A Slow Civil War?: Jeff Sharlet
April 27th, 2023
“We don't have to seek common ground with fascism.”
Jeff Sharlet is a journalist, best-selling author, and longtime observer and investigator of the Christian right. His latest book is The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. We discuss America's democratic bankruptcy, the martyrdom of Ashli Babbit, and the rightward shift of the mainstream.
The notion of civil war was a fringe idea, but in recent years it has become mainstream. It was just a question of time and for some, it was already happening. Fascism does not respond to logic but relies heavily on myths. Fascist movements need martyrs like Ashli Babbitt. Along those lines, the MAGA movement can be understood as an innocence cult, wishing for a return to a time that never was.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Jeff Sharlet
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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Jeff Sharlet Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:05] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
There is an arguably overused misquote of Ernest Hemingway, often, by the way, attributed to Mark Twain, and it goes along the lines of "slowly, then all at once." The original accurate quote is from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and dialogue between the characters Bill and Mike. "How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked. "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually. Then suddenly." It feels like there's a kind of democratic bankruptcy happening in the United States. Gradually. And then suddenly. The slow, incremental effects of vote suppression and gerrymandering or chipping away at abortion rights over decades and then these shocking sudden instances like the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, or in Tennessee, the expulsion of two young black men who were duly elected members of the state House while their white lady colleague was not expelled, and the overturning of Roe versus Wade followed within a year by attempts for nationwide bans on abortion medication.
To try to understand the shape of what we're seeing slowly and also suddenly, I'm joined by Jeff Sharlet. Jeff is a longtime observer and investigator of the Christian Right. He's a journalist and bestselling author, and he's director of creative writing at Dartmouth. His latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is out now. Writing in The Guardian, Anne Newman described the book thus: "The stories are as necessary as they are harrowing. The writing is explicit and expansive, almost cinematic, like looking at a battlefield from above." Altogether, it's a rare achievement, a cultural political book that is literary, which is to say you should read it. That's a plus one from me.
So Jeff, welcome to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us. Jeff Sharlet: [00:02:15] Thanks, Mila Thanks for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:17] So you've been on this beat, the far right and Christian Nationalism beat for more than a decade. Your book, The Family: The Secret
Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, came out almost 14 years ago. But this book, in stark contrast to The Family, is not a deep dive into elite behavior and beliefs. Tell us about where you situate The Undertow.
Jeff Sharlet: [00:02:40] I think The Undertow is a metaphor for understanding the various forces that have been pulling us toward this, as you put it, slowly and then all at once. The book is this kind of wrestling with with what, borrowing from the filmmaker Jeffrey Wolf, I call the Trumpocene, the age of Trump. And I think listeners should understand that, much like the Reagan era, which stretched -- political scientists, historians will say -- from 1980 to 2016, long after Reagan. What he changed in American life to find a kind of vernacular of American politics, American possibility. Trumpism does not depend on Trump alone. So I'm trying to think of how do we come to this place? Because I do think that 2016 marked a turning point. The family came out in 2008, but I've been reporting on right wing movements since 2001. I was so glad that you sort of noted that that distinction between the kind of elite right wing movement and this sort of broader movement. And when Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015, I saw coming down the escalator the kind of forces, a kind of politics that elite American fundamentalism, elite conservatism has been exporting around the globe for decades. Here is the strongman figure that we have supported in Indonesia and Philippines and Somalia and Brazil. And I think elite American right wing movements, and I mean this as no defense of them at all, there was a way in which they could support and export fascism internationally, but there was a line that they didn't quite cross domestically. In 2008, I wrote about this group and I said, "Here's the F word: fascism." That's a historical term. And they are not, in fact, fascists. There's more than one kind of bat under the sun. It doesn't mean that they're okay. But Trump brought that fascism that I think elite right wing movements in the United States have been exporting, brought it home and down the golden escalator and into American life. And that's when I sort of became interested in, well, this fascist aesthetic that he's bringing to us. Will it be received? And that's what this book, The Undertow, is. It's about both the undercurrents that were always bringing us there or always had the potential to bring us there. And the way that if you've ever been swimming and caught up in an undertow, some people call it a riptide, you think you're fine, and then suddenly you're further away from shore and you go, "That's fine, I can swim." And then suddenly you are too far. And that is, I think, the experience that I find absolutely necessary for all of us to
contend with. To wrestle with if we're going to recognize that current that power and instead of getting swept out to sea, figure out a way, a different way back to shore.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:29] Right. Well, the prelude in your book is called "Our Condition," and which is something that you say is distinct from being in a moment of crisis and also is something that afflicts all of us. We're in it together, so we're in this undertow together. So what is our condition?
Jeff Sharlet: [00:05:47] You know, there's a... Joan Didion famously writes in the White Album, We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Speaking of misunderstood lines. Right. They're, like, "oh, isn't that wonderful? Stories." They don't read the rest of the paragraph or the rest of the essay, which is a dark, dark essay. We tell ourselves stories in order to live is not necessarily a good thing, right? It depends on the story. So I try and pay attention to the language with which we tell those stories and the narrative structure. We speak of a crisis of a democracy, a climate crisis. Well, crisis itself is a metaphor. Pay attention to the metaphors. Pay attention to the stories we tell ourselves. Right. A crisis opposes an arc, a resolution, a conclusion. And I think having spent so much time amongst right wing movements, which are oftentimes very deeply mythological movements, of course they love crisis rhetoric. Recently, Trump has been launching his new campaign with a rhetoric of the final battle. That's a crisis, right? This is not the term that applies to our condition. This is the world we find ourselves in. Start with the climate crisis, which is an undercurrent in the book, the grief that forms us because of that. It's not a crisis. A crisis supposes there's a resolution. We're going to figure it out or the world's going to go up in flames. No, neither. It's going to get warmer and we're going to have to live with that. And we're not going back and we're not refreezing the glaciers. We have to live with our condition. So too, the crisis of democracy. We can't push Trump out of office or all the little Trumps around the world right now because he's not the only one. And then say, phew! Brazil had the so called Trump of Brazil. Bolsonaro. And he was defeated. Just like the Trump of America. So that's fine. Crisis resolved. Everything's great in Brazil now. And we certainly see that the United States has overcome fascism once and for all. Now we have to reject that crisis language and live with our condition. I'm 50 years old. I at 44, hit the genetic jackpot and had two very unexpected heart attacks. And when you have a heart attack, what happens is everyone tells you -- now I'm healthy, now I'm recovered -- and everyone says, your heart is going to be stronger than ever. And it is. You can exercise
and so on. It'll grow back like it never happened. No, it won't. There are scars, scar tissue. That is our condition. There are things that are lost. We have lost on climate. We have lost fascism. Full fascism has come to the United States. The fascism that percolated in pockets of America that we exported overseas. And we will all pay the price for that for a long time now. We can deny it. We can look the other way, or we can recognize that condition and learn to live with it and maybe, maybe create something new out of that. But only, only if we recognize what is lost.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:57] You tell the story of our condition through these individual stories and reading your book, I was surprised by how much empathy I felt for the people you write about. And when you describe the uniquely firm American belief in the prosperity gospel, that wealth is evidence of being anointed, that being wealthy is proof positive that you're blessed, the fervor for Trump kind of made more sense to me than ever before. So, I even can loosely grasp the allure of white grievance, which is embodied by the slogan "Make America Great Again." Can you talk about the ways white grievance appeals to an innocence that never really existed and how prosperity gospel plays into that grievance?
Jeff Sharlet: [00:09:47] Could I share a paragraph? Mila Atmos: [00:09:48] Sure.
Jeff Sharlet: [00:09:49] I think sort of gets at it. Let's see. I think there's a question we sometimes hear "Is Trumpism an American fascism? Is this a product of race or class?" Which is always a startling question to leave gender out of it, and especially at a moment when gender in particular and trans kids are on the front line of this assault. So is it race, class or gender? Is it misogyny or white supremacy or the old business elitism capitalism obscured under a new so-called populism? The answer is yes. The answer is yes. Intersectionality is a term we encounter on the left. The right has its intersectionalities, too. And here's a paragraph where I try and get a little bit at it. I'm at a rally for Ashli Babbitt, the martyr now of the movement, a 35 year old white Air Force veteran who was leading a charge within the Capitol on January 6th, climbing through a broken window when she was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer. And she's since become a martyr. The big movement of the book is I begin with a rally for her in Sacramento, California. She was a Californian and then began traveling around the
country watching that martyr myth information, watching that sense of whiteness in formation, which is, of course, as you say, white grievance. "It's about feeling yourself a victim. Such victims feel themselves drawn together not by whiteness, but by that of which it is made, by their belief in a strong man and their desire for an iron fisted God and their love of the way guns make them feel inside. And the grief over COVID 19 and their denial of COVID 19 and their loathing of systemic, as descriptive of that which they can't see, can't hold in their hands in a way, and their certainty that countless children are being taken, stolen and raped, or if not in body, then in spirit, indoctrinated to hate themselves. They are angry about their own bodies, about how other people's bodies make them feel, about eating too much because they're afraid they won't have enough, about not having enough, about others having more. They are drawn together by their love of fairness, which is how it used to be. They're certain. They remember. Or if they're too young, they've been told. Or maybe they've all just seen it in a movie, a Western or a space opera or a revenge fantasy, the forever frontier that is equal parts Little House on the Prairie and The Punisher. Make America Great Again. The solace of tautology, a loop, a return, a story, the end of which has already been written in the past." In trying to understand that grievance, that whiteness, I write a lot about movies and stories. The Punisher is a comic book character, and if you've seen in Trumpism this sort of skull with like big eyes and so on, and now, in fact, some police forces actually have started painting punishers on their cars. The Punisher is a figure, originally was a Vietnam veteran, comes back and his family is killed by the mob and and the crooked system. The deep state doesn't help. So he uses his manly American powers just to kill everybody, right? I mean, the Punisher does not bring people to justice. He was originally a villain. They've since updated him. Now he's an Afghanistan vet. He's a forever veteran. He's a forever stabbed in the back figure, which is another kind of fascist mythology who, as Trump recently said in Waco, Texas, a site of American far right martyrdom. "I am your retribution. I am your retribution." This is not seeking justice, but retribution contains within it innocence. For the book, I started documenting all the various fascist flags that are proliferating. I mean, it's a great blossoming of fascist flags around the country right now. I think I have some 200 varieties, the one that I have not yet seen, along with the so called Blue Lives Matter flag and the flags with AR-15 and the flags with the snake that says, "Don't tread on me." Of course, the flags with skulls, the flag of Ashli Babbitt herself. I wait for the flag that combines the fetus and the gun, the two symbols of this movement. We speak of it as a death cult, but it's an innocence cult. It's to be innocent of the past, to be innocent of race, to imagine the United States,
make America great again. Little House on the Prairie to return to this state of innocence that never was.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:22] Right. Yes. Although one of the things... To speak of Little House on the Prairie, I thought it was really a story about destitution. And I feel like people miss that because they haven't actually read it.
Jeff Sharlet: [00:14:34] Yes,
Mila Atmos: [00:14:35] Yes, yes. It's a very sad, sad story.
Jeff Sharlet: [00:14:38] Little House on the Prairie is fascinating because, of course... First of all, in the actual story and in the truth, Laura Ingalls Wilder, they are on very freshly conquered territory and stolen land. And Pa played by Michael Landon in the TV show, Pa is a much more complicated figure, a desperate man. And Laura Ingalls Wilder is herself and her daughter, who did actually much of the writing, as we now know, due to scholarship. Also a more complicated figure quite close to the American fascism of the time of the writing of the text. They were very prominent right wing figures. Morning in America has always a lie, is always a seduction and an untruth. But it's a powerful one. And if you want to understand that undertow, imagine here you are. I think of this figure, Ashli Babbitt. So we see her as a domestic terrorist. And she is. And I've seen so many folks -- I mean on the left and liberals -- range from "well, she got what she deserved," which I find unsettling. I mean, not to defend her in any way, but I don't celebrate the death of anyone to real pleasure in her death. I won't repeat some of the language always framed in the most misogynistic terms creating fake Twitter accounts in really vulgar terms for Ashli Babbitt. And assuming that she was a fascist, she was born a fascist. Ashli Babbitt's second favorite president after Donald Trump: Barack Obama, for whom she voted twice, for whom she was so proud of voting twice. For much of her life, struggled to be this better person. Age 17, moved by 9/11, convinces her parents to let her join the Air Force at 17. Now, this gets complicated. Serves eight deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Start thinking about the Punisher and the distortions of grief on process, the trauma that you absorb, but you cannot acknowledge she struggles against it to be this better person. And along comes Trump and he says, "You know what? You don't have to be a better person. Look at me. I'm not and I'm the best. Relax. Stop struggling against racism." Ashli Babbitt lives 15
minutes from the border with Mexico, and she is told that there are hordes of brown people coming across. What if she stopped trying to understand that and just let herself hate? A turning point for her is a homeless man defecates in her yard. She lives in Southern California. Anyone could be upset by that. It's quick. I am not going to try any more. I'm going to lean back into that undertow. I'm not going to read Little House on the Prairie and and say, let me understand the subtleties of this text. No, that was good and that was innocent. And this now is decadent and wrong. It's a relief.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:36] Right. Yes. I mean, I think that comes across very clearly that for many people it's a relief. We can now just be; sort of in a way that you describe Trump, that he just is. He isn't aspiring. He is, he is free from these desires and wants. Ashli Babbitt is a central figure in the book. And actually I had no idea the extent of the industry around her supposed martyrdom. And in fact, this movement is creating more martyrs all the time and they don't actually have to be martyred. Right. Like Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted after shooting two people dead at a Black Lives Matter protest, the January 6th prisoners. At times, even Trump plays a martyr as he faces multiple criminal indictments.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:23] We are going to take a quick break to hear from other people's pockets. It's a podcast that I think you'll enjoy.
Maya Lao: The thing that I'm most nosy about is other people's finances. I just want to ask people, how much money do you make and what have you figured out about money that the rest of us haven't? I'm Maya Lao, and this is Other People's Pockets, the show where I ask people about their money because salary transparency is important and because we can all learn something from other people's financial mistakes and money hacks. Other People's Pockets is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and Little Everywhere. Listen to Other People's Pockets wherever you get your podcasts.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:02] And now let's return to my conversation with Jeff Sharlet about his new book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. You write about a kind of dream logic. You know, the logic that permeates Trump rallies and evangelical churches. Can you describe what that is and how it functions?
Jeff Sharlet: [00:19:22] Yeah, I'm so glad you bring that up, Mila, because we sometimes imagine that imagination is the sole province of art and the good and the virtuous. And it's important to remember that fascism, of course, is not a movement that you can respond to with reason. You can't fact check a myth. No fascist ever said, "Oh, well, did you know Ashli, actually, there aren't hordes coming over the border." "Oh, thank you for the correction. I stand corrected." It doesn't happen. Right? Because they are in the dream logic. Because it is an aesthetic. It is a feeling and it is sort of seductive in this way of giving into, on the one hand, the dull old stories, right. Of white supremacy and hate, on the other hand, the expression of those stories with endless proliferation. Hence all the flags, this movement of great imagination. And then now, now we've got characters, martyrs. Martyrs are delicious. Martyrs are wonderful characters. Right. The term, of course, in its origin means witness. And you said so-called martyr. And I share the feeling. But of course, we don't get to choose the martyrs of other movements. Hard to imagine Kyle Rittenhouse a martyr. And yet so it is. In the book, I tried to describe this, this undertow of going from the fascist aesthetic of 2016 when I first started traveling around to Trump rallies. Not as Press, just attending them, because I write a lot about religion and I'm trying to understand these sentiments. And as you said before, the prosperity gospel, right? We're going to win, win, win. By 2020 it's turned darker. It's what I call an Americanized, bastardized Gnostic gospel, which is to say a religion of secrets, of conspiracies, of meanings within meanings, a QAnon inflected thing. But on January 6th, 2021, I think it enters into the full third stage. And that's why most of the book is actually after the Trump administration, which is the age of martyrs. And I think for fascism to come into its fullest incarnation, it needs those martyrs. There's a chapter called "The Great Acceleration." It used to be a leftist term. The right has now taken it. And when you mention Kyle Rittenhouse, yes, martyrs usually are... One who dies in witness for their cause. But now you just need to be persecuted by the deep state. So who is a martyr? Ashli Babbitt gives us the central martyr. We need a white woman. This is the martyr of American history. Innocent white womanhood. One of the very prominent white supremacist sites is called VDare. After Virginia Dare, the first white woman born in North America, Virginia Dare. Right. But once that door is open, now we can have all kinds of martyrs. Kyle Rittenhouse was already a hero. Then at Ashli Babbitt's rally, the biggest cheer besides Ashli is for Kyle Rittenhouse. And so it is. More recently in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott decided to pardon a man named Daniel Perry, who had written online almost an emulation of some of these other figures. "I'd like to kill some of those Black Lives Matters protesters." Well, and then he did. He drove his car
into a protest, one of 73 car ramming attacks in the United States on Black Lives Matters protests in the year of 2020, and shot a man dead. And was convicted by a jury of his peers, rule of law. And the governor, Greg Abbott, has said, "Ah, what an injustice." Tucker Carlson has said, "How can we let this man be lost, this great hero?" So there's that partisan process. I think of the worst music that ever was, the January 6th choir. It's recordings of the January 6th prisoners singing together at Trump's campaign launch in Waco. Please rise for the national anthem. No. The January 6th choir, which is a displacement. Now martyrdom is accelerating. And I think what it's doing is holding out this promise is that you, too, Mila, could be a martyr for this movement. Has anyone at work ever given you the side eye because of your love of America? You're a martyr. Martyrdom is always a magic trick. It's a sleight of hand by which one thing substitutes for another. So that's the undertow is picking up. I don't think it's hopeless, but that is a big acceleration that has, I think, happening right now.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:45] Well, it feels to me that this dream logic is a persuasive thread that allows people to buy into conspiracy theories. And further, to fuel the popularity of Fox News and the mainstreaming of these beliefs. And you talked about Tucker Carlson just now, but in the book, you note that Tucker Carlson's show reaches more people than the people likely to read your book. So in that sense, you're the fringe and he's mainstream. So my question here is, what is the danger in not recognizing that white Christian nationalism is mainstream?
Jeff Sharlet: [00:24:24] It's the bubble. It's that moment you said about Tucker Carlson. I was talking with a QAnon adherent, Diane G. in Sunrise, Florida, and she is describing to me a conspiracy theory about the horrific Las Vegas shooting in which a man named Stephen Paddock killed 50 some people at a country music concert. Well, did I know that of course, that was an attempt on Donald Trump's life, who was not there. This makes no sense. But what is the evidence? Well, there was a man on the hallway who was seen earlier that day eating Turkish kebab. Well, what more do you need? Well, this is just crackpot. I can't use this stuff. And then I go looking online and discover, in fact, the same theory has been on Tucker Carlson, shared by Congressman Scott Perry, a former brigadier general, and is based on an analysis by Trump officials. It's insane. Well, we don't need to contend with that, but not just more than the readers of my book. Uh, more than Tucker Carlson, more than the left media combined. And then we compound that with Truth and Telegram and folks who've never heard of QAnon but
are absorbing its ideas. And this is sort of, I think, where some media criticism comes in. I'm going to speak a little bit out of school. I did an event a little while ago and I will not name the individual, a New York Times political reporter. And we disagreed about some matters. Right. My friend there argued that we don't need to use terms like fascism or racism. Those are just labels. And I said, well, they're actually historically rooted terms and we should not use them loosely. We can't describe every right winger we don't like as a fascist, but it is this movement. And he felt very strongly that that wasn't the case and that their argument for not using that was validated, he said. The market has spoken. The market has spoken. And I said, What do you mean by that? He says, 10 million readers of The New York Times. And I said, 10 million readers. No kidding. Tucker Carlson's pinky. You know, if the market has spoken, if that's our logic, if we're going to get out of the undertow through the market, the market that brought us here, the market that put Trump in the White House in 2016 and could win outright in 2020. People say, but he lost by 7 million votes! No, he lost by 120,000. That was the difference in the Electoral College. What about those people who, with whom we still live, as he likes to say, 70 some million and the country that is in possession of 393 million firearms, officially, in civilian hands. And of course, we know it's more. The bubble of the center will always hold. Not only will the center always hold, the center can do nothing but hold. There is nothing but the center by folks who don't understand that it's moved. I think of another friend telling me about Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the House, very conservative man, absolutely displaced, hated within fascism, understands he's not going to get back into politics, but still thinks it's important to have a place in the room. What Paul Ryan doesn't understand is if he's in the room, it's not the room. It's moved. That's the danger of not contending with the mainstreaming of white supremacy and fascism.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:42] Right. Yes, it's definitely moved. For sure. I mean, some of the things that we hear today are, you know, we would have thought they were fringe things ten years ago. And now they're bandied about every day. Slowly and then all at once also feels like this. Right. The undertow. So you talked earlier about these currents that we couldn't see before that were beneath the surface and finding ourselves too far out. But another thing about a riptide that your book really made me think about is that if you're caught in a riptide, the harder you try to swim to shore, the further you get pulled out. So what led you to start seriously considering the possibility of civil war?
Jeff Sharlet: [00:28:25] I mean, that... Civil war is exactly one of those terms that certainly was fringe years ago. I've been writing about right wing movements for 20 years, and I've always heard that language. And there's, you know, the new Confederates and so on, and neo-Nazis here and there. But they were a fringe, again, not in a defense of the right wing movements that were there. But I started to notice that language sort of moving into the center right. And after January 6th, 2021, I noticed scholarly historians, academic historians, not those who write the popular histories that are wonderful, but in the academy, a very cautious, necessarily cautious group. They understand the history does usually move slowly. But now they were starting to speak of civil war as a possibility. The very folks who would have dismissed that as hysterical. Once. Right. So I said, I have to investigate this. Here it is, the language has moved from the fringes into the center, right. It's moving closer to the heart. And when I started traveling around the country for the second half of this book in the spring of '21, after January 6th, even then, I would talk to journalist colleagues and say, well, I'm interested in this sort of rhetoric of civil war that's coming up. We forget how recently that was scoffed at. Now in The New York Times, David French, no liberal there, conservative writer, says, "hey, we have to take this seriously." And The Washington Post, a group of retired generals, right, said, "look, the military fracturing is a real possibility." And of course, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just a few years ago entered Congress with no committee assignments, a buffoon, as if buffoonery has not always been the means by which fascism advanced. She'll never get anywhere. And now here she is. Kevin McCarthy is the speaker. Enjoy the title, Kevin. Marjorie Taylor Greene runs the Republican Party in the House and speaks of what she calls the national divorce. And if we say, well, I guess it could be an amicable divorce, all we need to do is recall that she has called for the executions of Democrats. I remember her advertising the sort of the militant eroticism of the right, her and Lauren Boebert. And she's standing there and with her like, she's got her aviator glasses and she's looking very tough, but she's got a big gun. And then above it are pictures of the squad, these four women members of Congress, women of color. A gun, in pictures framed like targets. Right. That is this mainstream. That is civil war rhetoric. And when I started talking to folks at first, I would sort of raise like, "well, I've heard people talk about civil war." The only answer was "yes." And the only variation was, there were those who thought it was happening, and those who thought it would come soon. But either way, there were those who looked forward to it. You know, you could see their pulse quicken and those who thought it sorrowful but necessary. I don't think it is inevitable. I am not one of those. But I think we
must take seriously see the great number who do. And if we don't, then yes, it could happen. And we're already in what I call a slow civil war, a cold civil war, and already casualties. So that's that's where I see that.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:39] Well, in your book, I think all the skirmishes that you describe, it's very clear that it's happening in real life for some people all the time. You know, the Antifa clashes with the Saviors and stuff. I thought, I had no idea these things are like happening. I mean, I don't want to say all the time, but it's not irregular.
Jeff Sharlet: [00:31:56] Every weekend, every weekend. I mean, I hear... You report on this stuff for a long time. People say, especially I'm talking to you from New York today and just visiting with friends. "Do you think there could be violence?" I'm like, "could it be? Could be."
Mila Atmos: [00:32:11] There is.
Jeff Sharlet: [00:32:12] There is. And it's taking place in multiple ways. You know, there are these skirmishes every weekend now with Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Patriot Front, Patriot Prayer, more organizations than you can name, militias without names, men with AR-15s and they line up outside libraries, schools, hospitals, bars and increasingly, I should say, defenders of those movement, the John Brown Gun Club and various leftist organizations, they line up with their AR-15s. In Texas, the Black lives Matter protester killed by Daniel Perry that I mentioned earlier. He was carrying an AK-47. Guns on both sides. That's happening. That's a simmer. But even more than that, since Dobbs, I think we need to understand that we hear every now and then a little story of, in Wisconsin, a woman who bled for days for want of health care because they were afraid to treat her in a pregnancy. This year, the crisis term there is appropriate a pregnancy crisis situation. Any reporter knows the stories that make the news are the tip of the iceberg. There are pregnant people dying for want of care around the country. Those are casualties of the slow civil war. I have a queer, non-binary child who is being criminalized now in 20 states and like so many queer kids now we see suicide rates spiking. Those are casualties of the slow civil war. It's happening right now. And if we reassure ourselves, well, but the courts are on top of it. The courts in Texas, that has just outlawed medical abortion. And we'll see how that plays out over time. That's going to be a long term thing. Unfortunately, too many
people again and again get seduced by every little victory to saying it's all okay now. In Wisconsin, there was an election for a state Supreme Court justice, very key election. Had it been lost, Wisconsin would be lost in 2024 regardless of the vote. And they made that very clear. No Democrats get to win, right? Well, thank God the Democrat won that race. And now that state Supreme Court is still in play. Well, we can relax about Wisconsin now, right? No! And my friends in Wisconsin are not relaxed. They know that's just the beginning. The struggle is long.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:34] Mhm. Mhm. Well, the struggle is long. The global fascist movement is old, as you mentioned. It's been around for a long time and so is the fight for freedom. And you remind us in the book that democracy is a practice. I'm going to quote you here. You say "it may not be real yet, but it is not a dream. It's something you do, something you could make in this life, the real one." So my question is, what are two things an everyday person can do to practice democracy?
Jeff Sharlet: [00:35:05] Oh, that's that's a good question. I'm glad you said that. Again, there's the language. You know, we speak of having a democracy, right? You don't have a democracy, ooh the language that really drives me nuts. "We must preserve democracy" like we're going to put in a jam jar and put it on a shelf. I don't want to preserve it. I'd like to use it right now and we'll make more. We'll make it fresh tomorrow. How do you do that? I'm not a strategist. I open and close the book, though, with what I think of as hope notes. Not optimism. Optimism, "I think it's going to work out!" Hope. Hope comes from a much deeper place. Hope comes from the place of I have no certainty and I need to have the faith that for some is religious and for others comes from solidarity with those who they love and those who they live with and as a part of a community. That's the hope. And I and I tell them the story of two singers, and I know people are going to be like, Oh, I want to learn about the Trumpocene and the Trumpism and scenes from a slow civil war. And there's a scary knife on the cover. It's Ashli Babbitt's knife, and then they're going to pick it up and they're going to open up. Wait a minute. The first half is about Harry Belafonte, the Day-o guy. "Daylight Come and we want to go home." The banana boat guy, and wait till they get to the last chapter, which is about an even lesser known figure, "the good fight is the one you lose" about Lee Hays. People know if I had a hammer, "on top of old smoke, it kisses sweeter than wine." So much of the American Songbook and "Good night Irene." Not his song, but he brings it to us. In 1950, a radical song like Day-o. A radical song. A freedom
song. A liberation song. I grew up singing these songs in elementary school, little white kid in a mostly white town, singing these songs with no sense of what they meant, no sense of that long struggle, no sense that the great Harry Belafonte still going at 96. Man, absolutely essential to the civil rights movement. There is almost no civil rights movement without him. He put all his star power, he put his considerable bankroll, he was so close to Martin. He's angry as hell even now because that movement did not succeed. Right. So what do you do? This is not a very concrete answer. But Harry Belafonte says where your "anger comes from is not as important as what you do with it." So what do you do with it? You make them hear your song. You make it beautiful, as he did. A beautiful man, that beautiful, buttery, golden voice, singing that song. White Americana listening to him sing freedom songs, which he would then turn in another direction and say, "Listen, there's a code within this," not a QAnon code, a deeper, older meaning of freedom struggle. You sing your song, you sing it again every time they will try and make you pay and you sing it again and you sing your song and then you give it away. And I love this idea. What do you do? You struggle in your life for beauty. And I'm not going to lie. A lot of this book is a real doomscroll. But I did try and thread these hope notes of loveliness because I'm always looking for them, and you'd find them in surprising places in a fundamentalist church in Miami. Oh, it was the most soulless church. And there was one holy fool. He had no idea. I said, "What does the City of God look like to you?" Because they love to talk bout City of God in their church, guarded from the poor around them by cops. He says, "Well, I think the first thing we do is we cancel all the debt and then nobody has to work too much because everybody works enough and they help each other. And we don't judge each other by beauty." This beautiful man in a church that was dedicated to only vanity. But but "we just accept whatever they are." I mean, it was just a lovely vision. Now, I don't know how that guy's going to vote. Not good. But what do you do? This is so new agey. But you stay alert to the loveliness and the beauty that is all around us. We don't have to seek common ground with fascism. But the other thing we can do is to be aware of those stories I hear. Sometimes we don't want to humanize those folks. I can't humanize them because they're human. I'm complicit with them. I, too, am infected by white supremacy. If I... To be an American is to breathe that air. But I can say "ah, here is the human condition." I can remember the bodies, right? I think so much of this has to do with fascism tempting us into the abstract and liberalism responding with the abstract. How can we reason with these people? You cannot. You can build something beautiful and some will come before that. I don't. I want to have the concrete answer. Here's what you
can do every day. You can get up, you know, and work for your local elected officials. But we all know those answers. And yes, you should do all that. But that chapter it's called "TikTok," QAnon meme. Tiktok a crisis language. Here comes the storm. And the line that you quoted begins with a young woman I call Evelyn, because there are Evelyn's everywhere. Young, hipster lefty woman. She happens to be in Austin, Texas. Pandemic lockdown. A friend sends her QAnon stuff for shits and giggles, the friend says, and doesn't notice at a certain point alone, not much to do. It's not worked out so well for her, economically; torn by her very conservative family. She loves them, but she loves what she thinks of as social justice. She starts slipping down the rabbit hole. She ends up getting into her little red Fiero and ramming two other cars in which she thinks they're stealing the children. Nobody's hurt, thank God, except that her life is ruined and it's gone. And maybe she'll get it back. But what if we had all been working together not for shits and giggles, but to find the beauty that would have given Evelyn something other than QAnon. Not a rabbit hole to go down, but forgive me for preaching, a mountain to climb. Right. Let's meet together on the mountaintop. That's my hope. Taken from Harry Belafonte, Mr. B.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:10] Well, you gave us a twofer there, because when I asked guests what we can do, I follow up and ask them what makes you hopeful? And you just gave us hope in action. Hope as a discipline, as they say, as a thing that we can do. Thank you very much for your beautiful book and for sharing your insight.
Jeff Sharlet: [00:41:28] Thank you, Mila. Thanks for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:31] Jeff Sharlet is a journalist, bestselling author and director of creative writing at Dartmouth. His latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is out now.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Craig Aaron. He's the co-CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action, and has been a leader in major campaigns at Free Press to safeguard net neutrality, stop media consolidation, oppose unchecked surveillance, defend public media, and sustain quality journalism.
Craig Aaron: [00:42:06] What is journalism's purpose? Who's it for? It's not for journalists. It's not just for publishers. If it's actually grounded in community, providing
the information people need to make their lives better. That's really kind of a higher calling for journalism and maybe one that journalism in a lot of ways needs to rediscover.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:24] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go. First of all, thanks for listening. You must really like the show if you're still here. We have an ask of you. Could you rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts? It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham.
Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:43:06] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.