No Country for Illiterate Men? Reading Western Literature in the Wake of November 5

This essay reflects on the 2024 US presidential election in light of the conservative movement’s increasing conflation of fact and literary fiction. Recent mobilizations of literature by J. D. Vance, Curtis Yarvin, and Clarence Thomas not only illustrate how literature and literary value can be weaponized in support of right-wing political programs, but also how these readers deliberately obfuscate the distinction between truth and narrative to construct alternative realities. In conclusion, the essay briefly reads Gustavo Petro’s conspicuous invocations of One Hundred Years of Solitude as a cautionary tale for opponents of the MAGA movement not to simply imitate the far right’s deliberate strategies of conflation.