Skewering Leftist Excess With Mockery and Sneers

MORNING AFTER THE REVOLUTION: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History, by Nellie Bowles

Activists! Attention-grabbing grifters, making everything worse by thinking the world could be better. What’s to be done but slay them with mockery? This is the general project of Nellie Bowles’s “Morning After the Revolution,” a slim collection of polemical reportage that I suspect is meant to be courageous stuff, also funny. Why, Bowles demands, does politics have to be so “deathly serious”?

Formerly a reporter for The New York Times, Bowles quit in 2021 as the paper’s newsroom, she writes, was devolving into a monoculture of utopian progressivism, “so sure everyone was good, except of course, conservatives, who were very very bad and whose politics only come from hate.”

I sense that Bowles is trying to channel Tom Wolfe, who skewered liberal pretension in high style, often by slipping stealthily into his subjects’ points of view. But where Wolfe was a precision-guided stiletto, Bowles is more of a dull blade, ridiculing her former colleagues by saddling them with laughably vacuous thoughts and dreams — their “beautiful vision of the role of journalism for such a beautiful time,” for instance. What twits!

“Morning After the Revolution” transports us to the heady days of 2020 and 2021 when protesters massed coast to coast demanding social change: Black Lives Matter, Seattle’s “autonomous zone,” police abolition marches. But it’s activists for the homeless who really gall Bowles, especially after she buys a house in a gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood of multimillion-dollar properties. A 200-person homeless encampment had recently sprung up in a nearby park; private security costs her nearly $4,000 a year.

Cue the organizers, opportunists and socialists who think “homelessness is a tool of the revolution” — a chance to show the world what a community operating outside the capitalist system might look like, not a problem to be fixed with something simple, such as housing. One activist is from a well-off family and drives a BMW! When the park was finally cleared by the city, 180 pounds of excrement had to be shoveled out, she reports, nose wrinkled. Bowles, who says that she has “always voted yes on every homeless housing supplement I come across,” wishes the unhoused could just have better manners — be less rowdy, perhaps more constipated. More like middle-class homeowners.