In reading James Fallows' "How American Can Rise Again," the cover story in the Atlantic (print edition), a particular passage got me thinking again about the recent rise of post-apocalyptic tales across various media. Fallows paraphrases Rick Perlstein, writing of "the relative shortage of a jeremiad theme under Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Obama." Perlstein attributes this to Reagan, who equated criticism with anti-Americanism. If we look at the best-seller lists in the 1960's and 1970's, though, there were countless "doom-and-gloom books."
With a majority of politicians no longer performing their patriotic duty in telling us that America's gone to hell, that our collective future's bleak, perhaps popular culture's picking up the slack?