#will be stealing the term “constipated correctness” though lol

[aint-love-heavy]

I don’t believe that creative people should avoid political engagement any more than other citizens, nor can they. In an intensely political time like ours, it’s inevitable that artists will turn to activism, and that politics will inform their work. But they should keep a vigilant watch on the border between the two so that neither does too much damage to the other.

The idea that such a border even exists may seem obsolete today. The invasion of politics into every crease of the cultural terrain is happening on both the right and the left—the right through government action and campaign rhetoric; the left through institutions of media, academia, and arts. These incursions require you to massage your artistic standards until they become identical to your political loyalties, and the notion that these could ever differ is rendered incomprehensible. It ought to be possible to say “This is a politically wrongheaded and well-written book” or “I share the author’s views—too bad he’s a terrible writer.” But you can guess the general outlines of a book review or prize competition if you know the politics of the authors, critics, and judges. Progressive orthodoxy has a strong grip on important institutions such as the National Book Awards and the MacArthur Foundation. If conservatives controlled them, the results would be equally predictable.

In 2021, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie criticized “people who claim to love literature—the messy stories of our humanity—but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy.” She worried that the constipated correctness of today’s literature would result in a generation of unreadable novels. In this atmosphere of rage and fear, where everything is public and everyone needs a tribe, political art becomes just another form of activism. Rather than disturbing our peace, this art has the reassuring effect of a petition with familiar names at the bottom, or the same sign held by thousands of protesters. It conveys a feeling that something right is being done about injustice. In a 1949 essay, James Baldwin wrote that “the ‘protest’ novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene … We receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all.” This fiction fails the main task of art, Baldwin wrote, because it denies human complexity and insists that our “categorization alone” is real.