A lot of television drama these days has been made redundant by the Trump administration. Why watch House of Cards when you can see the real thing rolling 24/7 on CNN? But the recent MGM-Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1984 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale has me mesmerised. I’ve been binge watching it lately, not because I think that Trump’s America is about to become a religious autocracy in which fertile females are forced into child-bearing servitude, but because Atwood was so prescient about how political extremism of any kind, coupled with a loss of trust in existing institutions, can quickly result in political milieus that one never thought possible.
In Atwood’s fictional world, late-stage capitalism has led inexorably to an environmental crisis in which birth rates are radically diminished. Angry, underemployed men are manipulated by self-serving elites who decide that the way to Make America Great Again is to take it back not to the 1950s but to the 1650s. After a “terrorist” attack on Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court, the US goes from being a liberal democracy to a theocratic dictatorship based on a literal interpretation of the Bible (take that, Steve Bannon). Just in case the ruling establishment didn’t get the message, Harvard University, founded by Puritans, becomes ground zero for the ensuing horrors.
Atwood is, wisely, an equal opportunity condemner of extremism on either side of the political aisle. Loony religious fanatics get slammed but so do radical feminists, who go all too quickly from porn-burning in the old society to abusing rebellious handmaids in a Red Guard-like retraining centre in the new republic of Gilead. It’s an amped-up version of the radical divides that have coursed through US culture since the 1990s, culminating in both the neo-Nazi groups and the leftwing “antifa” that protested in Charlottesville.