I Have Sold My Second Book

(it's not about "wokeness")

I have good news to share! I’ve sold my second book to Simon & Schuster. The tentative title is No Justice, No Progress, No Peace, but that’s subject to change, as pretty much everything is at this stage. I have no information to share about when it might be published, but I am bound and determined to have a manuscript in the publisher’s hands by the end of this calendar year. I don’t want to say much about the content yet, as that too will evolve with time, but the book is broadly about why social movements fail. This will mostly be about left movements, primarily those from Occupy (2011) to present, with a particular focus on 2020 as a year of great hype and no progress. But I will also consider why conservative movements like the Tea Party rise and fall, the endless contraction of the labor movement, DSA, and more.

It’s inevitable that this book will be represented by my critics as a jeremiad against “wokeness,” but that really isn’t the game I’m hunting. Yes, I will inevitably talk about social justice mores, as they have a great deal of influence on the organizing priorities and tactics of the contemporary American left, but this book will focus much more on systems, incentives, and structures than language norms or similar. For example, I will be writing about BlackLivesMatter, but my interest lies far more in the fact that the movement is a project of the Black professional-managerial class than in the enforcement of a particular set of liberal social expectations concerning race. As with my first book, there will inevitably be the book other people assume I would write and then there will be the book itself. Like I said, though - the book is yet to be written.

I’m grateful to Robert Messenger and Simon & Schuster for the opportunity and to my agent, William Callahan of Inkwell Management. I will be sure to be bugging you incessantly about preordering when the time comes.