A protester at a pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus at University of California Los Angeles earlier this month. The writer says she fears we’ll come to miss the progressive urgency that marked the Trump presidency. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
IN her new book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History,” Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times journalist grown disillusioned with both the mainstream media and the left, writes about the year 2020, when the combustible confluence of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the prospect of Donald Trump’s reelection made politics and culture go “berserk.”
She describes a liberal intelligentsia “wild with rage and optimism,” brimming with “fresh ideas from academia that began to reshape every part of society.” Her name for this phenomenon, often derided as “wokeness,” is the “New Progressivism,” and her book attempts, with varying degrees of success, to skewer it.
