In The Last Election (Akashic, Sept.), former presidential candidate Yang partners with novelist Marche for a political thriller about a third-party candidate and an impending military coup.
To what degree did you envision this book as a tool for advancing your own political agenda, Andrew?
Yang: The first thing I wanted to do was present a realistic scenario for a future national election. We’re going to see more people running from outside the two-party system. Right now, our political process doesn’t easily accept those new entrants, so they get treated as a spoiler for one side or the other. I’d like people to start thinking about what that means. What kind of system could we have where outside perspectives foster a healthy and positive dynamic? Some people might imagine this story working out a different way than Stephen or I. But hopefully, the book gets people thinking, ‘Okay, if I don’t like the way this thing plays out, what could we do differently?’
Marche: Andrew and I agree that the problems the American government faces are not necessarily who’s in power, but that the underlying structures need to be altered. We’re showing you that the problem is not the people, it’s the system. Many other political thrillers are ultimately feel-good takes on the ways American politics function. This is an accurate take.
Why was it important to explore the press’s role as gatekeepers of the truth?
Yang: We’re talking about an independent political candidate who doesn’t imagine that the press is going to help him a whole lot. That’s based on my experience—when I ran for president, I first became known through less official channels, like podcasts. But the unfortunate reality is that a lot of the major press outlets acutely feel the context that they’re releasing news in, and they know if they release certain stories, they might get received a certain way, and that reception might tip actual outcomes in one direction or another. And so, in The Last Election, we wanted to depict editors making decisions on a story that they knew could have immense consequences.
Early on in the novel, a reporter learns that the U.S. military may intervene in the upcoming presidential election. What led you to make a military coup one of the story’s central threats?
Marche: The military is one of the very last institutions with any trust from the public. People feel like they’re the only ones acting responsibly, and the pressure on them to preserve democracy is just so huge. When I was researching The Next Civil War, my nonfiction argument that the U.S. could fall victim to a right-wing dictatorship in the next decade, I realized how much weight is placed on the military’s oath to uphold the constitution. It doesn’t feel super sustainable, and I wanted to explore what it would be like if they decided to fudge that oath.
