Amazon has introduced a heat map of the political books sold in the U.S. An overwhelming lean toward red hues suggests that conservative-themed books are outselling left leaning ones coast to coast.
Amazon is quick to point out that the system isn’t scientific. The map presents a rolling 30-day average of book-buying data and classifies them as red or blue depending on promotional materials and customer classifications. And there’s no sliding scale. A book is either red or blue, so there’s no nuance for centrists. “Just remember, books aren’t votes,” Amazon says on the heat map site. “So a map of book purchases may reflect curiosity as much as commitment.”
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that even reliably blue states like California come out in shades of red in the Amazon map. According to publishing-industry analyst Michael Norris, of Simba Information, that might be due to the right’s ability to connect with its readers. “I can tell you that there are conservative imprints and conservative publishers that are just brilliant at figuring out what kind of books their audience wants to read,” Norris told Wired. “There just aren’t aggressively left-leaning imprints like that.”
Caveat emptor, but an interesting perspective. The full article, with some visuals, is here. Addendum: Ezra Klein comments.
There looks to be some double counting on both sides going on. If you look through the list of the 100 top books in each category, Kindle editions are listed separately from the print editions so that there are not really ’100′ books. It’s also arguable that some of these titles should be considered ‘current’ political books (Frantz Fanon is more a blast from the past than au courant). Some books on each side are works of serious scholarship, others on both sides are just hack jobs. Tyler’s comment of caveat emptor is appropriate.
If they’re just counting volume, I don’t see how listing the same book in two or more spots affects it.
It was interesting comparing the number of reviews of books to their rank-match on the other side.
Double counting is an issue. Also, most of the books are fairly categorised, but some are not. For example, Bill O’Reilly is a right-wing hack, but his co-authored book on Lincoln (I’ve read it) makes no comment at all on present-day politics, so I don’t think it should be on the list as a “red” book. On the other hand, Jonathan Haidt’s book (which I haven’t read) is, from what I understand, pretty sympathetic to the right, so shouldn’t really be classified as a “blue” book.
What I found most surprising is how low Obama’s books come in the “blue” book list, nos. 38, 42 and 98 (two editions of Audavity of Hope). I wonder if that indicates how disappointed or unenthusiastic a lot of American progressives are about Obama. Given the number of anti-Obama books on the red list, seems that there might be a bit of an enthusiasm gap in the presidential election.
I think the far more obvious explanation is that Audacity of Hope came out in 2008. The top of the list is dominated by books from 2012 and 2011, and “classics” such as Atlas Shrugged and A People’s History of the US.
It is interesting that Ayn Rand books are so popular when she had such contempt for popular taste. At least she was right about something.
This can’t possibly be true. Everyone knows conservatives can’t read.
And liberals don’t read, because they already know everything.
Conclusion: Conservative books have better pictures. Possibly we have found the secret of Ann Coulter’s success as an “author”.
Wwow, A People’s History is being counted there, I doubt any state would be blue without that being counted.
Why is it that the whole map looks essentially red yet the national split reported is only 56% Red Books?
Amazon has their own Electoral College.
HW Bush got 53% of the vote in 1988. He won 41 states. Reagan got 59% of the vote in 1984. He won 49 states. The fact that 56% Red leads to winning 44 states and tying 1 is not unusual, it’s how conservative landslides work.
If you are talking about current book sales, don’t you have to include some shades of gray with your red-blue dichotomy?
Yes… shades of grey… one for each of the 50 states…
We could call it Fifty Grey Shades, or something.
I get the impression that liberals are similarly over-represented in readership of periodicals (newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc). I will leave it to another commenter to draw out some deep psychological meaning from these divergent reading preferences.
OK, I’ll take the bait. Conservatives are more ideological – liberals are more pragmatic. Conservatives favor the sweeping generalizations and grand theories that are better suited to book-length treatment: eg., Collectivism Bad/Individualism Good, Government Bad/Private Enterprise Good, ’60s Values Bad/’50s Values Good. Liberals are more interested in the quotidian details of policy – targeted solutions to specific problems. These are areas where the facts on the ground change relatively quickly, so they are better suited to periodicals that publish more frequently.
So, Group A likes to read in a 200 page format, because they enjoy sweeping generalizations, while Group B enjoys topics discussed in 1-3 pages because of their interest in granular details? Please revise hypothesis.
o. nate is half right (though not half Right). Conservatives do favor broad themes, which are better suited to book-length treatment. In terms of liberal books, though, my guess is that not even liberals enjoy reading 200 pages worth of here-is-yet-another-way-to-redistribute-wealth-without-explicitly-calling-it-wealth-redistribution, which seems to be the theme of 95% of liberal writings nowadays. It’s easier to expand the sentence, “We should redistribute more wealth because rich people have too much wealth,” into a newspaper column than to fill up an entire book.
I’m not saying conservatives aren’t interested in granular details – rather that they like to see the granular details set within an overarching ideological framework, as anecdotal evidence for the ideology. Books are well suited to that kind of argument. Liberals are less interested in elaborating an ideology, and more interested in dealing with specific contemporary issues. Those can usually be handled individually, so a shorter format works better.
Conservatives have principles and strategy. Liberals like to solve immediate problems without having real principles to guide them, so they do what we software developers call “balloon squeezing”.
I believe it, actually.
-dk
It’s bizarre to me that some people seriously believe that liberals are less interested in ideology than conservatives or are more interested in “the curious, the unexpected.” My experience has been the exact opposite. YMMV, I guess.
I think that is correct. Conservatives think being in print, referring to history, the longer an argument, the more persuasive, the more they have to select from, to have their beliefs reiterated, recapitulated, and reconfirmed, whereas liberals are more interested in the current, the curious, the unexpected, to learn something new, anything having made it to book form already dated and obsolete or just boring.
I think it’s simpler then that. Economic incentives push conservatives much harder toward writing books. You write your book, send it to Regency, and hit the talk radio circuit, think tanks buy loads en masse, book clubs buy loads, you hit the bestseller list, etc. Herman Cain buying thousands of his own books with his campaign’s money illustrates this to the point of absurdity.
Actually, lots of politicians do that, then give away the book for free. My future congressman just gave me a copy of his book a few days ago, here at the RNC in Tampa.
“even reliably blue states like California”
My favorite trivia question after every election: California residents cast the most votes for the Democratic candidate. What state’s residents cast the most votes from the Republican candidate?
Presumably California, since it does have an eighth of America’s population. By the same token, there were more votes for McCain in Massachusetts than in either Mississippi or Oklahoma. And more people voted for Obama in Texas than Illinois, but I’m not sure if those facts prove all that much.
Just that the whole red-blue painting of states by the media is nonsense and the large number of conservative book buyers in California should be no surprise at all.
Not only that, but if you take out San Francisco, Republicans generally win California.
San Fran: secede already.
Wrong again, Other Jim. LA (a much bigger city) is also strongly Democratic. San Diego too.
I hope the Original Jim isn’t always this wrong.
Other Jim is wrong, but you are missing the mark as well.
San Diego, with a population of just over 3M, is traditionally pretty heavily Republican (though in 2008 it went for Obama). Currently, 3 of the 5 congressional seats that span SD county are held by Rs. Lots of other info can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_County,_California#Politics
That doesn’t make him wrong. If you take out Chicago, Republicans win Illinois. That doesn’t mean my town doesn’t go 4:1 for the Democrats.
Even if that were true, so what?
Why doesn’t San Francisco count? Both parties have strongholds. If you took out the states of the Confederacy the country would be overwhelmingly Democratic. But those states are part of the country too, so what’s the point?
Jonathan Haidt’s book isn’t really a “blue” book.
Looks like the right-wing publishers are better at capitalism… who knew?
Alternatively, conservatives have more money to spend?
signalling conservative affiliation by carrying a book by Coulter or blaming liberals for everything, or simply by dollars spent on books to signal being conservative.
Signalling progressive affiliation by carrying a Noam Chomsky book, or blaming conservatives for everything, or wearing a Che t-shirt.
Hmmm. That describes most of the people I know in local History Depts. …and my circle of friends … and my family! (It’s quite depressing.)
OTOH, if they were genuinely capitalist publishers they’d be agnostic to what philosophy they were peddling so long as it was a profitable one………….
An interesting effort, but I worry about how Dawkins’s god book got on the list, or for that matter why a globalization book is left. I’d trust something that did full text analysis and concept linking quite a bit more. A link map with bubble sizes for book sales … a job for someone.
Conservatives are currently much more excited about politics.
Go to a left-leaning blog and see 1,000 mindless comments saying “The 1% are out to get us.”
Go to a right-leaning blog and see 100,000 mindless comments saying “We all knew Obama is a Muslim communist!”
Note that virtually all the books on both sides look terrible.
Except Caro’s biography of LBJ. Dunno how that counts as liberal, though.
I would assume that whichever side is out of power sells more books…there’s more to bitch about when the other guys are in charge.
Conservative books have long out-sold liberal books. That’s a well-known fact in publishing. Wonder how much the current pattern is above or below trend.
Conservatives buy their books. Liberals ask someone else to pay for them and check them out from the library.
Political books sell because they call for things that are different. They sell because they rail against the current state of affairs. Hell-in-a-handbasket stuff sells.
Liberals won many of the important battles over 40 years ago. I don’t really see how much has changed since then. How motivated would even a dyed-in-the-wool liberal be to buy a book on, say, revving up the ERA again? Not a lot of big stuff left on the liberals plate. Reviving the union movement, maybe?
Right-wingers are better at winning elections than they are at enacting conservative policies, or even voting in anything approaching a consistently conservative manner. They have more stuff to whine about in book form.
This is the same phenomenon that drives the huge red predominance in talk radio. Liberalism is not the opposite of conservatism, it is different from conservatism. For most conservatives, politics is tribal and a form of religious belief. You see this reflected in the common statements by conservatives that they support a thing or believe a thing because it’s “conservative”. You almost never see a liberal say he believes a thing because it’s liberal. He’s a liberal because of what he believes, not the other way around.
As a liberal, I believe what I believe because I’ve read and listened and thought. Ditto Heads take pride in saying they believe whatever Rush says. They need to listen to broadcast sermons and read holy writ to know and reinforce what they believe. Liberals don’t have this same need to reinforce belief, hence less talk radio and lower book sales. I do love to catch Rachel Maddow now and again, though. But remember, she provides something you can’t get on the right side of the broadcast spectrum. Humor. Or is Dennis Miller still screaming “Al Gore is fat” somewhere?
funny, because my experience is the opposite (swimming in liberal waters), thereby proving both sides are basically the same (shocker!).
You’re right, superflat, that liberals often associate with other liberals and settle into groupthink, just like conservatives. But there’s a difference in attitudes toward this groupthink. Conservatives are usually very proud of their groupthink, the same way that a religious person is usually proud of their religion. And just as many religious people regularly go to church, many conservatives regularly go to “conservatism church” (talk radio, Ann Coulter books, etc.). In the rare case where liberals are even conscious of their groupthink, they certainly do not take pride in it. Liberals are like hipsters, in this regard (many literally *are* hipsters).
That is the number one reason why conservative books outsell liberal ones. The number two reason is that what gVOR08 says is also true in a more genuine sense: psychological studies do indeed find a negative correlation between conservativeness and the Big Five personality trait of openness to new experiences.
But its true, the opposite of american liberalism (social democratism) is libertariansm.
The opposite of conservatism is not progressivism, the opposite of conservatism is oddly also libertarianism.
Seems like you made up your first paragraph up based on your experience and a caricature of ‘conservatives’
Ah, you agree that liberals and conservatives are in agreement: it is all Obama’s fault, and Obama broke every promise.
Before that, it was all Kerry’s fault, before that, all Gore’s fault, before that, all Clinton’s fault.
Liberals use public libraries.
It’s got to be awfully hard to package the “we all owe everything to the government” message that the left will agree with in a way that persuades them the author has a unique claim to be paid for telling them that.
The left’s message is “we all owe something to the government”. The good books have all been written however, like L.T. Hobhouse’s 100-year-old On Liberalism: “The true function of taxation is to secure to society the element in wealth that is of social origin, or, more broadly, all that does not owe its origin to the efforts of living individuals.”
GW Bush is #72 on the left-wing list. Strange New Respect…
Don’t look now, but it’s also on the right-wing list (#40).
One hypothesis that suggests itself: liberals find “mainstream,” non-explicitly-ideological books to be a lot more congenial, whether because liberals are genuinely more open-minded and thoughtful, or because “mainstream” non-fiction tilts left, or some combination of the two. There’s obviously no equivalent to the “Politically Incorrect Guides” series on the left, for example.
Correct, because the left owns political correctness.
When was this last not the case? Conservatives push their books harder, they have book clubs, they push bulk buying by their churches, they push them on talk radio. Now, whether they actually get read, that’s another matter. And, by political books, we’re talking on the level of media pinheads, not serious books.
> And, by political books, we’re talking on the level of media pinheads, not serious books.
I haven’t read most of the book on the red list but I can attest that Atlas Shrugged, Capitalism and Freedom, or Free to Choose are all pretty serious, The Road to Serfdom is very serious.
I identify as center-left, and I have read significantly more “red” books than “blue” books. This is because I prefer to be challenged when I read, and am bored by reading arguments that I may already agree with.
Thus, I’m part of the “redding” of the map, even though I often disagree with the “red” books. That’s just me, but maybe I’m not an isolated case and this is a wider factor?
I think you describe the general case: liberals read all points of view, conservatives will not read anything that seems liberal.
If liberals spend $200 on books and buy $50 “liberal”, $100 “neutral” history, science, economics, $50 “conservative”, and conservatives buy $100 “conservative”, then the “conservative” books outsell “liberal” books 3:1.
And Coulter is always funnier than Franken was on SNL in my opinion, and she’s always doing “sit down”.
What was the last conservative book you read?
The typical American newspaper only publishes one conservative columnist as a gesture toward evenhandedness, and turns the rest of the opinion pages over to liberals. Apart from that single column, books are the only outlet for publishing conservative opinion on dead trees.
FE,
That’s BS. Take CNN, it has spawned the careers of multiple conservatives including Pat Buchannen, his sister, Robert Novack, Amy Holmes, Erick Erickson, Mary Matlin, Bill Press, John Sununu, and more.
MSNBC, the arch-liberal station once gave Mike Savage his own show, today it gives its morning program to Joe Scarborough. Pat Buchannen and other conservatives have periodically migrated to MSNBC from CNN when not getting checks from Fox.
ABC gave time/starts to Britt Hume, George Will and others.
The Washington Post has given space to nearly all the CNN/ABC conservatives. And as a matter of fact, in the pre-Internet age just about all conservatives of note made their bread and butter off syndicated newspaper columns (George Will, William F Buckley, Novak, Buchannan, Schlafey etc.).
I specifically limited my comment to publishing on dead trees. TV is different – there is more balance on tv because the medium seems to work better when you have two people arguing with each other. You are correct that the Post is a well-balanced newspaper with respect to opinion columns. I should not have said that the typical newspaper is different than the Post, because I do not know that for sure. Most newspapers I have read are not as balanced as the Post. I would be curious to see an empirical study.
Sorry, still don’t buy it. First you are neglecting the fact that conservative magazines have been around quite a while and have offered quite a few conservative writers a place to make a name for themselves and develop their brand. Second, you are neglecting that many mainstream magazines have likewise been open to conservative writers (see, for example, George Will who is a regular at Newsweek as well as historian Niall Ferguson whose anti-Obama rant got the cover just recently).
Likewise I don’t buy your claim that newspapers have been a conservative no-man’s land leading them to turn to books instead. First look at many of the ‘Red Books’. These are not highly intellectual pieces by writers shut out of the media. We have names like Steve Forbes, Bill O’Reilly, Dennis Prager, Glenn Beck, David Limbaugh, Monica Crowley, and Ann Coutler. All prime examples of intellectual hacks whose books are adjuncts to their radio/tv enterprises. (An interesting exercise might be to redo the numbers excluding books from well known TV and radio personalities like the Limbaughs and the Steven Colberts)
Second, you’ve already admitted a major national newspaper, The Washington Post, has been pretty balanced. It’s pretty clear that CNN and other networks used the Post to help find right wing talent to fill their slots both when they got started and today. The other major national newspaper is The NY Times. There you might have a point in that they have, for a long time, seemed to have a single regular columnist designated as ‘the conservative’ (although currently they have both Ross Douthat and David Brooks). However you’ll find they often have conservative guest columns and if you’re looking for conservatives who had serious written arguments to make, you’ll find many of them have appeared in the NYT archives (examples off the top of my head include James Q Wilson, Charles Murray but you’ll also find political right wingers like Mitt Romney and others showing up on a regular basis…..I might be wrong but I think even Dennis Prager and Rush Limbaugh had a piece or two at least once). Needless to say, the Wall Street Journal is another major paper whose editorial page is hardly biased against conservative writers.
That leaves as the last refuge for your claim that newspapers have shut the door to right wingers local and regional papers. Yet again let’s return to the fact that many, many right wing writer pundits made and make their bread and butter off syndicated newspaper columns. A list that is almost certainly incomplete can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspaper_columnists#United_States note there’s no shortage of right wing voices (Cal Thomas, Michael Reagan, Thomas Sowell, John Stossel). If the numerous local papers in the US had a rule of buying only one conservative syndicated columnist and multiple liberal ones would we expect to see more famous liberal columnists and fewer famous conservative ones?
You left ‘em speechless, I guess. I found a lot here that matches my experience–a 60 year, tri-coastal trip, with a Midwest sojourn thrown in for good measure. I would add that many here seem not to have an idea how book publishing works and how it has changed. For instance, Donald Trump (sometimes conservative, often just risible) buys enough of his own books pre-pub to assure he’d be No 1 on the bestseller list. It’s such a common tactic that you can’t take lists at face value. But, once a book is primed as a No 1 or bestseller, then it may catch on with the curious, only-buy-bestseller crowd. Not deep thinkers or independent thinkers, those.
Growing up in a conservative, John Birch bastion I watched how my parents and their friends bought books. Rand, Schafley, I Married a Communist, they just came like clockwork. Even to me, a bookworm and a proto-conservative, at a certain point it spoke to insecurity–represented a desire to squelch any self-doubt, or the countercultural impulses. I don’t think much has changed. My deeply conservative family and friends, some currently GOP politicians, wall themselves in behind Fox, like-minded friends, walls of books, and honestly believe they are wearing the tricorne hat and silk hose of the defenders of Bunker Hill. Say one word and they break into high-intensity rants about socialism and gun control. I have to wait until they calm down before I can raise a few questions or make a point–or get them to pass the gravy boat.
Anyway, the point here is the conservative book industry started out heavily subsidized (my sister worked at Regnery at its inception) and learned to sell to a closed-loop market of true believers. Like selling the Book of Mormon to Mormons, or sermons to the converted, or Steeler jerseys to Pittsburgh fans, there is no room in conservatism for the opposite view (the laughable exceptions of punching-bag Colmes characters prove the rule). In the late 90s the mainstream publishers saw they could jump this market. And lo, they were successful. One of the attractive things about conservative audiences to publishers is they will buy multiple copies and give them out left (literally) and right. As an author myself, I can only sit back and envy the sales success.
But it doesn’t mean a damn thing about who is more popular or well-read.
The idea that Buchannan is a conservative makes the other conservatives laugh and roll their eyes at CNN.
Joe Scarborough is a more of a libertarian than he is a conservative.
You are correct about the others.
The idea that Buchannan is a conservative makes the other conservatives laugh and roll their eyes at CNN.
You forget the cheers Buchannan received at the GOP conventions he spoke at, esp. his ‘culture war’ speech. I guess that was all coming from the CNN camermen.
What’s laughable is the notion that Pat Buchanan is not a conservative.
That Buchanan is a paleocon in a world of Koch-branded conservativism doesn’t make him any less of a conservative. He (Buchanan) is probably more conservative – in the true sense of the word – than most Tea Party folks.
Again just imagine him giving a speech at this year’s GOP convention. I don’t think we’d be hearing many ‘boos’ from the crowd.
Here’s my theory: Conservatives are insular, liberals are not. Conservatives enjoy their ‘echo chamber’, liberals like to feel they are engaging all points of view. Put it another way, despite getting all flushtered, Michael loved to argue politics with Archie Bunker. Archie would have rather just had an apolitical drinking buddy.
As a result, conservatives will gobble up Red Books. both because they are conservative and out of loyality to ‘members of the tribe’ (does any living conservative with a brain really think Ann Coutler or Denish De’Suza actually produces any insights worth engaging?). Liberals won’t gobble up Red books but they will sample them. Conservatives will almost never engage a Blue Book. As a result Red books will tend to trump Blue books even in Blue States.
Side note, liberals won’t as a rule be that eager to get a liberal leaning book unless they have reason to believe it’s important or insightful in some way. “Tribal loyalty” helps pathetic Red books maintain excellent sales but does little for Blue books.
That’s why there are multitudes of talk radio dedicated to trumpeting the right wing talking points, and Air America, the liberal counterpoint, had so much trouble. The “liberals” are using the radio dial to listen to music (or their ipods, etc.)
I’d suspect that of the book reading public, the liberals will be more likely to seek out art / literature / poetry, and the conservatives will buy the polemics (that they hear argued about on talk radio / hyped by those same hosts), in addition to the bulk purchasing of these books by ‘think tanks’ and other organizations that seek to inflate the sales and distribution of these books.
No, they listen to NPR for their liberal stuff.
Dinesh D’Souza is currently the President of a Christian institution of higher learning called “The King’s College.” He still does have some intellectual street cred on the right which is disappointing. On the other hand, I think even most conservatives recognize that Coulter’s books are essentially right-wing pornography.
What’s so funny is that if I were to read a colored book it would be on Austrian capital theory. I have no time to challenge my ideas or tickle my fancy. I’d rather get further down the road that I think is the right road. What is Security Analysis, blue or red?
Side note, I notice Christopher Hitchens’ essays are listed as a Red book but God is Not Great does not appear. That seemed like a very popular book at the time and I noticed it more than once being read by random people in public. Since other atheist advocating books are listed as Blue, I’m wondering if leaving that out unjustly biased the list towards Reddish?
Caveat emptor indeed.
Isn’t this just Amazon sales, and not total book sales?
That might introduce a bias, in that urban readers might be more likely to have access to retail bookstores.
Anyway, some of those “red” books look seriously deranged.
I have to agree – the selection bias here (Amazon purchases only) is strong. As a urbanite on the coast living in a dense city, I have access to numerous bookstores that I’d prefer to patronize over Amazon. I buy plenty of things from Amazon – just not books.
That would hardly explain states like California, NJ and being Redish. These states have plenty of easy access to Barnes & Nobles and retail bookstores where conservatives can stock up on their Red books without going to Amazon. It also doesn’t explain NY being Bluish. Die hard NY liberals have plenty of retail bookstores to use for their Blue book needs. Why are they shopping for them on Amazon.com?
Unless the conservatives in CA tend to live in more rural areas.
NY might be an outlier because of being very liberal, or it might just be an outlier. We’re talking about statistical tendencies here, not Euclidean logic.
OK then take NJ which is Reddish. In NJ you’re never more than 20 minutes away from a B&N mega book store which always stocks the latest in conservative schlock books. Why would conservatives in NJ be forced to rely on the USPS to airlift them in their monthly ration of Red printed text?
Conservatism is an ideology with two prevalant sub-sets offering comprehensive world views: libertarian and religious conservative (which has adopted much of the economics of libertarianism). Liberalism is more a “not conservative” coalition than a comprehensive world view. It is true that liberals are generally tied together by not having an inherent opposition to government intervention. But, there is not necessarily much agreement on what precisely government should be doing.
Since liberals are more fragmented, there won’t be many books that are purchased by most liberals. Someone interested in labor issues isn’t necessarily likely to buy a book on environmental issues. A socially conservative black Democrat isn’t going to buy a book lauding guy rights issues. Thus, there will be fewer liberal best sellers because it is difficult to craft a book in a fashion with universal appeal to liberals.
I also think that most conservative’s belief in natural law (be it from God or merely the laws of economics) make them more passionate about their cause and makes reading books on it akin to discovering the mysteries of the universe (which helps with book sales). Basically, conservatives are studying how to restore uptopia.
Since the collapse of Marxism as a viable theory, liberals can only muddle along. There isn’t a utopia to be created, just policies to be tweeked.
I disagree, in the world of books conservatives tend to be much more tribal. While they may mildly criticize conservatives from other ‘camps’, they tend to be friendly towards them. This carries over into politics where even libertarian orientated conservatives will tend to either tolerate social conservatives or else mildly disagree with them. For example, these days you can find Ayn Rand loving libertarian oriented Republican politicians but it’s almost impossible to find pro-choice ones, let alone pro-SSM….even though you’d figure with the rise of libertarian Republicans you’d see them clashing more with the Religious Republicans.
Liberals tend to be much more individualistic in books. Liberals read to be challenged but have much less regard for helping out other liberal authors simply because they are the same tribe. Even worse, many liberals have an academic mindset and academics is notorious for individual glory seeking (I’m sure Paul Krugman likes economists who agree with him, but he likes the fact that he has a Nobel and others don’t even more!)
I think your description of modern conservatism left out the hawkish “neo-con” tendency. Many of the more prominent neo-conservative intellectuals were secular and sometimes openly hostile to free-market libertarianism although they tend in practice to make common cause with religious social conservatives (e.g. atheist Allan Bloom’s attacks on feminism and rock music).
Otherwise, there is a siege mentality at work in popular conservative circles and there is nothing that gets people spending money and reading books faster than telling them that there is a group that is seeking to undermine everything they hold dear. This siege mentality is almost constantly at work in Glenn Beck’s programs but it is much rarer on the left. It does pop up sometimes (especially in the demonization of the Koch brothers) but most liberals just aren’t into this way of thinking for a variety of reasons. By contrast, conservative books are full of attacks on academia, “activist judges,” the ACLU, Hollywood, teachers’ unions and other groups they see as undermining their values.
I’d like to see where the readers are that read from both sides, that is to say read books popular with the “reds” and books popular with the “blues.” These would more likely be the open minded and/or interesting people, right?
I think this says something more about which party controls the Presidency — Those without power take solace in books. I expect that a similar map of sales during Bush’s reelection campaign would be awash in blue. Still, the relative intensities of various states probably does reflect underlying differences.
Where does it say the books were read?
Tyler – are you giggling now? You like to stir the pot periodically.
It seems to me that the “red” list contains many more strains of thought (or philosophies) if you prefer than the “blue” one, so maybe this is the reason why. The Austrian, libertarian, Tory, classic liberialism, moral theocractic, survivorship and nationalistic schools are actually in most cases opposed to each other when you get down to it. Indeed in many countries they are opposed to each other. There seems to be only one strain (rather confused to me) of “red” a sort of combination of pragmatism, utilitarianism, egalitarism, sentimentality and trust in elitism, coupled with special interest protectionism and environmental fetishism. These are not really schools of thought, more strains of feelings. The main argument for the Blue approach I would guess is emperical, not theoretical, which is why there are always the heated debates around the facts when comparing a particular red approach with the blue one (see for instance the discussion on stimulus).
Correct. The republican party contains /all/ of 19th century American politics within its various dissentions. The Democratic party is a new beast.
Conservatives have been very good at turning conservatism into big business. It seems to me that this list reflects that.
For instance, I have never heard of Paul Kengor’s “The Communist” before now but it seems like the sort of thing Glenn Beck would recommend and a bit of googling shows he did indeed do so. Some of the other books on the list have probably also been recommended by Glenn Beck and other conservative media personalities. So what I think is going on is that conservatives are busy constructing what David Frum has described as an entire “ecosystem” of media where Fox News, talk radio, WSJ op-eds, and books on Glenn Beck’s reading list can supply a conservative with a complete array of information and entertainment options.
Liberals have been much less successful at this although Glenn Beck’s fans would no doubt describe NPR, network news, most newspapers and magazines, and books written by most university professors to be part of a liberal bubble. However, there is no one in the liberal world with the stature of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh who can single-handedly propel, say, John Rawls to the top of the bestseller lists.
Oprah could.
…but then she wouldn’t be Oprah. Her book list doesn’t get very political.
The point is exactly that she doesn’t tell her viewers to read liberal polemics. I browsed through her “summer reading list” and most of the books appear to be rather tame and apolitical. Glenn Beck encourages his fans to read books written by former Birchers like Cleon Skousen — Oprah isn’t even remotely comparable.
Maybe left wingers don’t need a book to tell them how to think, since it’s just rational common sense. Zing!
As per the NY Times Book Review – if you look at the best-seller lists and focus on the symbols that are assigned to each of the books, you’ll see that many of the conservative books are bought in bulk. Given that the conservative organizations (churches, Tea-Party tea parties, etc.) tend to have a bit more focus and organization than the more fragmented liberal side of the equation, it’s no surprise that the conservative books sell better. Be honest – would Jerome Corsi really sell as many books as the lists claim he does without the lunatic fringe buying up his books in bulk?
Almost every theory put forth in this and especially in Ezra’s post on this (including comments) reminds me of how much I hate the Pepsi v Coke nature of politics. I think you could publish something completely random like, “A study has shown that conservatives prefer giraffes while liberals prefer purple” and it would generate thousands of explanations on why chimpanzees or purple have obvious moral advantages over the other. and vice versa, with no sense of irony, and complete obliviousness to how much each side resembles the other.
Dr. Rorschach, meet Mood Affiliation. I’m sure you can find something to talk about.
Agree 100%
See Daniel Kahneman’s great book: Thinking, Fast and Slow. People tend to seek out information that validates their view of the world. http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637/ref=la_B001ILFNQG_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345745838&sr=1-1
To me, it appears “red” voters are seeking to find “data” to validate their views. For some, such as Mr. Akin, that will be impossible.
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