National Review: The Politics of The Walking Dead

The National Review has published a neat look at the politics of The Walking Dead and how zombies are a stand-in for other natural and man-caused disasters:

“There are no zombies in the real world,” you might say. But the zombie apocalypse has lots of plausible functional equivalents. The Walking Dead isn’t even really about the walking dead. It’s about other people. It’s about the fact that hell, when it exists on earth, consists of other people.

The zombies serve only one ongoing function in the show: Having brought about the collapse of political society, their constant menace prevents the reconstitution of political society on any large scale. Survivors therefore have to figure out how to establish atomized communities large enough to save them from a precarious hunter-gatherer existence, but small enough to be manageable as safe, prosperous, and free communities. That proves a constant and often losing struggle in which little survives except our band of fellows and a little hope of a better world, which is why The Walking Dead keeps coming back.

You can find the rest of the article here.