Alyssa Rosenberg adds a final word to Megan's exploration of bad politics in fiction:
Art takes us to the places we can’t go. Sometimes it lies about what we’d find there, sometimes it misunderstands what it’s trying to see through the wavery glass of prison doors and tank windows. This is why it’s bad to read just one book, to read Gone With the Wind or Atlas Shrugged, or watch Birth of a Nation or Battleship Potemkin and nothing else. But it’s useful to read Gone With the Wind next to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: knowing that Confederate nostalgia is wrong, and racist, doesn’t obliterate the need to understand that people feel it, and are strongly influenced by those feelings. Resolving the moral conundrum is ultimately our work, not any one author of any one work’s, and it doesn’t make sense to fault fiction for that.
The Dish 