This is why we're so divided

Photo by Olena Bohovyk on Unsplash

The publishing industry isn’t exactly one that donated a lot of money to Donald Trump. They lean incredibly leftist and it colors just about everything they do. It’s part of why so much fiction today is absolute crap.

Admittedly, there’s enough blame to go around on that point, but it doesn’t help.

Yet the results of the election earlier this month make it pretty clear that most of the nation supported Donald Trump despite years of people like the publishing industry trying to shut down the man.

Hachette Book Group, though, seems to have understood what was going on. They announced a new imprint that would focus on conservative writers called Basic Liberty.

And, of course, the usual suspects are losing their minds.

Staff are protesting against a new US imprint of global publisher Hachette Book Group (HBG) specialising in conservative books, launched in the wake of Donald Trump’s election win.

A letter from an anonymous group of HBG employees has been published on social media, criticising the launch of Basic Liberty. It also expresses concern at the hiring of executive editor Thomas Spence. Spence is the former president of conservative publisher Regnery and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing thinktank that coordinated the Project 2025 initiative, which sets out plans to reshape the US government and strip minorities of legal protections.

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After the announcement, the anonymous letter was posted to the Instagram account xoxopublishinggg, stating employees’ “firm disapprobation of the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, and any conservative movement or thought that strips away sacred rights and the humanity of people.”

“We condemn HBG’s decision to put profit before its own people,” the letter goes on to say. “We are calling on HBG to recognise the responsibility it has as one of the world’s leading publishers, to act with empathy and compassion for all people, and to re-evaluate its decision to move forward with the creation of Basic Liberty and the hiring of Thomas Spence.”

Those behind the letter have not been named, and Instagram is the only place it has been published. It has not been sent directly to anyone at HBG, and the Guardian has been unable to confirm the identities of the letter’s authors. However, HBG has confirmed that Alex DiFrancesco, a US-based editor at Jessica Kingsley Publishers (JKP), which is part of Hachette UK, has resigned over the same issue.

Now, interestingly, this is the same HBG that fired a Trump-supporting editor with a long string of successes just four years ago. That editor worked for a conservative imprint owned by the company, so I don’t get why they’d want another, but they do and that’s cool.

But the staff has an issue with it.

Now, let’s remember that there are a bunch of progressive imprints that none of them have a problem with. I’m sure if you ask any of these folks what the deal is, they’d make it about “that person” and Spence’s affiliation with The Heritage Foundation.

I’d also bet that no matter who they hired would also be a problem for some reason or another, making it impossible for anyone but a good progressive to be hired to run this conservative imprint.

I’ve had issues with Hachette before. I’ve been more than willing to call them out publicly in the past, so no one can call me a fanboy or anything of the sort.

But recognizing that the American public isn’t as leftist as they’d been led to believe, that they’re not anti-Trump or any of that, and trying to adjust accordingly is just smart business on their part. Catering to the needs of an entire population whose needs aren’t being met by publishing as a whole is what an intelligent operation does. It fills the needs where it can find them.

And book publishing hasn’t done all that fantastic at doing so.

But HBG has an opportunity here. If all these folks are leaving because the company is no longer kowtowing to the most obsessive and oppressive people on the planet, then they can hire people who understand that people from all walks of life actually read..or at least would if anything was appealing to them in the bookstore.

Since there are apparently openings, fill them with people who don’t see their jobs as the opportunity to advance their politics but as an opportunity to advance the joy of reading and sharing knowledge with the entire world.

In the meantime, I have no sympathy for these people.

These are the same people who have hounded literally anyone who dares disagree with them on anything for years.

The world is changing and, frankly, HBG is trying to keep up. Those who are walking and who are complaining are those who want to pretend history follows a straight line and it just happens to coincide with the things they want.

They should get used to disappointment.

In the process, though, we should remember that people like this are why we’re so divided as a nation. While the right can’t help but see what the left thinks via their virtual monopoly on things like book publishing, as well as other aspects of the information and entertainment media, they haven’t a clue what anyone on this side of the fence thinks.

So, they respond solely to the voices in their head, they ascribe motives to anyone and everyone they don’t agree with, then try to destroy any attempt to bridge the gap by trying to destroy anything that doesn’t meet their approval.

What’s happening at HBG is just a microcosm of what we’ve seen elsewhere. The primary difference is that these folks don’t have the power they think they do, apparently, which is just going to make them worse.

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