Unique book
Radicalizing is the mood of the moment, it's the hottest word on the planet. One last embarrassing example? Catalans and Spaniards. In recent weeks we have already published a post on this topic and discussed the consequences of such a state of affairs that finds a powerful pandemic push in the anonymous mechanisms of social media and information sharing and dissemination algorithms. The so-called “echo chambers”. Few things are more harmful than radicalization, which is the antechamber of the bite. This mood has now taken root in every aspect of social life, including the world of books on topical issues of public conversation.
The same book recommendation algorithm operating on Amazon, "Whoever bought this... bought also...", in its disarming impartiality, contributes more to spreading than to fighting political radicalization. The algorithm, instead of suggesting books that can contribute to opening a discussion on the theme addressed by a given work, for example proposing a book with an opposite thesis, ends up recommending completely homogeneous readings aligned with the one considered. But it's not the fault of the algorithm, which unfortunately, with little artificial intelligence, weighs only the quantity and commercial relevance, but of the readers who increasingly tend to buy and read books with a unique thought, precisely the one that feeds their mind.
According to the Economist, Amazon, the world's largest bookstore that could also truly be the most important global cultural institution, should put a patch on this state of affairs and start promoting the value of cultural pluralism and the battle of ideas.
Democracy dies in obscurity
Indeed, a survey by the London periodical tells us that readers of essays and current affairs books have become radicalised: they tend to buy and, perhaps, read only what is homogeneous with their own ideas. If they're conservative, they don't even come close to opposing content. But they don't even find it offered by Amazon. Progressives are even more sectarian: anything that doesn't fit with their worldview is anathema. And the algorithm is careful not to offer him books of different political origins. And instead it should because, as the motto of the "Wahsington Post" says, wanted by its new owner Jeff Bezos, "democracy dies in obscurity". To recommend only what confirms one's ideas is obscurantism and perpetuates that modern quasi-religious fanaticism at which Voltaire and Spinoza would be horrified. One more step forward and we are at the burning of books in the squares.
As we said, "The Economist", the most important liberal think-tank in the world, has dealt with this issue and we are happy to offer our readers the reflections of the London magazine.
Clinton's cupio dissolvi
That people of different political opinion read different books is something that leaves no one speechless. After all, readers of different political views live in different places, eat differently, listen to their own music and, of course, consume information of a different nature. All of this reinforces a trend: increasingly, progressives and conservatives are ignoring each other. Valdis Krebs, a data analyst specializing in the web, conducted an analysis of the books sold by Amazon for “The Economist”. This dynamic graph shows the results. There is fun! People who buy conservative books usually only buy books by right-wing authors. The same can be said of progressives. These data were processed by analyzing the Amazon service "Whoever bought this... also bought...".
Two large liberal-inspired tomes dominate the New York Times ranking of non-fiction bestsellers. In What Happened, Hillary Clinton acknowledges some mistakes of her presidential campaign, but spends much more time and energy on Russia's meddling, the role of the media and James Comey, the FBI director whose investigation into Clinton's emails allegedly cost , according to the author, his election as president.
The second place in the "Times" ranking is occupied by Unbelievable by Katy Tur, published on September 12, 2017. The book recounts the author's experience as a correspondent for the NBC television network following Donald Trump during the electoral campaign. La Tur we need a story about Trump's shameful behavior towards her: from verbally assaulting her for her reporting, to kissing her cheeks and then bragging about it in front of the cameras. You once went so far as to openly goad onlookers into taunting her with the nickname "little Katy," to such an extent that Trump's security was forced to escort her out for fear of her personal safety.
Fair play
But the past years have also seen serious attempts to break the logic of writing for the sole benefit of loyal readers. One way to do this was to write something objective, or at least honest, about the other party. Some writers, especially on the left, have tried to do this.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, professor emeritus of sociology at Berkeley, spent months in Louisiana trying to figure out how right-wing voters -- economically impoverished and hit by the environmental disaster wrought by oil companies -- could vote for candidates whose agenda was to cut the intervention and to get rid of environmental protection agencies. Hochschild's book, Strangers in their Own Land, published in 2006, was read predominantly by left-leaning readers, not people like the one she addressed in the book. The same happened in White Trash (June 2016), a study of the atavistic forces that shaped a class of angry white people. In the typical tribalization of this period, that of Nancy Isenberg, author of the book, is an analysis strongly felt by the bloc of voters that formed Trump's electoral base.
Conservative writers, on the other hand, seem uninterested in analyzing the minds of voters in Brooklyn or Berkeley, who voted en masse for Clinton. But that wasn't always the case. In the 2000s and the first decade of the 2000s, there was more openness on these issues. David Brooks, a conservative columnist, insightfully sensed in his book Bobos in Paradise (XNUMX) the confluence of the bohemian lifestyle and the values of the career bourgeoisie. PJ O'Rourke, a conservative comedian, has poignantly described the birth of
liberal pietism in books such as Parliament of Whores (1991). But today it seems highly unlikely that someone like Dinesh D'Souza could have engaged in a frank discussion with Democrats before writing The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, one of the conservative political bestsellers of 2016.
The critical eye in your own home
Courageous right-wing writers have taken a different approach: the critical examination of one's own political side. Two Republican senators have both written a book warning against the rise of Trump.
Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, has never endorsed his party's nominee. In The Vanishing American Adult he talks about a country in "perennial adolescence" where the values of family, reading and community are giving way to selfishness, the pursuit of success and television. It is rare to find a politician's book that can be read by both tribes.
A conservative's more explicitly political book on conservatism has not met with the same bipartisan success, however. Jeff Flake, a senator from Arizona, criticized his party for making a Faustian deal for power by allying with Trump and ditching politics in favor of free trade, the soft state, and leading the democratic world. His Conscience of a Conservative was interpreted as a cry of alarm by his party comrades. Those who bought the book on Amazon probably also picked up Charles Sykes' How The Right Lost Its Mind, Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, or even Tur's Unbelievable or a book by another prominent conservative writer.
Leftist writers have certainly not lacked friendly fire for their own side. In The Once and Future Liberal, Columbia University's Mark Lilla criticized the sort of moral panic over issues of race, gender, and sexual identity that distorted the liberal message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force. Republicans could have gotten hold of the book by arguing that the left has gone astray by focusing on minorities at the expense of ordinary people in the American heartland. But Lilla's book is read almost exclusively by those who eat only liberal-inspired books.
One of the most favorably reviewed books on Amazon was also a surprise bestseller. This is JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Vance's family, "prone to violence," left a mining town in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky to move to an industrial town in Ohio. It is precisely the "white scum" on which other studies have focused in researching why this class of people has abandoned the Democratic Party. But Vance is not an anthropologist, he is an insider. Drugs, alcohol and violence have poisoned his family and the city of him and Vance, a conservative politician, is extremely critical of this culture. Left-leaning intellectuals and Republicans alike have enjoyed this book, published in 2016, but it is mostly bought by left-leaning readers.
A misleading title
Perhaps the most painful cross-sectional book category is the story of Clinton's ill-fated campaign. The book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign is the account of two journalism veterans like Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes on the confusion and disunity that reigned on the Clinton staff. Politicians of all stripes seem to care about this story.
The same thing did not happen to The Destruction of Hillary Clinton by Susan Bordo, a feminist professor at the University of Kentucky. Bordo argues that America is simply unprepared to welcome a woman with a personality as strong as that of the Democratic candidate. Many of the comments on Amazon seem to share this opinion giving the book a full five stars. Almost all those who are not of that opinion at all, manifest it rather vulgarly by assigning it a single star. Perhaps many of them bought the book with the belief that the word "destruction" in the title meant a joyful narrative of failure and not a celebration of the virtues of Clint's feminism.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought the "Washington Post" and wanted a new motto: "Democracy dies in darkness". But Amazon has conquered the book market also thanks to the efficiency of its recommendation engine, which now helps fuel the dark side of American politics. Whether Amazon will or can do something to change this state of affairs remains to be discovered.
