These anonymous reviews published in The Economist are deeply ironic. Like most mainstream media, the reviewer appears oblivious to the current trends toward more censorship of social media, political prosecutions, politicized media, fake news, the power of the intelligence agencies, the undemocratic Congress, and activist judges.
Five novels that imagine dictatorship in America
A gripping way into thinking about democracy under threat
Novelists have long imagined, and warned of, the threat to liberal places from totalitarian rule. British writers of the 20th century, including George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Robert Harris, won mass audiences for their depictions of anti-democratic dystopias. All owed a debt, in turn, to a disillusioned Russian revolutionary, Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose novel “We” described a dictatorial “OneState” of the 26th century, in which humans become mere “Numbers”—automatons who prioritise efficiency over freedom. His book, published in the early 1920s, provided an inspiration for Orwell’s “1984”. Authors across the Atlantic have fretted no less than Europeans about threats to democracy. Margaret Atwood, a Canadian, imagined America becoming a repressive religious republic, Gilead. Sinclair Lewis, who wrote soon after the Nazis were elected to power in Germany, told a story of the rise of populist, fascist government and the failures of ordinary American citizens to resist it. Phillip Roth picked up that theme seven decades later. Read these five novels as a chilling introduction to the idea of democracy under threat in America.
The Handmaid’s Tale. By Margaret Atwood. Harper Collins; 320 pages; $28. Vintage; £16.99
Margaret Atwood’s best known book was published in 1985. Reviewing it soon afterwards,The Economist found it to be “polished, ingenious–and terrifying”, and a “wry vision of life in 21st-century America”. Pollution and sexual disease have taken their toll. Fertility has plummeted. The Gilead Republic has become a police state run by the Commanders on lines laid down by the book of Genesis. The few fertile women are rounded up to serve as breeders. If they fail, they die. If they succeed, they are allotted to a new master. Sex is strictly impersonal, enacted in the presence of the Commanders’ wives. The narrator is Offred (of Fred: the handmaids are named after their owners). Her book is a secret record of atrocities.
In 2019 The Economist discussed the novel with the author, reflecting on the idea that, for many readers, the book illuminated current politics more than any other work of literature. To some, its dystopian predictions about the rollback of reproductive rights seemed prophetic. “While we were moving away from Gilead for a while in the 20th century,” Ms Atwood said, “we turned around in the 21st and started going back.” After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, some came to see Ms Atwood as a seer. “The Handmaid’s Tale” laid out an extreme version of America’s pathologies, issuing a warning that what was once shocking could come to seem normal, as outrage devolved into complacency. Speak up about injustice while you can, it seemed to say. For Gilead “may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will,” one character observes. (Read our full review from 2019.)
The Plot Against America. By Philip Roth. Harper Collins; 400 pages; $24. Vintage; £16.99
Just as Ms Atwood’s book found renewed interest after Mr Trump’s election, so did “The Plot Against America”, a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. The Economist’s review at the time described it as a novel that explores what happens to one family when America gradually rescinds its welcome. It imagines a nasty turn in American politics: Charles Lindbergh, an aviator who admired Nazi Germany and shared its animosity towards Jews, wins the Republican nomination for president on an isolationist ticket and defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the general election. It is not “about” a fascist America. Rather, it focuses on the tensions within a lower-middle-class Jewish family as the world they thought they inhabited disappears bit by bit.
Later, during Mr Trump’s presidency, The Economist reflected again on the novel, saying it had “prophetically captured something central to the American experience this century: the sense that the country has betrayed its own nature, and that it is running off the rails”. (Read our review in 2020 of a related television series). As we wrote then, Roth’s mythmaking often focuses on physical objects. Take the wood and leather prosthesis used by Alvin, the narrator’s cousin, after he runs off to Canada to join the army and fight Hitler, and gets his leg blown off. “Everything about it was horrible, but horrible and a wonder both,” Roth writes. The prosthesis becomes a fetish, simultaneously a grim medical time capsule and a totem of American history gone wrong, its heroic trajectory cut off below the knee.
It Can’t Happen Here. By Sinclair Lewis. Suzeteo Enterprises; 260 pages; $22.99 and £23
In the same way that Zamyatin served as an inspiration for later authors in Europe who feared the rise of a repressive state, Sinclair Lewis’s book—and its title—have been influential on authors who considered the topic in America. In his dystopian novel of 1935, “It Can’t Happen Here”, Lewis described the rise of an American Caesar, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. Buzz easily defeats Franklin Roosevelt and goes on to win the presidency by promising to make America great again. He then sets about destroying the country’s system of checks and balances, by fomenting fear and unleashing paramilitary thugs known as Minute Men, while sensible Americans mostly comfort themselves with the belief that their country is immune to authoritarian takeover. The novel is told from the perspective of a prosperous, decent, small-town newspaper editor who grasps early on that democracy is threatened. He tries, with a small cohort of allies, to resist the change. Their efforts, mostly, prove futile.
If This Goes On…. By Robert Heinlein. Serialised in 1940 in Astounding Science Fiction
The reader learns hardly any detail about Nehemiah Scudder, the man who, early in the 21st century, becomes America’s last elected president and then its First Prophet in “If This Goes On…”. Robert Heinlein’s novella, a peculiar mixture of pulpy action and political theorising, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940, centres on the regime’s overthrow many years after its founding. In a postscript he added when he expanded the story into a short novel published in 1953, Heinlein (a fan of Sinclair Lewis) defended himself against that-can’t-happen-here criticisms of his imagined theocracy. In the postscript he says more about his conception of Scudder, a televangelist who rises to power with a mixture of holy-roller rhetoric, money, “modern techniques of advertising and propaganda” and a revived Ku Klux Klan. Heinlein also writes about the underpinnings of Scudder’s success: “There is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past…[T]here has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian…The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.”
The Man in the High Castle. By Philip K. Dick. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 288 pages; $23. Gollancz; £12.99
The totalitarians in Philip Dick’s novel, set and published in 1962, are not American, but German and Japanese. Fifteen years after their victory in the second world war, the Nazis run the east of America and imperial Japan rules the Pacific states. Race rigidly defines status: in San Francisco, where much of the action takes place, white Americans like the obsequious Childan, an antiques dealer, are second-class citizens, subordinate to the Japanese. Black people have been re-enslaved. Frink, a Jewish metalworker, is at risk of deportation to Europe, where he would be killed. The neutral terrain between America’s eastern and western states is home to Hawthorne Abendsen, author of a counterfactual history, “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy”, in which America and Britain had triumphed.
Amid all this, a German agent, Baynes, arrives in San Francisco with a mission to foil a plot by a Nazi faction to provoke nuclear war with the Japanese. So far, so sort-of credible. What truly gives the book its air of unreality is the use by several characters, American and Japanese, of the “I Ching”, an ancient Chinese text, to divine the future and the course their lives should take. Dick himself relied on it in writing the novel. The “I Ching” gives “The Man in the High Castle” its final, confusing twist: which of its twin unrealities is the “real” one? “The ‘I Ching’ failed me at the end of that book,” Dick later said. Read it nonetheless.
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We wrote recently about Americans’ eagerness for fiction that imagines a different misery: the return of civil war.
Moby-Dick, or The Whale. By Herman Melville. Penguin; 720 pages; $32 and £20
Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”, a metaphor-laden novel published in 1851, tells of Captain Ahab’s vengeful quest to catch the enormous white whale which bit off one of his legs. Melville turns Ahab’s whaling vessel, the Pequod, into an allegory for the American republic. The 30 sailors on board (one for every state then in the union) are mostly a worthy bunch. But Ahab, “their supreme lord and dictator”, is a powerful orator. He enlists them in his single-minded mission, which ends in disaster when Moby-Dick sinks the Pequod and leaves only the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, alive to tell the tale. Power is not the only theme of “Moby-Dick”: commerce, nature and God all loom large. But the novel’s political concerns surface each time it compares the Pequod’s captain to 19th-century despots, such as tsars and sultans, and to ancient tyrants, such as the Biblical king who gives him his name. ■
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