I think it’s become common to point out that conservative publishers have lost their way. I grew up during the renaissance of the conservative press that began in the Clinton administration, and so I sort of expected books like Treason and the various Jerome Corsi horrors to stick around on the best-seller pages; but the renaissance ended sometime during the long slow death of the Bush administration.
But all that tea-bagging junk seems to indicate that a fervent (if small) slice of the country is eager to consume screeds in the Nobama-and-down-with-socialism vein. So what’s up with the conservative press?
The New York Times hardcover non-fiction bestseller list is topped by a new conservative book. A success for the right. But if K-Lo is any indication, it operates in the geisty conservative mode (see: tea-baggers) that requires a right-wing critique of both the GOP and Democrats. This is a disingenuous stance, of course, but compared to the strictly partisan angle of the books that came out five or ten years ago, it’s a loss for the right. And the only other book that could qualify on the hardcover list? A mostly apolitical Bill O’Reilly book.
(Incidentally, the second-most awesome end of a review, all in the author’s words:
“When I visited Vatican City, I lit a candle in St. Peter’s, thanking God I was born an American,” he writes. “And I believe many Italians would echo the sentiment.”
Lololol.)
The paperback list? Only Amity Shlaes’ revisionist history of the New Deal, below Hitchens and one of two Obamas. (All of them underneath Tucker Max, sadly.) Compare to the hardcover non-fiction list in April 2003, with five-odd conservative political books on the list.
Ann Coulter’s sales are down. Regnery, formerly the nexus of the vast right-wing conspiracy, seems dispirited. Despite some recent charmers, the book it’s pimping hardest on its website is a toothless book on how to raise boring children.
The best-seller list is obviously an imperfect barometer of public opinion, but the change over the past years is instructive. While it’s easy to say that this is a result of the shifting political climate, and I think it partly is, it’s also indicative of a general change in non-fiction reading tastes. There were more left-wing political books on the 2003 list, as well. The era of the polemic seems to be fading, replaced by books about dogs, lions, and kittens. I think this might be a sort of realization of Obama’s promise of a post-partisan era, but I suspect the cause of that post-partisanship is the recession rather than Obama. When people are hard-pressed, they’d rather read kitteh stories than talking points: the weird fantasies of Bush-era partisan politics can’t gain traction when the real results of Bush-era policies are changing people’s lives. I think.
