Washington, DC-based speechwriter, journalist, and fiction writer Michael Long is conducting an interesting experiment: he’s writing a novel in exactly one month. There are good reasons for it, he says. But what’s even more interesting is the book’s subject matter, writes S. T. Karnick

Longtime Washington speechwriter Michael Long’s new novel, America 2.0, is being written as part of National Novel-Writing Month, and the author has imposed himself the daunting task of completing it within thirty days. The stunt has a point, and the book itself is even more pointed. More on the latter in a moment.

As to why he is writing the book so quickly, Long told me that in addition to having "the patience of a flea" he wants to set an example for other writers:

I’ve been told by many writers that they don’t believe any fiction of quality can come at this speed. I know they’re wrong. I’ve done this before, and the product, a novel called Marry Me, was good enough to get me representation with one of the very best literary agents working today. Also, writing is work. Treat it like work instead of the product of capricious, airy inspiration, and you’ll get a lot more done.

I think that Long’s point is a good one and his attitude laudable. Writing a book–or any other kind of fiction–is a matter of decision-making, and characterizing the process as purely inspirational enables authors to escape responsibility for the implications of what they write. In short, it’s not only incorrect, it’s cowardly.

The really innovative and challenging aspect of Long’s book, however, is its subject matter: the modern socialist-hedonist state. Here’s how Long described it for me:

The subject of the book is this: What if liberals gained the power to do everything they ever wanted? This strikes me as one of those ideas that is perfect because it is simple and obvious. Those of us on the conservative side talk all the time about the threat that liberals pose. What my book answers is the question of would that liberal world would really be like.

If this book is the phenomenon both it and I deserve, I expect an inverse version–What if conservatives ruled the world?–to appear within months. (Of course, that book would be a story of paradise, not a dystopian farce.)

Long begins the story with a real-life character, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, about to be arrested for disagreeing with the current political administration’s policies. Long quotes the fictional Limbaugh as telling the socialist elite what he thinks their real motives are:

"I don’t think you love people. I think you love power. I think you get off on it. I think nothing makes you happier than forcing other people to change the way they live because you are convinced they’ll be better off. I tell you what, how I live is not your choice. It’s my choice. And you are so dead-set against the only kind of diversity that matters, the diversity of opinion, that you’d rather foreclose on their free speech and now put people in jail than allow them to disagree with you."

As that passage suggests, the segments of novel finished so far manifest a speechwriter’s interest in people and their ideas, and in particular how personalities and personal experiences affect what people think and believe. The narrative benefits from Long’s knowledge of how Washington really works and how flawed and even bizarre are so many of the people who presume to tell the rest of us what to do.

Part of the fun of the book is in identifying the numerous real-life people on whom various characters are more or less loosely based. America 2.0 is not a roman a clef, by any means, but it definitely is reality-based and amusingly topical.

America 2.0 is an insightful look at the careerism, impostures, manipulation, arrogance, cupidity, and outright malice that run rampant in the nation’s politics today. That’s how governments tend to be, because that’s how people tend to be, as our nation’s founders noted. Long’s story reminds us of how much more dangerous those human flaws are when the checks and balances against them are removed.

–S. T. Karnick