Is Literature Losing Its Audience Because of Politics?
And can we rebalance literature's leftward drift?
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. Lawyer and history buff Yan Margolin suggests that the prevalence of more technologically advanced modes of entertainment has made long-form reading virtually obsolete, and writers at The New Yorker and the APA concur. It’s true: we simply no longer have the attention spans to make it through an average-length novel, let alone a literary behemoth. Yet while the technology boom has certainly accelerated the reading bust, there’s something even more profound that is pushing people away from reading: literature has become a bastion for the radical Left.
A whopping 80% of English literature professors identify as liberal, the largest percentage from any subject out of the 15 surveyed in a poll by The American Interest. Across English classrooms in American colleges, students are trading their Shakespeare and Chaucer for Marx and Engels. As one Twitter poster aptly put it, “‘literature’ is [a] code word for Marxism.” After 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.
Readers also self-identify as overwhelmingly liberal. Of 300 readers in an online survey I conducted on my Instagram page, 61% identified as liberal. But why has literature become such a bastion for the Left?
One potential hypothesis is that creative types tend to lean left politically. 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. Because they are drawn to creation and novelty, they tend also to be left-leaning. And indeed, openness is the best predictor of political orientation.
Must writers therefore inherently lean left and attract an inherently leftist audience? Certainly not. Some of the world’s most renowned writers—T.S. Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance—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, from our contemporary imagination. 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, thereby selecting themselves out of the pool of literature lovers and creating the perception that the field of literature is inherently left-leaning.
As a more traditionally-minded writer in an overwhelmingly liberal space, I’ve often felt alienated from university classes, literary magazines, and online communities. 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 publications because I am neither queer nor a minority, and lambasted on my own YouTube channel for inviting a conservative speaker to express his opinions on literature. Yet when I recently started my literary magazine, whose mission is to focus more on good writing than on particular identity groups, I learned I was not the only one who felt ostracized: in just under a month, over ten people wrote to me expressing their gratitude for creating a space that did not judge their writing based on racial identity or sexual preference.
Because the Left has successfully alienated everyone who does not share their belief system from the majority of literary spaces, it is no surprise that a greater number of Americans have begun to associate literature with fringe ideologies. Unless we can find a way to depoliticize the field of 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 else in between to share their work with the world, I hope to create a space that invites writers of all political affiliations to bring the focus of literature away from identity politics and back to the human condition.
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I think some of the issue is in terminology. For instance Left is often a blanket for Democrat, leftist, progressive, and liberal (and vice versa at times). Yet leftists often think liberals are akin to fascists, progressives hold values antithetical to actual liberalism, people who call themselves (or insult others as) liberal have never heard of Mill, and nobody knows what the Democratic Party in the US even stands for. I wonder what percentage of writers (and readers) actually fall into the classical liberal category, where for instance I could see Hemingway or Bret Easton Ellis residing.
As a bona fide professor of literature, I regretfully have to agree with this analysis - but also to disagree. I have taught critical theory, genre theory, and even postcolonial studies for many years, using them as a way to engage my students in critical thinking. But it is only in the last ten years of so that pressure of ideological conformity has become intolerable in American universities and colleges. I emphasize "American" because when ten years ago I gave a long and critical talk on communist utopias in China, nobody batted an eye. In fact, students came over to thank me! I suspect it would be different in China today, but even so, the ideological pressure in the US is worse than in many Third World countries. And the ideology in question is not merely left. It is specifically woke left, focused on race, gender (particularly queer theory), and disability - not class. And engaging in any kind of open debate about its premises means you are cruel. Words and arguments are now "violence" directed at the "victims", which is a way to stop any conversation in its tracks. Somehow, in the course of my career, critical theory that was supposed to foster an open and intellectually provocative discussion of literature, has mutated into an Orwellian monster.