Why the sudden drop-off in attention paid to the living dead? A lot of explanations have been floated, some of them rather long-winded. Part of it, as Forbes’s Paul Tassi notes, is that after seven seasons TWD could best be described as middle-aged and in a very serious creative rut.

We are probably in cycle number five of Rick’s group coming up against a scary enemy, and then working to overcome them, and it’s both predictable, and a little bit exhausting, given how much filler tends to accompany these plotlines. And for those who have added Fear the Walking Dead to their show lineup, we are now over 30 weeks a year when AMC is showing zombie programs. Fatigue does have a part to play in this equation.

This has an Occam’s razor appeal to it. What I find interesting is whether the decline in TWD’s ratings augurs a general decline in American interest in apocalypse narratives. I wrote something semi-serious about this a few years ago:

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The spread of the living dead reflects a variety of anxieties in an American body politic buffeted by asymmetric threats and economic uncertainty. Surfing the cultural zeitgeist, a number of actors have adopted the zombie trope to advance their own political message. There are clear advantages in using the living dead as a pop culture hook for promoting political and policy ideas…. Simply put, zombies are unique in genre literature in emphasizing the breakdown of modern society in the wake of an external threat. In propagating this narrative, constant references to the zombie canon can reinforce an apocalyptic perception about the future of modern society. As interest groups also appropriate and exploit the zombie narrative to pursue their own political agendas, their millenarian rhetoric helps to lay the groundwork for the societal breakdown that they claim to fear.

And as it turns out, the Trump campaign was savvy enough to exploit this as well. They placed anti-immigration ads in “The Walking Dead” because they knew latent supporters who watched that show would be likely to respond to Donald Trump’s views on immigration. Throughout his campaign, Trump talked in apocalyptic terms about the threats facing the United States from within and without. Promoting fears about the end of Western civilization is perfectly in tune with Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s ideology as well.

So here’s my question: What happens to the American apocalypse narrative in a Trump administration? Assuming the apocalypse does not actually happen?

This kinda depends on whether you’re a Trump supporter or not. If you support Trump, then it’s going to be hard to hold onto an apocalyptic mind-set come Jan. 20. A president Trump, GOP control of Congress and the ability of Trump to alter the federal judiciary means that the very people who warned that the world was going to hell will be in charge of not letting that happen. Trump and his acolytes will have less of an incentive to talk about how bad things are once they are in charge. And his supporters will likely respond to those cues, as we’ve seen in attitudes about the direction of the U.S. economy. For 2017 at least, conservatives who were attracted to apocalypse narratives in the Obama years might find them less appealing with such a conservative administration in office (though it is possible that Bannon might want to continue the apocalyptic talk as a means to further his revolution).

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As for liberals, the problem is that the modern apocalypse narrative ain’t terribly friendly to them. As I wrote back in April, “The problem with these shows is that they seem unable to escape a single, unrelenting theme: The post-apocalyptic world is a Hobbesian nightmare that forces surviving humans to evolve into nihilistic killing machines.” Liberals neither survive nor thrive in such a narrative. To be sure, George Romero’s older zombie films had a decidedly more liberal bent. But at the risk of offending people, I’l just say that “Day of the Dead” ain’t a good film.

My hunch is that if politics really drives viewership, the apocalypse narrative will find a rival in the Trump years, which is some variation of a resistance narrative. Liberals will flock to narratives in which a plucky band of diverse characters resists domination by some authoritarian stand-in for the Trump administration. SyFy’s “Incorporated” offers up one possible example of this, combining both kinds of narratives.