The Stagnation of the Literary Left

The world is worried about fascism. Across the U.S. and Europe, conservative, nationalist, or populist movements are on the rise. The rhetoric is intense. Many people, including politicians in power in the U.S., have likened Donald Trump to Hitler. We’ve seen what appeared to be a Nazi salute from a major tech mogul. Other tech guys fell in line — they want to keep doing what they’re doing, after all. Not all the people who voted for the current administration are bigoted, misogynistic racists, of course, but some of them are. Most of them — or at least the ones I have contact with — just wanted better wages and cheaper groceries. But also, books have been banned. Especially in South Carolina, where parents are worried about sex (not the same people who are worried about fascism) and bad words. High school kids should not be able to read about sex! Because, then, you know. Also, they might become gay. Or trans. Or whatever. There’s a slow trickle of weirdness, mixed with danger. Many of us teachers think: but the students have the internet, right? And we’re worried about books turning them gay? And yet in the middle of this, people have been rounded up, deported, students sent away, and now, masked men have shot and killed citizens.

There have been several novels over the past 10 years that predict a coming civil war (or retroactively envision a disunion), the rise of a kind of fascism, the disintegration of countries, violations of privacies of all kinds: Omar El Akkad’s American War is one. Set in the future, it’s about a person being radicalized to the right, in what the novel calls the Free Southern States, a part of the U.S. that has seceded over fossil fuel policy. Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X also depicts a U.S. in which, in 1945, the South seceded from the Union and has become a theocracy. There’s a western territory, too. But rather than focus on this fascistic, southern theocracy, X is mainly about the literary cliché, popularized by Bret Easton Ellis in the ’80s, that you can never truly know another person. George Saunders’ Liberation Day is another example, where several of the stories are set in some fascistic, dystopian future. There are so many preceding this, of course. We have 1984, though