Opinion: What they’re saying about...

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...about Dave Weigel’s review of right-wing dystopian science fiction:

‘[T]he point of dystopian fiction isn’t that it paints a likely future,’ says the Instapundit. ‘And implausibilities abound in the field, with varying degrees of criticism -- Margaret Atwood’s misogynistic American theocracy certainly isn’t any more plausible than Card or Ferrigno’s scenarios (and in our podcast interview, Card admits that his story is implausible), but I remember plenty of people at my university (where I did a panel on it some years ago) seeing Atwood’s book as a realistic depiction of a possible future.’

‘The problem is that liberalism’s alleged weakness is crucial to the conservative critique of liberalism, which makes it hard to outline a coherent liberal totalitarianism,’ says Matthew Yglesias. ‘I think the best job is probably done in Demolition Man in which we see a kind of public health totalitarianism but it’s important here that the state actually has almost no repressive apparatus and proves incapable of coping with Edgar Friendly’s small, unarmed band of graffiti artists without resorting to illiberal methods that promptly lead the regime to collapse.’

Related: Is Demolition Man the greatest prophetic film of all time? Is Wesley ‘Simon Phoenix’ Snipes the last free man? And where are the dystopias of yesteryear?