Commentary Novels can move hearts and change minds in ways that cannot always be achieved by exposure to academic analysis. Late last century, the distinguished American jurist Robert H. Bork published a book titled, “Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.” For conservatives in the Reagan and Harper eras, Bork’s book was a blockbuster; a blistering indictment of the consequences produced by radical progressivism and the cultural self-indulgence of the New Left. But by the end of the 20th century even graduate students in the humanities were ill-equipped to understand sober academic analyses. Culturally illiterate progressive schooling had long since closed the minds of young people to classical references like “Gomorrah” or scholarly analyses of post-modern ideology. The Power of a Personal Story Popular novelists, on the other hand, can encourage a wider spectrum of readers to re-examine biases and question conventional wisdom. In the early years of the …