What Will We Write Now?

 

“The simple step of the courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.” —Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Consider today’s long post an extended continuation of sorts to Rachel Toalson’s inspiring offering from this past Wednesday, “The World Needs Writers Now More Than Ever.” If you have not yet read her post, I strongly recommend it, because it speaks to the courage and commitment and community we will need to overcome the things I describe below, which she identifies as the opposition we will likely face as we continue to address the truths we find most necessary in our writing.

She also recommends joining Authors Against Book Bans, and I second that—loudly, humbly, fiercely.

The Poet and the Dictator

A recent posting online titled “The Parable of Anna Akhmatova,” addressed the issue of what it means to produce art in the face of censure, condemnation, even threats to liberty and life from those in power.

Ted Gioia, an American jazz critic and music historian and the author of 12 books, wrote the post for his substack, The Honest Broker—”a frank and opinionated guide to music, books, media, and culture,” which I heartily recommend.

He began by lamenting the current state of the arts, music in particular, which he believes has been coerced into conformity by:

[T]he technocratic tone in today’s culture in which prominence and relevance is determined by metrics imposed by huge corporations. 

Sometimes they won’t even tell you their metrics—who knows how Netflix evaluates its shows? Who knows how things go viral on Instagram? 

But when we do learn what moves the wheels of digital media, it’s usually clicks, links, dollars, profits, and other extrinsic hierarchies.

If you look at art that way, you will avoid anything that deviates from mainstream entertainment. Or even just mindless distraction.

That’s why it’s useful to remind ourselves of other times and places when even the free creative impulse of artists, even those of genius, genuinely seemed on the verge of eradication. 

He then recounted the story of Anna Akhmatova, one of the most revered of Russian poets. He noted that despite the oppression the Communist regime imposed on her—her poetry was fiercely criticized and censored, the secret police bugged her home, and she was kept under constant surveillance—in the long run, her writing “prevailed.”

To those who don’t know the background: Anna Akhmatova was both brilliant and beautiful—Modigliani created at least 20 paintings of her, and Boris Pasternak proposed to her on numerous occasions—and her poetry was well received prior to the 1917 Revolution. But once the Bolsheviks seized complete power, she fell suddenly and steeply out of favor:

One by one, the people closest to her were arrested, prosecuted, and often executed. Her ex-husband Nikolay Gumilev, falsely accused of participating in a monarchist conspiracy, was shot. Her common-law husband Nikolai Punin, an art scholar, got arrested and sent to the Gulag, where he died. (His offense was allegedly mentioning that the proliferation of portraits of Lenin throughout the country was in poor taste.)

But none of these indignities struck as deep as what happened to her son, Lev Gumilev. First sent to a prison camp at the age of nine shortly after his father’s execution, he was released in 1939 only so he could serve in the Red Army, then re-incarcerated again in 1949.

Akhmatova wrote poems praising Stalin, hoping to influence the authorities to release her son, or at least inform her of his circumstances. She stopped writing her own poetry for fear those same authorities would retaliate against her son. Finally, she stood outside Kresty Prison in Leningrad for 17 months, in the bitter cold and savage heat, with other women hoping for word about their loved ones.

Challenged by just such a woman to describe this scene, she set about writing her masterpiece, “Requiem.” Given the constant state surveillance, however—her quarters could be searched at any time—she dared not keep written copies of her drafts, and instead memorized the poem as she wrote it.

Publication even outside the Soviet Union was out of the question. It was finally published in Germany in 1963, three years before her death. By that time the authorities feared doing anything that might enhance her international standing (she had already been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize).

The poem ends with this:

And if ever in this country they should want
To build me a monument
I consent to that honor,
But only on condition that they
Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,
Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

The building of such a monument actually came to pass in 2006, the 40^th anniversary of her passing. A statue of her was erected outside Kresty Prison in Leningrad (by then already renamed St. Petersburg, as it had been before the Revolution).

Gioia considers this a testament to the long-lasting power of great art, especially in contrast to the dictatorships which seek to suppress it, and which inevitably fall. Not only did Akhmatova outlive Stalin, her poetry is once again revered, while his legacy is tainted by his savage cruelty and incompetence.

On the Other Hand…

The comments to the post were interesting, especially as two Russians countered this homage, which one described as “mawkish nonsense,” while the other noted that their grandmothers also stood in that same line outside the prison:

Their faces, disfigured by pain and despair, served as a constant reminder of what was part of our family history, when we were two years old, when we were four, when we were six, and so on. Growing up, we did not have Sponge Bob or Disney cartoons. We had those faces, or rather what remained of them.

I have to admit, this response struck a chord, even though I find Anna Akhmatova’s courage inspiring and admire her poetry greatly.

I also knew from prior reading that one of the bitterest ironies of this story—as if it needed any more—is that Lev Gumilev resented his mother and thought that her efforts on his behalf were self-serving, a way to talk about herself in her poetry.

He considered his mother “frightfully lazy and egoistic.” In her memoir, Lev’s  long-time girlfriend, Emma Gerstein, described his relationship with his mother as eerily intense. He would throw tantrums if she ignored him, even into his forties, and this inhibited his other relationships with women; he did not marry until the year after her death.

Later in life, in a somewhat strained example of Stockholm Syndrome, he came to  view the Soviet Union in a far more favorable light, even forgiving it for the cruelty he endured in its prisons.

He also became a historian of the steppes peoples, especially the Tatars, Turks, and Mongols, and came to develop a theory of the “ethnos”—a kind of shared ethnic identity rooted in geography and shared suffering. He believed Russia possesses just such an ethnos, based on and connected to its Tatar heritage, and he’s become one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite sources for justifying Russian nationalism and expansionism.

That turn toward Putin, sadly, brings the matter full circle, i.e., back to Stalin. As Robert Kagan noted recently:

[Putin] has resurrected Stalin as a hero. Today, Russia looks outwardly like the Russia of the Great Patriotic War, with exuberant nationalism stimulated and the smallest dissent brutally repressed.

Given the incoming president’s reverence for the Russian leader, that sets the stage for what follows in this post.

What is the Relevance?

Another commenter to the Akhmatova piece raised an issue I myself had:

The other thing that’s impossible to ignore: the political situation in the US. I do *not* think “technocrats” are even 1/10th as dangerous as what we are facing. Anna Akhmatova’s life is more like a cautionary tale than any kind of “triumph.”

I might add that it’s the alliance of the technocrats with the new regime that inspires a particularly heightened concern.

Some have argued that the failure to recognize fully the coming peril reveals a lack of imagination—something particularly embarrassing for writers of fiction.

A recent article titled “Why Liberals Struggle to Cope with Epochal Change,” made this point explicitly. It was written by Ivan Krestev, co-author of The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy.

Krestev argued that the liberal west fundamentally misunderstood 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. It was seen as a triumph of capitalistic democracy, not a historical rupture:

Living through such moments in history [as Krestev did as a student at Sophia University in Bulgaria] teaches one many things, but the most important is the sheer speed of change: People can totally alter their views and political identity overnight; what only yesterday was considered unthinkable seems self-evident today. The shift is so profound that people soon find their old assumptions and choices unfathomable.

[The president-elect’s] second coming will clearly be different from the first. In 2016, [his] encounter with American power was like a blind date. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, and American power didn’t know exactly who he was. Not this time. America may remain a democracy, but it will become a more feral one. Under new management, its institutions will likely depart from the safety of consensual politics and go wild … Illiberal leaders select their cabinet members in the same way that emperors used to choose the governors of rebellious provinces: What matters most is the appointee’s loyalty and capacity to resist being suborned or co-opted by others.

The ”personalist” nature of the incoming administration, whereby everything revolves around the whims of the leader, no matter how fleeting or incoherent—or vindictive—underscores the risk of this demand for loyalty.

This is most apparent in the proposed appointments of who will lead the most powerful, and thus most potentially oppressive, government agencies: the Department of Defense and the Justice Department.

These proposed appointees are blatantly unqualified, but their loyalty is absolute. Add to this the proposed upheaval of the entire civil service, to replace professional experts with a cadre of loyalists, and one can easily imagine an army of true believers marching in lockstep.

That’s a key point. It isn’t just one man and a handful of like minds now. It’s a movement of fellow travelers keen on bending the existing order to the new ruler’s demands.

And what will those demands be? First and foremost, they will reflect the approach to governance that we’ve already observed. As Andrew Egger recently wrote for The Bulwark, with respect to the talk of acquiring Greenland:

The important thing to understand is that [the president-elect’s] interest in aggressive national expansion isn’t some odd and inexplicable sideshow to his politics. It is his politics. It’s the blossoming of the same deep, central impulse that’s driven him throughout his first election and his return to the presidency: Whom can I dominate, and who is going to stop me?

Second, I doubt the new president’s demands won’t reflect his frequent statements that America’s greatest threat comes not from foreign countries but from “the enemy within.”

This is often construed as meaning political or legal adversaries. But the enemy within can be construed more broadly as meaning “liberal elites” in general.

These elites are defined by Patrick Deneen (more on him below) as: “Those who possess social status because they possess the requisite social and educational skills to navigate a world shorn of stabilizing norms.”  If that seems vague, that might be deliberate. It permits a great deal of flexibility in determining who to blame—or attack—but it “roughly appears to mean people with college degrees working in knowledge-sector jobs: the ‘laptop class,’ as his fellow conservatives would say.” One can’t help but imagine that includes writers, especially those with a distinctly different view of what is moral, decent, and good.

One gets another hint of what’s to come from Project 2025, a “mandate for leadership” created by the Heritage Foundation, which was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, a conservative Catholic who rejected Vatican II’s call for ecumenism, and is now led by another conservative Catholic, Kevin Roberts.

Despite claims during the campaign that the candidate knew nothing about Project 2025, that has been contradicted by remarks from insiders since the election. And the appointment of one of the principal architects of the plan, Russ Vought, to be head of the Office of Management and Budget, which controls the federal bureaucracy, would seem as well to indicate that these disavowals were disingenuous.

Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation, is” a guidebook for the founding of a new America.” Its main aims, according to its own website, include:

• Secure the border, finish building the wall, and deport illegal aliens
• De-weaponize the Federal Government by increasing accountability and oversight of the FBI and DOJ
• Unleash American energy production to reduce energy prices
• Cut the growth of government spending to reduce inflation
• Make federal bureaucrats more accountable to the democratically elected President and Congress
• Improve education by moving control and funding of education from DC bureaucrats directly to parents and state and local governments
• Ban biological males from competing in women’ s sports

Don’t be misled by the anodyne wording. In the 950 or so pages that follow these bullet points, the authors make clear the sweeping changes they intend to bring about: removal of any mention of climate change from government documents (one of the most conspicuously Orwellian tactics admitted), banning not just abortion but birth control, an end to gay marriage and LGBTQ+ rights, and “de-weaponizing” the DOJ and FBI against their own, not their enemies.

Beyond these aims, however, what is even more troubling is the religio-political philosophy animating the plan—and this is where the issue of what we will write, or be permitted to write, comes into sharpest focus.

Aristopopulism and the Army of God

To understand that philosophy, you need to comprehend what motivates not just Project 2025’s most prominent advocate—the current head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts—but the billionaires tied most closely to the new regime: Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the latter the man behind the elevation of J.D. Vance to national prominence.

During the summer of 2024, Roberts asserted that what he was proposing was a second “American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it.”

Vance wrote the forward to Roberts’ recent book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, in which he stated, “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lie ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

Those ideas owe a substantial debt to Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at Notre Dame and author of Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.

In an article for Rolling Stone, Bradley Onishi, in tracing the various key influences on Vance’s political thinking, included Deneen as well as Peter Thiel and Leonard Leo, founder of the Federalist Society:

Deneen [has] called for something more radical than January 6th: a complete toppling of the current American order. “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government,” he said. “I want something far more revolutionary.” Deneen proposes an “aristopopulism,” in which the virtuous elite provide order and structure to public life in order to ensure the flourishing of the ordinary citizens who cannot provide it for themselves. The benevolent oligarchs are thus tasked with keeping the common good intact so that hoi polloi can enjoy the good life—even if they don’t know or believe or experience it as such.

As for the issue of who qualifies as a member of this virtuous elite, not to mention who decides who belongs and who does not, that remains opaque, though the use of “oligarch” offers a clue. Onishi continued:

Deneen’s “common good conservatism” is a move away from Ronald Reagan’s conservative fusionism—which combines the conservative Christian foundations of family, faith, and military strength with the libertarian idea that government is not the answer, but the problem—toward an imposition of a certain vision of the common good on all Americans through government. But Deneens’ view of the common good doesn’t include everyone. He opposes gay marriage, wants stricter laws on divorce, denounces CRT, and mocks health care for trans people as absurd. Deneen lauds authoritarian Viktor Orban’s Hungary as a place where the state actively cultivates political and moral order. “The role of the government,” writes political scientist Chelsea Ebin about Deneen and other postliberal Catholics, “is not to preserve individual rights and manage competing interpretations of the good but to impose and enforce a singular conception of the good through the regulation of social relations.”

I don’t mean by bringing to light these individuals’ shared Catholicism that the faith itself is to blame. Christianity writ large and Catholicism in particular admit to a broad range of views, but a growing percentage of American Christians including Catholics adhere to the Dominionist viewpoint that Christians “should take moral, spiritual, and ecclesiastical control” of the Seven Mountains of the culture: religion, family, education, government, media, education, and the arts.

It’s that last “mountain” that specifically applies to us here, with the understanding that the incoming administration is all in on this philosophy:

National organizations like the Faith & Freedom Coalition and the Ziklag Group [a collection of the nation’s ultra-wealthy conservative Christians], which bring together prominent Republican leaders with donors and religious right activists, feature “Seven Mountains” workshops and panels at their gatherings. Nationalist leaders and their political dependents in the Republican Party now state quite openly what before they whispered to one another over their prayer breakfasts.

Pulitzer-winning journalist Stephanie McCrummin recently added this:

At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light. And people who have never heard the name are nonetheless adopting the movement’s central ideas. These include the belief that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active “army of God,” one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.

How Bad Will It Get ?

How will the “enforcement through the regulation of social relations” take place?

The influence of Dominionism within the incoming administration provides one hint:

The ideas have [influenced] the agenda known as Project 2025, as well as proposals set forth by the America First Policy Institute. A new book called Unhumans, co-authored by the far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and endorsed by J. D. Vance, describes political opponents as “unhumans” who want to “undo civilization itself” and who currently “run operations in media, government, education, economy, family, religion, and arts and entertainment”—the seven mountains. The book argues that these “unhumans” must be “crushed.”

“Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” the authors write. “It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.

Another hint can be provided by the Texas bounty law that “incentivizes citizens with a cash ‘bounty’ if they succeed in suing anyone who has helped a person get an illegal abortion.” Similar laws have also passed in Idaho and Oklahoma. Texas in particular has sought to federalize such laws by, in one case, suing a doctor in New York (where I live), for mailing “abortion pills” to a Texas woman.

“Snitch culture” is a feature not a bug of repressive regimes, especially those that claim to answer to a higher moral order. Is it beyond our imagination to consider the possibility that, instead of posting a snarky review on Amazon or Goodreads or some other social media platform, people who object to what you’ve written instead report you to a local official connected to the Ministry of Culture (or its equivalent in the new regime)?

Maybe it won’t get to that—once the new president pardons all those who took part in the January 6th riot at the Capitol, the paramilitary shock troops will have a new lease on life, and will be able to serve as an extrajudicial body of enforcers to threaten, coerce, or punish those deemed insufficiently loyal.

We can also expect the various individuals and organizations that have been behind book bans and school curriculum restrictions to feel emboldened and to push for greater control over what writings libraries and schools can offer.

We can infer who might get targeted from the books being banned in several states: basically anything that addresses sexual or racial themes deemed inimical to “the common good.”

Project 2025 explicitly proposes the “criminalization of pornography,” and we have seen that books that address homosexuality in any way get banned on the grounds of being “pornographic.”

How far will this prohibition spread? What will happen, for example, to gay crime writers such as John Copenhaver, Renee James, Marco Carocari, among many others, whose books feature queer characters—not to mention literary authors as varied as Sarah Waters, Tomasz Jedrowski, Jeanette Winterston, etc.?

As for the issue of race, what about writers of color who address racial bigotry in unflinching terms? Will their views on race be deemed too “divisive,” and thus inimical to the general good as defined by the “virtuous elite” proposed by Patrick Deneen and J.D. Vance? Will Colson Whitehead or Jesmyn Ward or Percival Everett or Nancy Johnson, or crime writers of color like like S.A. Cosby and Attica Locke—I ’m sure each of us could add names to this list—even find or retain a publisher in such a climate?

Next consider the fate on non-Christian writers. Jewish authors who don’t offend Christian Zionisys may get a pass, but what about those who don’t? What about Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, atheists, anyone who openly answers to a different creed? I was teaching a workshop the day that the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was attacked by an antisemitic extremist. One of the 11 worshipers murdered that day was an uncle of one of my students.

We also have already seen major media outlets bend to the pressure of the new regime—ABC, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times.

The incoming president has already sued for “defamation” both Penguin Random House and the investigative journalists Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, publisher and authors respectively of Lucky Loser.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Facebook, Instagram, and Threads would no longer be using third-party moderation to counter misinformation, claiming that the results of the 2024 Election were a “cultural tipping point.”

Tipping toward what?

Zuckerberg himself suggested an answer when he went on to say that his platforms would be elevating “free expression” over third-party fact-checking, which he maintained has become “too political.” He may have a point, since crowdsourced fact-checking, to which he’s turning, seems equally reliable and is generally considered less biased by platform users. But that’s not the point. The incoming president threatened to imprison Zuckerberg in a book titled Save America, “a collection of pictures, anecdotes and reminiscences from [the president-elect’s] campaigns and term in office.” How much is this decision motivated not by a desire for accuracy but self-preservation?

Consider next Jeff Bezos, owner not just of the Washington Post but Amazon, the elephant in the room for writers. As Ted Gioia noted above, the algorithms that select who gets elevated, who does not, are opaque. They can be manipulated without our knowing. Trusting Amazon to do no such thing seems fanciful given its owner’s tanking of his paper’s endorsement of a presidential candidate, his contribution to the incoming president’s inauguration, and his $40 million investment in a biopic of the first-lady-in-waiting.

Clearly, at least in terms of who can be bullied into obeisance, wealth and power and prestige provide no protection. Will other publishers, large and small, not to mention bookstores, wary of the cost of legal battles, or fearful of violence and threats of violence, decide it’s simply not worth the risk of incurring the wrath of the new regime or its supporters by publishing or stocking anything that might even suggest impropriety—or disloyalty?

And where might we discern the line lie between proper and improper, loyal and disloyal?

We have already seen Elon Musk, in a stark reversal of his commitment to unfettered free speech, now decree that anyone who posts something that shows too much “negativity” or a “lack of respect” will be banned on Twitter/X. Given his influence on the incoming administration, one has to imagine that the definition of “negativity” and “lack of respect” will prove conveniently elastic and reach beyond his platform—say, to the hosts and writers of late-night comedy shows, among others. Like you. Like me.

So—what will we write?

I realize I’m painting a worst-case scenario, but what I fear almost as much as what might happen is complacency that makes us unprepared for it.

Will we, like Anna Akhmatova, restrict ourselves to nothing that might be considered offensive—worse, will we contrive paeons to the powers that be to curry favor or avoid terrible consequences?

Will the new regime also recognize the best way to silence us is not by attacking us directly, but targeting those we love?

Will we write in a code that only insiders can interpret? That might work, until the powers that be decipher the code.

Will publishers restrict their lists to tales of sainthood, family sagas, heterosexual love stories, crime stories and thrillers where justice always prevails? Many writers already restrict themselves to such themes in the name of pleasing their readers or pursuing financial success. And a lot can be said in such books. But not everything. As noted at the outset, such efforts all too often produce only “mainstream entertainment. Or even just mindless distraction.”

Distraction from what, one might ask.

As noted earlier, in considering such matters, it’s wise not to suffer from a lack of imagination. Or courage.

With the understanding that our attempts to continue creating a pluralistic, multi-cultural, egalitarian society will be viewed as “demonic desperation,” I nonetheless once again will invoke the words of Rachel Toalson from Wednesday’s post:

It’s not easy getting out there and speaking truth to lies … This will require extraordinary courage and hope and the ability to remain steadfast in the face of opposition—because there will be opposition … There will always be opposition when we are saying something worthwhile. Telling our truth leads the way to better and deeper understanding. It’s how we gift ourselves to the world, how we make change and facilitate the cultural conversations necessary to become a more enlightened society.

What will you be writing in the year(s) ahead? How will you “gift yourself to the world?” How will you tell your truth? What do you expect will be the opposition you face?