“The Undertow – Scenes from a Slow Civil War” by Jeff Sharlet, 2023
Like many books, the title does not describe what is inside. It’s the book version of click-bait. Sharlet is a reporter depicting various U.S.
stories with little concern for linking them together except in some kind of loose
cultural impressionism. As you read them, you wonder … ‘so where is the actual civil
war?’ What we have here mostly are the
various wonderments of the Right - bits of violence, lots of ideological nonsense,
especially religious, some justified anger, guns, lies and the organizations
and individuals that take advantage of it.
Sharlet is also an academic who almost exclusively focuses
on religion and its influence in the U.S. – especially the negative effects of
fundamentalism. So this book has much
from that point of view. This book starts with Harry Belafonte in the ‘50s and
‘60s – his songs, his life, his anger, his relation to Martin Luther King, his
activism around civil rights. It is not
clear why this is included. To depict an
earlier period of semi-fascistic ‘America’? For hope?
He includes his reminiscences about the brief, programless existence of
Occupy Wall Street in the ‘90s. More hope?
He ends with a paean to Leadbelly and the Weavers. Pathetic, I think.
Sharlet attends several Trump rallies in 2016 and 2020. He investigates a prosperity-gospel “Vous” megachurch
in Miami, led by a young, hip, clueless showman, Pastor Rich Wilkerson. In the same vein he attends a very creepy convention
of the anti-female, anti-feminist manosphere website “A Voice for Men” in 2014. He
looks at the QAnon cult, starting with a drunken Q’er ramming suspected
pedophiles with her car in Waco, Texas. He relates the story of military vet Ashli
Babbitt, a martyr for Trumpism, who was killed on January 6 as she attempted to
break into the House chamber. His meditation
on Babbitt continues through a rally and church service in California, then
interviews with various rioters at the Capitol.
He spends more time on her then his glancing mentions of the light-skinned
BLM martyrs in Kenosha killed by Rittenhouse. It is her 3 inch knife on the cover. He even does an analysis of The
Big Lebowski because Babbitt liked the movie. He doesn't know this but that film has a huge fan base among leftists.
Sharlet drives across the country and visits Boebert’s gun
café (now closed), then a visit to an Omaha church which preaches that CoVid,
drought and floods are curses from God upon the sinners and the wicked. I’m waiting for the grasshoppers, although
now we do have more mosquitos! Gun-slinging church attendees eventually order him out of
that church. He goes on to visit a tent-revival in a bleak
Ohio town and trips to gun-owning rural libertarians, farmers, vets
and Trumpers in ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’ Wisconsin. He never goes South…
Insights
of the Book
I do not think a liberal like Jeff Sharlet really
understands a ‘slow civil war’ or the rise of fascism, but his snapshots are
useful. What conclusions can we draw
from his intimate portraits of this fascistic and lunatic movement? Shartlet’s own religious understanding says
Trumpism is like Gnosticism – a mode of ‘knowing’ that does not involve facts,
expertise, real research, theory or actual material knowledge. It consists instead of hints, numbers,
letters, codes, imagination, faith, emotion and ‘gut’ feelings. The only documents are the Bible and the
Constitution. Trump’s speeches are full
of fear mongering about rape, pedophilia and murder carried out by immigrants,
Democrats, Marxists, black criminals, Antifa and the like. It’s a political diet of True Crime
television, detective fiction, conspiracies, local 'bleed and lead' news, the “Cops” TV show and the kind of white fear you see on Nextdoor.
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| Hip, rich and Christian - Time to Tithe! |
What Sharlet also catches is the overwhelming presence of
the prosperity gospel and ‘getting rich’ as a theme for Trump and evangelical
white nationalism. Pleasure, ‘fun,’
‘ease,’ and every other hedonic – like saying or doing whatever you want,
racist, sexist or not, eating whatever you want, driving whatever vehicle you
want, blowing as much gas as you want – deeply appeals to people whose ‘fun’ is
threatened. My 4x4, my snowmobile, my
boat, my riding lawnmower, my big house, my my my … They ‘believe’ and this
will lead them to wealth. It is hedonism as policy. This material lust appeals
to those who perhaps have failed in business the most, and need some kind of bogus 'lift.'
Sharlet only hints at the real crimes of Democrats like
Clinton – for instance how the U.S. under Clinton’s watch helped decimate the
Haitian economy. He ignores the long
history of Democrats spurning working-class concerns. Even the failure of the Left in the 1930s and
later to build a mass electoral party plays into this current situation. His focus is exclusively on Trump supporters
and in this he ignores class. But in
spite of himself he sometimes lists the occupations of Trump’s base – and many
of them are business people, while a few are white-collars. Only one blue-collar working-class identity is mentioned,
along with one lumpen. Now why would a media-savvy, wealth-flaunting, mafia-don
boss man appeal to the small fry of the business world? Or the entrepreneurs, the self-employed, the ‘independent
contractors’? And all the church followers
of the prosperity gospel and its wealthy pastor proponents? It’s pretty obvious
- they want to be rich too! Tithe and it
will be so.
His reporting confirms the Marxist view that the
petit-bourgeois is the main mass base for fascism and the ultra-right. 14 year vet Babbitt herself ran a ‘pool-supply company’
with family members, but it was $71K in debt.
It is explicitly ‘the ruined
petit-bourgeois’ that have to take their anger out on something. Behind this is a fractured understanding of
how capitalism actually works, so scape-goats must be targeted. Small business
is nothing but meat to large capital and only some now realize it. As I’ve written before, fascistic and
right-wing ideas are like seeing reality in a cracked, fun-house mirror. They can’t face the fact that it is the
capital system itself that is the problem.
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| Ashli Babbitt - Martyr? |
UnCivil
War?
Sharlet asks his interviewees if they think a civil war
is coming. They all say yes – but given
their shaky understanding of the world, that rings a bit hollow. He interviews a 3% militia member who agrees,
though his estimate of those who directly participated in 1776 of 3% - is about
22% off according to Shartlett. There is
a big difference between 3% and 25% and the lower number hints more at
right-wing terrorism and small mob violence than counter-revolution. Which is where we stand right now… though
Republican state legislatures are doing their part too. Their ideas of civil war also smack of a vague 'myth' - not a real understanding of what that means. Sharlet consistently points out the actual
facts over the lies on issue after issue to interviewees, but it makes no difference. At one point he calls Trumpism a shared dream, and that certainly seems operative. Fascist ideology is partly based on fear and magical
thinking, but that is not all as it has a material base within a capitalist matrix.
If you want a look inside the minds of ultra-right
individuals, this book will help. If you
want a broader understanding or theory that rises above anecdotal stories, it
will not. It ruminates about ‘whiteness’
but doesn’t get much beyond that. If you want a plan to defeat budding fascism
or win over potential allies, it will not either. Another sad, passive microscopic liberal
meditation.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “A
Confederacy of Dunces,” “It Was Predictable,” “Anti-Fascist Series,” “Loaded –
a Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” “The Hidden History of Guns and
the Second Amendment,” “American War,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Cranky Yankee,” ‘Southern Cultural
Nationalism,” “Kenosha Trial Was Rigged.”
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
June 30, 2023
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