by ANIS SHIVANI
There comes a time to quit something one has long been pursuing and even something one is good at. I feel like it’s time to quit political writing, at least of a particular kind that deals with the daily ups and downs in America, because it’s filling up headspace that takes away from crucial other tasks. I more or less quit writing literary criticism in 2017—along with writing poetry at the same time—after penning hundreds of thousands of words of literary criticism since the start of my career. It helped to abide by the new discipline because I announced my decision at a South Asian literary festival in Austin to a big audience and then stuck to it, except for the rare occasion when a friend or someone I respected asked me to write a review essay. And it was the right decision, my only regret being that I ever engaged in the pursuit, wasting precious years when I should have been dedicated entirely to my own fiction writing. Ultimately, I quit literary criticism because I didn’t feel that there was any real audience for the kind of criticism I was writing. I saw no value for it in the culture, and why pursue something valueless?
I feel the same way about writing about American politics now, that there is no audience for it. I can write for my own satisfaction, but if in my head I have the image of an iconoclast of the past such as Alexander Cockburn or Gore Vidal as my ideal audience, such readers have more or less ceased to exist. The feeling of speaking into a vacuum is further intensified by the manifest censorship among political outlets that took place in rising waves in 2016, 2020, and now 2024, preventing skeptical voices from gaining a foothold because that would supposedly have helped the fascists; democracy has had to be spurned in order to preserve democracy. Political writing strongly correlated with literary writing in this period, as the censors, in the name of a peculiar form of bland establishment wokeness, destroyed whatever remained vital in American writing, and have now reduced it to a cipher in terms of pure literary value. After a mere handful of interesting novels published in America in the 2000s (Hemon, O’Neill, Hamid), in the succeeding fifteen years I have found almost no American literary fiction to be of interest, and have pretty much stopped reading it. It’s no surprise that eventually political writing should succumb to the same pressures. Many of the iconoclastic journalists of the 2000s, such as Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi, have become Trump-adjacent, unintelligently selling populist myths that make me yearn for good old-fashioned liberalism. It wouldn’t be the first time in my life I have come to see plain vanilla liberalism as a healthy mental refuge from abstractions that can’t even be captured adequately under the rubric of conspiracy theory, so I’m used to personal course correction. It happened to me in the 1990s, when I confronted the actually existing ills of poverty and corruption in the developing world, as opposed to the fantasies spouted in Western academia, and it has happened a couple of other times, so I feel like I am prepared to exit from the cult of unhinged populism that has overcome my own confreres of the recent past.
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