TikTok is democracy in its rawest form. All that matters on the video-sharing platform is mass appeal and virality (so long as it does not offend the sensibilities of the Chinese Communist Party). The app debases its users to anonymous atoms, equal to everyone else, only powerful insofar as they belong to a crowd. Content succeeds on TikTok not because it is inherently good, but rather because it is merely popular. As with so many corners of the Internet, the leveling force of online democracy reduces the people to the lowest common denominator.

　　This mob-spirit inspired by the app has been on full display in recent weeks as large portions of America’s youth descended into hysterics over its uncertain future. Reactions from publicly melting down to allegedly planning literal acts of terrorism make clear that too many young people have an unhealthy dependence on TikTok. These are the sad outbursts of addicts, and even leaving aside serious national security concerns they vindicate Congress’s decision to move for greater restrictions.

　　But the freakout has not been limited to the youth. According to a recent Washington Post feature, some of America’s bestselling novelists are terrified that a blackout could spell doom for their careers. The Post reports that a segment of TikTok’s users, who call themselves “BookTok,” “has become a dominant commercial force in publishing.” They discover new books on the app, mostly romance, fantasy, and thrillers, and buy them in the millions. Some industry experts even believe that the viral bestsellers of BookTok have revitalized physical bookstores such as Barnes Noble. But now authors and publishers are worried this growing group of readers will dissipate with the potential decline of their favorite app, leaving them without a market to sell their books.

　　We should, however, welcome the end of this pernicious force in American letters. While some may instinctively want to applaud anyone for opening a book when reading is in desperate decline, the kinds of work “BookTok” promotes are for the most part unworthy of any sort of celebration. Its collapse would be an opportunity to advance the cause of genuine literature. American letters deserve more than obscene fiction, bad prose, and videos that cannibalize viewers’ attention spans. The collapse of “BookTok” could be a moment to push for cultural renewal.

　　Like many social media platforms, TikTok is designed to capture users’ attention. The app’s primary revenue source is advertising, so it needs to keep users scrolling for as long as possible. And by all accounts it is very successful at that—in 2023, for instance, the average user spent 53 minutes scrolling on the app per day. The reason TikTok is so effective is that it takes advantage of our animal instincts. The serotonin hits of each bite-sized video and the dopamine rush that comes with the platform’s gamified social aspects capture users’ brains at the expense of their souls. Simply put, TikTok achieved such overwhelming popularity because extremely short-form videos are far easier to consume for a short-term reward than, say, slogging through Count Tolstoy’s War and Peace. As Nicholas Carr has famously claimed, “the Internet is making us stupid.”

　　Is it any surprise, then, that the kinds of books social media makes famous are altogether vulgar? According to one open “BookTok” advocate, the hashtags #smut, #smutbooks, and #spicybooktok had a combined audience of over 4.8 billion last year. While some laud these hypersexualized books for being somehow “feminist,” their actual content is shockingly indecent. For example, one of the most successful “BookTok” titles—Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us—has even been criticized by real feminists for glamorizing domestic abuse. Internet democracy has not uplifted these users’ literary tastes but rather utterly debased them.

　　Many devotees of “BookTok” are no doubt very earnest readers simply engaging in escapism or enjoying the thin trappings of community they have found online. They just love books, and they want to spend time with other people who share that love. Some may even be uncomfortable with the wilder and more libertine side of their coterie. But that kind of sentimentality does not change the fact that this deeply unhealthy literary subculture is built around cheap entertainment, or that it stifles genuine literary aspiration.

　　More than a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed precisely this danger democracy poses to literature. In the second volume of Democracy in America, he noted that aristocratic and democratic cultures produce very different works of art. Aristocracies are more concerned with the peaks of greatness than democracies, which “habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful.” As a result, artists—including writers—in democratic ages tend to lower their aims and “in place of the ideal they put the real.” Standards decline and the possibilities opened in cultural explosions such as the Renaissance seem closed off to democratic peoples.

　　Another problem Tocqueville saw in modern letters is the way they tend to become industrialized in democratic society. “Democratic literatures always swarm with these authors who perceive in letters only an industry,” he noted, “and for the few great writers that one sees there, one counts vendors of ideas by the thousands.” Authors abandon the pursuit of greatness for mere commercial success. This tendency is on full display with the “BookTok” titles. The sorts of novelists popular in that corner churn out soulless content to be consumed en masse rather than work to achieve genuine artistry.

　　Instead of pioneering a literature for a democracy of elevation, “BookTok” embraces the degradation of the social media marketplace.

　　Despite his awareness of these problems, Tocqueville wanted to build what Russell Kirk would later describe as “a democracy of elevation against a democracy of degradation.” He knew that universal equality had become a permanent fact in the West, and that reactionary dreams of returning to earlier aristocratic social forms were doomed to fail. But instead of surrendering to despair, he came to the young American republic to look for those tendencies in democracy that could be ennobled. As we examine the digital wreckage of our contemporary culture, Tocqueville’s hopeful observations can perhaps point us towards means of renewal at our hands.

　　One of the most elevating habits Tocqueville discovered among Americans was a healthy respect for classic literature. Greek and Latin flourished in American schoolhouses, as did the study of the ancients’ greatest literary achievements. But perhaps even more striking to Tocqueville was the triumph of British literature on American frontiers. “There is scarcely a pioneer’s cabin where one does not encounter some odd volumes of Shakespeare,” he noted, going on to recall that he “read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log-house.” By treasuring British literature, he concluded that Americans “transport into the midst of democracy the ideas and literary usages that are current in the aristocratic nation they have taken for a model.” The chivalric sentiments of a Walter Scott or Jane Austen—both popular in the United States when Tocqueville visited—inspired citizens to become true gentlemen and resist democracy’s most illiberal spirits.

　　Classic literature can still help us defy the “democracy of degradation” today. The Great Books curricula that are experiencing a resurgence in higher education and the classical school movement growing at the K-12 level are both evidence of Americans’ need for a deeper rootedness. And it is no coincidence that many of these programs are moving to entirely ban smartphones from their classrooms. Teachers and parents understand that TikTok and other apps of its ilk are a distraction from the actual business of education and stunt students’ growth into full human beings. The ephemerality of a thirty-second video, or the kind of literary taste it cultivates, can never truly contend with the permanent worth of a timeless tradition.

　　But beyond simply importing aristocratic manners, Tocqueville also believed that something about democracy itself could call forth poetic beauty. “Poetry in my eyes is the search for a depiction of the ideal,” he wrote. While this kind of investigation of nature came easily to certain aristocratic writers, he also foresaw a way that democracy’s wider horizon could lead literature further up and further into that search:

　　People who lived in aristocratic ages made admirable depictions by taking certain incidents in the life of one people or one man for their subjects; but none of them ever dared to include the destiny of the human species in his picture, whereas the poets who write in democratic ages can undertake that. At the same time that each one, by raising his eyes above his country, finally begins to perceive humanity itself, God manifests Himself more and more to the human spirit in His full and entire majesty.

　　One of the finest poets of America’s democratic faith, William Faulkner, also believed literature could achieve this kind of greatness in our own time. In a speech he gave upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Southern novelist said that that “the poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about” the permanent things in the human experience. By expressing “the old verities and truths of the heart” in new words, Faulkner believed that the “poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” In his stories about triumph and loss, suffering and sacrifice, love and honor, Faulkner found a way to express universal truths in a particularly American idiom.

　　“BookTok” is one symptom of American writers’ general abdication of their responsibility to follow in Faulkner’s footsteps. Instead of taking up the high charge of pioneering a literature for a democracy of elevation, they embrace the degradation of the social media marketplace. But in the long run, that decision is precisely what will make this cohort of authors irrelevant. If their writing cannot survive this kind of challenge, then it certainly does not deserve to do so.

　　The potential collapse of “BookTok” and the industry grown up around it presents an unlikely opportunity. The phenomenon was the culmination of a revolutionary process of untrammeled democratic leveling, and now the evidence before us is clear: this digital free-for-all has been a literary catastrophe. Rarely are societies given the chance to arrest revolutions like this, but in its small way the TikTok blackout is just that. Earnest readers and writers not only deserve better, but have a responsibility to seek out the best books they can find. One hopes that TikTok’s demise could inspire them to do just that.

　　The good news for American letters is that there is a world elsewhere. Plenty of poets and novelists are still willing to resist the tendency of our times in search of a literature of real substance. A number of magazines and online journals still achieve what T. S. Eliot once called “the essential functions of a literary review.” These writers and critics understand full well that they have inherited a great tradition they have a duty to foster and defend. The faith that inspires them—their hope for a humane culture—is a kind of leadership of its own, pointing the way out of our digital democracy of degradation. It is only up to us, the reading public, to support them and join in their search for something much more elevated.