The year America went mad

Much has been written about the social convulsion that has taken place in the West since the Great Awokening of around 2015. Most of it has come from conservatives. Some accounts have also emerged from classical liberals and feminists. But few testimonies have come from one-time sympathisers; from those who have been in the eye of the storm. Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles is one such rare account.

This book comes from the heart. It is written by a witness who was initially a soft believer, who went along with much of the well-meaning, ultra-liberal behaviour that became so bellicose in 2020 – that first, mad year of lockdown. It explores how that revolution quickly turned ugly and sour. It is a terrifying account of an ideology that became demented. It is also hilarious.

Nellie Bowles was a reporter for the New York Times at the beginning of 2020 and a first-hand witness as events began to unravel with alarming rapidity. ‘American politics went berserk’, she writes. ‘Liberal intelligentsia, in particular, became wild, wild with rage and optimism.’

What came to be known as ‘wokery’ had long been in gestation. As a gay, liberal San Franciscan working at America’s most liberal and progressive newspaper, Bowles was well-aware of these festering undercurrents. She was also sympathetic to what she saw merely as an extension of a liberal creed, even if some of its excesses had started to ring alarm bells.

Lockdown provided a window of opportunity for many walled-up at home to rethink the world around them, or to even re-imagine a new world. Radical perspectives on race, gender and capitalism that had for so-long been the preserve of academia now began to capture a vulnerable populace already driven half-crazy by confinement – a populace eager for some action when let loose into the outside world.

The first year of lockdown was also when the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis took place, which unleashed a torrent of protests and campaigns to defund or abolish police forces across the United States. When this movement achieved its aims, it led to a spike in crime throughout the republic. As did the de facto decriminalisation of shoplifting and drug use in San Francisco and other cities in the years prior to the pandemic, also undertaken under the auspices of an ultra-progressive ideology. Areas of Portland and Seattle were abandoned to gun-toting Antifa militia or other criminals. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, having brought about a near-collapse in social order with the help of gullible liberals and cynical corporations, pocketed millions from the whole sordid affair.

Any accusations that the BLM organisation could be anything less than angelic were naturally rebutted with irrefutable counter-accusations of racism. After all, if racism is unwitting or subconscious, it can’t be disproved. And here’s where the revolution had become its most pernicious. It wasn’t just in regards to the way it had changed people’s everyday lives, the stuff of surreal CNN on-the-spot reports of ‘peaceful protests’ from blatant riot scenes. It had changed the way people thought.

Perceptions of race shifted profoundly. The idea that individuals and institutions were ‘unconsciously’ or ‘systemically’ racist had already been established; but this belief, intimating that there was something inherently problematic with white America itself, was now pushed to its extreme. To be white now became problematic in itself. Whiteness became a mark of original sin.

Anything associated with the white man and mainstream America was now deemed racist. A pamphlet titled ‘White Supremacy Culture’, published in the late 1990s by academic Tema Okun, proved highly influential. In it, Okun denounced as racist the following ‘white’ values: perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word, individualism and objectivity. ‘In this worldview’, writes Bowles, ‘if black people do somehow exhibit urgency or perfectionism, it means there has been internalised whiteness. And that is a type of death for that black person.’ The new racism had simultaneously demonised whiteness and pathologised blackness.

Racial politics had taken a deranged and very strange step backwards. Bowles’s myriad accounts, encounters and reports depict the revolution’s bleakly comic endpoints. We read of the Scientific American op-ed that denounced the Jedi religion in 2021, owing to the ‘religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) savorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks”, etc)’. Elsewhere, an Antifa pamphlet recommending the use of an AK-47 was at pains to add: ‘Most of the gun-owning anarchists we know are men, and it is readily apparently that it will take a tremendous amount of work, on both men and women’s part, to make basic firearms skill accessible beyond the manarchist milieu.’

The grotesque excesses of identitarian politics in America may seem like something from another planet. Less strange to British readers will be Bowles’s accounts of the gender and LGBT+ revolution, in which an extreme ideology has also been pushed to the point of absurdity and risibility. Just as the radical trans movement presumptuously invented a word to describe everyone else that wasn’t one of them – ‘cisgender’ – now asexuals hope those who aren’t asexual will also take on a special name: allosexual.

More seriously, the radical trans movement has brought about the slow erasure of women and lesbians as categories of people, and Bowles relates how this mindset has reached a grim conclusion. Last year, Johns Hopkins University released a new glossary of terms for clinicians and the general public. It classifies a gay man as a ‘man who is emotionally, romantically, sexually, affectionately or relationally attracted to other men’. It classifies a lesbian as ‘a non-man attracted to non-men’.

Bowles admits to being complicit in much of what came to pass. She even writes candidly about the joy of cancelling. In the end, she concedes that her breaking point was personal. First, she could no longer stand by with sorrow as her beloved San Francisco was brought low by libertine attitudes to law and crime. Second, she fell in love with a non-progressive ‘heterodox’ woman, a person that her puritan and belligerent tribe would never accept.

Who is to blame for the woke revolution? Bowles says that pointing the finger of blame at Michel Foucault and the postmodern gang only gets us so far. Ultimately, she concludes that the culprit is human nature: ‘We were always like this. We’re monkeys.’ Not that Bowles has surrendered her old-fashioned liberal-left optimism. We can, she rightly argues, overcome what comes naturally. ‘Liberalism, tolerance, living among and working with people we disagree with? That is what is completely unnatural.’ But that didn’t stop us before 2020.

Let’s hope more liberals come around to Bowles’s way of thinking.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, by Nellie Bowles, is published by Swift Press.