Pro-choice activists cosplay as characters from a show set in a dystopian future. A phrase from a science fiction movie becomes shorthand for a misogynistic philosophy. The world’s richest man repeatedly compares himself to a comic book superhero while pouring money into American elections. As literary and cultural scholar Jesse S. Cohn writes, these developments are part of the remarkable influx of literature and art of the fantastic into American politics.

Cohn writes that in the twentieth century there was no lack of superhero comic books, science fiction and fantasy stories, horror movies, or tabletop roleplaying games. But they were viewed by much of the larger society as culturally marginal and artistically less-than-serious.

This began to change around the turn of the century, with the widespread popularity of franchises like Harry Potter, Twilight, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and The Walking Dead. As the power of the internet and the cultural cachet of tech work grew, science fiction and fantasy references also became more palatable in “serious” contexts. The Game of Thrones TV show, which premiered in 2011, provided material for riffs on real-world politics in political opinion columns and social media memes. And the idea that we are actually living in a simulation, often discussed through references to the Matrix movies, became popular among Silicon Valley elites.

Of course, Cohn notes, The Matrix’s plot device of a red pill that could reveal the “real world” as an illusion (which was originally intended partly as an allegory for trans experiences) was also adopted by online antifeminists and fascists. Likewise, some on the right started using the video-game term NPC (non-player character) to—with a veneer of irony—depict those they disagree with as subhuman.

During the 2015 election cycle, alt-right online factions depicted Donald Trump in half-ironic terms as God-Emperor Trump, drawing on the Dune books and the Warhammer video game. After the election, liberals seeking to resist the new administration drew on the good-versus-evil imagery of Harry Potter, while leftists referenced the game Wolfenstein II to insist on the need to meet Naziism with violence.

In 2016, one ubiquitous nod to the sense of Trump-era politics as science-fiction was the phrase “This is the darkest timeline,” taken from an episode of the sitcom Community parodying multiverse and alternate reality tropes. Cohn argues that phrase represents “a means of coping with the radically unacceptable, a refusal to admit that liberal democracy has failed on its own terms.” On the other hand, he also suggests that the notion of other timelines opens up the possibility of envisioning alternatives to the actually existing political and economic system.

In fact, Cohn argues, aside from the cultural shifts that have brought speculative fiction into the mainstream, one reason the fantastic has infiltrated American politics may be that it’s a way to think about problems that are too complex or large-scale to easily grasp, like the acceleration of climate change or the global rise of authoritarianism, which increasingly dominate political discourse.

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