I was asked in the Q&A to name some great writers with leftist sensibilities.
Rafael Chirbes is my absolute favorite. If you are not reading the gay Communist genius that he was, you should.
Juan Goytisolo was another gay Communist genius.
Gabriel García Márquez was, of course, famously and even obnoxiously leftist. The entirety of contemporary Latin American literature with the lonely exception of Mario Vargas Llosa is lefty. It’s great literature, and I sincerely recommend it. Of course, there are talentless Commie propagandists like Elena Poniatowska but there are also real geniuses like Carlos Fuentes.
None of this is very recent because there’s no longer any leftism in the sense that Chirbes or Goytisolo were leftist. That’s all gone. Now there’s only neoliberalism, which is leftism for sex-obsessed people. Almudena Grandes, Paulina Flores, Guillermo Arriaga, Sara Mesa. All mega talented. All writing about very neoliberal people with their extremely neoliberal problems.
If you want some Anglo names, you have Richard Russo, Barbara Kingsolver, Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison.
I’m not sure why this is an interesting question. Obviously, during Stalinism, it was easy to get published if you were a Stalinist. Establishment authors encounter no difficulties. Right-wing authors are working against the establishment. We have to scour the world for them because they are silenced and in hiding. Leftist writers are all on the awards lists and in the NYTimes book reviews.
Clarissa's Blog 
I think it is an interesting question. Writing from the Left without Neoliberalism today requires an extraordinary amount of originality. It almost seems that the Left has become unthinkable without a neoliberalism lenses. In my view, Fuentes in Lat. Am always had a more (Neo)liberal sensibility than a Leftist one. Chirbes, in Spain, yes. In Latin America, nowadays, I cannot think of any leftist writer without neoliberal views but Horacio Castellanos Moya, who also became more moderate in recent years.
Ol.
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The left that is not neoliberal automatically becomes the right. The moment you talk about wage workers, the offshoring of labor, the deindustrialization, the evisceration of the working classes by global capital, you become right-wing-coded, and there’s simply nothing you can do. It’s easier to embrace it because there’s no escaping it.
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I am fascinated by the sheer number of concerns that used to be “left” things that are now reflexively right-coded: concerns about pollution, food quality, pesticides, herbicides, agricultural market access, any kind of reticence about mainstream medicine, freedom of information, anti-corporation sentiment, wage labor, workplace rights, parental rights (believe it or not, hippie homeschoolers were pioneers on this), the right to dissent, being against the surveillance state…
Left/Right is such an inadequate vocabulary for what’s going on out there.
-ethyl
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Right? Paul Kingsnorth tells in his book how he used to protest in front of the WTO as a young man. He was on the left back then. And he’s not ancient. He’s my age. Everything he’s cared about his whole life stopped being far left and became far right. He changed only in that he accepted Christianity. But in everything else he holds the same beliefs.
It definitely is fascinating how fast this happened.
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I’ve never been a liberal, but when I was young, many of these things were points of friction for me as a ‘conservative’. Like, I did not like that the ‘other side’ owned issues like pollution, or that being ‘on the right’ somehow meant you had to be pro-corporations-eating-local-economies, or be OK with the government lying to get us into unnecessary wars in order to enrich DoD contractors. Why did you have to be pro-industrial-ag-pollution in order to be against abortion on demand? That never made sense.
There’s no conflict now. All the things worth caring about are conservative issues, and all the evil pollution/corporateoverlord/surveillance/medical-totalitarianism stuff is now liberal. It’s… a relief, tbh. Not complete yet, IMO, but things are better aligned.
-ethyl
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It’s true. I didn’t have to give up any of the things I care about when I moved to the right. I deeply care about nature. I care about manufacturing jobs not being shipped overseas. I hate the medicalization of everything. It was always a huge issue for me. I detest globalization. I hate Big Ag and Big Pharma. And I don’t have to give any of this up to be on the right.
And yes, the country club Right of the Bush era was never for me. Market freedom above all, the surveillance state, the invasions. If this remained the right, I wouldn’t have switched. I just simply don’t believe any of it.
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Some of us care about all of these issues and are definitely not right wing. Some of us are “America First” but not in the way Trump is. We are against tax cuts for the wealthy, in favor of raising the minimum wage, in favor of universal health care, anti-austerity, in favor of policies that promote increased manufacturing in the U.S., etc. And Trump’s MAGA movement does not care about workers at all.
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Have you noticed, by any chance, that workers, in the original sense of the word, don’t vote Dem? That almost the entire MAGA movement consists of workers?
Or do you believe workers are really into BLM, infinity migration and they/thems?
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I would love a definition of “workers” here, for the sake of clarity.
-ethyl
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People who work wage jobs.
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Agreed. But when I talk to the “OMG workers need higher min wage and socialized healthcare… and also can’t possibly be hurt by illegal migration because nobody wants those jobs anyway” folks, I get the impression they define workers very differently… maybe retail only?
-ethyl
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And it’s only a sliver of retail workers at that. They either mean 40yish baristas who have given up on ever starting a family or immigrant gas station workers.
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Yes, I agree that workers generally don’t support these things (BLM, etc.). There are plenty of leftists who are opposed to identity politics. I recommend Walter Benn Michaels’s book The Trouble with Diversity.” He’s an English prof at UIC, but you won’t like him because he’s a literal socialist. Liberals don’t like him and have called him racist for years. Adolph Reed, professor emeritus of political science at Penn, is a Black scholar who is also strongly opposed to BLM and identity politics. Also a real socialist.
I don’t know what they think about the border, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they agree with Bernie Sander’s old quote about open borders being a Koch brothers fantasy. However, I do believe that both would want illegally immigrants to be treated humanely, which is something the evidence suggests ICE is NOT doing.
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It’s hard for me to imagine an approach more humane than offering people cash payments to go back home. What would you suggest as a more humane solution?
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“However, I do believe that both would want illegally immigrants to be treated humanely, which is something the evidence suggests ICE is NOT doing.”
What evidence?
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They don’t need to be treated by ICE at all if they accept the money and leave.
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I believe the argument is:
“If they choose not to take a generous cash offer and leave, we should put them up in nice hotels at taxpayer expense indefinitely. Anything else is inhumane.”
-ethyl
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I just now saw the news that an illegal with a final order of removal since the Biden administration crashed into an innocent person’s car, killing the driver who was a female teacher. Kindness to this guy now put an innocent woman under the ground. Illegal migrants cause a disproportionate number of deadly traffic accidents.
I have no idea whatsoever how people justify all this in their minds.
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I agree. That is definitely a humane and more than fair solution. But many of those detained by ICE are sent to hellish facilities that resemble concentration camps in their conditions. We treat murderers in U.S. prisons better than this. There are too many accounts in the media about the living conditions in these facilities for all of them to be false.
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I watched an interview today with a man who was arrested on Jan 6 in spite of extensive video evidence that he was actually helping Capitol police at their request. He describes the conditions of his incarceration as horrific. It’s outright torture what was done to him. And nobody ever claimed that this man physically hurt anyone. So I wouldn’t idealize anybody’s carceral experience.
As for media accounts, are those the same media that claimed that COVID was deathly to children?
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It’s the same media that stated that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.
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Well, I am a Canuck, and am genuinely embarassed about the lack of electoral protection in the USA.
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It is definitely bizarre that the most powerful country in the world just can’t manage to hold an Election Day that doesn’t last for weeks and that doesn’t allow for ballot harvesting.
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Yeah, protection of the ballot is the fundamental guarantee of democracy. If India can do it, the USA should be able to manage it ;-D
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