The moderate imagination: the political thought of John Updike and the decline of New Deal liberalism

"One of the most pressing questions to arise in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election concerned the white working class's so-called "abandonment" of the Democratic Party, especially in the Rust Belt, and their surprising embrace of Donald Trump. To better understand this development, The Moderate Imagination turns to an unlikely source: the writings of the novelist John Updike (1932-2009), which reveal Updike's insightful political imagination and shed light on the decline of New Deal liberalism. Updike has long been viewed as a gifted writer, poet, and essayist whose sensitivity to the quotidian combined with an extraordinary talent for realism enabled him to gracefully chronicle the postwar experience. But just as much as he was a man of letters, this book advances the counterintuitive notion that he was also an ardent man of ideas-political ideas. According to Yoav Fromer, Updike's fiction should not be read merely as a reflection of the postwar era but also as an investigation into the liberal political culture that helped define it"--