Which author today is the equivalent of Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain or Vladimir Nabokov? The answer is, none of them. These towering literary figures remind us that our cultural landscape today lacks the vision and style of one who is able to speak beyond the boundaries of race, class and ideology. Were any of these authors alive today and submitting work to a publishing house, the chances of them being published are zero.

Why is this so? Why is our literary establishment no longer interested in promoting authors with a unique voice who can speak to a diverse readership? That Book is Dangerous, a recently published scholarly survey by progressive writer Adam Szetela, identifies the reasons. Our publishing industry has been captured by those who see the role of literature as promoting a world view that aligns with their own - in most cases, a world of identity politics and preferred social narratives.

Szetela describes a literary world where the author must advocate for the marginalized, especially “LGBTQIA, Native, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities, and ethnic, cultural and religious minorities.” Through their storylines and characters, authors must reflect the reality of a Foucaultian world divided into oppressed and oppressors, where the author’s job is to “educate” the reader to become active in changing society for the better. To ensure compliance, anyone who wants to submit a book for publication must first have their work vetted. 

Checking for undesirable language, characters or themes is the work of the “sensitivity reader.” These often well-remunerated employees are now common to all major publishing houses. In former times, an editor would read a manuscript and offer advice on characterization, plot and style. The changes proposed were aesthetic. In the current climate, it is the sensitivity reader who decides what is and what isn’t acceptable. Suggested changes are political or ideological.

Sensitivity readers are used to authenticate the author’s work. Szetela notes that

“To be authentic, a sensitivity reader must share an identity with an author’s fictional character. For example, a heterosexual Chinese American author who plans to write a story about a gay native American character should hire a gay Native American sensitivity reader.”

However, this is no absolute guarantee of authenticity. Szetela relates the story of a white author wishing to write about a black regiment of World War I soldiers, and needing to consult a black sensitivity reader. The reader had no interest or knowledge of the subject - he was chosen purely based on race. Szeta reasonably asks, “how is the culture of a black sensitivity reader in 2019 the culture of a black soldier during World War I?” 

Another is the notion of “presentism” - the privileging of the ideals of the present over the realities of the past and present. This creates a particular problem for historical fiction, where characters are forced to speak anachronistically in order to reflect current liberal mores. It also involves re-writing existing books - for example, the novels of Mark Twain or Ian Fleming - by changing “offensive” words or phrases or removing sentences altogether. This is intended to make the books less “offensive”, although perhaps it is more offensive that a 22 year old college graduate, with the consent of the publisher, is revising important works of literature. 

As a consequence, many books published today share a homogeneity in language and outlook. Even established authors learn to “play by the rules.” New York Times best selling author Patricia Cornwall complained that 

“I spent about forty-five minutes yesterday trying to figure out the politically correct way to refer to people who fish for a living. Can’t call them fishermen. So I called them fisherfolks….You can’t say a vehicle is ‘manned.” It has to be ‘crewed.’”

Szetela’s book paints a picture of fear and conformity. It shows what happens when an institution - in this case, the publishing industry - is infiltrated and captured by ideologues and social justice warriors. Their ideological positions and attitudes are then enforced by a toxic combination of left wing “groupthink” and social media. The people interviewed and quoted by Szetela in his book asked not to be named, for fear of drawing condemnation from their peers.

Not all authors readily submit. An example of what happens when an author pushes back occurred in November 2020, when Lorena Germán, the author of The Anti Racist Teacher, attacked all “classic” books written before 1950. Such books carried values inimical to today’s enlightened readers. “We gotta switch it up,” she wrote. “It ain’t just just about ‘being old.’ #DisruptTexts.” 

The “Disrupt Texts” movement is aimed at school teachers seeking to be free of classic literature. Teachers are encouraged instead to offer texts that are more inclusive. Out goes Shakespeare, whose plays “harbor problematic depictions and characterizations” and contain “violence, misogyny, racism, and more.” In comes books highlighting “white supremacy” and the problems of capitalism.

For Jessica Cluess, an established Young Adult author, this trashing of all literature published before 1950 was too much to bear. She took to Twitter to vent her spleen in a long post, a portion of which is given here,

“If you think Hawthorne was on the side of the Judgmental Puritans in The Scarlet Letter then you are an absolute idiot and should not have the title of educator in your Twitter bio. This anti-intellectual, anti-curiosity bull**** is poison and I will stand here and scream that it is sheer goddam evil until my hair falls out, I do not care. If you think Upton Sinclair was on the side of the meat-packing industry then you are a fool…” 

Within an hour, Germán responded by encouraging the online community to go after Cluess. Ironically, Cluess was reported to Twitter for harassment. Post after post castigated her for her apostasy, and it didn’t take long before she was being portrayed as a violent racist. Szetela notes that those involved in the “pile-on” saw themselves as belonging to the “great protest movements of the past”, inheritors of the mantle of the Civil Rights Movement. The crushing of dissent was part of this great moral crusade.

By the next day, the witch hunt was over. Cluess, in the manner of a frightened bourgeois appearing before Maoist Red Guards, posted a long apology, including this: “My words were misguided, wrong, and deeply hurtful. I must - and will - do better moving forward.” Cluess was afraid that her career was over and did an about-face in order to salvage it. Yet by doing so, she illustrated how self-censorship had reduced her own status from free thinker to party apparatchik. Szetala observes: “Like 1984, the point is not just to punish the person who commits crimethink but to change them too.”

The tactics of ideologues such as Lorena Germán are not new. In communist countries, this is how dissenters are brought into line. Its victims learn that freedom of conscience is subservient to the party line. It is the party which decides what is moral and what isn’t - those in the game must play along, or else be ostracized and humiliated. 

What makes this traditional totalitarian tactic new and more terrifying is the advent of social media. The ideologues and colleagues who take part in the “struggle sessions” on behalf of the establishment do not see themselves as bullies or fascists but as helpers safeguarding the public sphere from “wrongthink.” Quick to apply labels such as “racist,” they can happily destroy a person’s career and livelihood by simply tapping their disapprovals on Instagram. It is our modern day equivalent of the Salem witch trials.

Members of organizations where this mindset has taken root have trained themselves into developing a self-censorship that undermines a full commitment to truth and honesty. In the place of truth, they internalize and promote approved “narratives.” Robert Kaplan, in his book Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, talks about the the “lust for purity and perfect virtue” that leads to tyranny. He writes,

“The young are more adaptable than their elders in the use of new cyber and digital products. This, too, raises the specter of particularly fearsome bottom-up mobs, since the young are not tempered by memories of the past [totalitarian regimes] and the grave mistakes they made in that past. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.”

It is not only the publishing industry that has fallen prey to ideologues. In 2024 Uri Berliner, a former editor at National Public Radio (NPR), went on Substack to blow the whistle on his own employer’s bias. When he checked voter registration data at the NPR newsroom, he discovered that there were 87 Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. Not surprisingly, the editors would select and disseminate news to promote one side only. NPR openly refused to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story, which contained revelations damaging to President Biden. As Berliner observed, “Politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.” Journalism was being supplanted by activism.

Taken to its logical extremes, the drift to totalitarianism aims for a cultural and political one party state where alternative viewpoints are forbidden. The closest we came to this experience was in recent times. Mark Zuckerberg admitted before Congress that, under pressure from the Biden administration, Facebook had removed posts and de-platformed users over Covid 19 and the Hunter Biden laptop, regardless of whether or not what they were saying was true. A similar policy of censoring conservatives on Twitter was ended only after Elon Musk took ownership.

It is no surprise to learn that many of those working in media and the arts are college graduates. One hears anecdotes of parents sending their children to college only to have them return as indoctrinated activists. Our institutes of higher learning are the training grounds for our new political and cultural masters. In an article for National Affairs in 2018, Professor Jon Shields highlighted the preponderance of left leaning academics in colleges. He noted that “Republicans make up 4% of historians, 3% of sociologists, and a mere 2% of literature professors.” 

The danger is that monocultures, whether intellectual or otherwise, always restrict growth and vitality. How did a free and open country such as the United States begin its slow drift toward totalitarianism?

One explanation is found in the book by the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, published in 1953. It describes how, in the aftermath of World War II, the writers and intellectuals of the day accommodated themselves to the requirements of their new rulers. The objective was to produce art in the style and content of “social realism.” Milosz observes that 

“In the field of literature it forbids what has in every age been the writer’s essential task—to look at the world from his own independent viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so to keep watch and ward in the interest of society as a whole…[Instead] it makes all judgment of values dependent upon the interest of the dictatorship.”

This is, in effect, the “sovietization” of culture, where independent thought is subservient to the party line, whatever that might be. The “truth” of the party, even when promoting lies, takes priority over everything else. Those writers who stray from the party line can have their careers terminated or worse, while those who remain in the system develop inner strategies to survive, including the internalization of oppression. 

Milosz recalls a conversation with a young Polish poet, who told him: “I can’t write as I would like to. My own stream of thought has so many tributaries, that I barely succeed in damming off one, when a second, third, or fourth overflows. I get halfway through a phrase, and already I submit it to Marxist criticism. I imagine what X or Y will say about it, and I change the ending.” 

The practice of censoring one’s own self out of fear of offending prevailing orthodoxies is no longer confined to those living under totalitarian regimes. The historian Gary Saul Morson recounts how, in 2020, hundreds of Princeton professors signed a letter demanding a faculty committee be set up to pre-censor publications to ensure they were not “racist.” From that point on, a committee would decide whether your work as a professor was publishable or not. 

What motivated the professors to give up this basic freedom of expression? Joshua Katz, then a professor at Princeton, believes that only a minority were fully in support. Some signed the letter without reading it. Others felt “peer pressure” to do so. The largest group signed the letter because they agreed with some of the demands and felt it was good to act as “allies.” Morson marvels at the fact that, “without Communist pressure, with no secret police, these American professors had taken the first opportunity to be captive minds.”

For anyone working in the creative field today, it is like being in Poland after the war. Every artistic endeavor, before it reaches the public, must be subject to an internal process of self-censorship. Often the institution will stipulate not only the message but also how the art is to be made. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) established “Inclusion Standards” which prescribed eligibility by requiring that each new movie production submitted for Academy consideration provide proof of race and gender employment quotas. Screenwriters, in the interests of “diversity”, must now shoehorn historically anachronistic characters into movie scripts, regardless of whether or not it is historically accurate.

Film critic Armond White likens this system to Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which specifically detailed ethnic and gender quotas and criteria. Its aim is political, which is signaled by awarding Oscars to those who conform. In White’s scathing assessment, “the Oscars are the means of enforced behavior, regulating film-production practices, then swaying public opinion about the quality of films that are aesthetically inferior but make sentimental liberals feel good.”

As in communist countries, art has become the means of propagating social and political ideology. Those who dare to speak out in opposition to the establishment do so at great personal risk. Many deem it far easier to go along with the herd and keep out of trouble. This is what is known as “soft totalitarianism”, because it makes you personally responsible for the silencing of your own voice. In his book The Disenlightenment, the screenwriter David Mamet warns that 

“The death of free speech is foretold not so much by the firing and shaming of its proponents, but in the silence of the majority reduced to consider - so many times a day - if this or that minor enormity is worth ‘getting into an argument.’ The weary soon cease asking the debilitating question and then forget there is a question, and then turn against those who suggest its existence.”

The insidious growth of this type of thinking must be challenged and resisted if the freedoms we take for granted are to remain and be passed on to the next generation. The generation of boomers who grew up in more enlightened times are perhaps unaware of the pressures to conform that their children and grandchildren now experience. How will young people retain their own integrity when, for the sake of their career and their families, they must bow down to the ideologues who control the institutions, such as the media, academia, the arts, and even elements of the Church? 

The good news is that ideologically driven art, which often distorts reality beyond recognition, usually fails. It always has. How much “social realist” work from the communist era is prized today? How will history treat the latest ideologically driven Star Trek series, for example, which is already losing money and reputation for its creators? 

However, the foot soldiers of soft totalitarianism are already entrenched in our society, policing our language and curtailing our freedom to express ourselves. When they tell you that they want to make you “safe”, and in return you must give up some of your freedoms, that is the alarm signal. It is a scene currently being played out in Europe, the UK and Australia. 

Fortunately, freedom of speech in the USA is guaranteed by the First Amendment. Someone once said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Paradoxically, the drift into soft totalitarianism here is powered not by poverty but by our general affluence. This has caused us to underestimate the threat that soft totalitarianism poses. The right to think and speak independently always needs to be asserted and protected. 

We were not made for captivity, either within prison walls or confined by mental constraints. The curbing of our mind to fit the narratives of another is a kind of spiritual death. Instead we are called to live in freedom without the threat of coercion or cancellation. This is more than a request to be let alone - rather, it is to assert the power of the imagination to be ourselves, to act in accordance with our consciences, and to speak fearlessly for the truth. 

Father David