The end of reading and the future of politics

June 6, 2025

The Rebuild is a newsletter written by senior correspondent Eric Levitz. Read more of his work on a wide range of political and policy issues on our site.

Eric Levitz is off this week. In his absence, we're bringing you a short excerpt from his recent feature about the decline of reading and its effect on politics — plus three recommendations from Vox staffers for good reads about the future of the left, liberalism, and the Democratic Party.

Is the decline of reading poisoning our politics?

Your brain isn't what it used to be.

If you aren't feeling the itch yet, you will soon.

It could come by the end of this sentence or, on a good day, the fifth paragraph. But before long, a little voice in your head will whisper, "Click away for just a second" — just long enough to take a quick glance at your email or Instagram feed or group chat or 401(k) or chatbot's answer to "how to tell if a mole is cancerous" or Amazon results for "joint-smoking garden gnomes."

At least, this will happen if you're anything like myself. And I am not alone.

Americans still consume plenty of text. Social media platforms teem with words — even video-based apps like TikTok are replete with captions and comments. And on average, we spend more than two hours scrollingthrough such platforms each day.

But not all reading is created equal. The mind can skim over the surface of a sentence and swiftly decode its literal meaning. But deep reading — sustained engagement with a longform text — is a distinct endeavor. As neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf explains, when you give your complete attention to a stimulating book or longform article, you activate a wide array of the brain's linguistic and cognitive capacities. In this contemplative state, the reader rapidly draws connections between the text and their background knowledge, generating original thoughts in the process.

And this vital form of reading is in sharp decline. In 2021, American adults read fewer books on average than in any year on record, according to Gallup. Among young Americans, the dwindling of deep reading is especially stark. In 1984, some 35 percent of 13-year-olds said they read for fun "almost every day," according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). By 2012, that figure was 27 percent. By 2023, it had fallen to 14 percent. Similar declines have transpired among the nation's 9-year-olds and late adolescents. Meanwhile, daily screen time among all age groups is surging to record highs.

Even among the rising generations' academic elite, reading books is an increasingly niche hobby. According to a recent report from The Atlantic's Rose Horowitch, many students at America's most selective colleges now lack the capacity (or at least, the wherewithal) to read a book cover-to-cover.

In the view of some analysts, these trends don't just threaten to curtail bookworms' literary lives or stunt young Americans' intellectual development. Rather, digital media's displacement of books is propelling our species back to an ancient mode of cognition and communication: After a brief dalliance with literacy, humanity is returning to its oral roots.

According to such varied commentators as media theorist Andrey Mir, Bloomberg reporter Joe Weisenthal, historian Adam Garfinkle, and culture writer Katherine Dee, the digital age's modes of thought and discourse increasingly resemble those of pre-literate oral cultures. In making this claim, these writers draw heavily on the work of Walter Ong, a philosopher who developed a deeply influential — but somewhat controversial — theory of how the oral and literate minds diverge.

For Mir and Garfinkle, America's reversion to "orality" underlies much of today's political dysfunction. In their telling, print media laid the foundations for liberal democracy. Now, as deep reading declines, the electorate's commitment to pluralism, objectivity, universalism, individual rights, and the rule of law is swiftly receding.

The analogies between ancient oral cultures, as described by Ong, and today's digital one are striking. And it's reasonable to fear that scrolling TikTok doesn't prepare a voter for rational self-government as well as reading the New York Times does.

This said, writers are liable to overestimate the social harms of our own cultural marginalization. And I suspect that Mir and Garfinkle are doing precisely that, when they blame the decay of American liberalism on the erosion of "deep literacy."

Read the rest on Vox.

Recommended reading

Three Vox staffers recommend some recent articles they enjoyed about the left, liberalism, and the future of the Democratic Party.

Biden has become a scapegoat for the Democrats (Financial Times)

At the 1860 Republican presidential convention, Sen. Charles Sumner welcomed delegates with a note that their duty "will be to organize victory." Lately the Democratic party, well, has not done that. As Janan Ganesh argues in an essay in the Financial Times, much of it boils down to picking "obvious losers." That might seem a bit circular — a loser is a loser because they lost, and that's what Democrats have mostly done on the national stage in recent years — but Ganesh identifies the real failure as the reluctance of Democrats to jettison bad candidates even after it has become obvious to everyone that they are bad candidates. A little more ruthlessness might be in order.

—Bryan Walsh, Vox editorial director

Centrist Democrats want a fight with the left (Semafor)

WelcomeFest, a gathering of centrist Democrats who want the party to more forcefully push back on progressives pulling it left, seemed to welcome at least one thing at a forum this week: a fight. Protesters showed up to take the stage and challenge one of the speakers, Rep. Ritchie Torres. As Semafor's Dave Weigel writes, the conflict was media catnip, despite an underlying message that's less controversial than it might appear: Democrats should welcome more people with different views and win tough seats by taking positions that might not be shared with those further left.

—Libby Nelson, Vox editorial director

Zohran Mamdani crashes the party (New York)

New York City's Democratic mayoral primary is only weeks away and has turned into a microcosm of the bitter feuds roiling the Democratic Party. The race — which has 11 different candidates and will be decided through ranked-choice voting — has narrowed down to two front-runners: former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who represents the centrist wing of the party, and Zohran Mamdani, a state lawmaker and member of the Democratic Socialists of America. While Mamdani is still trailing Cuomo in the polls, his unapologetically progressive and media-savvy campaign has helped narrow the gap between the two. This New York magazine profile of Mamdani, by E. Alex Jung, is a window into why Mamdani might be catching steam.

—Abdallah Fayyad, policy correspondent