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I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to get at with this whole line of argument, so I may be speaking past you, but yeah that's how literature works you're mostly reading dead guys, i.e. "the authors and musicians whose style they're riffing on and influenced by". There just really aren't a lot of great living novelists (my three would be Krasznahorkai (hates post-Soviet consumerism, hates Russia), Knausgaard (not conventionally political but says things unacceptable to the left), and Houellebecq (self-explanatory)). I guess Pynchon and Delillo (boomerlibs) are still alive, but have not written meaningful work in a long time. For literary culture, which is not the same as literature, the institutions are gigalib but we're also an a hundred flowers moment of right-coded spaces and presses. And that's fine. One of the eternal truths of counterculture is that the people with all the money rarely throw the best parties or write the best books.
Basically, to return to the Olympics stuff, if you are determined to be a fan of the US Olympic team wherever and whenever, you have to accept both the black power salutes and the photo-ops with Trump. The same thing with literature. There isn't any qualitative, and no major quantitative difference in the level of nose-holding conservatives and liberals have to do with literature. The main difference that appears from the outside is that, where possible, liberals downplay the conservativeness of writers they can claim as their own or apolitical, and only exile the real Celine types where you can't hide it, whereas conservatives who read admit they're often reading libs and discussing books with libs.
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