet complacency about the ways in which 2020’s “revolution”—from the mismanagement of the pandemic to the encouragement of “peaceful” rioting, to the re-institutionalization of “antiracist” racism (and then, inevitably, of just old-fashioned racism)—changed the country. Maybe permanently, and for the worse. What Bowles allows readers to glean for themselves through her searing depictions of these near-apocalyptic scenes and ideas is an understanding of this societal rot we “normies” are all too quick to passively accept.
Why won’t we acknowledge the devolution of civilization we are experiencing, from decreased safety to decreased politeness? Mostly, Bowles posits, because we want to “feel right.” We want to seem like, in the words of a pro-encampment activist Bowles quotes, “people where love and empathy come simple but power structures and hierarchies come hard,” not the opposite.
Indeed, Morning After the Revolution relies for its credibility on Bowles’ being, by nature, such a person. For most of her life, she identified as progressive, precisely because of her open-mindedness and her empathy. She is a person more invested in mercy than in justice, attracted to the “weird,” and enthralled with the artistic beauty of San Fransisco.
Although we are both too close to the center to be anything but politically homeless in this hyper-polarized age, as centrists go, I am in many ways Bowles’ opposite. I am a heteronormatively married, Catholic mother of four. I once took the big five personality trait questionnaire and scored in the third percentile on the metric amounting to open-mindedness. No one could accuse me of unwonted empathy for the few, particularly not when order for the many is at stake. I will take the colonial décor of my native Philadelphia over West Coast sublimity any day. If asked to name a beautiful place not my own, I stick inevitably with the old: Boston, New Orleans.
So, I suspect that if someone with my priors had written Morning After the Revolution (which I personally lack both the skill and the temperament to do), it would be ignored by book reviewers at most mainstream outlets. Not worth bothering with centrists or conservatives. But if it did get a review in a given outlet, that review would likely have its complimentary elements, given the quality of the book in question. It costs little to be polite to an outsider.
But Bowles was an insider once. So, several negative reviews of Morning After the Revolution have that edge to them understood since time immemorial to be reserved for intimates who have your number. The book “relies more on sarcasm than argument or ideas,” says the New York Times—whose denizens’ capacity for cogent argument comes off questionable at best in Bowels’ polemic.
They doth protest too much, methinks.