Why I sometimes feel like the literary fiction community is full of self-assured, shallow liberals

If anyone were to piece together the occasional political strands of this blog, he might be tempted to conclude that I was a political conservative. After all, I've used a number of posts to complain about liberal rhetoric or liberal culture (here, here, here, here, and here, for starters). But I write these posts because I consider myself to be more liberal than conservative. I'm a mix of some centrist-liberal and some centrist-conservative ideas, but if I had to pick an island to live on and the only two choices were Isla Conservativa and Isla Liberal, I'd go with the liberal one. I write critiquing liberal modes of expression because I don't want the people I share an island with to talk like idiots. We are supposed to be better than that.

Habits of how we talk about complex things should be even less cluttered by bum thinking in the culture surrounding serious literature. Since literature often operates for me as a stand-in for religion, I rely on the people who take that kind of literature to heart to exemplify solid thinking. It ruins my faith in the value of literature when those who are closest to it are lazy thinkers, much as it ruins the faith of a Christian when everyone in the local church is judgmental and selfish.

But the default political views in literary fiction, views that seep into everything, seem to be a very lazy stripe of liberal politics. For example, an essay this past week on the usually excellent and reasonably influential website Lithub committed all the sins I've come to hate from people whose politics I generally agree with. While writing "When Fiction Pulls Back the Curtain on American Conservatism," ostensibly a review of two novels with conservative main characters, Colette Shade first veers to the side to spend more than half the article talking about why American culture is essentially conservative. By "conservative," Shade means "the theoretical voice of animus against the agency of the subordinate classes," a definition she takes from Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind. Much of her quick analysis of conservatism and the last 50 years of American politics comes from Robin.

In the course of developing her views on conservatism, Shade exemplifies three characteristics of liberal rhetoric I've come to dislike. She dismisses the strengths of conservative arguments, she argues against a straw man version of conservatism, and she is unable to argue effectively for why a liberal philosophy is better, or even what such a philosophy would entail.

Sin number one: dismissing conservatism

But first, an aside

Conservatism and liberalism are two forces that ought to exist in dynamic tension with one another. Consider a poor, black child in Baltimore. She is up against every hurdle in the world. A conservative would say you have to encourage that child to rise up above her circumstances, to believe that with hard work, she can achieve whatever she puts her mind to. The conservative is right. A liberal would say you have to teach the child how the past has conspired against her to put her at a great disadvantage, at no fault of her own. You must make the child understand that if she fails, it is not her fault, because otherwise, the child may grow to think there is something inherently wrong with her instead of the world she was born into. The liberal is also right. For the child to have a chance, she will have to inhabit a space where she both accepts personal responsibility and also understands that there are factors beyond her control. Too much of one and she has no self-esteem. Too much of the other, she has no agency. 

This dynamic tension needs to exist in hundreds of ways. We need personal freedom, but we must also sublimate personal freedoms for the good of the community. We need to try new ideas, but we also need stability. We need peace, but we also need to defend ourselves when peace breaks down. For liberals, conservatism isn't the enemy. It's the balance we need for our ideas to exist. 

And now, what I mean by "dismissing conservatism"

Shade mostly talks of conservatism in neo-Marxist and economic terms, rather than strictly political ones. For her, the conservative world is a world in which "the right of property ownership has superseded even the right to clean air and bodily autonomy for those without means." Conservatives, in her logic, exist only to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Conservatives, in a word, do not care about the good of the world as a whole, they care only for themselves.

There is a reason why conservative ideas got into the world. It wasn't entirely something pushed on the poor by the rich. There were environmental stresses that caused the poor to accept the rule of the rich. The poor continued to accept these rules partly because of political oppression, but also because the poor often judged that rule by the rich was better than the alternative. Pre-historic Central American citizens of large cities chose to continue to live in the town under authoritarian rule rather than flee to the jungle. People made a choice for security over individual freedom. We might deride the choice, but unless we've lived with true environmental stress and scarcity, we really can't judge.

A friend and I were talking recently about the rights of trans-gendered people. He, the more conservative one, made a point I had a hard time arguing with. The fact that our society is able to even talk about these issues is a sign that we are living with abundance. In a time of stressed resources, nobody gives a damn about these kinds of things.

This is what I feel is missing from the Hulu show The Handmaid's Tale. It's easy to root for the oppressed when she's fighting to get the boot of her oppressor off of her neck. But the show takes place in a world that is dying. What would the oppressed do to save that world if they were in charge? We don't know. It's possible that, as in the musical Urinetown, the soft-hearted underdogs would, if put in charge, end up making everything worse.

Shade's essay, though, sees only the boot. It does not see conservatism as a force that keeps community together. There is no dialetic to be achieved through synthesis with its forces; it is only a thing to be annihilated.

The closest Shade comes to offering respect for conservatives is when she calls it a "frighteningly coherent ideology." But she fails to interrogate its coherence. In fact, the internal consistency of some conservative philosophy is what gives it universal and perennial appeal. To be coherent, in philosophy, is difficult to achieve, and not something to be lightly dismissed. Liberals wish they had as much coherence.

This musical ought to be required viewing for anyone about to write a story about a spunky underdog. 

Sin number two: arguing against a straw man version of conservatism 

Shade claims that the novels she is reviewing--The Sport of Kings and Mr. Bridge--provide the reader with "valuable attempts to use fiction to peer behind the facade of American conservatism." She compares reading these books--one about a man who uses his privilege to try to breed Triple Crown-winning horses, the other about a quiet racist--to reading Lolita. She views conservatives on a level with pedophiles in this analogy. She believes we can understand these loathsome beings, but that such understanding should never imply acceptance.

Although assuring the reader that the best fiction "embraces the moral totality of human existence--the range of good and bad actions of which people are capable--and suggests that there is some value in understanding all of it, including the bad," Shade is herself offering only the bad sides of conservative ideals. She has picked two books with awful conservative characters and joined her analysis of them to a one-sided essay about how America is essentially conservative, meaning it always seeks to stomp out the little guy.

Shade briefly alludes to conservative intellectuals who reject Trump, such as the folks at The National Review, but then quickly dismisses such conservatives by claiming they are a small minority and that most Republicans like Trump. She does not interrogate the notion that Trump himself is not, as The National Review would tell us, a conservative, nor does she interrogate whether the Republican Party itself is becoming something other than a conservative party.

She seems to be a breed of liberal who see in conservatives only hypocrisy. There is a kind of liberal who wonders why Christians decry abortion but do not themselves adopt, ignoring the rate at which Christians do, in fact, adopt. There is a kind of liberal who wonders why religious people ignore Jesus's injunctions to help the poor, ignoring that conservatives are either more generous than liberals or at least no less so.

Back when I was a Marine living in Hawaii, my first wife worked for a very conservative oral surgeon. I was just starting, then, to discover a lot of liberal ideology, and I would bring books like A People's History of the United States to the office to read while I waited for my wife to get done working so I could take her home with our one car. The doctor would come out from the back, where Rush Limbaugh was playing on the radio, and criticize the book I had and all such "revisionist history." I would roll my eyes at how little he understood.

But that same doctor routinely provided extensive medical care for young people whose parents, he knew, would never pay their bill. He might grouse about it and criticize parents for having kids they couldn't afford to take care of, but he gave them expert medical care, free of charge. "What am I going to do, let the kids suffer?" he'd say.

Conservative economics basically believes that if people follow their own interests, rather than having those interests directed for them, then economic growth as a whole will be greater. This growth benefits society in a broad sense even while it hurts some individual members of it. Conservative economics does not teach that you cannot donate the money you earn out of your own self-interest to charity. It does not stop the wealthy from forming charitable organizations that carry out large-scale philanthropic projects. And, of course, there a ample examples of rich people doing exactly this kind of thing. Liberals may argue that these are just crumbs to the poor after robbing them of a meal, to which conservatives reply that inequality is better than everyone being equally poor, as has happened in some socialist experiments.

I am not an expert on these things. Most literary writers aren't. We present the world as we see it in great detail. That doesn't make us economists. We can certainly present portraits of the unevenness of capitalism by showing the contradictions within society. We can be the voices of the people who tried for the American Dream and failed for reasons not entirely within their control. We can show the ugliness that exists beneath America's gilded promise. But we ought to be circumspect about conclusions we make with too much certainty. That's not considering "the totality of human existence."

Shade has essentially reviewed two books in which the worst kinds of conservatives are presented, then tried to link these portraits to an argument that conservative ideals are evil and have always threatened to destroy America. If someone else had reviewed two novels with extremist Islamist terrorists, then tied that to a brief history of how Islamist governments violate human rights, readers would have cried foul. But Shade isn't capable of granting that there are good conservatives--and even a good conservatism--with as much liberality as she would grant to Muslims and Islam.

Sin number three: not knowing how to argue for liberal ideology

Right at the outset, Shade acknowledges that she is probably preaching to the choir: "Whether you like it or not (and if you're reading this, the answer is probably "not"), America is a deeply conservative country" (emphasis mine). She is admitting two things by starting this way: that the literary fiction community is deeply liberal, and that she can assume this political viewpoint when addressing the readers of a prominent literary fiction website.

Because Shade is also part of this community, there is a cost to this ideological unity: Shade and others in that community are insular and exhibit a provincial way of thinking. They are so used to assuming a particular political philosophy in those around them, they have lost the ability to even articulate that viewpoint to outsiders. They are like Christians who only associate with other Christians who have lost any ability to "give an answer for the hope within them," to use St. Paul's phrase. If anyone challenges their views, they grow anxious and upset, and rather than engaging in the marketplace of ideas, they insist they do not have to engage with racists and misogynists.

Shade is not, to be sure, without some facts at her disposal. She is able, aided by Robin, to present at least something of a case for how America is fundamentally conservative and why this is bad. She cites several facts of life in America for the poor--many of which I very much agree with as realities that should be at the top of our agenda to address--as examples of the failure of our conservative beliefs.

I’m not referring to policy polls, party registration, or even the fact that Donald Trump is our president. Rather, I am referring to the material realities of daily life in America: the $2 a day on which our poorest citizens live, the for-profit healthcare system and the 45,000 Americans who die because of it every year, the veneration of the U.S. military at sporting events (and even at the putatively liberal Oscars), the fear of a violent black underclass that’s used to justify the imprisonment of millions of mostly poor people, the bipartisan obsession with “competition” and “innovation,” and the corporate exploitation of the natural world that imperils all life on earth.

Again, I agree with a lot of these assertions. However, there is a lack of balance to the picture Shade is presenting here. For example, many countries have a class living in abject poverty. America has the means to at least preserve the lives of most of these people (often through the volunteer efforts at soup kitchens of essentially conservative people). So in some ways, our system is better for our poor than it is elsewhere.

She also fails to acknowledge that there are a lot of conservatives who care about the same things. The libertarian strain of conservative is probably the most ideologically committed to ending mass incarceration. Some conservatives actually take seriously the "conserve" portion of their philosophy. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, just agreed to make Maryland one of the states supporting the Paris accords. Hogan has also asked for Maryland to be exempted from offshore drilling.

Shade is quick to push aside Trump and insist that the problem with conservatives predates him, but the two examples she chooses for novels are exactly the kind of people who put Trump over the top. They are not conservatives in any considered sense.

We have quickly forgotten how much America was not particularly thrilled with either Trump or Clinton. We have ignored the extent to which many people voted for one or the other candidate as a default least-terrible option. We have forgotten that many conservatives voted for Clinton and many liberals thought both candidates so terrible they voted for neither.

But liberals have adopted a siege mindset since the advent of Trump. We have no independent vision of the world, only a rebuttal of all things Trump. We are utterly wrecked. Rather than take this as an opportunity to remake ourselves, we are doubling down on simply opposing what we see as ugly rather than proposing what we view as beautiful.

We could be trying to reach out to conservative intellectuals right now, people who have fled the Republican Party since Trump showed up. We could be remaking a platform that represented a new vision of the sweet spot in the dynamic tension between conservative and liberal ways of looking at the world. Instead, we are constantly focused on cutting up all the bands that tie us together with conservatives in a dynamic tension.

If Trump proves anything, isn't it that America is essentially NOT conservative? That we're willing to blow up the status quo and try new things, even if those new things are really, really stupid?

How this all poisons the world of literary fiction

A lazy, self-assured liberal politics is the default political position in literary fiction. Shade clearly assumes it in her readers. That's the world I'm trying to enter when I submit stories to serious literary journals. That's the assumed view of the world on the minds of many gatekeepers reading those stories, and it's the worldview of the senior editors those stories get passed on to.

It's no accident that the stories I've been able to get published so far are all about people whom capitalism has failed in some sense. I've written a number of stories I think are possibly better than the published ones, but if you don't count my book, I've only had one story about a white, middle-class, American character published. (Joke's on those publishers, though. Nearly all of my downtrodden characters maintain a belief in the American dream, a belief they continue to hold onto at the end of all the stories I had published.)

Literature ought to keep an open mind to the data the universe is giving our senses. That includes data that refutes the deeply-held beliefs of the literary community itself. The literary community ought to be a place full of lively debate of all kinds of beliefs about the world. It should not be a place where one can assume liberal politics when addressing the community. That leads to tepid, boring work. Even when I read something I agree with, I find it dull.

I'm not trying to put myself out like Tim Allen or James Woods do, saying a liberal establishment is against me because of my conservative politics. I am, by and large, politically liberal. If, in the tension between personal freedom and social good, you are not sure what choice to make, I believe you should always err on the side of personal freedom. I'm not asking people to change their political beliefs. I'm begging, with tears in my eyes, for literary people to do what literary people ought to do: consider how what you are saying seems to others who view things differently from you. Consider whether your rhetoric increases understanding and healing or just makes both sides dig the trenches deeper. Consider that your own entrenched beliefs may be part of what brought us Trump, not the antidote to him.