Dreams (or Nightmares) of Civil War

Jeff Sharlet's travels through post-January 6th America reveal a nation sliding toward catastrophe, or is it catharsis? Plus more parsing of AI hype and digital fundraising scams.

Of all the recent books I’ve read about the threats to democracy in America – David French’s Divided We Fall, Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, Joan Donovan’s Meme Wars, Lee Drutman’s Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, Ryan Busse’s Gunfight, Tim Miller’s Why We Did It, Barbara Walter’s How Civil Wars Start, Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict, Elizabeth Williamson’s Sandy Hook, and Liliana Mason’s Uncivil Agreement being just the top ones on my shelf of the past year – none have hit me at quite the level of Jeff Sharlet’s new book The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War.

Sharlet, who has long illuminated some of the darkest corners of America’s fundamentalist right, has written a travelogue of post-January 6 America. Most of The Undertow chronicles his meandering journey from California east towards his home in Vermont, tracing the ghostly echoes of Ashli Babbitt, the young Trumper who was killed by a Capitol police officer as she attempted to breach the inner sanctum of the House of Representatives, and who has become a martyr to many. The author returns to the road as the January 6 Select Committee begins its hearings in June of 2022, but this stint, which mostly takes place on the backroads of rural Wisconsin, captures the impact of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade far more than the committee’s valiant truth-telling work. And nearly all of the portraits Sharlet shares, of Babbitt’s distraught mother, of a men’s rights convention in a ramshackle VFW hall, of rural evangelical churches swooning to deep conspiracy preaching, of the dinner crowd at Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Shooters Grill restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, of a heavily armed Wisconsin family whose father brags about teaching his kids to handle guns practically before they can walk, left me haunted. The Undertow is not an easy book to read, nor is it easy to put down once you start it.

More than all the academics citing surveys seeking to explain “the authoritarian personality” or pundits sketching the contours of hyper-polarization, Sharlet manages to convey something more visceral while also intuiting where current developments on the populist right are heading. Here he is on the political evolution of Donald Trump:

“Trump once flirted with and fed morsels to evangelicalism’s spiritual warriors and the rabbit-holers of Q. That was when they were distinct constituencies. But they had been merging, the theology of Q possessing evangelicalism, the organization of the Christian Right incarnating Q’s digital power. Together they became a base; and Trump’s identity. He was no longer a con artist. Now he was his own mark, like an email scammer who clicks on his own malware. He was not selling a dream, he was dreaming it. The difference between him and his believers was that he had the power to make the dream real, for them, for him, for us. To summon into being the ‘American carnage’ he nightmared at his inauguration, the cities he said were desolate set ablaze, the killers in the street recast as heroes, with paramilitary backup, fear a daily given, the plague risen up from legend to fill the land with ghosts. This was his dream. We were all nightmaring it together.”

And here he is on the uniquely American form of fascism that is starting to congeal:

“The purification project of the old fascism has also ‘been proved’ too extreme to be practical for a nation in which the Rightist ascendency can contend for the loyalty of a third of 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.”

And here’s a little more on that theme, written after the Dobbs decision:

“But for all its guns and Punisher skulls and actual killers, fascism is actually worse than a death cult: It’s an innocence cult, the belief that one might be as innocent of history—read, race—as a fetus is of the world. Perfect and pink (White); unbloody in the Dobbsian imagination of the womb. The gun, too, is made clean by the cult of innocence, born again not as a tool of aggression but of defense, as the protection of purity, inscribed by a growing number of manufacturers with Stars and Stripes and biblical verses; advertised as a form of evangelism, a means of spreading God’s goodness in the world. Like a baby. The fetus and the gun. Small marvel nobody’s yet put them together on a flag.”

If writing like this doesn’t make the hairs stand up on your arm, well, I guess that will explain the unsubscribes I get this week. That’s okay, not everyone wants to look at or think about the heart of darkness in America. And many of us, arguably the majority, live in places where this toxic brew is distinctly absent, or tucked in small havens where it presumably can be safely ignored, like the one or two MAGA-festooned houses in my cobalt blue corner of Westchester County that everyone just walks past without worry. One of the ongoing challenges we face collectively as a country is the fact that we’re already somewhat partitioned into two collectives, a mass of Red states passing abortion bans, book bans and transgender medicine bans, and an archipelago of Blue states expanding abortion access and celebrating LGBTQ+ authors and kids.

Sharlet peppers the people he encounters in The Undertow with one simple, two-word question: “Civil war?” and most of them nod yes, either warily or with anticipation. Personally I still think we will muddle through without a hot civil war, like the oil and gas workers in Texas now grabbing jobs in the rising renewable energy sector. But I’m a congenital optimist, and I think people will get tired of rightwing culture wars and identity politics. What Sharlet explains, however, better than anything I’ve encountered yet, is why losses in 2020 and 2022 haven’t pulled the Republican base back towards something like common sense; the MAGA movement is defying political gravity because it is satisfying much deeper needs for its adherents, and it’s anybody’s guess when that will peter out.

—Bonus link: In case you think rightwing paranoid fantasies of taking up arms against the government, the media, liberals etc are just fantasies, this AP story about four Oklahoma county officials, including the sheriff, discussing killing two local journalists and lynching Black people should give you pause.

AI, AI, AI!

—Must-follow AI skeptic Emily Bender tears apart Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s recent appearance on 60 Minutes, which featured him doing his very best to pretend that Bard, the company’s answer to ChatGPT, just mysteriously taught itself to speak Bengali (when the language was actually included in its training data). After years of Google lying about so many other aspects of its business model, why stop now, right?

—Instead of worrying about how large language models may be achieving “artificial general intelligence,” we should be spending more time addressing how humans, already equipped with something like intelligence, can use existing LLMs like ChatGPT to overwhelm our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, Gary Marcus argues cogently in the Atlantic.

—The Collective Intelligence Project and Taiwan’s digital affairs minister Audrey Tang used Pol.is to ask folks to share their views on generative AI, and the results—which group statements by their degree of consensus—are fascinating.

—Attend: This Thursday at 12:30pm Eastern, Witness’ new executive director Sam Gregory will lead an online discussion titled “Prepare, Don’t Panic, For AI.”

Odds and Ends

—This headline speaks for itself: “Pelosi campaign pays Illinois man $7,500 after he sued over ‘invasive and harassing’ fundraising texts.”

—Speaking of which, Arvin Alaigh, a veteran of a variety of Democratic digital campaigns, writes in the Baffler that the core problem with online fundraising is how it reduces organizing down to “hard cash as the only means of political involvement.”

—Speaking of which, it looks like Justice Deparment special counsel Jack Smith is looking to “determine if former president Donald Trump or his advisers scammed donors by using false claims about voter fraud to raise money” online, The Washington Post reports. Apparently the wire fraud laws make it illegal to make false representations by email to swindle people out of money. Who knew?

End Times

For the record, I didn’t pay the airline change fee.