The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
Jeff Sharlet is a kind of anthropologist of the Trumpocene,” said Elizabeth D. Samet in The American Scholar.
A magazine writer, Dartmouth writing professor, and author of two books on Christian fundamentalism, Sharlet has long immersed himself in church congregations, political rallies, and other gatherings that offer potential keys to understanding the belief system of the Right. His latest book adds more such stories as it zeroes in on the common belief among supporters of Donald Trump that the U.S. is headed toward another civil war, and it reminds me of Joan Didion’s masterful 1968 essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “Both books are mood-altering, mindaltering odysseys; both set forth visions of a weird and roiling body politic.”
Didion chronicled a moment when it felt as if the center could not hold, said Mark Dery in 4Columns. “Over a half-century later, the chaos is the center,” and Sharlet is an able guide, deftly linking today’s conspiracy theories and widespread belief in an apocalyptic confrontation to the fundamentalist fervor of the Great Awakenings in America’s past. He also excels at winning the trust of his subjects. At one striking moment, a Trump true believer he has befriended steels herself to inform him, through tears, that Bill and Hillary Clinton eat children. But Sharlet largely leaves readers to make what they will of such madness, making The Undertow feel “at once urgently important and inconclusive.”
“If a war is coming, even a metaphorical one, what are its terms?” asked Adam Fleming Petty in The Washington Post. As Sharlet visits an open-carry restaurant in Colorado or reports from a rally for Ashli Babbitt, the woman killed when she joined those storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, he makes clear that the grievances of Trump Nation aren’t coherent. But he does propose that what the mostly white crowds at these events want most is to reclaim the sense of innocence they once had about their racial identity. Sharlet’s “mythic-religious approach” gets to the heart of the matter better than polls can. In both style and ambition, “this is journalism as art.”