From Joep Leersen’s Comparative Literature in Britain: National Identities, Transnational Dynamics 1800-2000 (Oxford: Legenda, 2019), 165-166:

Most critics seem to concur that the great value of literature is its power to make us think differently: to empathize, to imagine how life feels to others…. The internationalist climate of the post-war decades was obviously congenial to such a literary and critical stance. The decline of internationalism after 1990 has affected political and academic life alike (most notably in the dwindling funding for cross-national teaching and research in the humanities); it has coincided with a decline in foreign language teaching, a key competence for comparatists. Conversely, neo-nationalist populism is hostile to such educational and research practices that involve empathetic or critical thought, and instead thrives on anti-intellectualism, fake news, fact-free politics and post-truth memes….

[T]he spread of populist neonationalism… has occurred in tandem with the institutional decline of the humanities, including Comparative Literature, with their emphasis on transnationalism and on the power of the human mind–critical, empathetic, imaginative. The pedagogical need for people trained to think clearly and critically, and transnationally, has been proved beyond all doubt in the negative, much as the need for vitamin C was proved, in the negative, by scurvy. …

The pedagogical need to train personalities in transcending ethnocentric or narrow national tunnel-vision, in imaginative and critical flexibility of mind, in transcultural literacy and competence, is, then, made obvious by the very failures we are witnessing in the national and international political field over the last decades.