The violent dreamworld of the American Right

Jeff Sharlet’s new book The Undertow is a kind of travelogue of revenant fascism:

At a Trump rally in 2016, Sharlet mixed in with a crowd aching to punch a liberal protester. “The joy of punching, real or imagined, is the ideal of action, an inner feeling made incarnate,” Sharlet writes. He quotes a rallygoer: “[Trump] stands up there and says what we all think…. We all want to punch somebody in the face, and he says it for us.” Sharlet’s reporting suggests that today’s American fascism is grounded largely in this sort of feeling, in a kind of Pentecostal Spirit. Gun legislation in GOP states does not in fact establish militias or give aggrieved incels explicit permission to shoot up schools and other public places. And yet, those who point to legislative failures and economic inequality neglect the power of Spirit to, say, besiege the Capitol and interrupt the certification of electoral college votes.

Here’s Donald Trump riffing at a rally in Tulsa in June 2020:

Hey, it’s 1:00 o’clock in the morning and a very tough, I’ve used the word on occasion, hombre, a very tough hombre is breaking into the window of a young woman whose husband is away as a traveling salesman or whatever he may do. And you call 911 and they say, “I’m sorry, this number’s no longer working.” By the way, you have many cases like that, many, many, many. Whether it’s a young woman, an old woman, a young man or an old man and you’re sleeping. So what are you going to do, right?

Journalism as we’ve known it for the last seventy years or so is not particularly well equipped to deal with policy announced via parables like this. Parables resist rock-solid, evidence-based debunkings. Donald Trump’s imagination is stuck in an era when salesmen traveled the land, but Pastor Hank Kunneman and 80 percent of the Republican Party seem to be stuck right there with him.

Trump’s entire project is to overturn both the sexual and civil-rights revolution of the 1960s and what’s left of the New Deal that preceded it. Sharlet’s writing suggests that there is an army all around us ready to help fulfill this project. He attempts to decipher the parables and sermons that hold sway in Ashli Babbit country and to understand why, for instance, the mob that descended on the Capitol was, for at least a couple hours, successful in taking it. The Undertow is an ear to the ground, recording the seemingly disconnected notes of what for many armed Americans is a coordinated symphony of revolution.

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Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values. . . .

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”

An email I received this morning:

Hello America hating bitch, 

This is in regards to your idiotic comments in the Times.   You sound like a squealing hysterical racist.  Stick to what you do best: Brainwashing the little bastards who attend your shithouse skool with your nonsense while feeding at the public trough.   Have a nice day. 

Bonecrusher Bob 

Sharlet’s treatment of Ashli Babbitt, who is becoming the Horst Wessel of Trumpism, is particularly interesting. From interview with him in the Guardian:

Because of my heart condition I’d been tucked in during Covid, and I live in a rural area. I remember sitting there at my kitchen table, watching January 6 on the computer, texting furiously. We heard about a white woman being killed. It was very soon after that we knew the cop was Black. And I thought, holy shit, it’s The Birth of a Nation [a 1915 movie that justifies organized white-on-Black violence with a racist depiction of Black people, including them being sexually predatory toward white women; such accusations were the pretext for lynchings for decades, with echoes remaining today]. They just did a live re-enactment of their fantasy!

They would say Babbitt wore an American flag, but it’s not true. She wore a Trump cape, which is the new American flag. They would say she’s unarmed, but it’s not true. She was carrying a knife. There’s a photo of [Babbitt’s knife] on the cover of the book. You could say, well, it’s a small knife. Really? That knife is plenty big enough.

You write that, almost immediately, the right tried to diminish Babbitt’s agency, to make her younger, smaller, quieter. It reminded me of Terri Schiavo [the 26-year-old woman who was found unconscious in 1984 and was the subject of a family battle for her medical decision-making, which became a national debate dominated by the Catholic church and the religious right until her death in 2005]. We see the efforts on the right to project a childlike acquiescence on to the adult woman.

Yes! Ashli Babbitt’s “martyrdom” is tied up in her remaking as an innocent. You realize that the gun and the fetus, it’s an innocence cult. It’s not a death cult, people misunderstand this. It’s an innocence cult, which is to say, it’s also the erasure of history. It says, “No, no, no, there’s no original sin in American history. We were always good.”

Babbitt was hurting. She was in her mid-30s, after serving eight tours of duty. She was in massive debt. And she fell in love with Trump.

Babbitt resolved her grief by getting certainty. She could not mourn.

You mean she was angry, hurting – but not reckoning with her circumstances, embracing her condition. What did she want? She wanted justice?

She just wanted to be a person and serve her country.

A pervasive sense of victimization and national humiliation, a fetishized cult of violent action, a fantasy of a departed golden age, ruined by the poisoners of the national blood, a bloody eschatology of ultimate triumph over the treasonous enemies in our midst . . . Is there a word for this?