I have said for a long time that the US is stuck between four dystopias, and I think the model is incomplete. The four dystopias are:
- 1984 – Big Brother is a totalitarian state that demands the citizens agree with whatever the government declares the truth. Leader Dearest’s lies and demands that people back him up. They want us to believe things that are flatly untrue.
- The Handmaid’s Tale – The Christian Nationalists want to live in Gideon and impose their very restrictive religion on everyone else and reduce women to wombs.
- Brave New World – The Fordism oligarchs want complete freedom from social responsibility and the want the proles to be essentially robots
- Atlas Shrugged – This is the dystopia that doesn’t quite fit the model. It is more a vision statement than a mission statement, where all the oligarchs are John Galt, worshipped by everyone else. The fact that this contradicts Fordism which wants the workers to be non-cognizant, and the Big Brother types want to be anonymous, doesn’t seem to bother them, because “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and they think themselves big thinkers of original ideas, parroting what they are told by the Right Wing Noise Machine.
The missing factor in all of these is the inherent racism in all the dystopian movements. The problem is I can’t find a book that highlights life in the white supremacist dystopia. Racism is a thread through all of the dystopias, but not a single dystopia in itself. I have found lists of books that the White Supremacists think important to their movement, but the only one with name recognition is Mein Kampf. Most of the titles point to the other thread through the dystopias: constant victimhood.
The current rupture is between the racists who voted in Leader Dearest hoping to be allowed to kill brown people and Musk calling them all idiots and demanding cheaper immigrant employees who cannot quit or unionize without losing what little life and security in America they get. The Fordists are winning right now, because despite hating women and brown people, Leader Dearest loves money and power more. If he can get those without the racism and sexism, then those aspects aren’t as important, they’re just icing on the cake.
But I really have more important things to think about right now, and I should get on with it.