Speaking Reassurance to Power
“It may be,” Edmund Wilson wrote in 1929, “that the United States will develop into a great imperialistic power with all its artists, critics, and philosophers as ineffective and as easily extinguished as the German ones were in 1914.” Wilson, born in 1895, came of age when national energies were still turned inward, and a largely Europhilic American intelligentsia possessed little cultural capital or self-confidence. He lived long enough to deplore his country’s midcentury turn from doctrinaire isolationism to righteous superpowerdom. “Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some other country,” he wrote in Patriotic Gore (1962), “it is always to liberate somebody.”
Wilson came to dislike the “all too conscious American literary self-glorification which is a part of our American imperialism.” He caustically noted the behavior of onetime radicals rushing to embrace personal opportunities for wealth and status in their freshly affluent society. John Dos Passos, writing on Barry Goldwater, sounded like a “teenager squealing over the Beatles.” He identified John F. Kennedy as an intellectual poseur, defying a burgeoning cult of American writers who viewed the U.S. president as a serious reader and thinker. During the Vietnam War, Wilson refused an invitation from Lyndon Johnson with, as the president’s special consultant recorded, “a brusqueness” never before known at the White House.
It is not hard to imagine what America’s preeminent critic would have made of the writers exulting over their inclusion in Barack Obama’s reading lists (issued occasionally while Obama worked, on Tuesdays, on “kill lists” targeting young men in South Asia and the Middle East). It’s easier to guess what Wilson would have thought of Marilynne Robinson declaring, as late as 2024, that Joe Biden was a “gift of God, all eighty-one years of him,” or of Timothy Snyder delivering, that same year, a “Biden benediction.”
Wilson’s vision of the brittleness of the American intelligentsia before a brazenly imperialist regime has never been more fully realized. While threatening the annexation of lands on multiple continents and absentmindedly supervising genocide in Palestine, Donald Trump is actively attempting to hollow out, with scarcely any effective opposition from their custodians, all major academic and cultural establishments in the United States. Many Americans are demonstrably disgusted, shamed, and angered by their tyrants, but mainstream literary and intellectual institutions seem unable or unwilling to give voice to them. As its icons flee to Canada and Europe, “resistance liberalism” is being outsourced to Harvard University, where its pusillanimity is further revealed through a president carefully implementing Trumpian strictures against “campus culture.”
This swift and near-total capitulation to political depravity is for many people outside the United States an extraordinary sight. The American intelligentsia has presented itself since 1945 as the worldwide guarantor of intellectual and creative freedom. From the beginning of the Cold War, its cultural institutions, whether the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a number of prominent creative writing programs, or PEN America itself, have promoted the idea of a literary sphere that is credible and respectable only when it is independent from political parties, state-controlled institutions, and propagandistic media.
Of course, it was always possible to argue, as Viet Thanh Nguyen did recently while complaining about “writers who say nothing,” that American literary institutions are not autonomous but “a part of empire, supported by the state or by powerful donors who benefit from the imperial machinery.” Indeed, Cold War–era American institutions and personalities who promoted the ideal of aesthetic autonomy while trying to dissuade writers and artists from left-wing politics and propagandizing (sometimes with the help of CIA subventions) represented a glaring contradiction. Their own failure to stand up to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s demagoguery hardly recommended their version of artistic iconoclasm and political neutrality.
Nevertheless, outsiders marveled at the pronounced American sense of moral and cultural primacy, which seemed to be guaranteed by hard power and enforced synergistically by the State Department, PEN America, the New York Times, Human Rights Watch, and Ivy League universities. The experience of fascism and despotism in Europe and Latin America, and racist imperialism in Asia and Africa, had forced nearly every writer and intellectual of stature around the world, from Albert Camus and Julio Cortázar to Naguib Mahfouz and Nadine Gordimer, into moral commitment, which became more explicit and articulate during crises. None of these ineluctably engagé authors, however, could count on, in their own nations, the same sprawling material infrastructure for literature and ideology that had been forged by the United States during its crusade against Soviet Communism.
As it happened, many victims of tyrannical regimes and fanatical movements ended up seeking refuge in the United States. These exiles and expatriates, from Hannah Arendt to Thomas Mann, Czesław Miłosz to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, helped define the intolerable pressures on the individual conscience in our time, and stressed the importance of saying “no” to violence and falsehood.
Their robust negations appeared to put both them and their American hosts on the right side of history, compared with writers in the unfree world of authoritarian regimes, who seemed to have been permanently tainted by lies, equivocations, and evasions. It was from the elevated ground of the open society that Martin Amis, briefly a proponent of collective punishment for Muslims, exhorted Westerners in 2007 to feel morally superior to the Taliban, and Salman Rushdie, champion of a “war of liberation” in Iraq, condemned, in 2012, that year’s laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mo Yan, as a “patsy” of the Chinese regime. More recently, cultural organizations and academic institutions reenacted the old Cold War skit casting the eastern seaboard as the vanguard of human emancipation as they denounced Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine and extended support to Ukrainian writers and academics.
For all its claims to superior virtue, the liberal American intelligentsia manifests very little of the courage and dignity it has expected from artists and thinkers in less fortunate societies, as hooded and masked officials disappear students for the crime of writing school-newspaper op-eds and liking social-media posts. Dissenters from far-right orthodoxies in the United States did not face such a concerted onslaught even in the early Fifties, when, threatened by the House Un-American Activities Committee, pursued by the FBI, and canceled by the Library of Congress, Thomas Mann departed the arsenal of democracy for Switzerland. Today, the “disgusting exhibition,” as Mann saw the witch hunts of McCarthyism, “of primitive Puritanism, hatred, fear, corruption and self-righteousness” is much more extensive. The destruction of U.S. institutions in order to suppress criticism of Israeli war crimes speaks to a pathology of self-mutilation that is striking even when measured against Stalin’s and Mao’s regimes (which, though infinitely more brutal, cared, above all, about projecting an image of national autonomy and sovereignty).
But the American intelligentsia is very far from manifesting a movement of moral and political self-criticism comparable to that of the intrepid dissidents it celebrated during the Cold War. No second “Harper’s Letter” has emerged, locating the threats to free _expression_ in an extremist ruling class, narcissistic Silicon Valley oligarchs, free-speech hucksters, and cravenly self-censoring media organizations and think tanks. The writers crying “Je suis Charlie” in 2015 have not made themselves heard saying “Je suis Refaat Alareer.” Nor has an institutionally backed solidarity rally of the kind that occurred after the attempted assassination of Rushdie been witnessed at the New York Public Library over the targeted killings of writers and journalists in Palestine. (Rushdie himself has accused student protesters of anti-Semitism and of supporting a “fascist terrorist group.”)
More than seven hundred writers signed a letter endorsing Kamala Harris. No one among them attempted, against the genocidal foreign policy of a senile president and his loyal deputies, the type of mild but prominent dissent voiced by Robert Lowell in an open letter to Lyndon Johnson that the New York Times published on its front page on June 3, 1965: “I . . . can only follow our present foreign policy with the greatest dismay and distrust.” Resistance liberalism yet again demonstrated its limits when Anne Applebaum, one of the most voluble heralds of global “autocracy,” took a strict vow of silence over the American-Israeli campaign of extermination—perhaps because she had once argued, in an article titled “Kill the Messenger,” that assassination was a legitimate strategy against Palestinian journalists.
It is possible that many writers believe, as John Updike did during the napalming of Vietnam, that they “had voted,” thus earning their “American right not to make a political decision for another four years.” Like Updike, they may think that their “stock in trade as an American author” includes an identification with the United States’ “national fortunes,” and that, as “privileged members of a privileged nation [they] believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world.”
In any case, only a few writers, strikingly almost all of non-Western ancestry, have taken the risk of pointing out truths distorted or concealed by interlocking class and ideological interests. As Kaveh Akbar put it recently: “It is excruciating to be the Muslim in every room forcing people to think about genocide, but I do not have the luxury of shitty cynicism or breezy despair.” It is also excruciatingly awkward for me, a nonresident alien (in IRS parlance), to say this: that the liberal American intelligentsia seems to have relaxed too cozily into imperial cultures of exaggerated self-esteem and self-satisfaction. A professionalized, even bureaucratized, and politically neutered literary-intellectual elite long ago shredded whatever countercultural aura the vocation had acquired over centuries; its compromised and enfeebled state is more vividly revealed today by the demons of sadism and stupidity rampaging across the United States.
Until 1945 at least, American writers resembled their counterparts elsewhere around the globe: mostly uncertain about their nation’s role in the world and troubled, if not personally damaged, by the age of extremes. The endless economic crises, wrenching social and political conflicts, and far-right insurrections of the low, dishonest decade made it impossible for many writers to remain neutral observers of social and ideological struggles. The pressures of conscience and craving for drama took Dos Passos and Hemingway to the Spanish Civil War. Edmund Wilson reported from picket lines during the Great Depression, traveled to the Soviet Union, and authored an introduction to revolutionary thought.
After 1945, an isolationist country found itself the world’s preeminent power, made stronger and more prosperous by a war that had reduced much of Europe and Asia to ruins. Visiting the United States in 1960, Italo Calvino noted the growing “abyss” between America and the rest of the world that made the country seem as alien as the moon. Calvino was struck by the relatively luxurious circumstances of American writers, and wondered whether the price for such plenitude was a “death of the soul.” Others worried, especially after the quick intellectual surrender to McCarthy in the early Fifties, about more tangible threats to the life of the mind in a simultaneously rich and conformist civilization. The intellect in America, Irving Howe warned in his classic 1954 essay “This Age of Conformity,” was increasingly prone to “some undignified prostrations” before wealth and power.
External observers have long been struck by the rampant depoliticization that has made the most celebrated American writers susceptible to the lures of unprincipled power and vacuous celebrity: for instance, David Foster Wallace spending over twenty thousand words to investigate, indecisively, whether John McCain was a moral hero and a “real leader or merely a very talented political salesman,” when a quick glance at the voting record of the warmongering Republican senator would have sufficed. In recent years, writers abroad who are, or romantically see themselves as, necessarily alienated critics of society have been baffled to see American counterparts gratefully receiving laurels from Barack Obama, “our own Black shining prince,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates, borrowing from Ossie Davis’s eulogy of Malcolm X, put it. In their eyes, some unprecedented confusion of literature with neoliberal chic occurred when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie read aloud, at the PEN America World Voices Festival, her Atlantic article that she had wanted to title “Why Is Hillary Clinton So Widely Loved?” as the former secretary of state looked on fondly.
These spectacles of writers speaking reassurance to power confirm Christopher Lasch’s diagnosis of more than half a century ago: that American “intellectuals, as a class, had achieved official recognition, affluence, prestige, and power, and something of the mentality that goes with them”: they had developed a stake in the perpetuation of the Pax Americana. Robert Frost matched the most spineless Stalinist hack by hailing the advent of “a golden age of poetry and power” when Kennedy arrived at the White House. In a new poem written for the inauguration, Robert Frost proposed an unprecedented alliance between imperial and literary authorities:
We see how seriously the races swarm
In their attempts at sovereignty and form.
They are our wards we think to some extent
For the time being and with their consent,
To teach them how Democracy is meant.
The central working assumption of PEN America and of the State Department—that the liberal American can teach the seriously swarming races what is meant by democracy—has been annihilated. Even some commonly used concepts that once seemed self-evident—American democracy, globalization, the West, and the rules-based international order—lie shattered. And it won’t be possible anymore for the liberal American intelligentsia to run up massive intellectual and moral deficits with American power as the invisible reserve currency.
Its helplessness today puts into sharper contrast its will to power, its often peremptory redefining of what art, literature, politics, democracy, and human rights are or are not. Shorn of its revolving door to the State Department and the Democratic Party establishment, PEN America will henceforth eke out a miserable existence, trying to simulate moral and intellectual supremacy long after its demise. Other enforcers of America’s postwar cultural hegemony are also likely to find themselves diminished. And, perhaps, a brutal estrangement from sources of power and patronage would be salutary in the long term.
It will be hard, though not impossible, for the beneficiaries of the remarkable American bonanza of grants, fellowships, and awards to break out of their elitist self-isolation and turn into dissidents. At the same time, adaptation to a regime of insolent cruelty and mendacity would require an amount of shitty cynicism that is fatal to intellectual and imaginative work. Too many consciences will be torn and shaken. American intellectual and literary culture may or may not abandon its deference to power and wealth and go to that necessary war against itself in order to salvage its dignity and purpose. But there is some cause for hope in the certainty that the best and brightest in the American intelligentsia won’t go looking for crumbs from the presidential table. Spurning breezy despair and jovial resignation, they might even assume the usual condition of writers elsewhere: a bitter but spiritually liberating powerlessness.