Conservatives often seem to resist reading
fiction, preferring fact-laden books on history, philosophy, or economics.
Similarly, conservatives are more likely to recommend the latest book by
Mark Levin or Ann Coulter, or a philosophical evergreen by Thomas Sowell or
Milton Friedman, than a work of fiction.
Yet fiction can be a powerful tool in advancing ideas, as the left
well understands. Fiction can entertain and outrage, trigger sympathy or
revulsion, provoke pity or pride, thus allowing the political or moral point to
be absorbed by the reader indirectly.
To that end, this writer humbly submits ten books that can be read
and enjoyed by a conservative looking for wisdom conveyed in a different form
from nonfiction. These books can be recommended to an apolitical person
who resists an overtly political screed. Or they can be part of a
homeschooling curriculum for a bright high school student (though some have
decidedly mature themes, as noted).
The list of books is eclectic, featuring both social and economic
themes and both American and European authors. In an effort to be
accessible, the roster is limited to "modern" (post-19th century)
novels.
With the prologue established, the list follows. Let the
brickbats fly!
1984 by George Orwell
George Orwell's 1984 is a dystopian novel
focusing on an individual living in "Oceania," a socialist society
comprising the present-day nations of England and the Americas. Oceania
is characterized by perpetual war; government surveillance; and the
"thought police," who persecute "thoughtcrime."
The novel's protagonist, Winston Smith, works for the
"Ministry of Truth," which is engaged in the practice of constantly
editing history to conform to the current party line. People and places
are changed, erased, or added as needed.
Although 1984 was intended as an indictment of
totalitarianism, especially the USSR under Stalin, the novel today can be seen
as a reflection of the current regime of political correctness in the popular
media and academia.
The erasing of America's past, renaming of holidays, and defacing
and elimination of statues can all be seen as an effort to conform America's
history to the Progressive party line, in a manner similar to that foreseen by
Orwell.
This is
how Orwell described it:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book
has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street
and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is
continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists
except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
Sound familiar?
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand's magnum opus, published in 1957, has influenced more
conservatives and libertarians than any other novel, from the
Alt-Right Milo
Yiannopoulos to the establishment Republican Paul
Ryan.
While the book's atheism and materialism are off-putting to many
on the right, the novel celebrates the power of the individual in human
achievement, the morality of capitalism, and the centrality of the
entrepreneur. These are many of the themes covered in Human
Action, the treatise on economics by acclaimed economist Ludwig von Mises.
But Ayn Rand's book gives flesh and blood to the Misesian themes,
presenting an exciting narrative with colorful characters and exuberance.
In addition, the book seems to have particular appeal to younger readers.
It appears from
recent surveys that our millennials have been infected with the virus of
socialism. Atlas Shrugged is the ideal antidote.
Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Long before Black Lives Matter and "Hands up, don't
shoot," Tom Wolfe illuminated the reality of racial politics in the
liberal big city.
His 1987 novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, revolves
around a young, wealthy investment banker named Sherman McCoy, self-described
"Master of the Universe," who accidentally enters the South
Bronx at night while driving to Manhattan. Lost and disoriented, McCoy is
involved in an accident with a young black man, which leads to criminal
charges. But this isn't an ordinary hit-and-run case. A liberal New
York prosecutor seizes on the McCoy case for his own political ends.
Whether McCoy is actually guilty or not quickly becomes irrelevant – all
that matters is that he a white defendant against a black victim. The
novel skillfully demonstrates how the interplay of the zealous prosecutor,
radical black activists, and a biased media culminate in a state of hysteria
where facts become meaningless.
Thirty years later, Wolfe's take on America's racial politics
remains prescient. In both the Trayvon Martin case in 2012 and the
Ferguson-Michael Brown case in 2014, we saw the same interplay of forces at
work: the radical activists, the cowardly and scheming politicians, and the
narrative-driven media.
Bonfire helps to make sense of it all.
Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail
Camp of the Saints was published in 1973 and quickly disappeared into obscurity.
Its premise seemed too far-fetched: prompted by charitable overtures from
Belgium, an armada of a million starving third-world immigrants sets sail from
India, headed for Europe. The armada arrives on the shores of the French
Riviera, and chaos ensues. The title of the book comes from the Book of Revelation,
describing the apocalypse.
The focus of Raspail's novel is less on the advancing immigrant
armada than on the various ineffectual responses of the French intelligentsia,
media, and clergy. (One of the voices in support of the advancing
multitude is a left-wing Latin-American pope!)
What appeared far-fetched in 1973 is coming to pass in Europe
today: the introduction of a million migrants into Europe, courtesy of Angela
Merkel (and with the blessing of the pope) coupled with a demographic collapse
that even Raispal could not envision. The book, which had languished in
obscurity, returned to the French bestseller list in 2011.
In an insightful analysis in The Federalist, John Daniel
Davidson observed:
At the heart of the novel is a moral question: Is the West
willing to defend itself? Denounced upon publication four decades ago as a
racist, xenophobic fantasy, Raspail's book now seems vaguely prophetic – not
because of what it tells us about refugees from the Third World but because of
what it reveals about European civilization.
The book is uncomfortable, often painful, to read. It needs
to be read anyway.
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
Written more than seven decades ago, Arthur Koestler's Darkness
at Noon stands as one of the most penetrating denunciations of
totalitarianism ever written. The book tells the story of Rubashov, a
veteran of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, who is imprisoned and tried for
treason by the regime he helped to create. The book is based on the
infamous Moscow "show trials" of the 1930s in which Stalin purged
many of the old Bolsheviks on trumped up charges obtained through manipulations
and induced confessions.
The show trials were bad enough. Worse still was the fact that
many intellectuals in the West defended them, including New York Times
correspondent Walter
Duranty.
The Times continues to whitewash Soviet atrocities to this day.
Recently, the Times put together a collection of nostalgic remembrances
about communism as part of a series called "Red Century," exploring
the legacy of communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution. Many of
the articles sounded as if they were concocted in the old Soviet propaganda
ministry. In one piece,
for example, we learn that "women had better sex under socialism."
In another, we discover that
the USSR was a global pioneer in conservation. In a third essay,
fondly titled "When Communism Inspired Americans," the Times
recalls that "at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world
solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of
men and women a sense of one's own humanity that ran deep, made life feel
large; large and clarified."
None of these insipid pieces can survive a single reading of Darkness
at Noon.
I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
Audaciously written from the point of view of an innocent
Christian schoolgirl, I Am Charlotte Simmons is a searing indictment
of the decadence of modern academia.
The protagonist, Charlotte Simmons, is an attractive and
intelligent but naïve freshman from a small town in North Carolina.
Charlotte receives a scholarship to "DuPont University," an Ivy
League school on the "other side" of the mountains, both literally
and figuratively. Back home, this is front page news. She is ready
to go off and live "the life of the mind" at DuPont.
But Charlotte's experiences at this elite institution turn out to
be considerably different from what she expected. She discovers, to her
shock, that at DuPont, academic achievement takes second place to sexual
conquest. The novel explores who Charlotte Simmons is and what she
becomes.
Wolfe, a master social satirist, takes on the modern university
experience – the random hookups, drug use, identity politics, and jock-worship.
His depiction is uncompromising – the language and sex scenes are very
frank.
Though written in 2004, the book already seems dated in some
respects – "safe spaces," Antifa, and transgender bathrooms were
still to come. But Charlotte Simmons's enduring value is showing
how the sex-soaked culture of the Ivy League college – it was based on Wolfe's
interviews with students at North Carolina, Florida, Penn, Duke, and Stanford –
devalues rather than liberates women.
Last of the Breed by Louis L'Amour
Louis L'Amour was known primarily as a writer of westerns,
but Last of the Breed is a Cold War novel, with a heavy dose
of masculine survivalism. Its inclusion on this list may surprise some:
it is a boy's adventure story, not an intellectual tour de force, but it's just
the kind of book we desperately need today.
Last of the Breed tells the story of Joe Makatozi, an Air Force major, whose
aircraft is forced down in the Soviet Union. Makatozi is an Indian, part
Sioux, part Cherokee.
The Soviet interrogator seeks to exploit his "Native American
victim status," but Makatozi will have none of it.
A proud Indian, a proud American, "Mack" escapes from
the prison camp and heads toward America through the Bering Strait
(much as his ancestors did thousands of years ago). In order to escape,
however, he needs to fend off his Soviet pursuers and survive the harsh
Siberian terrain.
Critic John J. Miller noted in National Review:
Moral ambiguity didn't interest L'Amour. He had a clear
sense of right and wrong: People should build rather than destroy, protect the
innocent and vulnerable, and recognize that law and order can descend into
chaos and barbarism with savage swiftness. L'Amour also didn't write sex
scenes, which made him a bit of an outlier among the popular novelists of his
time. He called sex "a leisure activity" and said he had more
important things to write about.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich deals with the struggle for survival
in a Soviet prison camp in the 1950s, part of the vast infrastructure of such
camps known as the Gulag Archipelago.
Solzhenitsyn had firsthand experience in the Siberian Gulag and
movingly writes of the various prisoners and their predicaments. In the
Gulag, the protagonist encounters a cross-section of Russian society, and,
indeed, the novel is allegorical – the whole of Stalinist Russia was a vast
prison camp with no escape. Ivan's struggle was the struggle of every
oppressed victim of Communist tyranny.
Chilton Williamson, noted author and critic, wrote of Ivan
Denisovitch that the novel is "a testimony to the essential
unmalleability of human nature by a political system whose professed raison
d'être is to alter not only human behavior but humanity itself."
America's storytellers, particularly in Hollywood, depict Nazism
as the sole or preeminent evil of the 20th century. A record of 100
million corpses suggests otherwise.
State of Fear by Michael Crichton
In 2005, Michael Crichton, author of sci-fi classics The
Andromeda Strain andJurassic Park, produced a thriller in
which the evildoers are radical environmentalists.
The theme of Crichton's adventure is that the widespread fear of
catastrophic global warming is baseless. As one his characters puts it,
"[l]ike the belief in witchcraft, it's an extraordinary delusion – a
global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages."
Though it's a work of fiction, State of Fear backs
its assertions with scientific evidence and an impressive bibliography.
But while the book on the surface deals with global warming, it is
really about something deeper: the assumption that man has the knowledge to
predict the future with precision. It's the illusion upon which all
central planning is built, including the "climate modeling" that
serves as the basis of Al Gore's fantasies. "I prefer true but
imperfect knowledge," the great economist Friedrich Hayek once said,
"to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false."
Crichton considered himself a political agnostic. And while
he thought climate research was impressive, it was simply not good enough to
justify radically transforming energy policy. "I never thought the
idea that you can't predict the future would be controversial,"
Crichton said,
echoing Hayek.
Submission by Michel Houellebecq
Submission is set in the near future – 2022 – in a France that has
elected a Muslim president who governs in coalition with the Socialist Party.
The theme is the ascent of political Islam in Europe and the crumbling of
an increasingly secular West.
The novel's protagonist is a symbol of the decadence of western
Europe: sex-obsessed, materialistic, bored, lacking religious faith.
Houellebecq's frank depiction of Islam is uncompromising. As
reviewer Jane Clark Sharl has noted:
There are no platitudes here of Islam as a partner-religion
with Christianity, Islam as a force for unity, or Islam as a spiritualized arm
of progressivism. Mr. Houellebecq describes Islam as it actually is: male-centric
to the point of chauvinism, aggressive, political, dominant. He has no
compunction about including all the doctrines of Islam, including those most
distasteful to the contemporary elite. Despite repeated insistence otherwise,
the Islam in Submission is not satirical; it is historically
and ideologically accurate.
Christian conservatives may find this book a tough read – the sex
scenes are graphic, and it is definitely written for a mature audience.
But it's a story that needs to be told.
***
The late Andrew Breitbart famously observed that
"culture is downstream from politics." Good storytelling is the
way we advance the cultural narrative. Conservatives ignore this to their
peril.