Author ORCID Identifier
Cheng Xu: 0000-0001-9436-0880
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-10-2026
Publication Title
The Forum
Abstract
This contribution to the special issue of the Forum argues that mainstream science fiction can be an important site for narrating a nascent change in the moral economy of armed politics in the United States. While firearm politics remain durably partisan, I show that a narrower but significant norm change is emerging: the boundary between ordinary gun ownership and politically charged preparedness has become more permeable, even as overt political violence remains broadly stigmatized. I develop this argument through an interpretive comparative reading of Disney’s Andor and Amazon’s Fallout as widely circulating cultural texts that register changing understandings of legitimacy, protection, and force. The article proceeds in three steps. First, it examines firearm politics and armed politics as related but analytically distinct concepts and situates both within the historical development of America’s partisan armed order. Second, it argues that contemporary distrust in institutions has begun to recode arming less as partisan identity and more as contingency and precaution. Third, it shows how Andorand Fallout narrate this shift through distinct but complementary normative scripts: predatory rule and reluctant resistance in Andor; fragmented sovereignty, self-help, and reluctant adaptation in Fallout. Importantly, neither series normalizes political violence in the abstract; rather, both dramatize the weakening of the threshold of exceptionality around armed politics by depicting the conditions under which force becomes thinkable to ordinary people. What contemporary science fiction reveals, in this sense, is a growing American anxiety that institutions may no longer reliably provide justice, order, and protection.
Keywords
armed politics, science fiction, political legitimacy, gun politics, American political imagination
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY 4.0 under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.
Version
Author's Submitted Manuscript
Recommended Citation
Xu, Cheng, "Reluctant Revolutionaries: Andor, Fallout, and Narrating the Shifting Moral Economy of Armed Politics in the United States" (2026). Government: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/gov_facpubs/80