Using Literature as a Basis for Political Argument and Opinion

I see this quite often I feel like. People like to use literary content as a basis for their arguments and will often utilize it as a form of historical or factual evidence. Some quick examples of this are Gary Stevenson using Charles Dickens in his arguments for economics, Orwell and Orwellian is/are thrown around like a football in American Politics, and "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair.

I can appreciate each of these authors as a journalist writing about the effects of policy, social opinion, and personal experience in their own time. It still seems very much like supplemental information to be as a window into the culture and atmosphere of history with historical records being used as your primary basis for these arguments.

If you told me you were opposed to communism because you read about the negative effects of it in Ayn Rand's "We the Living" or Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" I wouldn't be able to take it seriously. It seems like a shallow argument. You are just basing your opinions off of others opinions and personal experiences, but it's somehow given validity because it's from a book?