“All you have to do is cooperate”: V For Vendetta and the vengeful authoritarian regimes to come under collapse

Donald Trump’s (entirely predictable and predicted) victory in the first Republican Party primary – the caucus in conservative evangelical ‘Christian’ dominated Iowa – prompts me to share an excerpt from one of the chapters in my new book.

The book as whole is about how classic science fiction (really, speculative social futures) has in many ways predicted our increasingly dystopian present. Each chapter focuses on a classic sci-fi film, among them Blade Runner, Terminator 2, 12 Monkeys, Brazil, Soylent Green, and the Back to the Future series; these films are used to consider our likely environmental, technological, and political future.

Trumps’s openly – boastfully – vengeful agenda if he retakes power (“I am your retribution”) is frightening, and it’s meant to be. But what has created and spurred on this (certainly unconstitutional) turn in conservative politics? That’s what this particular chapter of the book discusses.

Excerpt: “All you have to do is cooperate”: V For Vendetta and the vengeful authoritarian regimes to come under collapse (chapter 7)

One of the complacent assumptions on the left is that, in wanting to build a better, even a ‘new’ society, the left is much more future-oriented than the right. But the right’s politics far more effectively exploit the scarcity and social conflict driven by early collapse. And they should, because they created them. Depictions of apocalypse distract from the long emergency – of ongoing failing systems, environmental, economic, social, and political crises – one we’re going to have to face, and are already in. More likely than irradiated wastelands, collapse reveals the truth of right-wing politics: hollowed-out states that are unable to provide for or protect people in crises, replacing this weakness with cult leader authoritarianism – as V For Vendetta (2005) starkly dramatizes.

If Nineteen Eighty-Four can be taken as a critique of Soviet totalitarianism, V For Vendetta is clearly about conservative totalitarianism. It’s not really futuristic at all, but backwards-facing. Future-promising neoliberalism turned out to be nothing of the sort. This chapter is about the right’s endgame – what it is, how they’ll seize power, and how they’ll hold onto it. Such regimes thrive on chaos. They might even engineer it.

Conservatism has changed before our eyes. At first, it tried to sell a modernized future, better than the one offered by liberals or the left. It’s not selling utopia anymore, not even a positive vision of the future, only survival against threats and ‘the other.’ The reason is the world it’s created. As Max Haiven, author of Revenge Capitalism (2020), says: “Authoritarianism today does not force society into a formation to fulfil perverse dreams of utopian potential. Rather, it offers austerity, purification and revanchism as means of survival in an ever more hostile world.”

As Dmitry Orlov, the Russian-American engineer and writer on collapse, argues in books such as Reinventing Collapse (2008) and The Five Stages of Collapse (2013), the United States and other countries are likely to face a Soviet style degeneration – a collapse in faith in business as usual, market-based provision, political and social institutions, and ultimately social trust and kindness. This is due to the over-use of natural resources, soaring debt, corruption, and military over-spending. Orlov also emphasizes the personal experience of collapse, and how those who assume they’ll be comfortable and secure will also be humbled.

We’re already experiencing what in hindsight we’ll recognize as an Eastern Europe style collapse, but the capitalist equivalent – a slide into ‘slow dystopia,’ as the graphic novelist, artist, and filmmaker Sarnath Banerjee calls it. And we’re most likely to end up with regimes like that in V For Vendetta. After all, ‘apocalypse’ means revelation, an uncovering of the truth. More likely than irradiated wastelands, collapse reveals the truth of rightwing politics: as a result of neoliberalism, hollowed-out states that are unable to provide for or protect people in crises, replacing this weakness with cult leader authoritarianism.

As we discussed in chapter 1, cyberpunk persists because it increasingly describes our present. As its name suggests, it tends to focus on, and heroize, the marginalized, the hustlers, the subversives – the people the megacorporations (having replaced the state) largely ignore. But anyone secretly hoping for a ‘cool cyberpunk future’ is going to be sorely disappointed. As in V For Vendetta, fascist states that seize power don’t ignore those who are ‘different,’ anyone who isn’t white, middle class, supposedly Christian, and heterosexual. Instead, they persecute them. And anyone who manages to survive, let alone challenge the regime, is going to be severely traumatized, as we’ll see.

Moreover, fascism not only uses fear, it’s also deeply fear based itself, and the reason conservatism can mutate into fascism is that fear has long been central to its ideology, lurking like a dormant strain that can always come back to life, given the right conditions.

As with the crises we’re going to face, the answers lie in the past. Historically, conservatism has long been catastrophe minded: its concern with ‘civilizational collapse’ because of the perceived decline in values, the revolution in sexual freedoms, the supposed decline of the family, the rise of feminism (and the supposed ‘feminization’ of men), immigration bringing different ‘cultures’, and ultimately the ‘decline of the West.’

But there’s also an internal fear, a genuine one for some conservatives, seemingly – about enemies, threats, conspiracies, and their secret plans and agendas. The right has always had a tendency to view the left in paranoid terms, reflecting its fear of social disorder, and ultimately its fear of the masses – from communism, the ‘red menace,’ ‘anarchy,’ new social movements, ‘cultural Marxism,’ community organizing (yes, really), and conspiracies relating to changing demographics. This is because conservatives fear becoming a minority – marginalized, persecuted, even eradicated. As a result, at times (one of them being now), the right sees any victories for the liberal/left as potentially apocalyptic. As this fear has become increasingly mainstream on the right, so has the view that no quarter can be given, that every battle is existential, and relatedly, that voting and political participation need to be curtailed.

Conservatism has always had a self-proclaimed attachment to ‘law and order,’ but combined with paranoia this starts to take on a different, much darker hue – a rationale for pre-emptively stopping ‘them’ before they’re able to introduce their dangerous, freedom-destroying programs. It’s propaganda and projection, but when you think your enemies are this dangerous, it’s only a few steps to justifying their elimination…

Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out now from Lexington Books. You can read more about it here.