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.
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