McArdle has decided, on behalf of the entirety of pop culture, than when critics refer to the message behind THT as "timely", they mean "THT is a warning about impending theocracy in North America". In fact, in sampling 3 reviews from the front page of Google that used the word "timely", all of them made the far more obvious connection: between THT and concerns about misogyny and sexism, a huge feature of the 2016 election.
Further, McArdle's attempt to knock back the idea that the overall story of THT is something out of 1992† is incoherent and actually pretty fatuous.
Consider: McArdle goes out of her way to observe that Orwell --- to her the only realistic dystopian fiction writer --- cribbed details from communist dictatorships in the USSR and China. That 1984 doesn't talk about (what she perceives to be) a credible future for the United States is excusable, because she can't write a takedown of George Orwell.
Now consider: Islamic State didn't exist in 1985, and in fact few people in the west appreciated the toll Islamic theocracy took on women in the middle east. But substitute Wahhabism for fundamentalist neo-Puritan Christianity, and a whole lot of THT seems uncannily predictive, right down to the public execution of gay people and members of other Islamic religions. Remember, Winston Smith's story took place in London, not Moscow.
If McArdle was just criticizing a TV show, I wouldn't care. But, by subtext, she's attempting to diminish the potency of the book (the book, by the way, is even more biting than the show, which strips away a lot of the systemic racism of the book's Gilead). McArdle isn't always full of it; sometimes she writes some interesting things. This isn't one of those times.
† Note to McArdle: Suzanne Vega is still recording albums; she didn't stop existing when you stopped listening.