American Gothics

By Chris Lehmann

Nearly a decade after Trump’s victory, novelists still haven’t figured out what to do with him. In our latest issue, Chris Lehmann pages through the literature of Trump 1.0 and finds it wanting:

AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE, like American life generally, finds itself under siege from a second Trump White House. Colleges, broadcast news outlets, and newspapers have knuckled under in stunning fashion before shakedowns administered by Trump’s vain and venal strongman cult as it polices speech and remakes public discourse in its preferred authoritarian image. During past institutional lurches into thuggishness—notably the McCarthy inquisition of the 1950s—American creative writers in the film industry and book publishing marshaled an oppositional response, castigating both federal goon squads and their meek enablers in the universities and the culture industry. Now, however, it’s a very different prospect, with colleges caving to MAGA extortion threats, and publishers and media executives swallowing MAGA libels and empowering in-house censorship boards as writers mostly dither on the sidelines. Where mid-century writers mustered legal defenses for red-baited colleagues and mounted public appeals to discredit the forces of intellectual reaction, their Trump-era counterparts have greeted the great crisis of the present age—a multifront mobilization of state power to enable war crimes abroad and crush all manner of dissent at home—with little more than a collective puzzled shrug.

Accordingly, the American literary establishment has come in for some serious—and no doubt unwelcome—criticism. Pankaj Mishra has written a blistering Harper’s salvo calling out American novelists and literary figures for long-standing habits of imperial complacency and inert acquiescence before White House power, noting David Foster Wallace’s infatuation with John McCain’s neocon bomb-everything agenda and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Obamanian orthodoxies. Viet Thanh Nguyen raised many of the same criticisms in a Lit Hub essay. Both writers have underlined the muted-at-best response of most established American writers to the genocide in Gaza as a telling symptom of the quisling cast of our literary culture; both are appalled by the way big-name novelists have advertised their fealty to Barack Obama and Joe Biden—and particularly by the way they’ve jockeyed for inclusion on Obama’s viral lists of reading recommendations.

“Where mid-century writers mustered legal defenses for red-baited colleagues and mounted public appeals to discredit the forces of intellectual reaction, their Trump-era counterparts have greeted the great crisis of the present age with little more than a collective puzzled shrug.”

As Mishra argues, the depoliticized makeup of today’s U.S. literary culture is a byproduct of its long Cold War dalliance with state power, going back to the CIA funding of literary magazines published in Europe, and the unsightly gathering of literary courtiers around the Kennedy White House. “A professionalized, even bureaucratized, and politically neutered literary-intellectual elite long ago shredded whatever countercultural aura the vocation had acquired over centuries,” he writes. “Its compromised and enfeebled state is more vividly revealed today by the demons of sadism and stupidity rampaging across the United States.”

Mishra’s indictment singles out the baleful civic fallout from our stagnant and risk-averse institutional literary culture: “Many Americans are demonstrably disgusted, shamed, and angered by their tyrants, but mainstream literary and intellectual institutions seem unable or unwilling to give voice to them.” His critique focuses on the literary world’s incursions into civic life, but a close look at how America’s literary elite has reckoned directly with the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in its own published work shows an equally advanced state of intellectual sclerosis. With nearly a decade’s worth of American fiction that has sought to render the Trump insurgency, the verdict on the strictly literary value that our insular novelist caste has summoned in response to the Trump phenomenon has to be at least as harsh as Mishra and Nguyen’s damning appraisals of their learned imperial helplessness before the runaway authoritarian throttling of our public life.

Continue reading “American Gothics,” an essay by Chris Lehmann, on our site.

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