THE UNDERTOW: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, by Jeff Sharlet

 

One of America’s finest reporters and essayists explores the powerful currents beneath the roiled waters of a nation coming apart.

 

An unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread. The Undertow is both inquiry and meditation, an attempt to understand how, over the last decade, reaction has morphed into delusion, social division into distrust, distrust into paranoia, and hatred into fantasies―sometimes realities―of violence.

 

Across the country, men “of God” glorify materialism, a gluttony of the soul, while citing Scripture and preparing for civil war―a firestorm they long for as an absolution and exaltation. Lies, greed, and glorification of war boom through microphones at hipster megachurches that once upon a time might have preached peace and understanding. Political rallies are as aflame with need and giddy expectation as religious revivals. At a conference for incels, lonely single men come together to rage against women. On the Far Right, everything is heightened―love into adulation, fear into vengeance, anger into white-hot rage. Here, in the undertow, our forty-fifth president, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood, and the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed on January 6 at the Capitol, is beatified as a martyr of white womanhood.

 

Framing this dangerous vision, Sharlet remembers and celebrates the courage of those who sing a different song of community, and of an America long dreamt of and yet to be fully born, dedicated to justice and freedom for all.

 

Exploring a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism, The Undertow is a necessary reckoning with our precarious present that brings to light a decade of American failures as well as a vision for American possibility.

NONFICTION

One Man’s Foray Into the Heartland of the Far Right

 

Alarmed by the country’s political divisions, Jeff Sharlet embarked on an anguished quest to understand the rise of antidemocratic extremism. In “The Undertow,” he documents his findings.

 

By Joseph O’Neill

March 21, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/21/books/review/the-undertow-jeff-sharlet.html

 

THE UNDERTOW: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, by Jeff Sharlet

 

The premise of “The Undertow,” Jeff Sharlet’s anguished new book of reportage, is that the United States is “coming apart.” The disintegration is political. It involves the rise of the autocratically inclined Donald Trump; the attempt by members of the Republican Party to overthrow the election of Joe Biden in January 2021; and, during the Biden presidency, the overturning by the Supreme Court of Roe v Wade.

 

The extremist maneuvering of right-wing officials has, if anything, only intensified. In the past few weeks, Republican legislators have introduced bills that provide, in effect, for the abolition of the Democratic Party in Florida and the putting to death of women who have abortions in South Carolina. The Supreme Court has requested further briefs in a case about the “independent state legislature theory,” a spurious legal-political doctrine that, if adopted as law, would enable (gerrymandered) Republican legislatures to effectively terminate democratic federal elections in their states. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sits on the House’s Homeland Security Committee, has floated the idea of a “national divorce” along red state and blue state lines. Sharlet’s premise would seem to be valid.

 

Not so long ago, Sharlet admits, he declined to characterize the threat to the Republic as “fascism.” Yet,

 

one by one in recent years, objections to describing militant Trumpism as fascist have fallen away. In addition to “the personality” of Trump, the movement his presidency quickened now cultivates paramilitaries and glorifies violence as a means of purification, thrives on othering its enemies, declares itself persecuted for “Whiteness,” diagnoses the nation as decadent and embraces the revisionist myth of a MAGA past.

 

But what explains this fascism’s grip on millions of ordinary Americans? It’s an important inquiry, not least because the rise of antidemocratic right-wing fanaticism in America has no good precedent. The fascisms of Europe and postcolonial states arose in response to socioeconomic collapse and dire poverty. The American version, by contrast, flourishes in a society that’s very rich by historical and global standards. Its political party — the G.O.P. — enjoys deeply entrenched power, and its supporters and corporate allies are hardly victims of the status quo. Nonmaterial factors — culture, race, geography, ideology — must be at work. What might these factors be? What is, to adapt Sharlet’s terminology, “the theology” of the cause?

 

To investigate this question, he embarks on a yearslong, one-man anthropological expedition into the heartland of the far right. As the author of two books about the political dangers posed by Christian fundamentalism, he knows his territory. He attends rallies for Trump (as candidate and president); he drives across the country in an attempt to trace the spiritual-political legacy of Ashli Babbitt, the insurrectionist shot dead at the Capitol on Jan. 6; he engages with pastors, gun fanatics, QAnon adherents, militia types and the other usual suspects. The result is a riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America, one that horrifyingly corresponds to liberals’ worst fears.

 

Sharlet’s encounters almost all follow the same basic structure: He approaches his right-wing subject with humility, friendliness and generosity of spirit. The interaction briefly exemplifies the old ideal of the good-faith meeting of minds; and then the beliefs of his interlocutor (about God’s will, about pedophile Democrats, about Trump’s undisclosed powers, about the need for armed self-defense, etc.) reveal themselves in their full intransigence, menace and delusional mind-set. Sharlet leaves the scene feeling more shaken up and pessimistic than ever.

 

A subplot of the book is the author’s fragile mental and physical state. A middle-aged man who has survived two heart attacks, he suffers from anxiety-induced high blood pressure and travels with pills for his cardiac health. (He is also in mourning for his beloved stepmother, whose ashes he transports in his car.) He freely admits to his frailties and his foibles, refusing the standpoint of hauteur characteristic of literary predecessors such as Joan Didion and V.S. Naipaul. Indeed, Sharlet’s authenticity and urgency as an essayist stems from his spooked, vulnerable persona, which confers on him a moral credibility that an ostensibly neutral writer would lack.

 

Sharlet offers several ideas, most intriguingly that Trumpism, with its embrace of conspiracy theories, its distrust of scientific and academic knowledge, its division of the world into believers and nonbelievers, resembles or partakes in the Gnostic tradition, with its emphasis on illusion and enlightenment, on paradoxical wisdom, on esoteric insight. But ultimately he isn’t detained by any of this. It’s as if his topic doesn’t bear too much conceptual contemplation, so grave and pressing are the practical political challenges that it prompts.

 

As his title suggests, Sharlet believes that what he’s documenting may be nothing less than “the undertow of civil war.” The anticipation of civil war, he discovers, strongly animates far-right circles. Although he holds fast to the moral and political example of the singers and activists Harry Belafonte and Lee Hays (to whom he devotes the book’s beautiful first and last chapters, respectively), Sharlet admits to being deeply worried.

 

It might be said that anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time with political extremists will emerge with an inordinate fear of political extremism. But it might equally be said that complacency has been an important reason we find ourselves in a situation where one of our two political parties is no longer committed to liberal democracy. Jeff Sharlet doesn’t propose a practical solution to the problem, but this book is his way of sounding the alarm.

 

Joseph O’Neill’s novels include “Netherland,” which received the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and “Godwin,” forthcoming next year.