Ah, so this is BASS's bad sci-fi story for this year: "Democracy in America" by Allegra Hyde (Best American Short Stories)

My Kindle tells me this is the 12th year I've read BASS. It seems like more years than not, there's one story in it that's either sci-fi or speculative fiction, and it seems like more years than not, I don't like the selection. Whether it was Michael Byers's "Sibling Rivalry" or T.C. Boyle's "Are We Not Men?" or pretty much anything by Karen Russell, I hardly ever like the "some time in the future" stories. Exceptions have been Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence" and "The Semplica-Girl Diaries" by George Saunders. The rest of the time, to re-use a metaphor I've written before, it kind of feels like churches using modern music to try and seem hip and relevant, except it's snooty lit-fic trying to write the sci-fi it knows the people can never seem to get enough of. I usually leave feeling like BASS should stick to what it's good at, because it's not good at this. 

"Democracy in America" is built around one of those kind of ill-advised premises an intern might nervously shout out in a writer's room if they were given 30 seconds to pitch ideas and couldn't come up with anything good. You know, like "inventor builds an 8-year-old robot daughter," or "British boarding school, but for wizards!" In this case, the premise is: what if Alexis de Tocqueville came to research America and write Democracy in America, but today? Or maybe not today, but some time in the near future?

When I was in a church youth group as a teenager and an adult would ask a question like, "What do you think Jesus would think if he came back to Earth today?" we all knew what the answer was supposed to be. He'd be shocked, of course. Gay people just being gay right there on the street. More abortions than nubile women. Men with long hair. There was a right answer, and we were supposed to give it. 

"Democracy" reminds me of how much the culture surrounding American liberalism seems similar to the religion I knew as a kid. It has right answers to seemingly open-ended questions. The right answer, of course, is that de Tocqueville would be shocked. The story doesn't just make the historical social observer from 19th-century France come back to life, of course. It creates a female character with about the same social background and brings her to America with her companion Beaumont, the same name as the person who came with the original de Tocqueville. The original people came to study America's prisons, and the people in our story are there to study our immigrant detention centers. 

The right answer for politically liberal people, which includes nearly all literary magazines, is that the traveler will find America is terrible, and "Democracy" meets those expectations. It's full of ugly strip malls that all look the same, giant cars, smelly fumes, and horrible lives for all but the rich. Moreover, science has invented some process whereby old people can more or less take the attractive skin off of young people for money. This process, called "consignment," is attractive to a lot of women who desperately need some help in life.

Nothing is more tiring to me than being lectured about something I kind of already agree with, and it's worse when it's coming from a true believer instead of someone who tentatively believes it, but with reservations. There are no reservations in "Democracy." It's full-bore, uncomplicated, America-is-a-shithole observations. I'm far from being rah-rah Team America, but it's hard for me to believe an observer would come here and see nothing to admire at all. 

I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Netflix snatches this up and it becomes a hit. Americans don't just buy a lot of crap at strip malls; they buy it on streaming services all the time. There are a hundred stupid shows doing just fine right now. 

One key point the story looks past is that societies have always practiced a kind of consignment, letting the old and wealthy feed off the young. Whether it's having young people do physically demanding tasks, or having those who work pay into social security for those who have stopped working, or having a volunteer fighting force of young people who take recruitment bonuses in exchange for giving over control of their person to a power of indeterminate concern for their wellbeing, various forms of "consignment" exist everywhere. All societies live on hope; they want those struggling now to believe that eventually, they'll be part of the class benefitting from the system. That's true in North Korea, it's true in China, it's true in old Europe, and it's true here. 

Is there some way out of it? Is there some specially invidious way societies trick us into believing the lie? Those are interesting stories, but this isn't. It's the kind of smug, non-reflective liberalism that bears more than its share of the blame for the idiot we just got elected for the second time. It's a thin idea with thin characters, and I'm ready to move on. 

See also: Karen didn't like it either, but for different reasons and to a different extent.