No, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Is Not ‘Unexpectedly Timely’
29th April 2017
Megan McArdle isn’t buying it.
My quarrel is not with the politics of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” nor with its realism. Expecting plausibility from dystopian fiction is like expecting haute cuisine from a highway service area. Of the dystopian fiction I’ve read, only “1984” comes even remotely close to feeling real, and that’s because Orwell was working from two vivid contemporaneous examples, from which he lifted freely.
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America hasn’t had a unified theocratic tradition since the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the descendants of those Puritans are now pouring their fervent moralism into buying Priuses and complaining about Trump. The closest modern equivalent, the statewide hegemony of the Latter-day Saints in Utah, doesn’t look very much like The Handmaid’s Tale, and hasn’t the faintest prayer of co-opting the rest of the nation’s fractured religious traditionalists, many of whom do not even consider the Mormons to be Christian. And even if some movement did, somehow, gather a Mormon-like critical mass, Trump is hardly likely to be its avatar; our most religious red state was also the one where Trump had the greatest trouble.
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There is nothing wrong with enjoying implausibilities on a screen or page. But there is something very wrong with hysterically declaring that those things are reality. That risks confusion so we will not notice the real dystopia rising — or the rest of the world will be too tired of our cries to hear any warnings we shout.