Why do they stay?
Why do Trumpites—whose lives were much worse when Trump was president, who never got their wall, who never saw America made great in ways they were promised, who recognize in their cells that Trump is an abusive fraud with the aspirations of a dictator—continue to support him? Throw good love after bad? Dig their own graves?
There are clues in an unusual place: Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, a 1984 study of Harlequin romances and other mass-produced romance novels for women.
Radway chose to study romance-readers because they were above all readers, consuming more than a book a day, sometimes as many as five. The act of reading, making sense of symbols, was compelling to them in the extreme—existential. They entirely defined themselves as readers of these books; if they’d had a “booktime” metric at the end of the day, the way we have “screentime” metrics, they’d be getting those 10-hour-plus scores. This is much, much more than even serious readers, academics, people in publishing, self-described “bookworms.”
They were probably closer to people who are consuming narratives online now—at scale and at speed—gluttons for the written word, hyperlexic. Perhaps like some of the Trumpites who might believe, for example, that Trump is God.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Magic + Loss to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.