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Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court on ?? ?? ??Wednesday, effective July 31. Given that Donald Trump gets to pick his replacement, and Mitch McConnell controls the Senate confirmation process, it seems all but certain that the next judge on America's all-important bench will be a hardline conservative.

Kennedy, appointed by President Reagan, was something of a conservative jurist himself. He has voted with the court's four other conservatives in every major decision of the Trump era thus far. But he was also the court's so-called swing vote; his decisions saved Roe v. Wade in 1992 and instituted gay marriage as the law of the land in 2015.

There's a strong chance that any replacement for Kennedy picked by Trump will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade the first chance they get. That would mean no more guaranteed access to abortion for American women; Republican states would then be likely to outlaw it, sending women in those states back to the unsafe abortion practices of the pre-Roe era. Decades of progress on LGBTQ rights in the court could also be erased. And then where will we be?

For many on Wednesday, the answer was obvious: we'll be in Gilead, the misogynistic nightmare future America of Margaret Atwood's classic The Handmaid's Tale.

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Ironically, CNN's Brian Stelter had just declared Gilead comparisons to be "fear-mongering" 24 hours previously, in response to citizenship-testing roadblocks in New England (Atwood's location for Gilead). Thousands immediately chimed in.

It's fair to say the tweet has not aged well.

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So is it fear-mongering to bring up Handmaid's Talein the context of today's America? Not in the slightest, for a whole host of reasons.

Writing in 1984, Atwood outlined a chilling scenario for how the United States could turn into a medieval republic that regards women as mere reproductive chattel. As I explained a year ago, this scenario seems more relevant now than ever -- and that was even before the border clampdowns and the rightward lurch of the court.

Here's how it goes down in the novel: a secretive patriarchal cabal launches a violent attack on Congress. The attack is blamed on Muslim extremists. The Constitution is suspended. Women and the men who support them are denied access to credit cards, which in Atwood's future America is the only way you can buy anything.

Meanwhile, fertility rates are dropping, likely due to chemicals in the environment, and the men in charge want to control access to women who can still give birth. Hey presto: handmaids.

Are these things literallygoing to happen the way Atwood described? Probably not. But does every sentence in the paragraph above seem plausible? Is there a real-world analog for everything in it? Absolutely. One need only think of the Patriot Act, or the fact that infertility is on the rise in China, or that women weren't allowed credit cards until 1974, or that a woman's credit score still suffers more after a divorce than a man's.

When Trump's preference for gaslighting us with obvious lies, a.k.a., "alternative facts" became clear immediately following his inauguration, many of us, myself included, reached for George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears," Orwell wrote. "It was their final, most essential command."

This seems an apt comparison; Orwell's focus was mostly on the totalitarian desire to control truth, a desire Trump clearly shares. (Orwell was obsessed with language as a means of political control; not so much with the surveillance state part of the book.)

Does this mean we're heading for Orwell's Oceania, with all that implies -- the Thought Police, the two-way telescreens, the wartime rationing? I'd argue not. But the essential spirit of Nineteen Eighty-Fouris alive and well, so much so that you can't dismiss the comparison outright.

Could there be an element of unconscious sexism in dismissing comparisons to a woman's dystopia more readily?

Both Orwell and Atwood explicitly wrote their dystopias as warnings, not predictions. "Back in 1984, the main premise [of Handmaid's Tale] seemed — even to me — fairly outrageous," Atwood wrote in a new introduction to the book in 2017. And yet, she added, "having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. 'It can’t happen here' could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances."

Kennedy's retirement is just such a vanishing of the established order. In the space of a day, we are suddenly made aware how fragile the liberal values of modern America are. In poll after poll over the years, clear majorities of Americans favor a woman's right to choose, although they're divided on what restrictions should be in place. But under a Supreme Court with one judge changed, that may not matter.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, legal analysts have pointed out, some 20 Republican states stand ready to outlaw abortion outright. This will not end abortion, of course; it will mean more women taking flight to Democratic states, or relying on the hideous old-fashioned backstreet abortion techniques that were common before Roe.

And what happens then? Will religious conservatives in the Mike Pence mold be satisfied and take a backseat? Or can we imagine more encroachments on women's rights being enshrined in law once the nation's top court has signaled it won't stop them? Birth control is already in the sights of many. Pharmacists are legally allowed to deny it to women according to their conscience. Last year one state lawmaker described women as mere "hosts" for children.

No one, least of all Atwood, can pretend to predict the future. But that also means we can't pretend to know that a Gilead-like repressive patriarchal state isn'tin our future, and we certainly can't call the threat over-hyped. The only thing we can reasonably do is fight like hell at every possible juncture to prevent the warning from becoming reality.