Fascists Don't Read: America's Rejection of the Written Word

Illustration by Connor JL Moore

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One hundred million books were burned in Nazi occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. It's easy to imagine tooth-brushed mustachioed SS men traveling from library to library burning centrally disapproved literature. In reality,  it was a nationwide fascistic orgy of anti-intellectual action. Every day, Germans turned in books from their homes, tore them off library shelves, and gathered by the thousands to watch them burn. They burned Goethe and Schiller, Thomas Mann and Heine. Germans rejected by the tens of millions the authors, musicians, poets, and artists who had defined their cultural identity for a millennium. Americans are presently doing much the same thing. Anyone who's wasted hours scrolling on TikTok or Instagram knows the truth in Bradbury’s words, just as any German did in 1935, “It feels good to burn.” We aren’t burning our books, we're just not reading them. We aren’t rejecting our authors, we’re just forgetting them. 

Rejection of the written word in exchange for formats with less robust context – Hitlerian tirades on the radio, cable news on television, or short-form content on TikTok – is a common theme in authoritarian countries. Books present ideas in a well-researched format, which decreases the potential for manipulation or distortion as compared to a dictator behind a podium or an anchor behind a desk. A book is credible only because of the argument it makes and the information presented in a literary context. In contrast, cable news and short-form feed content warp our perception of information based on how it's presented. 

Between 2003 and 2025, masked members of the American state began shoving protesters into unmarked vans, America conducted mass surveillance of private communication, and detained and tortured foreign nationals without due process in illegal CIA black sites. Over this same period of time, the average time Americans spent reading declined by 33%. The conflict over public opinion in post-9/11 America was waged before green-screens in cable news studios, not in the columns of the New York Times or the shelves of a library. That is a significant shift in context compared to how we’ve conducted public discourse in the past. In the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, the first truly televised conflict, only 6% of Americans did not read a book all year. We’ve watched the invasion of Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan from LaZBoy™ chairs in the living room. By the tenth year of the war in Iraq, the percentage of Americans who had not read a book all year was 23%. 

In the lead-up to Viktor Orban's consolidation of political authority in Hungary, for example, national library card ownership decreased from 2.2 to 1.4 million over a 15-year period. Over that same time period, the number of books printed in Hungary declined by half from 69 million to under 34 million. In 1990, 72% of Soviet citizens were at least occasional readers. Now, 56% of Russians read neither a book nor a magazine all year. It’s a universal feature of democratically backsliding countries to see a decline in public readership.

What the book burnings in the 30s were meant to symbolize was a rejection of what had made Germany German. German Romanticism was focused on the goodness and equality within every person. Beethoven's 9th, the Ode to Joy, is set to a Schiller poem. Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, spawned the entire genre of bildungsroman, or “novels of formation”, of which Perks of Being a Wallflower and Catcher in the Rye owe lineage. Much ink has been spilled regarding the mid-Twentieth Century, but suffice to say here that it was a release of mass psychic tension to embrace ignorance and reject compassion so publicly. What we have seen for the last quarter-century in America is that Americans as individuals no longer value robust information. In a world where information is the currency of politics, we’re ceding our ability to participate in the marketplace of political authority. 

There are bright spots for the publishing industry and readers in general. Ebooks and audiobooks have seen a meteoric rise in the last decade, but these have not made up for overall decreases in total book consumption. Part of what matters here is the ability for a market to sustain a parallel industry. Real writers, not just academic journals that no one reads outside of university classrooms, are necessary to foster a democratic culture. If it weren’t for a powerful publishing industry, the world may not have known Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Oil!, or F. Scott Fitzgerald's crown jewel, The Great Gatsby. These books exert immense influence on American culture. They changed us as individuals and as a nation. Benjamin Franklin’s warning after the first constitutional convention, “we have a republic. If we can keep it.” It’s become clear that our ability to preserve and protect our democracy rests on our ability to discern and digest information. In other words, it rests on our ability to read.

Braxton Fuller is a current master’s candidate for International Security at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs.

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