There's a 2019 BBC six-part drama called Years and Years by Russell T Davies. It takes place in an alternative future between 2019 and 2034. At the end of the first episode, Trump is re-elected and drops a nuclear bomb in the Pacific. The main plot-line concerns the rise of a white populist leader played by Emma Thompson, clearly modelled on Nigel Farage with a dash of Katie Hopkins, who comes to power in the wake of a banking crisis and promptly sets up secret death camps for immigrants and poor people and shuts down the BBC.
Round about the same time I was also struck by the fact that Charlie Brooker, whose Black Mirror series generally represents one of the few genuinely insightful and entertaining dystopias of recent years, failed to see anything at all dystopian and questionable about the government ordering a nationwide house arrest in 2020. He made an episode of his Screen Wipe programme that used his snarky comedical talents to support the regime narrative, predictably bashing Boris Johnson for being a buffoon and not taking The Virus seriously enough.
A recent dystopian novel is Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, which won the Booker Prize in 2023. The Booker is the UK's most prestigious literary prize and its award grants the winning novel significant cultural cachet. Of course, recent winners have been resolutely On Message (and the ones I have been able to bring myself to read have been extremely poor novels indeed).
Prophet Song is set in a near-future Ireland ruled by an increasingly authoritarian, you guessed it, FAR-RIGHT FASCIST regime. The hero is a trade-union dissident who is disappeared by the government, which establishes concentration camps and censors the internet.
Lynch has said that the purpose of the novel is to evoke empathy for the plight of immigrants who are fleeing despotic regimes and are seeking to enter the free, democratic, liberal west, by depicting Ireland descending into the kind of totalitarianism that refugees are apparently escaping from.
As you point out, it is striking (but hardly unsurprising) that at a time when leftist, self-proclaimed liberal governments who speak of their determination to Save Democracy are in fact censoring free speech, trampling on constitutional norms, sending thought criminals to jail etc, all prominent dystopian films, TV shows, novels, video games etc invariably fixate on the fear of authoritarian, etho-nationalist, patriarchal, Third Reich-esque right-wing futures. The confected hysteria over "Project 2025" and Trump's supposed secret plans to turn the Handmaid's Tale into a reality is enabled by these cultural products.
The primary reason that left wing regimes turn to these ever-more hysterical witch hunts is that they have no real idea of how to run anything. They want power, in order to make things "fair" or "equal". But once they have power they are expected to also maintain order. Rather than worry about that, they immediately turn to hunting down counter-revolutionaries. This has been the case with every leftist revolution since the French Revolution.
The other reason for their witch hunts is that a core tenet of leftists is that they are the perpetual outsider, the underdog, the disenfranchised. No matter how much power they wield, how much if their agenda they have accomplished, how nearly complete is their propaganda blanket, they must still believe that they are speaking truth to power.
There's a 2019 BBC six-part drama called Years and Years by Russell T Davies. It takes place in an alternative future between 2019 and 2034. At the end of the first episode, Trump is re-elected and drops a nuclear bomb in the Pacific. The main plot-line concerns the rise of a white populist leader played by Emma Thompson, clearly modelled on Nigel Farage with a dash of Katie Hopkins, who comes to power in the wake of a banking crisis and promptly sets up secret death camps for immigrants and poor people and shuts down the BBC.
Round about the same time I was also struck by the fact that Charlie Brooker, whose Black Mirror series generally represents one of the few genuinely insightful and entertaining dystopias of recent years, failed to see anything at all dystopian and questionable about the government ordering a nationwide house arrest in 2020. He made an episode of his Screen Wipe programme that used his snarky comedical talents to support the regime narrative, predictably bashing Boris Johnson for being a buffoon and not taking The Virus seriously enough.
A recent dystopian novel is Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, which won the Booker Prize in 2023. The Booker is the UK's most prestigious literary prize and its award grants the winning novel significant cultural cachet. Of course, recent winners have been resolutely On Message (and the ones I have been able to bring myself to read have been extremely poor novels indeed).
Prophet Song is set in a near-future Ireland ruled by an increasingly authoritarian, you guessed it, FAR-RIGHT FASCIST regime. The hero is a trade-union dissident who is disappeared by the government, which establishes concentration camps and censors the internet.
Lynch has said that the purpose of the novel is to evoke empathy for the plight of immigrants who are fleeing despotic regimes and are seeking to enter the free, democratic, liberal west, by depicting Ireland descending into the kind of totalitarianism that refugees are apparently escaping from.
As you point out, it is striking (but hardly unsurprising) that at a time when leftist, self-proclaimed liberal governments who speak of their determination to Save Democracy are in fact censoring free speech, trampling on constitutional norms, sending thought criminals to jail etc, all prominent dystopian films, TV shows, novels, video games etc invariably fixate on the fear of authoritarian, etho-nationalist, patriarchal, Third Reich-esque right-wing futures. The confected hysteria over "Project 2025" and Trump's supposed secret plans to turn the Handmaid's Tale into a reality is enabled by these cultural products.
The primary reason that left wing regimes turn to these ever-more hysterical witch hunts is that they have no real idea of how to run anything. They want power, in order to make things "fair" or "equal". But once they have power they are expected to also maintain order. Rather than worry about that, they immediately turn to hunting down counter-revolutionaries. This has been the case with every leftist revolution since the French Revolution.
The other reason for their witch hunts is that a core tenet of leftists is that they are the perpetual outsider, the underdog, the disenfranchised. No matter how much power they wield, how much if their agenda they have accomplished, how nearly complete is their propaganda blanket, they must still believe that they are speaking truth to power.
Fantastic essay!