Reading Oryx and Crake in the time of debt ceiling brinksmanship

I'm not quite sure when my long-held optimism about the human race took shape, but my read of history for some time has been that human life is steadily improving, that our progress, notwithstanding major setbacks, has been moral as well as material, and that we are adaptive enough to continue to increase wealth, freedom and peace. There's always been the caveat that global warming or some as-yet-unimagined disaster could undo all -- or that we would bioengineer or own evolution or replacement. But I've felt reasonably confident that the progress of the last few hundred years -- long lives, better health, less subjection to violence, more scope for more people to exercise their faculties -- would continue.

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy, which I've read in the last couple of weeks, has dinged this optimism.  It's a double dystopia, with two narrative presents:  an anarchic world of balkanized corporate dominance and environmental degradation prior to the near-extinction of humanity by an engineered superbug, and a remnant community's life in the ruins - and interaction with a community of genetically engineered human mutants designed to be more pacific-- after the "waterless flood."

"You are too shallow, Hastings...to sound the bottom of the after-times"*

There is a certain strain of conservative British fantasist that pits the folly of the common people, Coriolanus-like, against the beleaguered wisdom of leaders. George MacDonald, in The Princess and Curdie,  portrays a benevolent king gradually worn down by the recalcitrant foolishness and greed of his people.  In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, battle-hardened chieftains keep the faith and hold the line against the encroachments of Mordor as their people weaken.  C.S. Lewis has more of a feel for the ways in which the powerful and ruthless deceive and enslave common folk, but he too betrays a weakness, in the Dawn Treader vignette of the Dufflepods ruled by a fallen star, for the vision of the wise ruler bemusedly enduring the follies of his simple subjects  (though Lewis is more consistently smitten by the fantasy of a contented and submissive populace willingly ruled by wise and benevolent monarchs).

Perhaps it is in this spirit that Sir Max Hastings laments that voters in the western democracies will punish at the polls leaders who tell them the hard truth about "the scale of upheaval and the sacrifice necessary to meet it."  Suggesting that "we get the political leaders we deserve" -- which may in some ultimate sense be true -- Hastings seems blithely unaware of the first axiom of political science: economic conditions (absent all-encompassing catastrophe) shape the dominant public perceptions of leaders everywhere. There's not much point in excoriating "pampered European and American voters" for blaming "bad news" on leaders currently in power. All electorates everywhere do that, to the extent that they're free to choose at all.