How the Left Killed Reading

How literature became political—and lost readers along the way.

Americans are bored of reading.

A 2021 Gallup poll found that the average American now reads 12.6 books per year, down from 18.5 in the late 1990s. The contrast is even starker in college-educated readers, whose yearly book quota has dropped to 14.6 from 21.1. Worse still—by 2025, the median American had read just two books, with the average reader clocking in at eight. That means that 20% of the population reads 80% of all books in circulation.

In other words, most Americans have stopped reading.

As always, it’s easy to blame the decline of reading on technology: Americans are now scrolling on TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, and Instagram at record rates, and with the publishing industry racing to transform books into movie scripts, there seems to be little reason to struggle through a 700-page novel when you can just watch Matt Damon run around a cave brandishing a bow and arrow.

It’s true—modern modes of entertainment have made long-form reading virtually obsolete, and with TikTok and Instagram videos frying our attention spans, most of us can no longer make it through an average-length novel—let alone a literary behemoth.

Sure, the technology boom has certainly accelerated the reading bust, but that’s not the whole story.

There’s something even more insidious pushing people away from reading: literature has become an ideology training camp for the radical Left—and most of us more moderate folks, in the words of Ivan Karamazov, would like to return our tickets.

A whopping 80% of English literature professors today identify as liberal, the largest percentage from any subject out of the 15 surveyed in a poll reported on by The American Interest. As a result, students in English classrooms across American universities are trading their Shakespeare and Chaucer for Marx and Engels in increasing numbers. As one X poster aptly put it, “‘literature’ is [a] code word for Marxism.” Indeed, following a recent change to UCLA English department graduation requirements, UCLA English majors must now take one course in each of the following categories: “Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies,” “Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies,” and “Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, Critical Theory.”

Yet not one course mandates the study of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton.

So is literature simply inherently about sex and critical theory? And have these ideologies simply infested English departments because the study of literature naturally lends itself to progressive politics?

One narrative certainly claims that readers overwhelmingly identify as liberal. A 2025 Guardian poll found that Labour voters in the UK were more likely than any other group of voters to have read a book in the past year. Similarly, according to a 2007 IPSOS poll, liberals, on average, read more books than conservatives. This data appears to suggest that liberals are more likely to call themselves bookworms than conservatives, but not by much—the same IPSOS poll found that conservatives typically read eight books in the past year, while liberals read nine. That difference is, perhaps, not statistically significant enough to conclude that reading is an inherently “liberal” activity.

So why have literary circles become so disproportionately left-leaning?

One hypothesis is that creative types tend to lean left politically—and that writers have simply created a literary culture where only other like-minded writers feel welcome. Individuals who score high in the psychological trait “openness” from the Big Five Inventory—those interested in creativity and exploration—are often society’s writers, painters, and musicians, and because these people are often drawn to creation and novelty, they tend also to be left-leaning. Openness, furthermore, is the best predictor of political orientation—and individuals scoring high in openness tend to lean left. While there is nothing inherently wrong with such an ideological imbalance—artists have never been obligated to represent the political composition of the general public—the broader issue arises when our literary culture begins to alienate broad swathes of the population. We’ve seen this in the publishing industry’s bias towards leftist politics and in academia’s rampant politicization of English curricula.

No wonder conservatives don’t want to participate in such a leftist clown show.

And just because creative types are more likely to lean left does not mean that writing is an inherently “leftist” activity. Some of the world’s most renowned writers—T.S. Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example—held staunch conservative convictions and drew in a robust conservative reader base. The idea that a reader or a writer must necessarily be a progressive has been born, perhaps, out of our contemporary imaginations.

As the publishing industry shoves DEI down our throats, it is no accident that more conservatively-minded readers associate literature with woke politics and refuse to give it a chance. After all, when universities, publishers, and literary institutions parrot the same political vocabulary—identity, power, privilege, oppression—readers outside of that political culture select themselves out of the pool of literature lovers, contributing to the widespread misconception that literature itself is inherently left-leaning.

As a more traditionally-minded writer in an overwhelmingly liberal space, I’ve often felt alienated from university classes, literary communities, and the publishing industry. I have been called a racist for claiming that Shakespeare is an objectively better poet than Maya Angelou, disqualified from submitting my work to many literary agencies because I am neither queer nor a minority (Jews don’t count), and lambasted on my own YouTube channel for inviting conservative speakers to express their opinions on literature. I’ve had my novels turned down by publishers because I didn’t sufficiently discuss “privilege” and have been told that there’s no audience for my book about literature that’s geared towards conservatives.

In the early days of Pens and Poison, I was also told that it would be impossible to secure an audience for my work because the Venn diagram of conservatives and lovers of literature had virtually no overlap.

But that couldn’t be true. Frustrated with the political bias in the literary world, I sped ahead with Pens and Poison, starting my platform with a simple mission: restore literature to its rightful place in the humanistic tradition and disprove the widespread misconception that literature is for the Left—to speak, in other words, to the supposedly non-existent conservatives who like literature.

Today, I have almost 250K followers across Instagram and YouTube. Last night, I conducted a survey on my Instagram page—a hub of all things literature and culture—to gauge my audience’s political leanings. Out of 1,242 book lovers surveyed, 57% identified as conservative, while only 11% identified as liberal. As of this morning, my Substack mailing list now has 11K readers.

Clearly, literature isn’t just for the left.

I know for certain that I’m not alone. Every day, I get dozens of messages thanking me for starting my platform, and I’ve since proven that there are at least 250K readers and writers who love literature but feel that contemporary literary culture doesn’t want them.

And what happens when people feel unwelcome in a cultural institution?

They leave.

I was once told that conservatives simply don’t like literature, but I know today that that’s not true. The Left has simply alienated everyone who does not share their beliefs—and it is no surprise, consequently, that Americans today associate literature with fringe ideologies. But books, on the contrary, are one of the few places where people with radically different worldviews can encounter one another and learn to come together despite their differences.

Because great literature asks something much bigger than questions of race or gender.

Great literature asks what it means to be human.

And unless we can find a way to depoliticize literary study, literature might not survive.

I know I am not the only writer with a more traditional bent. In encouraging centrists, libertarians, conservatives, and anyone in between to share their love of literature, I hope to create a space that invites writers of all political affiliations to shift the focus of literature away from identity politics and back to the human condition.

The left might have hijacked literature, but we know better—and if we want people to read again, it is our duty to make literature intellectually pluralistic again.

Because great literature belongs to everyone.

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