Is Literature Losing Its Audience Because of Politics?

Americans are bored of reading. A 2021 Gallup poll found that the average American now reads 12.6 books per year, down from 18.5 in the late 1990s. The contrast is even starker in college-educated readers, whose yearly book quota has dropped to 14.6 from 21.1. Lawyer and history buff Yan Margolin suggests that the prevalence of more technologically advanced modes of entertainment has made long-form reading virtually obsolete, and writers at The New Yorker and the APA concur. It’s true: we simply no longer have the attention spans to make it through an average-length novel, let alone a literary behemoth. Yet while the technology boom has certainly accelerated the reading bust, there’s something even more profound that is pushing people away from reading: literature has become a bastion for the radical Left.