We Need to Talk About Lionel

I can’t be the first one to think of this title, can I?

Shortly before Election Day 2024, I came across an interview with the American novelist and political commentator Lionel Shriver on the website of Spiked, an online magazine based in Britain. The interview was titled “Why I Loathe Kamala Harris.”

For the uninitiated, Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver in Gastonia, North Carolina in 1957; as a child, she took the name “Lionel” as gesture of feminist defiance. Admirable enough. She is a well-regarded highbrow author whose most famous novel is the Orange Prize-winning We Need to Talk About Kevin(2003), which was made into the 2011 film of the same name starring Tilda Swindon, directed by Lynne Ramsay. A-list, arty stuff all around. Educated at Barnard, with both a BA and MFA from that institution, and no relation to the Kennedy-adjacent political clan with the same surname, she is also a longtime expat who has lived in Kenya, Thailand, and the UK, and currently resides in Portugal, though she retains her US citizenship.

OK, with a pedigree that bog standard progressive, what was Shriver’s beef with Kamala?

Well, the first thing to understand is that Shriver is representative of a certain kind of self-styled “neutral” (to use soccer terminology) who wants to position themselves as above politics. I have some friends—on both the right and the left—who traffic in this same bullshit.

The left-leaning ones tend to be scornful of anti-Trump sentiment from their fellow progressives, taking the eye-rolling view that people like me who are outraged by Donald are naïve, since the powers-that-be have ALWAYS been terrible, so what’s new? To them I would argue that, be that as it may, Trump represents a unique escalation of that terribleness, posing much more urgent and deadly dangers that demand our attention, not selfish, too-cool-for-school solipsism.

Those on the right, meanwhile, tend to fancy themselves “libertarians,” and Shriver fits that mold perfectly: people who are ostensibly against the GOP and the Democrats in equal measure (the better to boost their view of themselves as above it all), but who devote 99% of their time to attacking the Democratic Party, with only the occasional, perfunctory acknowledgment that, oh yeah, Donald Trump is kinda bad too.

Shriver’s half hour-long October 23 video interview with Spiked is a master class in that rot. (The magazine prefers the lowercase “spiked,” but it’s my blog.) In reality, if one examines her positions, her past statements, and her writing, it becomes clear that she is really just another howling reactionary enamored of the general MAGA agenda, albeit papered over with an arty, chattering class veneer.

But this empress not only has no clothes, she doesn’t even have skin or muscle or sinew, just rotten right wing bones.

HATERS GONNA

Shriver is a natural-born provocateur who relishes the role. Speaking to The Standard in 2022, she described herself as a monarchist, albeit a “reluctant” one. (And I am still making up my mind about leeches as a medical treatment.) She was pro-Brexit, a COVID lockdown skeptic (cue the Eric Clapton), and a vocal critic of DEI initiatives and the Black Lives Matter movement who delights in “woke-baiting.” Like most right wingers, she also spends a lot of time worrying about trans people competing in women’s sports and thinks the rich pay too much tax. Above all, she is a strident opponent of what she sees as an out-of-control wave of immigration by non-European people into the US, the UK, and EU.

Many of these positions are framed as part of a vigorous belief in free speech, which raises the question of how she squares that will her admiration for a guy who sends people to foreign gulags for saying things he doesn’t like.

Indeed: Shriver consistently professes to dislike Donald Trump but rarely criticizes him, and in fact, regularly pays him sly compliments. (The Democrats she pays no compliments, sly or otherwise, just openly derides.) Almost every criticism of Trump that she makes—usually only after being prompted by her interlocutor—is followed immediately by praise that negates what came before. For example, she told Spectator TV last fall that "however weird” Trump is, he makes a lot of people feel “that he's at least a powerful and strong figure.” And yeah, as she laughed to Spiked, he rambles for hours in his speeches and “doesn't seem like someone who's completely in his right mind” (“I mean, it really does seem demented to me”), at least he is capable of “filling time with words in a way that Kamala Harris is not.”

So what specifically does Lionel “loathe” about Kamala that precludes the generosity that is extended to Donald? Well, lots.

Shriver expresses glee that the Biden dropped out of the race and we got rid of a “geriatric, demented candidate” (again, her tolerance for geriatric, demented candidates seems to have skyrocketed in the Trump administration), and says she is glad that he was replaced “with someone who technically is in her right mind.” But that’s the last nice thing she has to say about Ms. Harris. From the Spiked piece:

I've really struggled to put my finger on it, but there's something about Kamala Harris that makes me despise her even more than Joe Biden. The closest I've come to identifying it is there's something centrally fraudulent about her. You know, she doesn't ring true, and I don't believe she has any convictions of any kind. They are purely convictions of opportunity….and the idea of having such an empty suit in the White House is anathema to me.

Her central argument is that Kamala is a calculating opportunist without any real policies or ideologies for which she feels authentic passion, except abortion. She goes on to engage in snickering ad hominem attacks, accusing Harris of plagiarism, and saying that she only wants to be president because it’s fun to get attention and wear a lot of different colored pantsuits. If that’s not petty enough for you, Shriver then proceeds to ridicule Kamala’s fashion sense—even though a moment ago that topic was held up as an example of her alleged lack of substance—declaring it “the worst of anyone who's ever run for president.” (I dunno. William Henry Harrison dressed like dogshit.)

And a written transcript does not do justice to Shriver’s snide and condescending tone in delivering these sentiments. Shriver’s giggling, obsequious interviewer—Fraser Myers, a deputy editor at Spiked and host of its podcast—reveled in her comments and piled on. I was not familiar with Mr. Myers, but a quick survey of the Internet reveals a decidedly aggressive right wing social media presence, and previous employment at the pro-Tory Telegraph. (Although Spiked grew out of the Trotskyite British magazine Living Marxism, which folded in 2000 after being bankrupted in a libel suit, its politics lean much more right than left.)

Another of Shriver’s talking points was the popular GOP canard that Democrats have challenged electoral integrity just as much as Republicans if not more, citing Stacey Abrams in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, the Russiagate allegations, and Al Gore in 2000…..as if asking for a recount is equivalent to a violent attack on the Capitol with the intent of lynching Mike Pence. But—again parroting others on the right—Lionel would have us believe that the left is just as bad when it comes to political violence as the right, explicitly equating the response to George Floyd’s murder with January 6^th, and suggesting that if Kamala were to lose, we would be in danger of an armed uprising by Democrats. (“I think it may be a tossup who could be worse,” she told Myers.)

It goes without saying that this is all absolute tripe wildly divorced from reality or any demonstrable evidence, and would not be out of place on the most hair-on-fire right wing opinion show on Fox, OAN, or Real America’s Voice.

Well, Lionel is a writer of fiction, after all.

JUST DONALD BEING DONALD

OK, so Shriver doesn’t like the former Vice President. But even so, she recognizes how bad Trump is, and doles out a proportionate amount of criticism of him, right?

Uh, no.

In keeping with the libertarian dynamic I described above, Shriver prides herself on hating both parties equally, though only one ever comes in for abuse while the other habitually gets a pass. Risibly, she tries to justify this imbalance by saying she has more loathing (her word) for the Democrats because “the American media is saturated with nastiness about Donald Trump,” and there’s no need for “more people trashing his character.”

There's nothing duller than talking about what's wrong with Donald Trump, what kind of a terrible character he has, how he's going to destroy American democracy, and he's going to become a dictator. And it just puts me to sleep.

What a smug rationalization for a world-beating level of hypocrisy.

Shriver bemoans what she calls the “hyperbole” of the left when it comes to Trump, saying, “I'm not quite sure that he is the threat to democracy that everyone claims. We've already survived four years of his presidency.” She scolds progressives for taking “that one offhand remark about how he'd be a dictator on day one, literally,” calling them “a little silly” for so doing. In fact, she goes further and actually argues that the Democrats pose the greater danger of dictatorship in America—another popular Republican claim—and to support it, parrots the Fox News harping on what it argues was the “anti-democratic” nature of Kamala’s selection as her party’s presidential candidate.

But Trump’s not the only Republican who gets the kid gloves treatment.

Shriver is openly admiring of J.D. Vance for being smart and articulate (“I actually find him pretty impressive”)—except, I would argue, when ordering doughnuts—as well as “lucid,” “bright,” “formidable,” and “intimidating” to the left. She blithely excuses his submission to the Big Lie as the price of being on the Trump ticket (a tradeoff she apparently thinks is justified) and concludes that he, like Trump, is not “a fascist threat to democracy.”

“I don't think he's radical,” she told Spiked. “I don't think he's out to necessarily pass an abortion ban for the whole country.” Even though in 2022, J.D. Vance appeared on a podcast where he said exactly that, and that he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” Referring to such a proposed ban, she also accused the Democrats of “constantly trying to pin that on Republicans.”

Yes, so unsporting of us to accuse them of saying the thing that they repeatedly say, over and over.

SEPARATING THE BULLSHIT FROM THE BULLSHIT ARTIST

I realize I’m sounding pretty snotty myself in this diatribe against ol’ Margaret Ann. But she started it.

I’m not gonna pretend I’ve read all of Shriver’s novels (let alone actually read them). Life is simply too short when I could be doing any number of other far more pleasurable and enriching things, like surfing, or listening to Nina Simone, or watching paint dry, all of which are infinitely preferable in my view. So unlike other artists whose work I enjoy despite their vile political views, like Morrissey or Mamet, for me there is no angst or dilemma when it comes to the not-so-divine Ms. S. But it’s still curious to encounter a highbrow artist whose politics are so odious.

At the risk of making a massive generalization, the political views of most artists skew left-of-center because the profession requires some degree of open-mindedness and empathy, two qualities not usually associated with right wingery, and declining in direct proportion as one moves further starboard on the political spectrum. There are, of course, some stark exceptions, but the general rule holds more often than not. That’s what a “general rule” is, no?

When we venture out of the arts and into “intellectualism,” things get a little trickier. (The Venn diagram of artists and intellectuals has a fat intersection, but it’s not quite a concentric circle.) Shriver straddles that line because she is both a writer of fiction and a political commentator.

So why fixate on her? Why not single out a self-satisfied right wing journalist like The New York Times’ insufferable Ross Douthat, or The Washington Post’s Meghan McArdle, or the WaPo’s even more repulsive Marc Thiessen? There are lots of right wing journalists who are plenty smart, their odious beliefs notwithstanding. But as history has made painfully obvious, intelligence is no bulwark against despicable political beliefs. Plenty of very intelligent people—even undeniably brilliant ones—have fallen under the sway of grotesque political ideologies.

As a documentarian, I have met and interviewed a few folks who fit that description, prominent right wing figures of whom it is often said, “They’re evil, but they’re brilliant.” Without mentioning any names, it’s been my experience that that is frequently not true. Usually these people are of perfectly fine or even above-average intelligence, but not at all brilliant. What they usually are is thirsty, and insecure, and desperate to prove how brilliant they would like to be seen as. That tracks, as the kids say, because the right wing ideology is very suited to damaged souls.

That said, Lionel does not strike me as being in that category. I’ve never met her, but her arrogance and sanctimony seem very genuine. So is that better or worse? (Discuss.) She is certainly not a dumb woman. Far from it: she’s real smart. But she feels like one of those highly intelligent people who are so deeply invested in their world view, even in defiance of inconvenient facts, that they are willing to embrace the most outrageous lies and hideous behavior in order to cling to it, and to twist themselves into Gordian knots to defend it, rather than break with their own mythology and acknowledge the difficult truth. And that’s pretty hard to respect.

THE JARABE TAPATÍO (ENOCH POWELL REMIX)

Per above, Lionel’s main hobby horse is a xenophobic stance on immigration that would give Stephen Miller a hard-on.

Recently she praised Trump’s deportations and renditions, saying that they put illegal immigrants on notice and are an example for other countries to follow. That is a cruel joke, of course, because she is herself an immigrant, living in a country other than her own. (Ironically, Shriver’s current domicile of Portugal is the preferred destination of many American progressives who want to flee Trump.) Describing her as an “expat”—the usual designation for privileged elites who live abroad, which even I reflexively did at the top of this essay—does not make any appreciable difference. It’s an appellation typically used for privileged foreigners who choose to live overseas, as opposed to the tired and poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse who are forced to flee their homelands for dear life.

Now, Lionel might argue that this is actually a point in her favor, as she is a “legal” immigrant. But the idea that it’s only “illegal” immigration that sticks in her craw doesn’t pass muster when so much of her shit-stirring has to do with race and ethnicity….and there is no better example that her satirical 2016 novel The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, about a dystopian America in the near future.

As I say, I haven’t read much of Shriver’s fiction—I really gotta watch that new coat of paint on my fence dry—but I did feel compelled to read (some of) this one, and it’s troubling at best. Much of the novel is a polemic for free market capitalism. More tellingly, its vision of a “dystopia” hinges on the premise of Hispanic immigrants coming to dominate the USA. (Nightmare!) In the novel, whites are a minority in the United States, Spanish is the preeminent tongue, and the President is a pudgy, lisping, Mexican migrant who turns the country into a dictatorship. There are also digs at Chelsea Clinton and Paul Krugman, and a key plot point about an illegal immigration amnesty. The primary Black character, Luella, suffers from dementia—and incontinence—so extreme that her white husband (who married her in order to look more progressive) resorts to walking her on a leash. One senses not so much satire on the part of the author as willfully transgressive racist “humor” under the pretense thereof.

And Shriver didn’t do herself any favors in addressing the inevitable complaints about the book. She infamously wore a sombrero during a 2016 speech in Brisbane, Australia to protest what she believed to be oversensitivity on the matter of cultural appropriation. Many in the audience were pointedly not amused, including the writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who called Shriver’s speech “a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance,” adding: “The stench of privilege hung heavy in the air, and I was reminded of my ‘place’ in the world.” (In response, the Brisbane Writers Festival formally disassociated itself with Shriver.)

I agree with Lionel that the very essence of writing fiction is imagination, and that authors need not be of the race and sex and specific life experience of the characters they create, any more than an actor playing a doctor should be required to actually have a medical degree. But it’s a huge leap from there to The Education of Little Tree. The Mandibles doesn’t commit that specific sin of outright imposterism, but it is certainly a piece of reactionary agitprop—Ayn Rand with an extra dollop of racism—that calls to mind works like The Camp of the Saints or The Turner Diaries.

Is it a big shock then, that the author of that book, who has so ostentatiously planted her flag in smack in the middle of a white nationalist right wing political movement, and loudly denounced the influx of immigrants in America and the rest of the Western world, would go after Kamala Harris with a viciousness usually reserved for catfighting soap opera divas?

CURRENTS OF ANXIETY

Soon after that Spiked piece, Shriver did a shamelessly gloating video interview with Spectator TV on the other side of Election Day called “The Election That Smashed Identity Politics.”

In it, she sneers at Harris’s supporters as feeling sorry for themselves, and affirms that while she disliked both candidates, the side that she “emotionally” wanted to win, did. She concedes that a Harris administration would “probably (be) safer for the country,” yet in the next breath crows: “But when I learned that Trump had won, I felt quietly happy, with a little undercurrent of anxiety.”

Yeah, uh, those of us not fortunate enough to live a cossetted life in Portugal are feeling a lot more than “a little undercurrent of anxiety” right about now.

Mostly she gloats that the election was “a summary rejection of progressive identity politics,” and continues the vicious personal attacks on Kamala that characterized her previous comments:

(It’s) a rejection of the fake, empty, insulting politics represented by Kamala Harris— not just her campaign, but her candidacy. I just found that her being run as a credible president of the United States insulted the electorate. Now, I completely accept that there are lots and lots of people who also look at Donald Trump that way. Okay, I understand that, and I kind of do too. But he is more credible than she is.

She is a nothing….I'm not persuaded that she believes anything else other than that it would be fun to be president.

As in the Spiked interview, she repeatedly accuses Kamala of being a mere opportunist, speaking of “emptiness,” “flimsiness,” a “refusal to be pinned down,” and of Harris as “someone who could easily be controlled.” (Hmmm, I wonder if she had the two candidates mixed up?) This time around, she also flat-out calls her “a DEI candidate.”

Again, she criticizes Harris for not giving enough policy details on her positions, having told Spiked that "at least Trump has an agenda.” Of course, that’s not true at all. Kamala and the Democrats had a coherent, detailed platform; you might not like it, but it was there. Trump, by contrast, had only “a concept of a plan” about health care, for example, even though he had already been President of the United States for four years. Indeed, that accusation about lack of detail may be among the most brain-blowing example of the double standard in the whole 2024 campaign.

But maybe Shriver meant that at least we knew that Trump wanted to deport millions of people, prosecute his political enemies, and give the rich another deficit-busting tax cut? OK—but does that really count as “better”? “Sure, Jeffrey Dahmer ate all those people, but at least the guy knew what he liked for dinner, right?”

This sort of gaslighting goes way beyond simple partisan politics, betraying an almost pathological hatred for Kamala. And I’m sorry, but given Shriver’s history, it’s hard to avoid thinking race is part of the equation. In her 2022 interview with The Standard to which I referred earlier, Shriver was as dismissive of Meghan Markle as she would be of Kamala Harris two years later, and while it would be unfair to conclude that pigmentation is the whole or even primary source of the animus, it is not exactly putting Lionel in the running for an NAACP Image Award.

Full disclosure: in that same interview, Shriver did cop to having “enormous misgivings about another Trump term,” calling it “unsettling.” But that brief qualifier is buried amid a wave of palpable pro-Trump giddiness and relentless kicking of Kamala when she was down. Shriver went on to tell Spectator TV that we should choose our leaders based on intelligence, wisdom, experience, education, contacts, and good instincts. (I’ll pause here, until the laughter dies down.)

As for the future, she scolded Democrats for “characterizing Trump as planning to imprison his opponents and to sic the military on anyone who doesn't agree with him,” referring to those critics as “worrywarts and hysterics” who have engaged in “hyperbole” and “twisting what he has said.”

And they consistently did that with everything he said. So I'm not I'm not worried that he's going to be throwing throw his opponents in jail in the same way that his opponents tried to throw him in jail. I always thought that that was an ironic accusation.

As with her Orwellian assertions about who is prone to violence, or undermines electoral integrity, or lacks details in their proposals, she says that Democrats, not Republicans, are the ones who engage in political persecution of their foes, presumably on the grounds that Trump was charged with crimes after he left office. Not to split hairs, but I would suggest there’s a big difference between credibly prosecuting a former president for demonstrable violations of the law and, say, arresting a judge in their own courtroom and perp walking them into a squad car for the cameras, or threatening to arrest John Roberts, or ginning up ridiculous charges against a member of Congress for allegedly assaulting police.

Shriver even expresses enthusiasm for Musk coming in to shrink the size of the federal government, saying:

I think the idea of eliminating all departments is brilliant, and I love the idea of trying to pull back and comb through the morass of regulations that federal government levies on everybody. It it's a huge job. I'd be surprised if they got very far with it, but I would love to see someone to try.

EXHILIRATE YOURSELF

All that was six months ago.

As with her novels, I’m not a regular reader of Lionel’s column in The Spectator either, as I prefer to maintain my mental health. But I checked in with her recently to see what she’s saying now that Trump has been back in power for over 100 days. I was curious. After insisting that talk of his authoritarian impulse was so much hysteria, how would she respond to the mass deportation campaign, including extrajudicial kidnappings and the renditioning of people to foreign gulags without even a whiff of due process? How would she feel about to the weaponization of the DOJ to persecute his political enemies; to the attacks on the courts; to the wanton corruption and the wholesale conversion of the US presidency into a shameless mechanism for the enrichment of Donald J. Trump? Would she ignore that stuff altogether? Deploy more rationalizations and excuses? Continue to offer perfunctory dismissals of his transgressions that also functioned as backhanded plaudits? Or would she try to claim that she knew all along that he was a monster, without copping to how her excusal of that monstrousness abetted his return to power and the current sorry state of affairs?

I’ll admit that I was pretty stunned at what I found.

Despite her earlier pooh-poohing of Trump as potential autocrat, Lionel does not seem at all bothered by the stark evidence to the contrary in last three months. In fact, very much the opposite. She reports that she is “exhilarated” by what he is doing—once again, her word not mine. Read for yourself:

While never a Trumpster, I found the initial weeks of the 47th presidency exhilarating. No more racial preferences in the military, the federal government or universities that receive federal funds. Yes! Finally, aggressive prosecution of immigration law, with the flow of illegal aliens slowed to a trickle. Yay! Cutting wasteful and wokeful spending. Grand! Pushing Europe to pay more for its own defence. Fine! Men banned from women’s sport. About time! It’s official: there are only two sexes. Shouldn’t really have to announce what we all know from the age of two, but apparently we do – so good show! The end of ineffectual, self-destructive net-zero policies when 80 per cent of the world still runs on fossil fuels. Effing fabulous! I’m even keen on being able to buy higher-volume shower nozzles, which you wouldn’t think should require presidential intervention in the Land of the Free.

Her only compliant? That Trump has not used legislation to carry out what she calls “his commendable initiatives,” but rather, relied on “flimsy executive orders, lazy and monarchical edicts that a Democratic president could instantly reverse four years from now.” (I find it interesting that she thinks there will even befree elections four years from now, let alone that the Democratic candidate might win, especially given that she wishes that party would stay “far longer in the wilderness to learn its lesson [careen left, fall off edge of Earth].”)

No, Trumpist authoritarianism does not seem to bother Lionel at all, and indeed actively thrills her. Bemoaning the damage to the global economy that Donald’s tariffs will admittedly do, her greatest fear is that the electorate will turn on him and reverse the Project 2025 agenda that is now in progress, saying, “I desperately want us to bury Woke World deep under the sea like a depraved Atlantis. That opportunity could now be slipping away.”

One thing we can conclude from this, perhaps, is that Shiver’s definition of “authoritarianism“ is not like most people’s, nor the dictionary’s. Another is that she is simply a colossal hypocrite and self-deluding egomaniac. (Careful what you wish for, Lionel. With that masculine name of yours, Trump’s “pro-family”/ tradwife bigots may well come for you, too, despite your valiant service to the autocracy.)

But in a way, seeing her post-election commentary makes me less bothered than before, as it bluntly exposes her as a hack. Many people clocked that about her well before November, even as others gave her the benefit of the doubt on the basis of her literary credentials. But now there can be no doubt. For anyone other than the MAGA faithful and their fellow travelers, Lionel Shriver has no credibility whatsoever as a serious political observer. She is nothing but a brazen fascist collaborator and enabler, and an insufferably smug one at that.

So I’ll leave the final verdict on Shriver’s place in literature to the critics. But when it comes to politics, if she is remembered at all, I suspect she will go down as one of these strange, pro-fascist artistic outliers: File under Ezra Pound.

History will not be kind to the Lionel Shrivers of the world, nor to Lionel Shriver herself.

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Photo: David Azia / AP