That's what it boils down to, wishes.

It struck me also that the left has no archetypal novels in the sense of what the world could be if only... but then I realized why.

The left has no image of a perfectable world, because there will always be people in it. People are inherently imperfect, and resist the "happily ever after" endings of a community where the people in charge are good and the people on the lower rungs of society are just happy to be of service. Instead, we have dystopias, as you have pointed out, in which control of the many by the few becomes the norm, and also stories of individual redemption, in which people save themselves and those around them by practicing liberal virtues like mercy and tolerance. These are not normally frontier stories, but stories set in civilized or urban settings.

Another example is the rebellion story, which is set in a dystopia and follows the adventures of a hero or heroine whose consciousness is raised during the course of the book. Sometimes, as with Les Miserables, it becomes a redemption tale. Dickens wrote a lot of these too. In fact, looking back to the Romantic period, I see a lot of them.

The dystopias start to appear in earnest with the realistic fiction of Zola. You may remember Zola as the example of liberal values who defended Dreyfus in the real-life drama of that French/Jewish officer being railroaded on a charge of treason. Brave New World is another example of dystopia, from about the same time period, in which it looked as if technology was robbing people of their humanity.

I find it interesting that the works of literature that liberals like tend, on the whole, to fall on the side of cautionary tales as concerns technological advances, going all the way back to Frankenstein. I see that as an ongoing trend. The issue is not so much opposition to technology (though, depending on the author, there's some of that too) as it is a suspicion that human beings, being not nearly so good as we think we are, will use tools to oppress each other, an essentially pessimistic point of view.

Modern stories that liberals read tend more toward comedy and satire, especially of class structure. Vonnegut and P.G. Wodehouse are two disparate but valid examples. The dystopia is still around, though: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood bears witness to that.

I see other works that the more liberal patrons seem to like, dealing more frankly with sexuality and sexual behavior, but these are no more literature than Tom Clancy, who does for war what people like Terry McMillan do for sex.

As you know, I read more children's and young adult fiction than anything else. The dystopias and the rebellion stories are very visible in YA fiction. But they would be: youth's job is to see how screwed up the world is.

Now that you've framed the question a little differently for me, with your mention of Lost Horizon, I'd have to revise my short list of Animal Farm to include Les Miserables. It doesn't show an ideal society in operation, but the striving of idealists toward a better world. The story is full of cruelty and injustice, but its plot is driven by the personal redemption of one man, and the echoing, clumsy movement of his society toward justice and freedom. The effort will never be entirely successful, but its nobility is not in conquest but in the striving itself. "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" (Robert Brownin

Regards--
Mary Anne