Red and Blue Books: Conservative Get Out the Book Drive Surges

According to a recent Amazon Election Heat Map, “red books”, or ones that are specifically crafted to appeal to a conservative sensibility, are outselling

their liberal counterparts, or “blue books”, by a wide margin of 58% to 42%. Whichever party wins the upcoming election, Republicans are are dominating the belletristic race.

What accounts for this disparity? At first glance, the book tally could appear as a symptom of superior enthusiasm on the part of conservatives this year, hyper-energized by their desire to unseat an incumbent president they perceive as ideologically extremist and politically polarizing. Especially since Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate, the election has become one about a stark cleavage between competing political visions, an intellectual contest between overarching political philosophies. A philosophically charged election could conceivably inspire prospective voters to arm themselves with information and seek clarity, not to mention argumentative ammunition, in the relevant literature.

But the conservative consumption of books belies an increasingly familiar narrative that they distrust highfalutin intellectuals, and prefer the pragmatism of the common man and the general ethos of the middle class over the ersatz European pretensions of Ivy League egg heads. The conservative chooses Palin over Proust, beer over Burgundy, french fries over French literature. But this is now more mainstream media caricature than a serious diagnosis of the status of intellectualism in conservative circles today. It is closer to the mark to say that conservatives prefer intellectuals congenial to the interests of the common man, and properly appreciate the limitations of the status of philosophical thinking within practical political life. In other words, conservatives still think that practical judgment is different than philosophical theorizing, that facility in the latter doesn’t necessarily produce an embarrassment of riches in the former, and that academic credentials don’t immediately translate into a legitimate claim upon governing others. The philosophically robust suspicions of public intellectuals is well articulated in books like Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society , Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, and Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind.

Progressive liberals today often loudly proclaim a monopoly on the market of reason, typically identified with its scientific iteration. This was the significance of Obama’s promise in his inaugural speech to “restore science to its proper place”: his intention was to save reason itself from the benighted religious faith and antiquarian moral prejudices of untutored conservatives. However, it the liberal left today that suffers from a dearth of new ideas and has become the entrenched gatekeepers of the regnant status quo.

It is no longer clear what are the literary sources from which liberals draw their philosophical succor. It is rare to hear a liberal account for his liberalism with an appeal to a foundational thinker or cerebral hero, and their own internecine disputes are similarly unanchored from any identifiable philosophical center. Paradoxically, this is likely a consequence of their dominance of the academy, purging it of any vestigial remains of dissident thought that might fortify their own ideas through vigorous debate. The expulsion of conservatives from higher education turned out to be a Pyrrhic triumph, one that slowly degraded their own intellectual depth. The election season is far from over and victory could land on either side of the political aisle, but conservatives are winning the battle of ideas, one book purchase at a time.

Category: Books & Culture