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 at a pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, May 1, 2024. (Philip Chung/New York Times)
In her new book, The Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times reporter disillusioned with both the mainstream media and the left, writes about the confluence of combustible cities in 2020. I am writing about. The pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the prospect of Donald Trump’s re-election have sent politics and culture “wild.” She describes liberal intellectuals as “raging with anger and optimism” and full of “fresh ideas from academia that have begun to reshape every part of society.” Her name for this phenomenon, often derided as “wokeness,” is “neo-progressivism,” and her books, to varying degrees, attempt to skewer it.
There’s a lot worth satirizing in its frenetic moments, like the sarcastic Robin DiAngelo-inspired white women’s struggle sessions and the inevitable collapse of Seattle’s anarchist Capitol Hill borough. Bowles analyzes both in the best parts of the book. She was inspired by the great works of New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s about the absurdities of the counterculture, most famously Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” and Joan Didion’s “Staggering to Bethlehem.” It seems there are. But “Morning After the Revolution” is marred by Bowles’ lazy mockery and intolerable generalizations.
“At various points, my fellow reporters at major news organizations said that roads and birds were racist,” she wrote. “Voting is racist. Movements are deeply racist.” Even considering the deluge of social justice clickbait in 2020, these are misleading, reductive satires. It’s a painting. For example, it is not historical revisionist to point out that interstate highways were instruments of racial discrimination.
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 didn’t happen. Even at the height of the Floyd demonstrations, the corporate social justice movement was little more than a façade. 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 university campuses, both the Gaza protests and the resulting crackdown have shattered the illusion that radical politics can be seamlessly integrated into elite academic institutions. Long-standing debates about speech and sensitivity have been upended, with leftists demanding the right to chant slogans that offend their classmates while moderates and conservatives insist on the need to protect Jewish students from psychological and 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 clumsy neologism and disdain for free speech, that I would be happy to see go away. But however turbulent the politics of 2020 were, it was also a rare moment of sudden bursts of social energy to address years of worsening inequalities. That energy largely dissipated when it was most needed, leading up to the next election with President Trump on the ballot.
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 worry that we’ll forget the progressive urgency that defined the Trump presidency, even if it was sanctimonious and strident. Bowles writes as if the 2020 riots were caused by anomie rather than a real crisis. She draws an analogy with allergy science: “When a child’s environment is sufficiently disinfected, their immune system continues 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.
