I fear we will miss the progressive urgency that has been a hallmark of the Trump presidency, however sacred and painful it may be.
FILE — Protesters gather at a pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, May 1, 2024. (Philip Chan/New York Times)
Michelle Goldberg New York Times
| May 22, 2024, 12:00 PM
Former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles, disillusioned with both the mainstream media and the left, writes in her new book, The Morning After the Revolution: Reports from the Wrong Side of History, about the pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and the He writes about the year 2020, when politics and culture went “into a frenzy'' due to the explosive synergy of Trump's possible re-election. Bowles describes the liberal intellectual class as “brimming with anger and optimism” and filled with “fresh ideas from academia that have begun to reshape every part of society.” Bowles has dubbed this phenomenon, often derided as “wokeness,” the “neo-progressivism,” and his book attempts to criticize it with varying degrees of success.
There's a lot about that frenzied moment that's worth satirizing. These include the white women's struggle sessions inspired by the noble Robin DiAngelo and the inevitable fall of Seattle's anarchist Capitol Hill borough. Bowles analyzes both in the best sections of the book. She produced great works of journalism in the 1960s and 1970s that depicted the absurdities of the counterculture, most famously Tom She Wolf's “Radical Chic” and Joan Didion's “Headed to Bethlehem.” It seems that he was inspired by “leaning forward”. But The Morning After the Revolution is marred by Bowles' lazy mockery and untenable generalizations.
“At various points, fellow reporters at major news organizations have said that roads and birds are racist,” she writes. “Voting is racist. Exercising is very racist.” These are misleading and reductive caricatures, even considering the deluge of social justice clickbait in 2020. It's hardly revisionist history to point out, for example, that interstate highways were instruments of racism.
But my biggest disagreement with Bowles is her insistence that the movements she criticizes have won. She describes neo-progressivism as “the operating principles of big business” as well as the technology sector and academia. “The revolution isn't over because we lost,” Bowles said this week on a podcast with his wife, Times Opinion writer-turned-maverick media entrepreneur Bari Weiss. It's over because I won. ”
But that wasn't the case. Even at the height of the Floyd protests, most corporate social justice issues were window-dressing. The management principle of large companies has always been the pursuit of profit. And now we are in the midst of a ferocious reversal.
A recent article in Business Insider titled “Woke No More” stated that “many companies are reining in their rhetoric and, in some cases, their actions on issues like sustainability and diversity.” The once-lauded Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion department is being dismantled. “The backlash is real. I mean, in a way I've never really seen before,” the president of the Society for Human Resource Management told Axios. In the face of right-wing protests, Target, a company once known for its social justice trappings, has decided to stop selling Pride products in some stores. And as the Times reported, Wall Street financiers who were once enemies of Trump have reconciled with him.
On college campuses, both the Gaza protests and the resulting crackdown have shattered the illusion that radical politics can be seamlessly integrated into elite academic institutions, upending long-standing debates about speech and sensitivity as leftists demand the right to chant slogans that offend their classmates and moderates and conservatives argue that Jewish students need to be protected from psychological as well as physical harm.
Amid this chaos, the days of content warnings and microaggression crackdowns may be over. (Certain progressive criticisms, such as the idea that the speaker's intentions are irrelevant in determining what kind of speech is problematic, ), while donors and administrators have suffered losses. They accuse DEI programs of being too patient and ignoring Jewish concerns. Earlier this month, Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the most high-profile school to waive mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring. I don't think it will be the last time.
There are aspects of neo-progressivism, with its clunky neologisms and disdain for free speech, that I would be happy to see go away. But however heated the politics of 2020 may have been, it also represented a rare moment in which there was suddenly enormous social energy to tackle long-simmering inequalities. That energy has all but disappeared just when we need it most, heading into the next election with Trump running.
Bowles wrote that his book is “for anyone who wants to know why Abraham Lincoln was canceled” and the San Francisco Board of Education's 2021 plan to give new names to many city schools. I think you are referring to the fact that the decision was quickly overturned. But those days feel terribly distant now. Four years ago, in response to the Floyd protests, the Shenandoah County, Virginia, school board renamed a school honoring the Confederate general. This month, the board changed the name back.
I fear we will miss the progressive urgency that has been a hallmark of the Trump presidency, however sacred and painful it may be. Bowles writes as if the 2020 riots were caused by anomie rather than a real crisis. She compares them to allergy science. She says, “If your child's surroundings are well disinfected, her immune system will continue to look for a fight.”
When I think of that era, I too tend to reach for a health metaphor, but this one is different. America reacted to President Trump as if he were a new pathogen, and he raged. Now our immune systems are exhausted, and the virus is coming back stronger than ever.
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
