Editor’s Note: At Minding the Campus, we have documented how identity supersedes merit in admissions, faculty hiring and promotion, scholarships, awards, and other opportunities. The essay below describes a similar problem in publishing, where young men, especially white men, struggle to find a place.

The literary world is not far removed from higher education. It grows out of the liberal arts and humanities, where writers encounter the books and ideas that shape our culture. Literature, especially the great books, is one of the principal means by which the West preserves its inheritance from one generation to the next.

In her essay, “The Right’s Retreat from the Liberal Arts and Its Intellectual Costs,” Liza Libes argued that the right made a mistake in abandoning the liberal arts. The same is true of literature. The right should not cede either.

Originally published by Chronicles, the essay is crossposted here with permission.

Here’s an interesting question: how many white American men born after 1984 have had a literary piece published in the New Yorker? The answer is zero. How did we get here, and who let this happen?

Every literary generation used to produce its Roth, Updike, Bellow, Wolfe, McCarthy, or Franzen. Today’s literary establishment shows no interest in producing young men of comparable prominence, especially if they’re straight and white. This is not a new or underdiagnosed problem; in fact, it appears to be a point of pride for the new generation of literary critics and publishers alike. Penguin Random House has no problem publishing its demographics yearly and celebrating the slow but consistent decline in white editorial staff.

Acclaimed novelist Joyce Carol Oates had no issue tweeting that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.” And, without a hint of irony, followed up that statement with “this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’” Although she is willing to recognize that young white men may be talented and barred from literary opportunities, she cannot help but equalize the statement with ludicrous notions of “privilege” where there is anything but.

None of this is especially controversial within the industry itself. By 2021, there was not a single white male millennial on the Times’s “Notable Fiction” list; the same was true in 2022, and only one appeared in each of the next two years. Demographic transformation of American publishing is measured, publicized, and, in many quarters, celebrated. The question is not whether the literary establishment has changed, but whether its new priorities have altered the kind of literature it is capable of producing. If the aspiring Roth or McCarthy today finds fewer editors willing to take his manuscript seriously (not because of its prose but because of the demographic profile of its author), that represents more than an injustice to individual writers. It represents a narrowing of the imaginative possibilities of American literature itself.

Beyond the disparities in race among novelists and literary agents lies the much more pervasive racial disparity in short-form magazines where fiction writers can build a portfolio. These magazines brazenly cater to just about every favored identity group imaginable. They offer fee-free submissions for minority groups; they have exclusive windows to segregate who may submit; and they champion these groups as combating historical overrepresentation from white men. This, of course, can only go on so long before these identity groups, themselves, become the overrepresented ones.

The most commonly offered explanation for this obvious discrimination against white men is that publishing is simply “correcting historical imbalances.” An industry that once professed indifference to the identity of the author increasingly treats identity as a meaningful criterion in and of itself. Literary merit is now expected to coexist with representational goals, institutional diversity targets, and a moral vocabulary inherited from Marxist cultural theory. The result is a publishing culture that increasingly evaluates fiction not as art but rather as an instrument of social justice.

What does this mean for us? What does this mean for the West?

Many conservatives are quick to dismiss fiction and literary pursuits as lowbrow or frivolous. These shortsighted people tell us that stories are just something for children or young adults to read for pleasure and do not have the same impact on our culture that as other pursuits. It is not uncommon for even the most bookish of Republicans to view the whole question with disdain, but that attitude ignores several key truths.

First, novels are among civilization’s most powerful instruments of cultural transmission. Long before a people codifies its values in law, it embodies them in myth, folklore, drama, and fiction. A society’s fiction reveals what it admires, what it fears, what it finds amusing, what it regards as sacred, and what it believes worthy of preservation. While conservatives buried themselves in historical reports, manifestos, and memoirs, those on the left gleefully captured the hearts and imaginations of the American people. Novels serve as a basis for movies and television series; they inspire people to act; they are quoted and cited ad nauseam in debate and discussion. The right wing has been all too happy to concede this ground to a political class eager to deconstruct and destroy the West.

The right has ceded the literary world under the mistaken assumption that novels are luxuries while politics is reality. In truth, politics follows culture, and culture is transmitted through stories. Before a people votes together, it imagines together. The abolitionist movement had Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Progressivism had The Jungle. Anti-totalitarian liberalism had 1984 and Animal Farm.

The disappearance of young male authors is not just another sign of a decline in literacy, or another case of DEI taken too far; it is the drying up of the fertile ground in America from which all ideas spread. If conservatives wish to preserve Western civilization, they cannot content themselves with competing in elections while abandoning those institutions that shape imagination. They will need publishers, journals, literary prizes, patrons, critics, and, above all, novelists. Politics may determine who governs a nation. Stories determine what kind of nation we’ll have.