Bookshops as Political Barometers

Entering a mainstream bookshop these days can feel a bit like entering a Scientology org, or some other cult headquarters. The new books are dominated by an array of memoirs by the US Democratic Party elite, and by books about race. Around the time the pandemic was getting started, I asked the manager in my local Waterstones branch whether the BLM propaganda greeting people as they came through the door was his own idea or a company-wide policy. After histrionically recoiling from me, and putting on a mask, he said it was company policy. I couldn’t tell whether he was more frightened of biological or ideological contagion.

Perhaps the most significant change in bookshops over the past couple of decades, however, is the disappearance of the Irish literature section. This used to be standard in bookshops all over Ireland. It reflected an assumption that we had some coherence as a nation, and that our literature was an expression of it. Now the Irish and General Fiction categories are merged, and arranged alphabetically, which has the effect of mixing nationalities together in a microcosm of the diverse progressive polity we’re assumed to inhabit, one with higher crime rates, where kids can’t roam free anymore, and the spectre of white supremacy stalks the land. 

The Classics section has also disappeared, though the black spines of a few Penguin volumes can still be seen among the crowd of young novelists jostling for attention. Classics, of course, are overwhelmingly written by dead white European males, whereas the publishing industry today is dominated by cosmopolitan females with exquisitely curated digital identities. A classic is a book that has outlived its time, and a repository of that which transcends nationality. This is why classics were taught at ‘universities’. The new multiculturalism also transcends nationality, but in the interests of identitarian categories that are anti-universalist and divisive.

In the absence of classics and national literature, the children’s section now constitutes the single biggest subdivision of my local Waterstones. Crime, Fantasy and Sci Fi have also become relatively more prominent than they once were. ‘Horror’ has disappeared as a separate category, but horror writers like Thomas Ligotti and HP Lovecraft have been canonized and placed on the General Fiction shelves. Graphic Novels command a large amount of real estate, making even more visible the postmodern effort to collapse the distinction between high and popular culture. Meanwhile ‘Smart Thinking’ is a new category that seems to represent the converse of what’s happened to comics, involving a lot of pop social science. Populist political literature by right-wingers like Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro or Donald Trump is nowhere in evidence, but Guardian polemicists like Paul Mason, Seumas Milne and Owen Jones are well represented. 

History has held its own, but it’s interesting to note that Irish History remains a separate category, sitting alongside other national histories whose imaginative literatures have dissolved into the global melting pot. We read history for its subject matter more than for who the author is, and so it wouldn’t make sense to organize it in the way that fiction is organized. Organising it alphabetically by title would have the effect of dividing it into national categories for the most part, but with some titles distributed anomalously in other sections. So the national subdivisions remain. World History has its own section, but by and large histories are national in scope, a consequence of the fact that you can’t easily explain historical causality without attending to what Leopold Bloom in Ulysses called “the same people living in the same place”. In answer to this definition of a nation, his interlocutor replied, “if that’s so, I’m a nation, for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.”

When you try to write about the world as a whole you’re forced to either take a synoptic view that lacks detail, or to focus on individuals who are representative of the bigger picture. The latter is perhaps better done by biographies, and by novels such as Travellers by Nigerian writer Helon Habila, whom I wouldn’t have discovered if he hadn’t been singled out by Waterstones as a notable figure. His book describes the intersecting lives of African migrants across Europe, and is a great read. The only part where I found it hard to suspend disbelief was when he trundled out some white supremacists to besiege an African asylum-seeker hiding in a London flat. This episode seemed like the kind of thing that only happens in the New Left imaginary, which is a very different place from the literary imagination. 

Aside from noticing the disrepute into which literary nationalism and artistic universalism have fallen, the conclusion I draw from all this is that the reading public has grown a little shallower, though for a serious reader there’s still plenty of reason to browse in bookshops. It’s irritating that the selection of books is so skewed towards the left-liberal zeitgeist, but I wouldn’t project the end of civilization into it just yet. The public discourse and the national balance of power have changed, with the result that, without altering my core values, thirty years ago I was a centre leftist and now I’m on the centre right. These changes may not look seismic in the longer historical perspective.

If I was a rich philanthropist with the money to subsidize a chain of bookshops, I’d open one that skews conservative. There would be a ban on memoirs by liberal politicians unless, like Obama, they have literary talent and would deserve to be published even if their author hadn’t won the Nobel prize for being black and President of the US at the same time. I’d restore the Classics section, but since they’re probably going to be small bookshops with no pretensions to comprehensiveness, I’d bias it towards the likes of Burke, Carlyle, Arnold and Kipling. I’d also include modern and contemporary rightist works by people like James Burnham, William F Buckley, Michael Malice, and Milo Yiannopoulis, alongside a few quality left-wing writers.

This selection would be conditioned by the way mainstream bookstores like Waterstones are now deploying themselves as weapons in the culture war: a counterweight, not a prescription. Buying an Ann Coulter book in a second-hand bookstore a couple of years ago felt a bit like how it used to feel buying contraceptives in the Ireland of the 1980s. Sexuality has been destigmatized since then, but conservatism has put on its mantle as that which one dares not admit to in polite society. My bookshop might have to be sequestered away from the high street, in a political red-light district, but I wouldn’t mind having that sort of dissident glamour. 

Since I can’t afford to do this, we’re reliant on the internet to find these books, but they’re all easily available to anyone who goes looking for them, and a lot of us do. Worriers that the marketplace of ideas has stopped functioning because schools, bookshops and newspapers of record have been wokeified may not have reckoned with the countercultural tides that have always been a feature of Western democracies. I worry about the fate of liberal democracy myself, but my recent reading has reminded me that people in the 1970s had very similar fears about societal collapse as they watched police fighting trade unionists, experienced the breakdown of public services during wildcat strikes, and predicted an imminent right-wing coup. 

The centre held then, and there’s a good chance it will continue to hold during the current internet-driven turbulence, even if mere anarchy is breaking out here and there in places like Portland and San Francisco. Liberal democracy is a resilient political dispensation because it doesn’t rely on the wisdom of any one individual or group, and can allow people to be foolish or mistaken, often in interesting ways. None of the people on the authoritarian left and right advocating alternatives to the present dispensation would be free to do so if they achieved their political goals. Real-world liberal democracy is messy and in ways repressive, but that doesn’t mean it’s not working, or that there’s something better on offer from those whose sense of hygiene is offended by it.

John Tangney is a writer, photographer and podcaster from Ireland. He has a PhD in Renaissance Literature from Duke University and spent a number of years working as an academic in Singapore and Russia. His articles can be found in New English Review, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Time Traveller, Religion and the Arts, Litteraria Pragensia and Literary Imagination, among others.

You can follow him on YouTube.