THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO DYSTOPIAN POLITICS
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t’s no coincidence that two dystopian classics—George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—shot to the top of best-seller lists in the wake of the 2016 pro-Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Novels, like other art forms, can help people make sense of the world around them. In this case, it is political fiction helping readers parse the political world, with frightening futuristic visions serving to amplify, explain, or warn us about current trends. The government that controls Oceania in Orwell’s 1984 is a Stalinesque communist nightmare centered in what was formerly London, England. The Party, led by the dictatorial Big Brother, keeps its members under control through constant surveillance and intensive language and thought policing. In Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the Republic of Gilead is a theocratic (religion-based) totalitarian government that controls the Northeast of the former United States; it parcels out its most precious resources—fertile women—among powerful men for purposes of enforced reproduction. Key themes link Orwell’s and Atwood’s otherwise quite different visions of totalitarian government, including surveillance, fear, hierarchy, rules about sex and reproduction, violent repression, and a deep concern with language and its connection to thought control. This is also not a coincidence; these are some of what we will later discuss as hallmarks of dystopian government. A good dictator, if he or she knows what’s what, will be concerned with all of these. And those who might want to resist such
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governance should also know and understand key concepts about dystopian government. Democratic self-governance is difficult, tedious, easily corrupted, and prone to failure. History is littered with failed democracies (ancient Greece, Rome, multiple Italian city-states, current abortive attempts at democracy in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Russia . . . and the list goes on). As Aristotle noted more than two millennia ago, democracies often devolve into dictatorships, which can then be overthrown in favor of democracies, and so on; political scientists refer to this as regime cycling.1 Since Aristotle’s time, many political theorists and philosophers have helped us clarify the negatives of both tyranny and mob rule and tried to form political philosophies that would strike a balance. No government, they have concluded, is perfect—but even so, some government is better than no government at all. In these sentiments, political theorists are joined by writers of dystopian fiction, who delight in pointing out the myriad problems both with the presence of government and with its absence (the pure state of nature). It is a paradox: we need government, but it often sucks. Democracy, however, can be seen as an attempt at stopping dystopia. In this book, we try to give you (relatively) short answers to large and longstanding questions: Why do we even have government if most governments either under- or overreach? Short answer: like bad pizza and bad sex, a bad government is better than no government at all. Second, why do some people choose to live under authoritarian rule? Short answer: democracy is scary, and it’s hard freaking work. Next, why would democracy prevent dystopia? Short answer: because no one gets exactly what they want in a democracy. Finally, is resistance futile? Short answer: of course not. But some forms of resistance are more realistic than others, and we’ll mostly look at nonviolent resistance. The premise of this book is fairly simple. We believe that dystopian fiction can help us explain and make sense of key concepts in political science—that is, the study of government, governance, state power, public policy, people’s political behavior, and social movements, importantly including resistance to authoritarian rule. Political science taught in a purely theoretical way can be dry indeed; using dystopian fiction, especially popular books and films, like Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games or even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, helps put some meat on the bones. And art gets under the skin and into the soul in a way social science, journalism, and outright legal argument just cannot do. For all the abolitionist arguing
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for over a century, it was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin that spread the antislavery message across the United States—the book was so influential that Lincoln called Stowe “the little lady who caused this great war.”2 The approach we take blends fictional examples of bad government with concepts from comparative government studies and adds a dash of political theory. Fiction is a good lens for concepts because it insulates us from the horrors being presented in the narrative and sometimes helps us see our world in a new way. For instance, it is not too far a stretch to compare those seeking to consolidate and wield power in real-life states to the “Death Eaters” trying to control the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter’s world. Dystopia, however, is far from a fictional concept. Real-life examples of dystopian government, while useful, and which we will use throughout the book, can be downright distressing. This book, we hope, strikes the right balance between humor and political science, a blend that invites you to better understand bad governments and why they do what they do, and we hope it does so in a way that is ultimately empowering and even inspirational—or at least not tedious. The good news, as you will soon learn, is that every dark dystopian vision has at its core a little ray of sunshine.
WHAT IS THIS BOOK? WHAT WILL IT DO? HOW? WHY? In this book, we’ll be using dystopian fiction to explain what good governance looks like and how to resist bad governance. You probably had to read at least one dystopian novel in high school (1984, we’re betting), and you would have to have been living under a rock to miss The Hunger Games mania that swept the United States a few years ago. There have also been several dystopian TV series—notably cult hits like Jericho (2006–2008) and Joss Whedon’s Firefly (2002–2003), the reboot of Battlestar Galactica (2004– 2009), as well as newer shows like CW’s The 100 (2014–2018) and Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle (2015–).3 But dystopias show up in some unexpected places, too. For example, who would expect to find an Orwellian nightmare in a hilarious and seemingly perky kids’ film? Yet you’ll find one in The LEGO Movie. The movie is a brilliant depiction of a dystopian Lego Universe in which happiness comes from obeying The Instructions. It gives you an oppressive authoritarian
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ruler (Lord/President Business) who rules with an iron fist, lies to his people regularly, keeps/tortures political prisoners, and uses gimmicks to distract his subjects from the reality of their oppression and impending doom. See also Disney’s Wall-E, a somewhat soul-crushing but cute indictment of the disposable elements inherent in today’s consumer culture. There is also dystopian poetry. For example, Bruce Boston’s 2008 poem “Dystopian Dusk,” about a society gradually sliding toward fascist rule, ends with “and a bare reflection of the sun’s last rays heralds a fascist night.”4 Then there’s dystopian music—Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” and Judas Priest’s “Tyrant” and “Metal Gods” come to mind pretty quickly.5 And for those of you who aren’t metal fans, the Pet Shop Boys’ 2006 song “Integral” explicitly references Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We; the song is meant “to register [the band’s] hostility toward the Labour government’s plan to require national ID cards containing individuals’ biometric data.” 6 Most recently, dystopias are appearing in video games, too—for example, the dystopian cities of Columbia and Rapture at the core of the first-person-shooter series Bioshock.7 There has been considerable speculation in the popular press as to why dystopian fiction has become so popular—maybe it’s because so many dystopian stories show an everyday person fighting back against oppressive government. Maybe it’s because the magnitude of the surveillance state in many countries has made the stories relatable to people. And maybe it’s just that there are just some damn good stories in the genre. Honestly, we don’t really care why people like it. We’re just excited that people have gotten into it, and in this book we hope to help people translate their familiarity with dystopian societies into an understanding of modern authoritarian and other horrible forms of government. It is worth mentioning, too, that those who make dystopian fiction, in whatever form, are not just trying to tell a good story (although they often do). It is the creators’ objective to get us to think critically about a current pattern or trend in our world, project where it might go in the future, and then (hopefully) take steps to avoid it. You can almost hear Bruce Boston screaming at us in that poem, à la Dylan Thomas, to not go gentle into that dystopian night. A key element of this book’s approach will be comparing governments; throughout, you’ll see several “Comparing Dystopias” boxes. In them, we contrast real and fictional dystopias, using the fictional to highlight key elements of the real. We report a Freedom House score (0 to 100, with 100
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being most free) for each state—real or fictional. Freedom House (an international nongovernmental organization, or NGO) provides that score for each real state, and it also provides its methodology for arriving at a score. We’ve used Freedom House’s methodology, including its “Freedom in the World 2017 Checklist of Questions,” to score the fictional dystopias we’ve used in the comparisons.8 Here’s how the book works: in chapter 1, we do the set-up work for the rest of the book. First, there’s some basic stuff about dystopian fiction that you just have to know. Also, a bit of history. (Truly, just a bit.) And then you have to understand a little about political theory, which is that branch of philosophy focused on governing, politics, and the state. We promise we will make all of this interesting. But it’s impossible truly to appreciate dystopian fiction without knowing some of the theory and history behind it. Chapter 2 dives into some examples of dystopian government, of both the fictional and the real-life variety. The goal of this chapter is to define dystopian government and understand its hallmarks. And then in chapter 3, we switch to the role of economics in real and fictional dystopian states. Starting with chapter 4, we delve into the strategies and tactics that dictators use to achieve and then maintain their power. (Have you ever wondered what the difference is between a strategy and a tactic? Stay tuned.) We examine survival and resistance; there are a variety of ways for people to survive in a dystopian state, some of which work better than others. Chapter 5 explores individual strategies for survival and tactics that you can use to keep yourself sane while (hopefully) undermining a dystopian government. In chapters 6 and 7, we look at the theory and practice of collective resistance to dystopian government. Specifically, we examine nonviolent resistance, and we do so for two reasons: first, nonviolent resistance works better, and, second, a successful nonviolent resistance campaign is more likely to result in a new democracy than is violent resistance. That brings us to chapter 8, which tackles rebuilding your society after you bring down an oppressive dystopian regime. In this chapter, we want you to think about what type of society you want, what principles the government should uphold, and what institutions you could use to build a strong, sustainable, and just government and society. Ultimately, this book acknowledges the visceral power and popularity of modern dystopian fiction and seeks to use readers’ interest in it as a hook to draw them into deeper analytical thinking about the concepts, questions,
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and answers that political science can offer on the topic of good versus bad governance. Our epilogue suggests that there is still reason to hope, even in dystopian darkness. Fictional works about bad governments can be enormously useful as case studies; they help us know and name what we are seeing, perhaps avoid it if we see it coming, and find the way out if we are trapped.
SPOILER ALERT Before we go too much further, we should probably give you one very large spoiler alert. We are going to give away major details of many books and movies. Sorry. But now that we’ve given you fair warning, we can move on to giving away plot twists and endings! We hope you enjoy and learn from this book. If it does nothing else, we hope it gives you a greater appreciation for that clumsy but ultimately hopeful system of governance we call democracy, which we argue is the antidote to dystopia. Although the fictional visions we use to explore bad government can be dark indeed, keep this in mind: someone bothered to write them, and millions have read them. That means people care enough about what bad government is to want to change it. Through the fiction, they are giving warnings for the future. Think about it: that’s hope.
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HIS BOOK uses dystopian narratives to help explain how real-world politics work. Amy L. Atchison and Shauna L. Shames draw on classic and contemporary fiction, films, and TV shows—as well as their real-life counterparts—to offer funny and accessible explanations of key political concepts such as governance, citizenship, and the state. They emphasize nonviolent resistance and change, exploring ways to challenge and topple a dystopian-style government. Survive and Resist provides a timely and innovative approach to the fundamentals of politics for an era of creeping tyranny.
“Survive and Resist shows us how to be intellectually engaged with but not discouraged by ideas that often seem too overwhelming to examine in moments of political despair. Rigorous and disarming, morally serious and fun—a must-read.” ALEX ZAMALIN ,
author of Struggle on Their Minds: The Political Thought of African American Resistance
“This engagingly written book is an urgent reminder that decency prevails when people of goodwill join in the frustrating and uncertain practice of self-governance.” KRISTIN GOSS ,
author of The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice
“Atchison and Shames’s examination of political machinations, tyrannies, and the human desire for resistance makes for a sizzling and unsettling yet reassuring read. I wanted to cheer at the end.” CORDELIA FRANCES BIDDLE ,
author of Saint Katharine: The Life of Katharine Drexel
“Atchison and Shames have gifted us a concise guide to dystopia, full of hope and humor. Survive and Resist crisply offers political science insight into nondemocratic regimes— their economics, tactics of control, and blind spots. Its brisk voice, quick pace, and dark humor should make it a favorite of political science students and speculative-fiction diehards. I can’t wait to use it in my teaching.” AMELIA HOOVER GREEN ,
author of The Commander’s Dilemma: Violence and Restraint in Wartime
AMY L. ATCHISON is associate professor of political science at Valparaiso University.
Her work has appeared in journals such as Politics and Gender, the Journal of Political Science Education, and PS: Political Science and Politics, among others. SHAUNA L. SHAMES is associate professor of political science at Rutgers University– Camden. She is the author of Out of the Running: Why Millennials Reject Political Careers and Why It Matters (2017) and coeditor of The Right Women: Republican Party Activists, Candidates, and Legislators (2018). ISBN: 978-0-231-18891-3 COVER DESIGN: LISA HAMM COVER IMAGE: PL AINPICTURE/CULTURA PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S / N E W Y O R K C U P. C O L U M B I A . E D U