Alina, who has two degrees in literature that she doesn’t know what to do with, opens this video with the question: “Does anyone else feel like contemporary novels are written like we’re stupid?” She then proceeds to favour us with her views in a world-weary way that characterises her videos. It’s an interesting discussion – you hope it would be with two degrees – but a little too long and too focused on her demographic – twenty-something girls.

I don’t have much to say about her views because I don’t read contemporary novels. That’s mainly due to my being sick to death of the woke assumptions that are either in the foreground or the background. Now, Alina slings off at a right-winger like me (actually, I’m a Burkean conservative, but I rather doubt Alina knows what that is) who complains about the left-wing bias in contemporary novels.

She says political ideas are an essential part of literature. Well, they are, but that’s not the point. The issue is how political ideas are handled in woke novels and how they characterise their political opposition.

In the first place, they are assumed, which is intellectual surrender or, worse, the woke writer does not possess the ability to justify his ideas philosophically. In the second place, woke writers have no idea of the philosophical underpinnings of a competent, serious conservative writer. Such a philosophical defence is not imaginable.