A question haunts the mind when reading Scott Johnston’s The Sandersons Fail Manhattan, a satire of the college admissions racket: is this a work of historical fiction or of current reportage? Until just yesterday, the novel’s targets—the elites’ self-abasement before the gatekeepers of higher education and the pitiless social hierarchies enforced by those gatekeepers—seemed like unshakable traits of America’s ruling classes and institutions.
Recently, however, a possibility has arisen that the entire apparatus of academic identity politics and its real-world offshoots, including the veneration of manufactured victimhood and the scapegoating of whites, may be dismantled by Donald Trump’s executive actions. If so, then The Sandersons Fail Manhattan can be read as an artifact of an era just concluded, all the more important for chronicling the group hysteria that so many would prefer to forget. Sadly, however, the chances are good that the novel will remain relevant for years to come.
Johnston’s acclaimed first novel, Campusland
