Disaster Junkies

Detail from Albrecht Dürer’s 1498 woodcut depicting the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Image via Wikimedia commons.

We live in an era where catastrophe looms large in the political imagination. On the one side, we find hellacious visions of climate crisis and ecological collapse; on the other, grim warnings of social disintegration through plummeting birth rates, mass immigration and crime. Popular culture’s vivid post-apocalyptic worlds, from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, increasingly echo in political discourse — most memorably in…