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Maybe We Could Call It Accomplishment

It suggests that there aren’t any interesting Republicans in our fiction not because Republicans aren’t interesting, but because our intelligentsia’s political prejudices blind them to the possibility that a Republican might be, well, a complicated human being rather than just the sum of every liberal’s fears. ~Ross Douthat Ross is right about a certain lack […]

It suggests that there aren’t any interesting Republicans in our fiction not because Republicans aren’t interesting, but because our intelligentsia’s political prejudices blind them to the possibility that a Republican might be, well, a complicated human being rather than just the sum of every liberal’s fears. ~Ross Douthat

Ross is right about a certain lack of imagination among liberals when it comes to depicting Republicans.  If there is an audience for what has seemed like 462 books on the imminent onset of theocratic fascism or fascistic theocracy or whichever other contradiction in terms the cunning religious conspirators are developing, this audience is not going to be interested in stories that depict religious conservatives and Republicans as anything but absurd stick-figures.  On the other hand, if you tried to imagine an administration filled with fewer interesting, engaging personalities than the present administration, I don’t think you could do it.  It also doesn’t help encourage the depiction of complex human beings when this administration in particular has seemed to go out of its way to play to every caricature of Republicans that the left has conjured over the years. 

That isn’t to say that the last few years haven’t provided plenty of material for rich, florid, even baroque novels about corruption, fanaticism, pride and failure.  But how to tell the story?  Perhaps only the genre of magical realism could fully capture what seems to be an assembly of stunning mediocrities, the half-mad, the drearily self-important and the embarrassingly venal.  I think we lack the writers we need to tell this story.  They would need to be part Prokopios, part Ortega y Gasset, part Kafka and part Miguel Angel Asturias, but would have to be able to speak in a distinctly American idiom.

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