It is August 8th, 2045, exactly 100 years after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fundamentalist Christian United Confederacy marks the centenary by burning at the stake Maxime Lefkowitz, a transgender Jewish comedian from New York. Lefkowitz is an informer for the Bureau, the intelligence agency of the rival New Republic. She has offended the fundamentalist regime by making crude jokes about Jesus Christ in her comedy routine. Their agents abduct her in the neutral zone of Minneapolis, take her across the border into the Confederacy, convict and execute her.
In the dystopian vision of the Irish-American author Douglas Kennedy, the US has split into the Confederacy, corresponding to present-day red, republican states and governed by twelve self-proclaimed apostles, and an ostensibly progressive, secular but totalitarian Republic corresponding to today’s blue, Democratic states. The book’s English-language title will be Flyover.
Published this year in France under the title This is How We Shall Live, Kennedy’s novel reads like an updated version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Unlike Orwell’s central character, Winston Smith, intelligence agent Samantha Stengel supports the totalitarian regime that employs her. The intelligence agencies of the former United States are engaged in a savage war of kidnapping and assassination.
Divorce, abortion and gender-affirmation surgery are banned in the United Confederacy. The president of the secessionist New Republic, Morgan Chadwick, is an Elon Musk-like tech executive and inventor of the Chadwick chip, which all citizens must have implanted behind their ear.
In the Republic, The System uses Chadwick chips and facial recognition to track every movement and conversation. The System dispatches driverless taxis, automatically opens apartment doors, even monitors cholesterol and stress levels and knows when to send citizens to a womb-like DeStress box. Outdoor temperatures and prices are of course high. Ambitious people avoid emotional attachment by using the Tonight Only app for sex. As Leonard Cohen sang, “I have seen the future, it is murder”.
Kennedy wanted his novel to be plausible. “A world without freedom and under surveillance; I don’t think that’s far off,” he says. “A cop once told me, ‘If you have a smartphone, you are under surveillance already. We know everything. Unless you happen to be in North Korea, we are going to find you, probably within 10 seconds. When we arrest somebody, the first thing we do is take the phone, because it’s all there. This is not being paranoid. This is just true.’”
We seem to feel an inescapable compulsion to imagine our future. Haunted by the Cuban missile crisis, my generation half expected to perish in a nuclear Holocaust, a prospect renewed by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The American futurist philosopher Buckminster Fuller predicted in the 1960s that man would invent a device to connect everything, making it unnecessary for people to work from an office.
In the 1990s, two Harvard academics offered contrasting visions of the future. Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book said the triumph of liberal democracy spelled The End of History. Four years later, Samuel Huntington foresaw The Clash of Civilisations, a confrontation between Christianity and Islam. That fear was seemingly confirmed on 9/11 and has receded somewhat with the invasion of Ukraine.
Kennedy believes the fragmentation of America started 50 years ago
But what if internal disaggregation was the greatest threat of all, as predicted by Kennedy? In earlier books, he wrote about the US Bible Belt and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. He is fascinated by the way religious fundamentalism pulls societies apart.
Fundamentalism often goes hand in hand with populist nationalism. In Kennedy’s novel, the extreme right has also come to power in France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the former Warsaw Pact countries.
The scenario is disturbingly credible when one recalls Donald Trump’s presidency and the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court has overturned the right to abortion and reversed affirmative action. In Russia, the Duma assembly just banned gender change operations, because fundamentalist Orthodox Christians view the LGBTQ+ community as an existential threat.
Kennedy has known his greatest success in France, where his novels have sold eight million copies. Flyover, with its cover showing a torn US flag, is selling like popcorn. He bridles at the suggestion that the French enjoy a little schadenfreude at the thought of American misfortune. “That’s rubbish,” Kennedy says. “France is a much more nuanced country than that. There’s an American attitude that the French hate us. The relationship is very complex. I think there’s a sense of ‘If it’s happening in America, will it happen here too?’”
Kennedy recommends Rick Perlstein’s 2008 book Nixonland, which recounts how Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election by appealing to white middle-class voters who were shaken by race riots, the Vietnam War, and the sexual revolution. Nixon told them they were the real United States, the silent majority, dominated by elitist Democrats from the east and west coasts. “There was a subtext of racism, homophobia and misogyny behind it,” Kennedy says. “The fragmentation started more than 50 years ago.”