I'm moved today to share this excerpt from The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War. It is hard to pick just one excerpt because the whole book is excellent, chilling, and illuminating. Jeff Sharlet is masterful in bringing to light the ways in which what we humans struggle with and have absorbed in our culture make us vulnerable to the undertow pulling us into delusion, polarizing propaganda, and the dangerous belief systems which are at the root of the slow civil war that is unfolding in our country and which brings with it so much fear, suffering, othering, and violence. It is my perspective that it is deeply important for our numbers to grow who are informed of this "undertow" and the threats which are deeply impacting us all. Jeff Sharlet's work is a gift. Deepest bow to this man's extraordinary courage and his profound commitment to truth. 🙏 Molly
In 2008 I published a history of an elite Christian nationalist movement called The Family. Even though the Family's leaders have long expressed admiration for the organizing prowess of Hitler, I argued that this predilection didn't merit labeling with what I then called "The 'F' Word" — fascism. I meant no defense; rather, that Christian nationalism is a different sort of authoritarianism. I believed that within the United States, Christian nationalism's ostensible commitment to some kind of idea of Christ prevented the movement from ever going all in on the cult of personality necessary to foment true fascism. I was wrong. 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 — as exemplified in its dream of adding Trump's likeness to Mount Rushmore...
This bait-and-switch — the promise of Whiteness is by definition unfulfillable — may be the next American contribution to fascism. As documented in historian James Q. Whitman's Hitler's American Model, Hitler looked to American westward expansion, the way, as he said with admiration, that the U.S. "gunned own the millions of redskins," as inspiration for his eastern ambitions. Nazis admired American eugenics as much as The Great Gatsby's Tom Buchanan, who said, "it's all scientific stuff, it's been proved." But they deemed the "one-drop-rule" — the notion that even "one drop" of Black "blood" made a person ineligible for full citizenship — too extreme. So it is now: the purification project of the old fascism has also "been proved" too extreme to be practical for a nation in which the Rightist ascendancy can contend for the loyalty of a third Latinx voters. This time, White supremacy welcomes all. Or, at least, a sufficient veneer of "all" to reassure its more timid adherents that border walls and "Muslim bans" and "kung flu" and "Black crime" and "replacement theory" somehow do not add up to the dreaded r-word, which anyway these days, in the new authoritarian imagination, only happens in "reverse," against White people.
Such victims feel themselves drawn together not by Whiteness but by that of which it is made. By their belief in a strongman and their desire for an iron-fisted God and their love of the way guns make them feel inside and their 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 and weigh, 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.
And yet, "slavery, slavery, slavery," murmurs the actual past. So they insist otherwise, they imagine otherwise. An imagination that draws curtains carefully around its stage, that looks inward. That curdles. "It gets to be too much, sometimes," Julius lamented.
It does.
— Jeff Sharlet
Excerpted from The Undertow, pages 164-166
https://www.amazon.com/Undertow-Scenes-Slow-Civil-War/dp/1324006498
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