My friends and colleagues have said in National Review’s recently published symposium almost everything that there is to be said on the matter of Donald Trump, the vicious demagogue who currently leads the Republican presidential pack in national polls. I myself have written a small book on the subject. Forgive me for turning to one other aspect of the question, which is that the candidacy of Donald Trump is something that could not happen in a nation that could read.
This is the full flower of post-literate politics.
There are still individual Americans who can read, a fact for which we writers should say daily prayers of gratitude. There are even reading communities of a sort, and not only ladies’ pinot parties loosely organized around 50 Shades of Grey. Conservatives are great readers, which is why the overwhelmingly left-leaning world of New York City publishing constantly is looking forward to the next offering from Mark Levin or Bill O’Reilly, whose works produce literary profit sufficient to subsidize the careers of any number of poets and high-minded novelists. But we are not a nation that reads, or a nation that shares a living tradition of serious contemporary literature, fiction or nonfiction. Indeed, some critics of our Trump symposium sneered that none of the contributors had much in the way of “mass appeal,” as though the fact that our populist friends fail to read John Podhoretz and R. R. Reno were a judgment on those writers rather than on themselves. But serious writers, even those who manage to be both serious and popular at the same time, have rarely enjoyed much influence in the practical matter of winning elections: William F. Buckley could not carry Barry Goldwater very far on his own in an age when serious writing enjoyed much more prestige than it does today.
