But there’s one form of entertainment that seems to appeal to all: dystopian fiction.
It’s a literary and pop-culture genre that portrays individuals struggling in fallen or otherwise broken societies, often as a coded warning of a nightmarish future that could take place if we’re not careful. Even in such a divisive time as this, it has universal appeal.
Consider the reanimated corpses of strangers, en masse.
Unlike most pop-cult memes, The Walking Dead — both the comic book series and the wildly popular AMC series — has fans from all points along the political spectrum.
For the right, it offers a world totally free from the rules and regulations that trap us in our everyday lives, one where men rely almost solely on brute strength to achieve their ends, protecting their families against ruthless villains and raiding abandoned towns for food, all while bashing the shit out of hordes of soulless corpses.
For the left, it offers a diverse-ish cast that readily adapts to the world around it as the players constantly try to avoid/overthrow ruthless authoritarian strongmen and their hardened minions.
Like other fictional dystopias, the protagonists are fighting not only to survive, but to attain or keep freedom in a world where the odds are grim and everyone/everything is out to get you.
And aren’t we all?
Anyone who’s ever had to struggle against a powerful antagonist beyond their control, which is nearly everybody, can relate.
“I think that we use dystopias to kind of work out these horrible nightmares,” said Sarah Lauro, a professor of literature at University of Tampa.
But just exactly who your Negan is depends on your vantage point.
At first glance, it would seem like this genre would be solely liberals’ domain. Characters deal with the breakdown of society — probably due to war or some environmental factor that’s spreading disease or squeezing resources. They’re often struggling against conformity, constraints on the language they can use and some kind of tyrannical overlord, religious or otherwise.
These types of scenarios look a little like what liberals and minority groups fear most about Donald Trump’s America: the rationalization of possible internment camps in talking about a possible Muslim registry, normalization of hate speech and crime, and the installation of cabinet members who seem not to care about the likely environmental catastrophe that will come from deregulating industries and ignoring climate change.
Throw in the influence of fake news, an absurdly evangelical vice presidential pick and Russian involvement in the election, and this generation’s Fahrenheit 451 practically writes itself.
Plenty of dystopian literature and film already uses those things.
The big screen adaptation of Children of Men, with its environment-induced mass infertility that sparks violent anti-immigrant sentiments, could seem prescient to those who fear Trump and his cabinet. Same goes for The Handmaid’s Tale, a 1985 novel set in 2005, when a terrorist attack sparks the onslaught of a violently paternalistic society in which women are forced into a narrow list of roles (incidentally, Hulu is releasing an adaptation of the novel in 2017).
And during the lead-up to his election, a handful of speculative essays and fiction was inspired by his rise, from a short story by former Obama speechwriter Josh Lovett to a gallows humor-rich Daily Show segment.
But hold on.
Perhaps ironically, it was fear of collectivism, and the sense of a diminishing of rugged, John Wayne-esque individualism, that drew so many people to Trump’s narrative, even if it was all fantasy. At his rallies, he spoke in drastic (oft-untrue) terms about the implicit doom of the Democratic platform: clean energy killing even more coal jobs in Appalachia (even though it was automation/cheaper coal elsewhere/natural gas); that the U.S. military isn’t “winning” anymore and is in fact “a disaster.” At rally upon rally he offered pages of (however untrue) rhetoric about the perils of socialized medicine and the specter of tyranny that might befall us if there’s even minute limitation placed on gun ownership rights.
“I think Trump tapped into that fear in our society and even maybe used the rhetoric of those dystopias to try to scare people. And, yeah, ironically, where we’re headed now is, I think, much more dystopic than what we had previously,” Lauro said.
For the right, the real nightmare is the stripping of free will to benefit the greater good: Think Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Think Orwell’s 1984. Hell, even the Vonnegut short story “Harrison Bergeron” can be seen as a critique of going to extremes to ensure no one has more advantages than anyone else.
Trump’s election, after all, was largely a symbolic rejection of what many see as an urban elite that’s controlling their lives. Think The Hunger Games.
“Embedded in this kind of working-class world there is this kind of resentment that I think we did see expressed in the election, which is tricky because the people who were expressing the class resentment elected this really rich guy who lives in New York who would seem to not identify with them,” said Slate.com books and culture columnist Laura Miller.
The Hunger Games' protagonist is from a poor mining town, after all, and is forced to fight to the death to the delight of urban elites.
The left — with its argument that lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy and pervasive lack of a living wage are not good things — probably reads the books a little differently.
It’s unclear whether Trump’s reign will inspire a wave of works within the genre.
“I would almost predict less dystopian fiction, because dystopian fiction, although it’s always about the present, it takes place in kind of a fantasy realm that’s like a dream world, and I think that the Trump presidency is far more likely to inspire an embrace of realism,” Miller said. “People are going to want fiction to tell real news to counteract the sort of lies that everybody believes the media is telling us.”
Lauro said it’s likely that writers will gravitate toward comedy as a distraction from how bad things really are.
“This is reality now. I really wonder if things get really, really bad here, what’s going to happen to a show like The Walking Dead? Because if you look at the history of cinema, in times of great strife and pain in our country, people gravitate more towards comedies,” she said. “Who would want to go see a horror film or a tearjerker if your life sucks? You want to have that escapism from it.”
She added that while dystopian fiction may excel in offering warnings of possible social perils, in anticipating Jan. 20 — Trump’s inauguration — it may be best to read fiction inspired by the rise of former Haitian dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier or former Dominican President Rafael “El Jefe” Trujillo. In that, she said, you may find some startling parallels.
“I think what’s important for people to realize is that we’ve had terrible people in power in various countries around the world and [Trump’s behavior] is sort of the dictator’s playbook.” It’s important “to read that literature,” said Lauro, “and start to see the danger signs.”
This article appears in Dec 15-22, 2016.