How to profit from the current political moment

Johanna's breakout was a nonfiction title about how you should read classic literature.

Bolstered by good reviews and word of mouth, she vastly exceeded her publisher’s sales expectations, but a few critics did wonder, "How is this any better than all the other books in the ‘literature is great’ genre?”

One answer was that Johanna's book differed somewhat from other recent books on this topic, because those other books tended to be policy documents: they were about the importance of embedding liberal arts education into the college experience.

In contrast, Johanna had no opinions about how kids should be educated in high school or college. None whatsoever! Instead, her opinion was that you could gain a lot of benefit from reading the Great Books on your own.

This seemed like a pretty uncontroversial statement, but Johanna found ways of making it interesting and that's why her book succeeded.

However, one thing that most reviewers didn't talk about—or only talked about obliquely—was that Johanna felt very politically safe in a way that other writers on this topic don't. That's because almost all the writers who publish these defenses of the liberal arts are white men, and you kind of wonder about their politics.

These men are usually not overtly political. And their books are often a rather explicit attempt to reach out to all kinds of people, including those who generally don’t read the classics. But there are still questions about these guys. Probably they're not fascists, but...you never know.

The problem was that over the last few years, the Great Books had been taken up heavily by the right wing as a cudgel to use against secular education. The right wing claimed that secular universities somehow deconstructed or destroyed the Great Books as a way of eroding Western civilization, and that in order to protect our civilization, the secular university needed to be remade. As a result of this talk, the Great Books program now seemed distinctly right-wing in a way they hadn’t seemed even five or ten years earlier.

With Johanna, people were certain that she did not support this fascist agenda. And this certainty arose because she belonged to a subaltern group—transgendered people—that was being actively persecuted by this government.

So when her book came out, it was reviewed well both by insurgent media and what remained of establishment media. Johanna tended not to overtly trade upon her demographics characteristics—she certainly never claimed to speak for any non-white or trans people besides herself—but the existence of those characteristics made it safe for both reviewers and readers to think Yes, I really ought to learn about and take pride in my literary heritage. And it was this psychological permission slip that allowed Johanna to sell so many books.

This made a few people very mad. Because there were other people who would like to have success as self-appointed literary critics, and they felt envious of Johanna’s success. Some of these people said, "What is going on? Why is this thoroughly mediocre book taking off? This is basically DEI! You feel comfortable with this woman because of her identity. Like...the book is receiving a level of attention that is quite disproportionate to its merits."

Which was fair enough. But usually those critics were heavily associated with the fascist government, so it was easy to write off these people as racists and transphobes.

Three years after that, Johanna's short story collection came out, and while it was positively reviewed by many critics, there was a viral takedown review which argued that Johanna was a grifter who had succeeded as an author by selling her ethnic and gender identity in various carefully-constructed ways.

This reviewer was a trans woman named Margot. And her argument was that Johanna came of age as a writer in the 2010s, where there existed a sort of literary writer who achieved popularity by publicly performing their own ethnic identity.

As demonstrated by her early novels, which made strong overt diversity appeals, Johanna had attempted to find success as this type of writer, but had failed to gain traction.

But, luckily for Johanna, this form of overt ethnic performance eventually fell out of fashion—by 2025 it was no longer possible to get attention by openly identifying with your own ethnicity or sexual orientation. Some of these first-generation identity entrepreneurs were able to maintain their pre-existing readerships, but very few new authors were breaking out in the “voice of my marginalized group” space.

However, this reviewer, Margot, said that during the second Trump administration there arose a new form of race-grifting, where writers of color learned to signal, in various complex ways, that they had repudiated the identity politics of the past. In this new form of tokenism, people of color got material rewards by pandering to white peoples' desire to seem post-racial. And this reviewer argued that Johanna was one of the premier practitioners of this form of race-grifting.

Because this critique was by another trans woman, it gained a lot of traction. This review was widely shared, and many people thought the critique had some merit.

What went unmentioned was that by then the fascist regime had ended, at enormous cost, and there was a search for scapegoats—folks to blame for the late troubles. The actual fascists were untouchable, because they were shielded by fascist foundations that survived on private contributions. So instead the cultural sphere turned upon perceived collaborators—liberal journalists, intellectuals, businesspeople, academics, lawyers, and NGO-workers who compromised with the fascist regime and helped it to pursue some of its aims.

And at least a few people felt that Johanna had somehow, through some mysterious alchemy, lent moral support to the late regime by helping it achieve one of its stated goals (improving the cultural position of the Great Books). She hadn't actually supported the fascist regime at all in any material way, but that didn't really matter.

During a year when people who spoke out openly against fascism were losing their jobs and their platforms, she had instead promoted her book about how you really ought to read more of these old, white authors. And the success of that book was a direct result of the psychic energies caused by the rise of fascism. The tumult in the political situation made people desire a retreat into the past, and Johanna’s demographics allowed them to feel avoid feeling guilty over that retreat.

The essence of the charge against Johanna was that many trans people had suffered tremendously under fascism, but not her—instead she’d grown her audience, achieved critical and commercial success, and profited financially. And that was a charge that stuck not just to her, but to everyone who made a career during those terrible years that have now, thankfully, come to an end.

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P.S. The Johanna tales are a how-to guide for making a successful literary career under a fascist regime. Here are the three previous tales in the series.