WHAT WE CAN READ INTO US ELECTION CANDIDATES’ FAVOURITE BOOKS

From virtue signalling to self-promotion, reading tips from Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and JD Vance say a lot about American politics

‘Just over half of Americans said they read at least one book in 2023,” according to the polling company YouGov. The phrasing is distinctly glass-half-full. What about the just under half of Americans who read no books in 2023? Not a single spine cracked, not a single page dog-eared. What do these people do with their time?

“Most people don’t read,” the novelist Zadie Smith observed recently. Well, it looks as if most Americans do — although, according to YouGov, we’re hardly talking about a supermajority.

To the habitual reader, reading books seems self-evidently beneficial. But it’s only liberal self-flattery that sees books as indispensable to the business of living a good or meaningful life.

On the other hand, it’s always reassuring to learn that the leaders of what used to be called the Free World have had at least a glancing acquaintance with the printed page. What do American presidents and vice-presidents read? Do they read at all? And if so, what do they make of the books they’ve read?

America, the anti-intellectual utopia, has a dirty little secret: it is a nation founded by intellectuals. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t just a sly political operative or a canny statesman: he was one of the major thinkers of the Enlightenment, and was deeply familiar with the work of the Enlightenment’s other major thinkers.

Ironically, it was Jefferson who originated the strain of “common sense” anti-intellectualism that has done so much to shape America’s sense of itself (and the world’s sense of America). His vision of a nation of modest — and modestly white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant — farmers cannily voting for their rational self-interest still sits somewhere near the heart of America’s self-image. It is partly because of this that American intellectuals, when they go into politics, have generally had to pretend to be something else.

Or at least try to pretend. Not every candidate has managed the trick. Adlai Stevenson, who had a degree from Princeton in literature and history, ran for president twice (in 1952 and 1956) on the Democratic ticket. He was famously derided as an “egghead” and lost on both occasions to General Dwight D Eisenhower, whom voters admired for the image he projected of plainspoken virility.

In egghead terms, Stevenson’s natural successor in the Democratic Party is Barack Obama. Like Stevenson, Obama gave pretending not to be an intellectual his best shot, and failed. His best efforts to be folksy boiled down to saying the word “folks” a lot. But an egghead is what he was and everyone knew it: editor of the Harvard Law Review, author of his own memoir and campaign book — the readable Dreams from My Father (1995) and the unreadable The Audacity of Hope (2006) — Obama famously devoted his evenings to solitary reading and reflection, like the very model of a liberal intellectual.

Liberal intellectuals adored Obama because he was one of their own; they especially enjoyed his book recommendations, which he still makes. These tend to be eclectic in the same way that an “Our Staff Recommends” table in Waterstones is eclectic — that is, they are advertisements for a general, as opposed to a specific, taste. Obama’s 2023 summer reading list includes a serial killer thriller by SA Cosby, Jonathan Eig’s biography of Dr Martin Luther King and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, which one outlet described as “a polyphonic and uplifting novel set at a community grocery store”.

EGGHEAD-IN-DISGUISE

Obama’s reading lists are exercises in marketplace promotion (one of the things they promote, of course, is the post-presidential multimedia Obama brand). What about those exercises in political self-promotion, the favoured-reading lists supplied by incumbent or aspirational POTUSes and Veeps?

Let’s look at the current crop. Kamala Harris — who, at the time of writing, has secured with alarming swiftness the endorsements and convention delegates needed to ratify her presidential candidacy in August — is a classic egghead-in-disguise. Her mother was a biologist and her father an academic economist. Harris has definitely read books, and in 2019 she supplied a list of her personal faves to the book blog Book Riot. First on the list is Native Son by Richard Wright, the 1940 classic in which Bigger Thomas, a barely literate black kid who grows up on Chicago’s South Side, murders his employer’s daughter, whom he loves, in an excess of terror about what will happen to a black man caught in white girl’s bedroom.

Native Son is still, after eight decades, a shocker of crude Dostoyevskyan power, but it is also, unimpeachably, a canonical indictment of systemic racism in America. As a political signifier, it is very mildly edgy; but also, it is absolutely a book that you might expect a mixed-race Democratic candidate to praise.

Harris’s list also includes The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini; The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan; Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison; and The Lion,

the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. There’s a term for this list: “virtue signalling”. It adumbrates not an idiosyncratic taste but a desire to be seen as generally left-progressive: multicultural but in a warm-hearted, mainstream way sanctified by the Nobel Prize and the New York

Times bestseller list.

It would, I suppose, be asking too much for a vice-presidential candidate to signal her adoration of Pauline Réage’s BDSM classic The Story ofO , or to confess to a sneaking admiration for Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s vitriolic Journey to the End of the Night. Blandness is the rule, in these

If anyone has become rich through reading Trump: How to Get Rich, they have kept pretty quiet about it. Wouldn’t you?

precincts — blandness, and the micromanaging of political acceptability.

CS Lewis presumably appears on Harris’s list because he is a constant favourite of the American evangelical right: the Narnia books are works of barely coded Christian apologetics, and Aslan the lion is, as Jonathan Franzen once put it, “a furry, four-pawed Christ figure”. Perhaps Harris was hoping to sway a few evangelical voters with this pick. Perhaps it worked.

In any event, an avowed admiration for Lewis is something that Harris shares with Donald Trump’s just-appointed VP candidate, the chameleonic Catholic convert JD Vance. From the anti-intellectual standpoint, Vance has one major strike against: he first became famous as the author of a book, the forgettable memoir Hillbilly Elegy,

which supposedly explained why poor white people, abandoned by neoliberal elites, were primed to vote for Trump.

Vance is also an admirer of the French-American Catholic anthropologist René Girard. Girard’s work is popular among Silicon Valley tech overlords for his theory of “mimetic desire,” which in their hands becomes the idea that people can be made to want things by seeing other people want them. (A familiarity with Girard’s work was what encouraged Peter Thiel to invest in Facebook, way back when.)

Asked to name his favourite novel, Vance said The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, he named his venture capital firm, Narya, after one of the Rings of Power from Tolkien’s trilogy: a depressing response to a work of literature, if you ask me, but perhaps that’s why I don’t run a venture capital firm.

The Lord of the Rings is not exactly un-mainstream. But we should perhaps always worry when an aspiring public servant names an ethically uncomplicated good-versus-evil story as his preferred reading. Public life — indeed, life itself — is not a good and evil story, no matter how much we may wish it so; and in our wishing lurks considerable danger.

Similarly, there is, in Tolkien, an unignorable strain of nostalgic authoritarianism. The story hinges, after all, on the idea that there can and should be a rightful king, and that the cosmos is ordered into higher and lesser races (Tolkien’s dwarfs, as the science fiction writer Adam Roberts has pointed out, are hook-nosed gold-hoarders, and this is, as they say, pretty problematic).

And then there’s Trump himself, who claims that he doesn’t get much time to read, these days: a shame to see such a mind go to waste. But that’s politics. Asked to supply lists of his favourite reading, he tends to name books that he caused to exist and that bear his name: The Art of the Deal (1987), ghostwritten by the journalist Tony Schwartz, or Trump: How to Get Rich (2004), ghostwritten by Meredith McIver, who is “a staff writer at The Trump Organisation” (now there’s a job).

Are these books any good? It depends what you mean by good, really. If anyone has become rich through reading Trump: How to Get Rich,

they have kept pretty quiet about it — though wouldn’t you? And unless the advice it contains is “have a rich dad,” its usefulness is probably limited anyway.

Here we are. Books have a life in American politics. It’s a strange life, in which books become tokens in a reductive game of signification, meaningless except in so far as they “say something” about a given politician’s personal or strategic goals. Speaking for the readers among us, I must insist that books — even the really bad ones — can and should mean more than that.

⬤ Kevin Power is the author of ‘White City’ and

‘Bad Day in Blackrock’