I’m going to try and review this book as dispassionately as possible in the beginning. I’ll save my personal comments for the end.
Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times writer who now works for The Free Press on Substack, found herself dismayed in the aftermath of lefty uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s death. She’s a liberal, a woman, a lesbian no less and she suddenly found her words and identity out of step with what she saw as progressive overreach. So she attempted to go visit some of the more illiberal lefty sites like autonomous zones, an antiracism conference, and others, along with writing about the changing political winds of her hometown of San Francisco.
Along the way, she meets and records the sayings and musings of people who she feels like are overly critical of liberals like her, who are taking hard won gains that “we won” and discarding them in favor of a purity progressivism around race, gender, sexuality, income, etc.
The writing is fine; Bowles is a seasoned pro. If you’re curious about it, pick it up.
As for me, it didn’t work.
I suppose I identify as a lefty, though I guess it’s debatable in some circles. My approach is community organizing and voting. I realize that others have different approaches and I’m mostly fine with it. There is no one way to make the world a better place.
I do know, having traversed in several lefty circles, some of which Bowles tut tuts in this book, that the vast majority of people in this ideological chamber are not living in autonomous zones or defunding the police or talking about banal tasks as being white supremacist. Most of us just want a better life for ourselves, our fellow human, and our burning planet.
I also will compliment one thing about this book that I wish white lefty activists realized more: the vast majority of people they perceive as marginalized due to race or gender or sexuality or immigrant status just want to have their daily bread. They want a steady job and they want to go home. They are aware of the corruption of the United States but want reform, not revolution. Bowles chronicles this several times and I do wish white activists would sit with this and internalize it more. People don’t like being treated as causes.
That said, I just don’t think the premise of this book works.
History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. One thing that tends to happen when there’s a major political reorganizing is language changes overnight. The process of this is not smooth; it’s clunky. Look at how we got to LGBTQIA+ (and probably need to go further). Or the process of Black people claiming the word in the 1960s. Or how multiple waves of feminism have encouraged us to change how we address women. We were going through an organizing then; we’re living with the backlash now.
Bowles sees this as less of a reorganizing and more of a “revolution” and for the life of me, I don’t understand why. The Democratic party nominated its most moderate candidate with the longest intraparty resume. The police were not defunded. Restrooms are not agender. The moderates got what they wanted. Acting like the “Left,” as she bills it here, somehow turned everything left-of-center to doctrinaire authoritarianism is not fair or accurate.
There were dozens of quotes/paragraphs that got my hackles up. I worry listing them all, or most, will just come off as cherry picking. But I want to highlight a couple that wobble Bowles’ thesis…
-On page 112, when talking about police violence, Bowles, who really likes using the royal “we,” claims that we have a better idea of how cops screw up because we have video evidence. In fact, Black people have been telling us for years, decades about police violence. This is not new. It’s just now that some, apparently Bowles included, have chosen to believe it. So much of politics is who you give the benefit of the doubt to and who you don’t.
-On one page, she makes mention of how New York City temporarily disbanded its plainclothes anticrime unit in 2020, only to reinstate it two years later. Plainclothes units have long been a complaint of city residents because of their outsized power and lack of accountability. The infamous Baltimore PD Gun Trace Task Force was a plainclothes unit. Was there something that happened politically in New York City between 2020-2022 that perhaps changed the winds around police funding?
-Bowles makes sarcastic mention of how the “transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless.” I couldn’t decipher what this meant in context; if it was, I missed the memo back in, I think 2021? This is a line of someone who spends way too much time on the internet and thinks her detractors are setting the standard of life.
-Bowles loses the plot when she gets into gender, talking about what she sees as the ridiculousness of the gender/sexuality spectrum. But these conversations predate this book by decades. It’s only now that they’re being highlighted slightly more and again, there are perilous few LGBTQIA+ still in positions of power or influence. It’s clearly something that bothers her and eventually came off less as a response to illiberal backlash and more as an axe to grind as something she doesn’t want to understand.
There are others; I just deleted ten lines off my notes because it will make this even more exhausting. Hopefully, you get the point.
After reading this book, I perused Bowles’ Twitter feed. Among other things is a re-post supportive of JK Rowling and a re-post of an op-ed Condolezza Rice wrote on Bowles’ site about what Juneteenth means to her.
I feel like both sum up why Bowles and I aren’t going to see eye-to-eye, even with me making a real attempt to engage with her work. Trans people just want to live their lives normally, to not be murdered by maniacs, to not be driven to suicide. They’re not the oversexed cartoons they’re made out to be. And as for Rice, not only is she objectively speaking a war criminal, she was part of one of the most virulently anti-gay presidential administrations in recent history, one that fought hard against progress for people like Bowles.
Bowles believes that the illiberal left is hurting the gains that have been made. Nevermind that trans people likely vote at a much higher rate for Joe Biden than white women, who went for Trump twice. Forget that, for all the verbiage that comes with antiracism, it does cause white people to think twice before saying something stupid. Ignore that people like Mariame Kaba —whose antiprison writing was quoted by Bowles in an unflattering manner — are first and foremost community activists who do great work for people in need while Bowles sits inside her home and feels sad that houselessness is so bad in San Francisco.
Because this book isn’t written for those people. It’s written for people who love watching Bowles punch left. Therefore, it’s no wonder that she finds horseshoe solidarity with people like Condolezza Rice and other conservative intellectuals who trumpet her work. And if their candidate of choice gets elected, I hope the “gains that we’ve made” will stand.