Jeff Sharlet predicts fascism in America. He’s still an optimist
On the Shelf
The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
By Jeff Sharlet
Norton: 352 pages, $29
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Jeff Sharlet is an optimist ... of sorts. That’s why he included so many detailed scenes from Donald Trump’s election rallies in his new book, “The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War.”
In a video interview from his home in Vermont, Sharlet describes his latest book as “the awful fruits” of two decades of covering religion and the far right. Written across the better part of a decade, these essays spend time with hard-core militias, armed evangelicals, men’s rights activists and even some ordinary citizens who, in 2016 at least, had some legitimate reasons for buying what Trump was selling.
But the question arises, reading his book: Do we need to relive Trump’s demonic performance art, to hear his ranty hostilities, even on the page?
“I’m sympathetic to that,” says Sharlet, whose previous book was “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” But he has his reasons. Sharlet imagines a reader stumbling onto his book decades from now in the kind of used bookstore he likes to frequent — where he recently found, for instance, Matthew Josephson’s 1934 history, “The Robber Barons.”
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“I’ve got to keep this stuff in or it will disappear,” he says. Therein lies the optimism: the projection of a future when the convulsions of the present will feel alien — and when people will still be reading books.
He may be unusually hopeful for an author invoking civil war in his subtitle, but Sharlet is not deluded. “I think we’re going to go through a period of fascism,” he says. “Right-wing intellectuals have actively rejected democracy now. Trump’s emails are getting scarier, talking about, ‘This is the final battle.’ Our job is to hold on as long as we can, but we’re going forward into the desert. The terror is about how much hurt and how much pain happens.”
Even if we do succumb to a full-fledged fascist takeover, Sharlet believes it will be temporary — a mania “that burns its life force very quickly.”
The heart of his book tracks our gradual descent into the madness. But first, a musical number. The opening chapter poignantly captures the life of Harry Belafonte — his music and politics, his perseverance and resilience. It’s a fascinatingly odd choice.
“There’s a calculator somewhere that could figure out how many fewer books I’ll sell by starting with this chapter,” Sharlet says with a laugh. “People will come to the book because they’re alarmed and distressed and then they’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, first I have to read about this? If I want a book about 1950s music I’ll get it.’”
Nevertheless, Sharlet insisted the chapter belonged up front. “I don’t want people to encounter the book as a form of doomscrolling. So you start with Harry’s endurance and his hope.”
Then things fall apart. Sharlet worries that the U.S. military will fracture, “base by base,” pointing to the way National Guard commanders in some states refused to enforce vaccine mandates, as well as the actions of governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott who “want to stand in the schoolhouse door” against the federal government, like the segregationist governors of the civil rights era. “Either troops come and they’re a hero,” he says, “or troops don’t and they won.”
Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte met through the American Negro Theater when they were both in their 20s. After that, the fast friends spent a lifetime as fans of the other.
“The Undertow” is generally closer to the ground — a dark travelogue of a nation of “simmering violence” in which QAnon-influenced rabbit-holers stalk perceived enemies, often without making headlines.
Of those he encountered, Sharlet found the men’s movement activists the most deplorable. “You’re always looking for complexities beyond the caricatures,” he says. “They were the only ones worse than their caricature, and their caricature is dumb. They really are a bunch of sniveling guys pissed off at their wives, ex-wives or girlfriends. You don’t like your isolation and incel status? No better way to keep that going than to join them.”
Most frightening, however, was a threat he received in an Omaha church for trying to hold unauthorized conversations. “Once it was, ‘You’re damned, but we’ll talk to you,’ because they wanted attention or thought you might convert,” he says. “Now it’s, ‘How do you know I don’t have a gun?’ I didn’t think they’d shoot me, but they were baring their teeth and they were definitely going to hit me or call the cops, who would definitely be on their side.”
Sharlet also writes in detail about Ashli Babbitt, the insurrectionist killed at the Capitol on January 6th. But his viewpoint may not be what you’d expect. “She was a domestic terrorist, but that shooting was at best questionable,” he says. “I don’t like it when cops kill people.”
Babbitt was a victim of the rabbit hole, he says — and her husband, Aaron, was an apolitical “lunkhead” before grief fueled his evolution into “a very sad character” co-opted by the extreme right wing. Ultimately, Sharlet sees it as a tragedy that’s been flattened in the public discourse. “I find it grotesque both when she’s trending online among right-wingers as a martyr and when people who think of themselves as liberals are celebrating her death.”
He wants readers to feel empathy for the Babbitts and those he met along the way. Some of them might be “worst of the worst,” but ultimately we need to understand the right and its vulnerabilities. “We should have empathy for the devil, not sympathy.”
Former President Trump has sought to portray the woman shot by a police officer during the Jan. 6 insurrection as a righteous martyr.
In any event, Sharlet’s goal isn’t to persuade people like Babbitt. “I’m not into converting people,” he says. To counter the rise in white supremacist propaganda, we need a different path. We might look back to Harry. “Belafonte is not trying to talk people back, he’s trying to make something beautiful that people will want to be a part of. We must build a vibrant democratic culture and take seriously the critiques of it.”
He knows some on the left will disagree with his perspective but argues that those fighting for democracy must stop squabbling over methods. In prewar Germany, he notes, liberals were bashing each other as fascism took root.
“This is all-hands-on-deck time,” he says. “We don’t know what’s going to work. You want to make jokes or write a long political science essay or do earnest union organizing or create beautiful art and poetry — it’s all good.”
Sharlet never saw himself becoming a veteran of the extremism beat. Years ago, he had declared himself done with covering white extremism — “it’s so poisonous” — but now he calls up the famous Michael Corleone line about being pulled back in by Trump’s ascension.
“I had to write to try and make sense of this,” he says. “I have some agency and I can tell these stories. I have kids that I’m scared for. This book isn’t going to help, but it lets me imagine that I’m doing something. To me it’s much scarier to be looking away. No blue pill for me.”
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