"Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States of America had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship? In the the book (The Handmade's Tale), the Constitution and Congress are no longer: The Republic of Gilead is built on the foundation of the seventeenth-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew."
Yes. Well. This has a resonant ring of plausibility. Yikes...
