I promised to give my fan­tasy sce­nario for the 2010 elec­tion. I don’t know if this is a worst case or a best case. A lit­tle of both, perhaps.

It needs some pref­ace. Back in the sum­mer of 2006, I started a novel. I’d been inspired by a num­ber of dark songs, some of my favorites from decades before: Sniper by Harry Chapin, For You by Man­fred Mann, The Boom­town Rats’ I Don’t Like Mon­days…

I wont tell too much about the story. It was an exper­i­ment for me, some­thing unusual, push­ing my sto­ry­telling lim­its – lots of vio­lence and sex, very dark, very much con­cen­trat­ing on unusual char­ac­ters in extreme sit­u­a­tions. But to make the plot work, it required a soci­ety to work within. I’d envi­sioned the tale cen­ter­ing around two teenagers. As I con­structed the out­line, as I started the writ­ing, the world grew up around them, a dread­ful dystopian place, a world hor­ri­ble enough to pro­duce the vio­lence of my plot.

It became a tale of pol­i­tics and hid­den intrigue, of prej­u­dice and tinfoil-​​hat con­spir­a­cies. A fas­cist and ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gious sen­ti­ment had assaulted the nation, a fevered col­lab­o­ra­tion of cor­po­rate inter­ests and church dogma, a per­pet­ual state of war, para­noia over immi­grants, sex­ual repres­sion, fear of homo­sex­u­als. The nation had been divided between a tiny cadre of unimag­in­ably wealthy élites, and the impov­er­ished masses who found them­selves as fear­ful but will­ing slaves kept docile by man­u­fac­tured ter­ror­ist plots pub­li­cized by a com­plicit media. This is the world my teenagers had to deal with.

Mine is not the first anti-​​utopian tale. Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World are clas­sics of the genre. Those books were pub­lished in 1949 and 1931, respec­tively. The new mil­len­nium needed a new warn­ing. For a pro­gres­sive such as myself, the Bush years had been a fright­en­ing era. The Pres­i­dent ignored the law and the Con­sti­tu­tion. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq evoked fright­en­ing and vivid mem­o­ries of Viet­nam. The media had become lap­dogs to a cor­rupt admin­is­tra­tion. The mid­dle class shrank, Amer­ica fell into irra­tional fear of for­eign­ers and gays. My novel seemed about to come true. I feared the extremes I imag­ined might seem pale in com­par­i­son to the real­ity. Or, worse, my book would be seen as ret­ro­spec­tive rather than as a warning.

The story poured out of my key­board. I had nearly a half-​​million words writ­ten in the first six months, and had reached the halfway point in my out­line. But then, a mir­a­cle happened.

The Democ­rats took con­trol of Con­gress in the fall of 2006.

Maybe, just maybe, the world would turn back from the brink.

Over the next two years, other projects took my atten­tion. By the win­ter of ’07, and into early ’08, my novel seemed increas­ingly irrel­e­vant. I set it aside, hav­ing added only an addi­tional chap­ter or two. Caught in the heady thrill of the Obama cam­paign, my story of fear and prej­u­dice and para­noia seemed quaint, a hor­ror movie from a bygone age. Even the eco­nomic col­lapse of 2008 couldn’t bring back the ter­ri­ble days when I had started the story; by then all the polls told us change was com­ing. Surely Amer­ica would come out of its Dark Ages!

With the elec­tion of Obama, there seemed no rea­son to con­tinue that fear-​​filled fan­tasy. I pol­ished a cou­ple of other projects, and a very dif­fer­ent novel, much shorter and brighter and more hope­ful, was even­tu­ally pub­lished instead, in the sum­mer of 2010.

But through 2009, the old forces of manip­u­la­tive dark­ness began once more to grow. A note of insan­ity drifted into our pol­i­tics, with mind­less mega­phones sub­sti­tut­ing for con­ver­sa­tion in town hall near-​​riots, astroturf-​​funded by the same corporate/​media con­glom­er­ates, oil inter­ests, and reli­gious extrem­ism of the Bush years. The hor­ror hadn’t been defeated. It had merely lain briefly dor­mant, as a mon­ster of myth plot­ting its vengeance.

We stand now on a precipice. One of three worlds will emerge from this year’s elections.

Per­haps the polls and pun­dits are wrong. Aspects of the cur­rent “likely voter” mod­els don’t seem to make sense, and/​or have never before been tried (there is no proof that “enthu­si­asm” trans­lates to “turnout”; we don’t know what effect cell phones have on polling; the cur­rent pro­jec­tions assume an unprece­dented rever­sal of vot­ing trends from the last two cycles; and so on). Yet, when all the “experts” point in the same direc­tion, a layper­son is fool­ish to ignore them (hence, the silli­ness of the climate-​​change deniers). A hope­ful future remains a pos­si­bil­ity, how­ever slight. Per­haps some­thing not far from the cur­rent sta­tus quo might sur­vive. The Democ­rats might get a sec­ond chance, hav­ing dodged a bul­let, and per­haps emerg­ing leaner and meaner from their col­lec­tive near-​​death experience.

More likely is a good night for the Repub­li­cans. They may well seize the House, and take sev­eral Sen­ate seats. Many of the incom­ing fresh­men will be extrem­ists, who are giv­ing every indi­ca­tion of absolute inflex­i­bil­ity and an inabil­ity to com­pro­mise. Grid­lock and obstruc­tion, inac­tion and inat­ten­tion could become the norm. The nation’s prob­lems – the worst of which are stub­bornly high unem­ploy­ment and slow eco­nomic growth – could well worsen in an orgy of irre­spon­si­bile tax cuts and sense­less pro­gram gut­ting. 2012 would be up for grabs; would the pub­lic blame the Democ­rats for hav­ing blown their chance, or the Repub­li­cans for actively sub­vert­ing repairs?

But then there’s the pos­si­bil­ity of the bib­li­cal dis­as­ter which the media has been push­ing. We’ve watched as the Repub­li­can Party has been hijacked by the most extreme denizens of its ide­o­log­i­cal sewer. Bush was pre­lude. These new kids are scary. Maybe they’ll tear the Repub­li­can Party apart. Or maybe they’ll assume con­trol. That pos­si­bil­ity makes Orwell look like an optimist.

Okay, I’m in the midst of the sequel to the novel I pub­lished in the place of fin­ish­ing that dark fan­tasy I started back in 2006. Once my cur­rent book is done, I’ll need another project. I have one well-​​plotted and half writ­ten, all set to com­plete. It might be applic­a­ble once more. The con­di­tions seem favor­able. The novel will seem prophetic. And it’ll give me some­thing to do as the world grows darker, and all the lights of rea­son go out.