Future Earth, by Marco

Last week, a new novel book by a moderately well-known conservative author launched, and Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords. These things are connected.

This about sums up the Paris Accords decision:

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This is a real, real low point.

 — @chrislhayes

I’m not going to give the conservative author the free promotion by mentioning his name or his book, but here’s the deal. I follow a lot of conservatives. Some of them seem like genuinely nice people, at least most of the time.

This guy is not one of them.

Sure, It’s probably a schtick for his online persona. Who knows. He’s probably lovely in person. But when he’s hitting the ol’ Twitterbong he seems to lack even the most basic veneer of impulse control. His timeline is full of climate denial, racism, sexism, subtle and not so subtle threats of violence, and paranoid attacks on anyone to the left of Dick Cheney. His own self-described political strategy is “buy more guns and ammo.”

I haven’t read his new book, or his previous ones. I kind of want to, but it’s been tough to really prioritize. But based on the description, it seems pretty similar to the Glenn Beck (sketchily ghostwritten) “Agenda 21” series book, which I did read a couple years ago. Beck’s book is weirdly relevant to my day job, and I saw it all over the place in airports while I was traveling for a work project, so I grabbed a copy on one of those trips. Paid for it, I mean. Didn’t shoplift it. You’re welcome, Glenn.

The common theme in a lot of these books seems to be this weird environmental authoritarian fantasy, where the objectives of a future police state are somehow switched from protecting private property, large corporations, and profit to not just protecting public goods, but attacking private ones. There’s a lot of handwaving about how this comes to pass; i.e. it’s not just not clear how the jump gets made from “laws that encourage car companies to build more efficient cars” to “laws that make it ok for the police to shoot someone driving an inefficient car” — but that issue never gets approached in any form. Nor does the fact that the vast, overwhelming majority of the antiauthoritarian, anti police state pressure is coming from the left (broadly speaking), not the right. The conservatives this guy supports are the ones governing by royal decree, putting people like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions in charge of the Department of Justice and supporting his backwards agenda in Congress.

Even given the fundamentally nonsensical premise, you’ll never guess how his book is selling. If you guessed, “I bet it’s selling pretty good!” you’re right:

Having studied this stuff, those numbers are pretty good. Not amazing. He’s ranked high up in a bunch of smaller categories, which says more about his ability to choose good niche categories than his ability to sell lotsa books. And, this is his 8th or 9th book on Amazon, and book marketing efforts are cumulative. So clearly he’s found a pretty decent sized audience. (If see where this is going and you’re tempted to skip ahead and check Venus Shrugged’s ranking vs. these, I’ll save you the trouble: he’s doing a LOT better. But don’t panic! I’ve got a plan, these things just take a while to kick in. We’ll get there.)

Who cares, right? Some conservative is a jerk on twitter and manages to sells a bunch of books, what does it matter?

Unfortunately, ideas have consequences:

Is there a direct line between some guy selling books and Trump tossing a 200 country agreement in the trash can?

Yup.

How could it possibly be? But the more you think about it, the more true you realize it is. Politics is a war of ideas. Just because it was Newt Gingrich who said that, doesn’t make it any less true. In the artist and organizer Terry Marshall’s phrase (via Adrienne Maree Brown), we are in an imagination battle. The stories a civilization tells itself matter profoundly to the direction that civilization goes.

My fellow US lefties seem to often be a bit confused on this. We seem to have a tendency to get caught up in today’s battle, while forgetting we are in a longer war. We do things like argue that abortion should be considered as an economic issue, setting aside the deeply dehumanizing ramifications of that line of argument, because maybe it will change a few people’s minds on how we build our coalition in the next election cycle.

And our speculative fiction engines of imagination seems to be trapped in a bit of a trap where we can’t help but talk about what the world looks like assuming ongoing political catastrophe. KSR is one of my writing heroes and by all accounts his new one is a positive book about how to thrive in a world we’re almost headed for, but the cover doesn’t exaaaactly send a message of confidence that we’re going to pull this off:

Or take Cory Doctorow’s recent novel, Walkaway. It’s a blast of a read, and maybe the first anarchist future that’s made me think: OK, that actually sounds pretty awesome, I could live that life and dig it. (This gets lots easier if you assume some of the technology advances he supposes, like auto-assembling buildings and universal fabricators) But it’s full of outright government failures. Every time the malevolent police state inflicts carnage on the emergent community Cory writes about so lovingly (and entertainingly), I couldn’t help but think, damn — can’t we just fix that, too?

This doesn’t just play out in the world of fiction. It plays out in the messages we tell ourselves through elections, too. I drew this (crappy) message box the day after the election:

Unfortunately, that looks like it’s holding up pretty well through the special elections so far this year. How bad this is, why it’s happening, and how we might be able to fix it are all topics for another post. But that upper left hand quadrant — what our candidates say about ourselves — is a critical one. That is an area where we have a lot of work to do, and fiction has to be part of the solution.

One weird thing about the modern conservative dystopia novels is that they’re not even drawing us a picture of what the world looks like if they win. They’re only drawing the imagined horrors of what they think is going to happen if some truly bizarre funhouse parody of the actual left wins. Maybe this is a fallback strategy, since anyone with half a brain could see where the whole Galt’s Gulch thing was headed. But no author I know of since Ayn Rand has really tried to paint a picture of what the positive conservative future looks like. It’s tough to even imagine when their agenda revolves solely around doing things that liberals don’t like:

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If the rightness of a Trump decision is judged by the level of hysteria that decision causes among elites, yesterday he was very, very right

 — @WalshFreedom

As always, there’s something you can do.

And as always for the foreseeable future of anything that I write, that something is going to be to not just buy my book (which is now available as a paperback as well as e-book) …

Venus Shrugged: Part 1

… but to read it immediately and vigorously, post extensively about it on every social media channel you are aware of, start an international series of salons to discuss it, and then buy a few cases of it and dedicate your life to handing them out on street corners.

The withdrawal from the Paris accord is a short term tragedy, but as fellow idea-warrior Alex Steffen eloquently puts it, it doesn’t have to be a defeat in the longer war. This could be a real moment of awakening:

Paris: Time for Passion, not Despair

Can we really write our way out of this? I don’t know. It’s possible, particularly given recent events, that the kind of massive political failure is an inevitability. Although if you look at the rest of the world — all the other 195 countries that have joined and stayed in the Paris Accords (keep in mind Nicaragua only isn’t in because it doesn’t go far enough) — they seem to have more or less figured it out. Even if it’s not possible and we are doomed, and we’re going to hand a planet with rising seas and greater migration pressures and energy wars and food insecurity and all the horrors that will go with it to our children …

I sure as hell am not going to skip the fun of going down without a fight.

Part 1 of Venus Shrugged is now available in paperback and as a Kindle e-book.