Well, it’s a lot more accurate to say that “a lot” of the blacklisted screenwriters and other industry figures were NOT Stalinists, literal or otherwise. Any number of them weren’t even communists in any sense at all. That’s part of why blacklists tend to be bad things: even if you can defend the central purpose, they’re inevitably used like a shotgun where a scalpel is called for.
I mean, we have blacklists today, in the form of sexual offender registries. Let’s say we all agree that rapists (to take one example) should be on such a registry. But maybe there’s a class of people (topless female political protestors) who are included for reasons that are technically valid (“indecent exposure” is on the list) but morally wrong. And let’s say that down the line a bunch of people are retroactively added to the list for things we don’t currently consider sexual offenses (e.g., posting to degenerate filth sites like this). And then let’s say a bunch of people with Jewish names are added to the sex-offender list at some point because a given list-keeper doesn’t like Jews. That’s a lot closer to how blacklists worked during the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s than what you’re describing.
MGM doesn’t have to hire Joe Stalin, Jr. to write the screenplay for Guys and Dolls if it doesn’t want to, especially if his pitch is that he’s going to reimagine Nathan Detroit as a revolutionary proletariat hero struggling against bourgeoisie oppression. But that’s not how the blacklist actually worked.
