Excerpt, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement: Whatever Happened to 2020?

from my forthcoming book

Hello friends, on September 5th, Simon & Schuster will be releasing my second book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. This is obviously a big deal for me professionally. I also think that its publication takes place in an interesting moment in our political culture, where some of the more extreme illiberalism of the past decade has begun to dissolve. The book is not about “wokeness” or other broad concepts of social liberalism. Instead, it’s about American progressive social movements, particularly the civil unrest that engulfed the country in 2020. The book looks at the events that led to the summer of 2020, considers how little happened in response to the political rage, and suggests how progressive movements can achieve more in the future. Though this fact will surely be lost in some reactions to the book, my argument is fundamentally one of deep sympathy for the anger that made it such a passionate time. It is precisely because of that sympathy that I extend my argument for how to do better. We do not simply have a duty to demand justice; we have a duty to achieve justice, and we have failed badly in that duty in recent years. Let’s try something new and better.

I think it’s a good book! And an entertaining one, and a necessary one. It would mean a great deal to me if you would preorder the book if you haven’t already. If you’re Amazon-averse, there are other options for buying at that link. And now please enjoy this excerpt from How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.

In the summer of 2020, the country was on fire. The Trump presidency had enflamed the country, his boorishness and serial scandals convincing many that the 2020 presidential election would prove to be one of the most consequential of our lifetimes. Along with sustained rage at Trump’s long history of racist and misogynist statements, there was despair at his handling of the Covid-19 crisis. In March of that year, the virus had bloomed into a pandemic, spreading across our globalized world with unprecedented speed. In response to the crisis, state and city governments across the country enforced lockdown policies that cleared public spaces and kept people in their homes. Fear gripped the country as the virus killed hundreds of thousands, while being shut inside ratcheted up the tension. Enduring public anger over sexual misconduct in the workplace, systemic racism, and socioeconomic inequality burned on. The #MeToo movement had galvanized resistance to sexual misconduct, and the Bernie Sanders campaign, with its army of newly-minted socialists, continued to call for change through the Trump years. Our whole civic society seemed strewn with kindling. On May 25, 2020, four Minneapolis police officers lit the match.

The killing of George Floyd, an unarmed man accused of nothing more than passing a counterfeit bill, reverberated around the world. Covid-19 had devastated the economy, causing massive and immediate job losses of a kind rarely seen in American history. Floyd had recently lost jobs as a truck driver and a bouncer. In time, aggressive economic policies jump-started the American economy and led to historically low unemployment, but in May 2020 there was little comfort or support for an unemployed Black man. After a call from a store clerk, Minneapolis police officers arrived and detained Floyd. He was forced to the ground, and while there one of the officers, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck, for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. By the time Chauvin released the hold, Floyd was dead. The video went viral, and the country exploded in protest.

Thanks to the multiplicative powers of the internet, Floyd’s murder and the reaction to it are among the most discussed and analyzed events in human history. Yet I find that in spite of all of the attention the 2020 political unrest provoked, there’s a current of amnesia when it comes to that period. The heady, emotional, and radical atmosphere that predominated has evaporated. When we marched for justice, we chanted that things would never be the same. A few short years later, things very much look the same. People still speak about turning society upside down, but the fervor is gone and many seem vaguely embarrassed to look back on it now.

To understand why, we need to go back and take stock of where we came from, of the political and cultural history that led us to what 2020 became.