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Notes -
The movie obviously seems bad, but I'll be devil's advocate and take the opposite position on the book.
While the politics of the plot setting may be purposefully superficially vague, it imo portrays a failure mode that only really make sense from a far-right PoV.
Basically, a theoretically ideal state, on an abstract level, does a simple thing: It sacrifices the less important things, to give everyone as much of the important things as possible. The details depend on the environment; If gangs are murdering and oppressing common people, you sacrifice significant freedom to get the situation under control so that most may be free from the gangs at least; If the murder rate and crime rate is already very low, contrariwise that's a reasonable price for greater freedom. And so on. The by far most common fail state is then simple: "Promise everyone everything without sacrifice, then blame subversion when it inevitably comes crashing down". Who is blamed again depends on the situation and the ideology of the government. The auth-left is pretty much the purest form of this failure mode, always blaming insufficient dedication to the cause and/or wreckers for absolutely everything. But there is also a rarer fail state, which is this: "The situation is so dire, we have to sacrifice everything just to survive." Historically this was even true for significant amounts of times. But it can be taken advantage of, since if even progress is sacrificed, the ruling class can stay in power indefinitely. The auth-right is the purest form of this failure mode, outright fetishizing "blood, sweat and tears". The game as described in the book fits only with the latter. The former may gleefully do something similar to alleged conspirators against the cause, but it would still frame it very differently.
This also makes sense given King's politics; He has to my knowledge never strayed far from left-wing orthodoxy in his stated politics, and I have read many of his books, and his left-leaning worldview shines through these works, even if he often attempts them to be superficially non-political.
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