A Failure to Communicate
Jeff Sharlet’s new book is a stark and dispiriting dispatch from Trump country.
A review of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet, 352 pages, WW Norton (March 2023)
Jeff Sharlet’s most recent book The Undertow provides a timely election-year dispatch from the MAGA heartlands, and an immersive, boots-on-the-ground record of America’s turbulent political and cultural moment. Like two of his previous books, Sweet Heaven When I Die (2011) and This Brilliant Darkness (2020), Sharlet reports his firsthand encounters with a variety of people in an effort to identify the forces threatening to pull America apart. He attends a Trump rally, sits in at a “prosperity gospel” church, chats to militia members, and investigates the life and death of Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot during the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th, 2o21.
Sharlet is not really a conventional reporter adhering to the five Ws of journalism. His approach is more novelistic: he tries (successfully, on the whole) to convey the atmosphere of an event, the personalities he finds there, and his own sensory impressions; he is interested in the looks on people’s faces, how they talk, and how they gesture when they’re speaking. His goal is to evoke a feeling rather than to formulate a political diagnosis, and his approach is well suited to the free-floating quality of the roiling discontent out there. He consistently tries to be compassionate and non-judgmental, but he’s plainly biting his tongue much of the time.
Sharlet is not the first writer to point out that Trump’s followers support incoherent policy initiatives, offer incongruous facts and figures, and believe contradictory ideologies. Inconsistencies like these are legitimate points of criticism of course, but Sharlet cautions that using facts to challenge muddled premises and conclusions is only useful up to a point. You can’t argue someone out of something they weren’t argued into in the first place. Those trying to understand and explain the appeal of Trumpism, he writes, often miss that its social power flows downward from the exhilaration of spectacle and sensation.
“What I felt most, flowing around me,” Sharlet notes after a 2016 Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, “was something like happiness. A sense of freedom. Permission.” When an elderly man near him snarks about having “dibs” on the first protestor and his wife rolls her eyes and beams (“Oh, Gene!”), Sharlet perceives what’s between the lines: “The joy of punching, real or imagined, is the ideal of action, an inner feeling made incarnate.” In Sharlet’s view, Trump supporters “are not afraid of the full range of human emotion: not just the manufactured hope of a political rally but also the lust, the envy, the anger of our bluntest selves, transformed by a mighty plane and the man inside … into something greater.” And that something greater depends on the all-American dream made flesh in one corpulent pseudo-billionaire and former reality-show host: “the prosperity gospel, the American religion of winning.”
This sentiment is not far from the thinly veiled promise of pastor Rich Wilkerson Jr’s Vous (short for Rendezvous) Church. It isn’t big enough to qualify as a mega-church, but it still has plenty of juice due to its proximity to celebrity and an incessant, fist-pumping mantra about everything being “so good.” The philosophy of Pastor Rich (as he likes to be called) more closely resembles self-help works like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and How to Win Friends and Influence People than the humble teachings of Christ. After all, he officiated at the opulent wedding of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, with its seven-foot gold-encrusted wedding cake and half-a-million-dollar bridal dress that merited its own five-star hotel room. Nevertheless, he is fond of reminding his congregation that prosperity follows the righteous man.
Inspired by Michael Lesy’s stark photography collection Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Sharlet travels to Wisconsin, where he encounters people who apparently don’t behave in the proper prosperity-bringing fashion. Instead, he finds apocalyptic tattoos, plenty of very powerful weapons, Confederate flags, Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and flags depicting a cartoonishly muscular Trump. Some places display all three. People brood about hypothetical abortions and women in power, make theologically ambiguous statements about God’s vengeance, and murmur disturbing remarks about how “they” are trying to take away your way of life. “The name of the enemy didn’t matter,” Sharlet observes, “just that it existed.” It’s much easier to get worked up over an unspecified danger; paranoia tends to catch any number of strange and risible items in its ever-widening net of connections, flimsy though they may be.
Which brings us to the tragic story of Ashli Babbitt. The more we learn about her pre-insurrectionist life, the less she seems like the kind of person that those who now lionize her would have liked very much. Though something of a hothead, she had never been particularly political despite serving two tours in the military. She dabbled in polyamory, getting involved in a “throuple” with her boyfriend and another woman. Her favorite film was the Coen brothers’ 1998 slacker classic The Big Lebowski (and Sharlet tries too hard to identify a deeper meaning in this). She was partial to the “hang loose” hand gesture, waggling the thumb and pinkie finger. She didn’t even seem to be particularly ideological until she started to fall into the online conspiracy vortex. But her nonconformism seems to have made her vulnerable to the siren song of the internet’s most paranoid theorists.
“QAnon consumed her,” Sharlet writes. “She was a researcher, a rabbit-holer, a clicker of links, known in her circle for knowing things, facts and numbers beyond her friends’ measure.” She grew relentlessly outraged about all manner of issues: thousands of children being disappeared, Disney working with Jeffrey Epstein, race-baiting, guns, rumors of atrocities at the border. She began posting videos in her kitchen and her car where she would say things like: “There’s riots, there’s arrests, there’s rapes, there’s drugs … I- I am so tired of it! ... Where is everybody?” Her journey offers an example of routine social-media posturing mixed with an earnest but naïve reaction to a steady stream of outrageous and enraging (mis)information that led her to feel righteous, provocative, and powerful. Sharlet explains her mindset well: “They’re coming. Nobody’s doing anything. She’s posting a lot of social media. She’s a digital soldier. She was a real soldier. She’s going to take it IRL.”
And that is just what Babbitt did, joyfully joining the violent crowd at the Capitol on January 6th, excitably posting about it until the moment a desperate policeman fired into the angry mob pressing in on him. Financially, she had been floundering, left deep in debt by a failed business venture, which is something to be sympathetic about. And her online obsessions began to alarm a potential business partner, which isn’t. But as Sharlet points out, those facts inevitably lead us back to her core issue: “Her pain may have been real, but she chose to pass it on, as publicly as possible. But that makes understanding the direction of her anger, if not its roots, essential. Not how it was constructed … but how it was aimed.”
In the end, the story of Babbitt’s dive into incoherent extremism seems to be a familiar one—someone desperately trying make themselves feel and look more important and interesting than they would otherwise be. It is often said that the personal is political, but in this case, the reverse was the problem. A person’s opinions, especially about political matters, really shouldn’t be the most significant thing about them. Politics are not an all-purpose balm for one’s deeper emotional needs. Voting to heal some psychic wound is a fool’s errand.
An important takeaway from The Undertow is that a disturbing number of our fellow citizens are now simply unable to agree on basic facts, which means we can forget about shared civic goals. Pleas for unity are often quickly drowned out in a roar of spite, and the body politic is groaning beneath rampant election denial, insurrectionary fervor, threats of violence, a proliferation of firearms, and general disenchantment with the whole idea of self-government.
Much of America hasn’t just lost the ability to communicate with one another, they no longer believe it is worth the effort. Why worry about other people’s problems when our own private obsessions are everything? A Thoreau line, casually quoted in the hit TV show Succession, feels especially relevant now: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
