Everything old is new again, and nothing seems older than The Handmaid’s Tale, the book written in 1985 by Margaret Atwood and the televised series that was filmed last summer, which is streaming on laptops right now. Both portray the doom and destruction supposed to evolve from the Reagan agenda, or as the New Yorker once put it:

“[Margaret] Atwood began writing The Handmaid’s Tale shortly after the election of Ronald Reagan, and she drew inspiration from the political stories of the day.” The “stories of the day” were the arms buildup and the rise of the conservative social agenda, which would lead in due course to a terror agenda, with torture deployed as a tool of suppression and women reduced to the status of cattle, forbidden to read, much less to write something, whose function was only to breed. Feminists loved this so much that they came to believe this would happen or had happened and, as time went on, failed to acknowledge that in real life things here on Earth turned out rather differently and not in the way they’d foreseen.