Political journalism that meets the moment
 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

View this email in your browser

 

A Hole in the Culture

Why is there so little art depicting the moment we're in?

I get letters. This one came from a couple in a Southern town with a
population of around 700. I quote it with permission:

Oh, Rick, you get it ... My husband and I are old and sitting right slap
dab in the middle of red Arkansas with MAGA friends and family all
around. They try to pull us into their discussions but we change the
subject. I stopped going to church because the churches no longer teach
Christ's message, but Trump's message. We are too old to move but if
I was young I'd get out ... Even if Trump doesn't win, his followers
will take up arms (Our relatives love to show off their assault rifles)
much worse than Jan. 6 so either way we are screwed ... Will my son lose
his job as a government inspector? Will my black, gay, openly political
blue neighbors be imprisoned or simply lynched the way it was done here
in the '50s or '60s? And if so, how do I stay neutral while horrible
things are happening to good people? I have no fight left in me ...
Sorry to rant on so long so I'll wrap this up now. I could use your
help though. How do we prepare in a practical sense? How will this
affect my everyday life? How do people in Russia go on about their lives
and jobs? I assume I will have to kiss ass like in North Korea in order
to live but then there are some things worse than death!

I have no good immediate answers. All I can do is my best journalism to
help others understand what is happening. I expect that a different sort
of writer, however, can do better.

How

****does a small, tight-knit community, absorbing signs and signals
emanating from far beyond, descend to the level of the feral? How does a
religious congregation once devoted to the Prince of Peace's call to
love one's neighbor as oneself fall prey to secular calls to make war
against neighbors? What does all of this

**feel**

**like**, deep in people's souls and in their bodies, on

**every** side of this moral collapse? And what sort of things might
ordinary people-again, on every side-

**do**?

These are questions best mapped in the medium of fiction.

Think of Melville's allegory
of absolute power corrupting absolutely, within the enclosed specimen
bottle of a whaler at sea. Consider Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown
watching respectable
townspeople gleefully consorting with the devil the minute the threshold
of civilization is passed, or Arthur Miller's Salemites
searching out witches to
burn. Ruminate on Tolstoy on war and peace, foxes and hedgehogs; Chekhov
painting what it felt like for a shabby aristocracy to watch the world
pass it by; Kafka on the most solid things one knows about the world
melting to nothing, as if in a dream.

Previous generations produced masterpieces about alienated masses
falling to the manipulation of demagogues, or just lashing out against
their neighbors from rank existential fear and heedless emotional
frenzy: Robert Penn Warren's

**All the King's Men**and Nathanael West's

**The Day of the Locust**;

****films like

**A Face in the Crowd**,

**Ace in the Hole**,

**12 Angry Men**, and

**Sweet Smell of Success**; episodes
of

**The Twilight Zone**.

[link removed]

But what about more recently?

It has always been a colossal frustration of mine. The world all around
us falling into an authoritarian maw is one of the greatest, most
confounding dramas Americans have ever experienced. But where is the
great fiction worthy of these antecedents-allegorical fiction,
realistic fiction, fables,

**romans à clef**, coming-of-age sagas, whatever-on that monumental
subject?

There may be something conspicuous I'm missing, especially since
I've never been much of a sci-fi or fantasy fan (maybe it's Andor
?).
I don't keep much abreast with contemporary fiction, but I did a
canvass with some good sources, including the head of the book
department of the world's biggest and most prestigious talent agency.
He couldn't think of any, and asking around, didn't come up with
anything, either.

Don't say Philip Roth's

**The Plot Against America**; I found it

****schematic, clunky, and unconvincing. Nor

**The Man in the High Castle**, on Amazon Prime, which was so dumb I
regret wasting space on this sentence.

An excellent novel from 2015 by T. Geronimo Johnson called Welcome to
Braggsville
,
about what happens when a woke clique of Berkeley students visits one of
their Southern hometowns and stumbles on a pro-Confederate Civil War
re-enactment, is excellent, but only covers a small piece of the broader
canvas.

The Handmaid's Tale might be the kind of thing I'm looking for; I
couldn't get into the series and haven't read the novel. But I've
always found it telling that Mary McCarthy panned it with extreme
prejudice in The New York Times Book Review in 1986
,
characterizing the notion that the Christian right

****had in mind turning women into passive vessels for childbirth the
ravings of a literary hysteric. I find just that kind of domestication
and denial of right-wing threats, Infernal Triangle readers know by now,
endemic among America's establishment elite. Maybe because Margaret
Atwood was more politically radical, and a Canadian, that hers was the
sounder

imagination
,
when it came to

**that**.

Blurbage on the back of the incomparable Barbara Kingsolver's
Unsheltered

(2018) informed me that this was "The first major novel to tackle the
Trump era straight on." It isn't; Trump's rise is only a vague
presence. But I did find it outstandingly illuminating on the theme of
American economic precarity and how it is experienced by different
generations. Just like I found the series Station Eleven

****(2021) outstandingly illuminating, and the 2023 The Last of Us
good but not
quite outstanding, on how future Americans might make sense of the
climate and/or pandemic apocalypses on the horizon.

And Demon Copperhead
(2022), also by
Kingsolver, is

**superlatively**illuminating on what the opioid epidemic feels like in
communities, not unlike the one from which my correspondent writes. That

****is the kind of thing I'm crying out for on the grand subject of
conservatism-one not unrelated to the subjects of the aforementioned
books, but one which, for some reason, American artists seem to have
skipped.

[link removed]

Why is there no great recent fiction about the American right? I have my
theories. One is not unrelated to my suspicion that Section 501(c)(3) of
the tax code may end up as the death of liberal democracy. Too much of
liberal America doesn't understand, or are bound within institutional
confines that don't allow them to understand, that conservatism is
their

**adversary**. Something that must be

**defeated**if the most basic values that sustain a healthy society
(whose flourishing too many liberals take for granted, or presume The
Grown-Ups have under control) are to survive. For a way too big chunk of
Blue America, the answer will always be more affirmations to "going
high" when "they go low,"
or that

"there's not a liberal America and a conservative America-there's
the United States of America." And from a position like that, the kind
of stories that

**really** get inside the ugliness and fright we're now dealing with
may simply sound too "divisive" and "mean," or hysterical-just like
Mary McCarthy said about

**The Handmaid's Tale**.

Here are more possible reasons: the political and social shallowness or
indifference or navel-gazing narrowness, or a shrunken understanding of
"market conditions" for this sort of thing-or maybe even a fear of
right-wing backlash-among the class of people who write, edit, and
publish "literary fiction." Which are surely why, if you want to study,
on the subatomic level, marriage among hyper-educated and affluent
Brooklynites, American literary fiction has you thoroughly covered. But
if you want to grasp the emotional and social texture of Trumpism and
its conditions of possibility, America's fiction feels to me like
**Hamlet** without the prince
.

And, I would argue, that matters. If it's not a central component of
the Infernal Triangle of forces that helped make America what it looks
like now, it's an outlying one.

My new friend asks:

**How do we prepare in a practical sense?**Art isn't necessarily the
kind of help she's asking for. Although it

**could**be: To feel seen, to know one is not alone when it comes to
fears that no one else seems to be adequately articulating, is a
powerful fuel for resistance to tyranny and a powerful salve for
existential suffering.

More broadly speaking, for the rest of us: Devouring a great novel,
film, dramatic play, musical, series, song-or something else-that
takes people deep within the skins of people like her and her fearsome
neighbors

**is**one of the ways we can prepare in a practical sense, in 2025 and
beyond, for when things start getting very, very ugly. That binds people
together in a shared understanding of it in the ways only art can. So I
sure hope some great artist is sweating out a project right now.

This is the first of another two-part essay. The second will be an
analysis of the one novel I've read that I feel like actually answers
to what I'm looking for. Though it comes from and speaks to a slightly
different political moment, and is intended for brows far lower than
Mary McCarthy's. I wonder if anyone writing in with their suggestions
will hit on it.

To be continued ...

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

Follow Rick Perlstein on Twitter ,
Facebook , or Instagram

Click to Share this Newsletter

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
Copyright (c) 2024 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.

To opt out of American Prospect membership messaging, click here
.
To manage your newsletter preferences, click here
.
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters,
click here
.

CLICK HERE TO OPT OUT OF THIS NEWSLETTER SERIES