The Rise of Illiterate Democracy

By SEAN WILENTZ

The nonfiction best-seller lists these days are often full of partisan screeds labeling Democrats as elitist traitors and Republicans as conniving plutocrats. But look over on the fiction side, and politics appears almost nowhere. Some critics read Philip Roth's "Plot Against America" as an allegory of the current White House, and there have even been a few blunt and appalling political fantasies, like Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint," a brief dialogue between a man who wants to assassinate George W. Bush and a friend who wants to talk him out of it. But unlike the ubiquitous nonfiction tub-thumpers, today's novels rarely take the grubby business of ordinary politics, past or present, as a subject, let alone an activity in which their authors might participate. Contemporary party politics, which once inspired writers as different as James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain and Robert Penn Warren, is terra incognita. The separation of church and state is hotly contested; the separation of literature and state seems to have become absolute.

It was very different during the formative era of American democratic politics before the Civil War. Some observers of that time, it is true, claimed that American democracy would never encourage profound writing. "The inhabitants of the United States have, then, at present, properly speaking, no literature," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the second volume of "Democracy in America," published in 1840. Tocqueville thought democracy would some day produce "vehement and bold" novelists, and poets who explored "some of the obscurer recesses of the human heart." But when that distant day arrived, he supposed it would have little to do with the frenzied moneymaking and party politics that dominated the New World.