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It has been a joy and a privilege to observe a rich and lively debate take shape on the provocation I put on the table two weeks ago: Why is there so little great art on the forces that find the U.S. on the brink of right-wing dictatorship? The opinions I received helped refine my framing question.
Only one of the most frequently cited counterexamples—the most recent season of the anthology series Fargo—depicts characters who recognizably live in America’s current political world. Almost every other suggestion came at the problem sidewise: from a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away). Set in Germany, or some future Ireland. As allegory, or “magical realist fable.”
And this is fine. After all, the models I cited for political art included both Franz Kafka and Arthur Miller’s deployment of 17th-century Massachusetts to allegorize how McCarthyism works. Despite many people’s misimpression, a billion-footed beast—Tom Wolfe’s 1989 name for the kind of sprawling, hyperrealist, Balzac-ish “social novel” he was frustrated American writers no longer wrote—is not what I was stalking.
But.
So much admirable fiction concerning other aspects of our modern American polycrisis are explicit about the precise problem that animates them, be it pandemics, or opioids, or precarity. It feels maddeningly inadequate to me that when it comes to American right-wing authoritarianism, hardly anything out there actually names the thing.
In an astute roundup of the year in TV, New Republic critic Phillip Maciak concluded that “endurance TV” shows like The Bear and I’m a Virgo “dared you to keep watching through brutal, unblinking set piece after brutal unblinking set piece.” So it is that much of the best culture in 2023 did a great job of reflecting what 2023 felt like. But why must culture flinch from addressing the politics that made it feel that way?
Well, not all culture. Ultimately, I found that Americans are smart, patient, and curious enough to handle the truth. The best and most unflinching American novel I’ve read on how something like Trumpism functions, at the level of the human soul, happens to have sold something like a million copies. Its plot is set in motion when mysterious space aliens somehow encircle a small Maine town with an invisible, impenetrable, many-miles-high wall.
Drumrooooooolllllllllllllllllll …
STEPHEN KING’S 1,074-PAGE MASTERPIECE Under the Dome (2010) is about as profoundly political as one can imagine a product moving those million units and getting made into a TV miniseries could possibly be. Most remarkably, it is unflinchingly political, containing within its richness both a sophisticated theoretical understanding of how democracies get murdered, and a model for how to defend them from the thugs holding the knife to her throat.
King began writing it, he explains in an author’s note, in 2007, the same year I began documenting in my own work the way an “astonishingly sizable population in America … doesn’t consider any Democratic president legitimate.” It was published in November 2009, just as it was becoming all too evident that this was the operative theory in both the Republican Party’s parliamentary and emergent paramilitary wings. King first conceived the idea in 1976, a similar such political moment when, despite the election of a Democratic president, America’s political structure of feeling was nonetheless drifting toward the political right.
It takes place, we learn from an offhand reference to a bumper sticker on a Volvo—“faded but still readable: Obama ’12! YES WE STILL CAN”—some years after Barack Obama’s re-election, but while this “bastard” (as the villain of the piece puts it) and “pro-abortion son-of-a-buck” who “knew nothing about faith” is still president.
The tyrant at its center owns the town’s biggest used-car lot, a shrewd political insight in itself: The local empire of auto dealerships has long been an epitome of “family capitalism,” the sturdiest institutional base for conservative politics in America. King, born in 1947, might even have been just politically precocious enough to have registered Adlai Stevenson’s joke, upon the inauguration of the first Republican president in 20 years, that “the car dealers have taken over from the New Dealers.”
It feels maddeningly inadequate that when it comes to American right-wing authoritarianism, hardly anything out there actually names the thing.
I’m not a fan of supernatural storytelling; I was very much enjoying both King’s The Stand (1978) and the classic horror flick The Blair Witch Project (1999) until the harrowing mysteries for which the protagonists reach for supernatural explanations turned out to actually be … supernatural. But this supernatural story works. It asks what might happen when a stereotypical American small town gets cut off from the rest of the world. It is a social microcosm, much like Melville’s whaling ship—a brilliant, and somehow convincing, contrivance. The plot turns upon what happens when our car-dealing Ahab does what strongmen always do when crisis strikes: use it to become dictators.
Sorry, no spoiler alerts. In my opinion, a truly great story can’t be spoiled, because a truly great storyteller can deliver unto the reader the delight of surprise even if they supposedly “know” what will happen next. This is a great story, by a great storyteller. Is it “great literature”? Well, maybe getting a million Americans to open their eyes about how “conservatism” and “Christianity” can serve as an alibi for cruelty and domination is a great artistic accomplishment in itself.
The small-town setting of Chester’s Mill, Maine, is crucial. Edmund Burke, pioneering philosopher of modern conservatism, called “little platoons”—families, clans, churches, villages—the soundest foundation of a moral society. Great social critics on the left—and King is also one of these—have always understood the problem more, well, dialectically.
Late in 2003, driving through red counties in central Illinois to report on whether voters were still sticking with George W. Bush as Iraq turned into a charnel house, I recognized this wisdom in, of all places, the burg that advertises itself as Reagan’s own “hometown” (he had no hometown): Dixon, Illinois. Democratic civil servants wouldn’t let me use their names for fear of career retribution. The daughter of the town bookie told me, “Hell, all the cops bet with him!” A Black childhood friend of hers, graduated from Northwestern, returned to his hometown sporting dreadlocks, with the aim of serving the community in some philanthropic way—until police raided his home for (nonexistent) drugs.
King conveys this dialectic by having characters sing snatches of an earworm called “Talkin’ at the Texaco” by songwriter James McMurtry, son of novelist Larry McMurtry, which came out in 1989, but which King imagines into a rebirth as a cover song that was a hit the summer before the action in the novel takes place. Some characters hum it to themselves in appreciation, others with sardonic irony:
Who you lookin’ for
What was his name
You can probably find him
At the football game
It’s a small town
You know what I mean
It’s a small town, son
And we all support the team
One of the book’s themes is how difficult it can be, in places like Chester’s Mill, to arrive at independent moral judgments when such tribal attachments interfere. One character doubts that the cops in town would ever hurt anyone unprovoked: “That was for the big cities, where folks didn’t know how to get along.”
Chester’s Mill cops, of course, very much hurt people unprovoked—that is, once the Ahab, whose name is “Big Jim” Rennie, purges the force of anyone who treats their job professionally, and finds enough local toughs to sign up for the work because of the sanction it grants them to open up a can of state-sanctioned whup-ass whenever someone crosses them. This gives Rennie his own personal murderous squadristi, thugging out against this Duce’s enemies—the story’s good guys—whom he successfully frames as “terrorists.”
That’s part of the sophistication of Under the Dome’s liberalism: a savvy grasp of how quickly institutions can be degraded into extensions of the will of evil men. As Lyndon Johnson’s political mentor Sam Rayburn put it, “Any jackass can knock down a barn.”
New England towns have selectmen, not city councils or mayors. Chester’s Mill has three selectmen. Another example of King’s sharp political antenna is that he makes his villain the second selectman. The first selectman King props up in business; the third selectman he keeps strung out on oxy. Big Jim takes all the power with none of the responsibility. For instance, during the final battle, when the emergency lights go out in the dome because Big Jim had greedily vetoed funds to keep it maintained, the dictator sniffs: “Al Timmons should have done it on his own initiative … For God’s sake, is a little initiative too much to ask?”
Big Jim is especially buffered from responsibility when it comes to (oh, all right: spoiler alert!) the massive meth lab he’s built under the 50,000-watt Christian radio station he owns, funded via shell companies around the globe. “For the good of the town,” he always explains to himself. Because, as King well understands, never has there been an evil dictator who wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and sees evil.
Did I mention our Ahab is also a devout “Christian”? Which means he never swears (“Pete, get rid of this rhymes-with-witch.”). And hasn’t the wit to grasp the irreplaceable cultural importance of the local dance hall, because it is a “sinpit.”
This may sound cartoonish. But it is another token of King’s political sophistication. As John Ganz told us a few columns ago, when it comes to fascism, “everything kind of looks farcical until it doesn’t.” Think of Jerry Falwell Jr. mortgaging his “Christian” college’s future, first to the political fortunes of Donald Trump, then to his and his wife’s throuple with a pool boy.
This is Steven King, unflinchingly, naming the thing: “Big Jim Rennie felt remarkably good for a man who had committed murder the night before. This was partially because he did not see it as murder, no more than he had seen the death of his late wife as murder. It was cancer that had taken her. Inoperable. Yes, he had probably given her too many of the pain pills over the last week, and in the end he’d still had to help her with a pillow over her face (but lightly, ever so lightly, slowing her breathing, easing her into the arms of Jesus), but he had done it out of love and kindness. What had happened to Reverend Coggins was a bit more brutal—admittedly—but the man been so bullish. So completely unable to put the town’s welfare ahead of his own.”
Reverend Coggins had to go, you see, because he wanted to blow the whistle on their shared drug empire.
Again, too cartoonish for some. Satire? A little bit. But still and all: What other novelist has written about the moral evasions of Christian conservatism—I’m seriously asking—as unflinchingly as that?
ONE OF THE THINGS I FIND MOST STRIKING about Under the Dome is that it was written and published while so many Americans were declaring that, with the triumph of President Obama, the feral divisions that have always driven American politics—usually just beneath the surface, just like petty tyrannies in small towns—were, quite literally, over. King saw through this. It’s especially amazing the way he grasped the fundamental moral evasion of the fantasy underlying such conclusions. He seems to be suggesting that the authoritarianism already visible in the early stages of Obama’s rise could not be transcended by comity and olive branches and bipartisanship.
The 44th president makes a cameo, signing an order transferring command of the town from Big Jim to a heroic Iraq War veteran—an order that cannot be enforced precisely because the dome is impenetrable. Obama signs it, Big Jim reflects with a smirk, “using all three of his names, including the terrorist one in the middle.” This is the apogee of his dictatorship, right before a small army (emphasis on small) arises to take on Big Jim’s reign of terror. It’s a ragtag mélange of outcasts and liberals—the ones every small town has, whose depth King artfully signals by the fact that they grasp the complex moral nuances of the song they hum about “supporting the team.”
They include: the widow of the decent and wise police chief Big Jim cashiers as his opening chess move (“It never would have happened if Duke was still alive…”). “Sloppy Sam” Verdreaux, town drunk, who stockpiles the oxygen he needs to stay healthy by cheating a government program, and ends up saving the day. The town “skank” (on page 606, there’s a lovely riff on a rare moment when someone of higher social status treats her with respect). A female Congregationalist minister who’s lost her faith, to the enhancement of her pastoral gifts.
There’s the local New Age loon, who also happens to be the town librarian (“Who better to recruit than a librarian when you’re dealing with a fledgling dictatorship?”). A clutch of adolescent skate rats. A dipshit college English professor with a Volvo, who seems at first to be in the story only for comic relief, signaling virtue to everyone who’ll listen, making sure they know he guest-edited the latest issue of Ploughshares. Turns out he’s an indefatigable combat medic and a conscientious objector in Vietnam. His is a redemption arc: man’s rescue from the involuted narcissism of lefty academia. I loved that part.
Finally, there is the town drifter, a short-order cook on the run from himself, having witnessed, done nothing about, and then participated in the torture of an innocent Iraqi man while at war. His number two in command is the editor of her family’s ancient local newspaper, a old-fashioned, civic-minded Republican who reflects, “If asked to write about the emotional heart of the event, she would have been lost. How to explain that people she’d known all her life—people she respected, people she loved—had turned into a mob?”
How do they win? Read and see. I will, however—spoiler alert—reveal their secret weapon, the only one powerful enough to make the mysterious, mischievous space aliens who built the dome get bored and go away: empathy. You gotta have heart.
The ending reads less cheesy than I’m making it sound, I swear. In my humble opinion, it’s deep and searing. It is why, in fact, this book is exactly what I thought of when I read the letter from the woman from rural Arkansas with which I opened Part I of this essay, the one who wanted to know what she could do now that the people she’d known all her life, whom she loved and respected, attend church services dedicated to the greater glory of Donald J. Trump.
Turning themselves, in other words, into a mob.
THERE IS A DOCUMENTARY CALLED The Brainwashing of My Dad (2015). It’s good. But it contains within it a kernel of something that could be greater. In the film’s first reel, director Jen Senko explains what happened when her beloved father, a liberal from whom she’d only heard compassionate and kind things all her life, stopped carpooling to work, began listening to Rush Limbaugh, graduated to Fox News, and turned into an incessant spewer of bilious hate—someone his family could no longer recognize. In 2013, an anguished Senko decided to do a film to explore what had happened. She put up a Kickstarter page to fund it. From the title, and her explanation of the premise, something unexpected and extraordinary happened: “Before I knew it, people were coming out of the woodwork, contacting me from all over the country telling me similar stories.”
This is how she tells the story on-screen:
A voiceover: “They just drummed into her what they wanted her to hear”—and the speaker’s anguished face appears in the left third. “She’s a completely different person.”
Another woman appears in the middle of the screen: “My brother became very fact-resistant.”
More faces pop up, over a panned map of the United States: voices from coast to coast.
“My reaction was, ‘Who are you and what did you do with my stepfather?’… He was completely changed. He was bitter, and angry …”
As the snippets grow yet more alarming—“and he had a pistol …”—the frame pulls back, and people are speaking stories like this from 15 boxes on the screen, like an overcrowded Zoom call; then it pulls further back, and there are 50, then further back, and further back— “… don’t know this person anymore … was loving and caring … fundamentally different person …”—until there are 150 boxes speaking the same horror story.
The effect is like the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Harrison Ford knows he’s in the same room with an object concentrating all the evil in the world, except, as that frame pulls out, he sees there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of identical such objects. Senko told me that, all told, she collected over a thousand such horrifying tales.
Again, this is before Donald Trump. There are many more such tales by now, each just as horrifying. That this is not a central component of our national self-understanding of what is happening to us is a hole in the culture indeed. Artists should start filling that hole up, until we can’t look away.
