The Power of Chicken Soup for the Anti-Woke Soul: Nellie Bowles’s “Morning After the Revolution”

“While it might be intellectually fascinating to dig into the Marxist or postmodern roots of wokeness, Bowles’s book is a welcome reminder that sometimes things are simply crazy on their face. And maybe all that is required to defeat the crazy is to point it out.”

Nellie Bowles recently appeared at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco to promote her new book Morning After the Revolution. I was in the audience that night, sitting near the front of the relatively small room. It felt like a mildly rebellious act to be there, knowing that Bowles was just about to unleash a tidal wave of criticisms against the progressive politics of San Francisco. The Commonwealth Club is a rather serious, buttoned-down institution. But surely, I thought, there would be some measure of shenanigans from the audience tonight. I glanced around to see if anyone looked primed to raise a bullhorn or rush the stage. The audience seemed tame enough.

Bowles did, indeed, chastise San Francisco for its over-the-top progressivism. In conversation with Griffin Gaffney, she mentioned all the highlights from the past four years: the homelessness crisis, the lack of enforcement of drug laws, the chaos with the local school board, the fact that the city does not need more money to fix its problems. Instead, it needs a fundamentally different approach.

To my relief, the audience lapped it up. The entire room nodded along, laughed along, and shook their heads in mutual dismay at just the right moments. Bowles scarcely had to argue her case. The fact that the progressive left had taken things too far was patently obvious, requiring no deep analysis. As a reporter covering the excesses of the left, Bowles saw her job primarily as reminding everyone that these things—unbelievably—actually happened.