
The Handmaid’s Tale is a cautionary story about theocracy in America. Photo: Vic Hinterlang / Shutterstock.com
Just as many on the Right see Obama as the head of a spear of a radical left-wing poised to destroy the liberties granted by the Constitution, those of us on the Left see the Tea Party and Santorum, Bachmann, et al, as the tip of a spear of a radical evangelical movement that seeks to break down the separation of church and state and impose a totalitarian theocracy here in the US.
If Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” has provided a guiding cautionary tale for the GOP’s brand of small-government libertarianism, then Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” is an equally important text for those of us on the Left who see the emerging threat of an Authoritarian Theocratic regime here in the US. The Nazis seemed civilized, as they sipped fine Rieslings and listened to Beethoven while committing unspeakable atrocity. We should remember that many Germans, including my great-grandfather, a German Jew who fought for Germany in World War I, never believed the Nazis could implement the Final Solution.
A friend of mine on Facebook, Robert Chandler, likes to write that “the impulse of the Left is totalitarian,” which ignores the fact that the impulse of any extremist ideology is either totalitarian or authoritarian. The Right fears the collectivist/socialist ideology that underpinned Nazism, and the Left fears the nationalistic, white-supremacist side of the Nazis.
Thus, Chandler’s description of Obamacare and Obama as part of a totalitarian takeover plot is not that different from saying US Evangelicals = Islamo-fascism/radicalism. Each description is driven by an assumption that: either; 1) there is a radical, extreme version of the Left embodied by Obama; or, 2) there is a radical, extreme version of the Right embodied by the Tea Party.