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Jeff Sharlet’s ‘The Undertow’ Goes Inside Trump’s America

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Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, wears a T-shirt trumpeting other Capitol rioters at CPAC in 2022.
Photo: Go Nakamura/REUTERS

Maybe it’s hard to believe now, but liberalism once seemed ascendant. In 2008, the nation elected Barack Obama, its first Black president, a man who ran on hope and transformative change. Millennials were secularizing and liberalizing on issues like LGBTQ+ rights. Obama passed health-care reform. Toward the end of his second term, the Supreme Court would rule in favor of marriage equality, and joyful singing crowds swallowed up the bigots who stalked the grounds with their signs and their shofars. The America I knew as a child of the Christian right was far removed from the America I had come to inhabit, or so I thought.

Threats crowded the horizon: The Obama era also marked the rise of the tea party. A year before the Supreme Court extended marriage rights in Obergefell v. Hodges, it found that corporations could refuse to cover contraception if doing so violated their religious beliefs. The year of Obergefell was the year too of Donald Trump. He announced his campaign for president in June 2015, not long before celebratory crowds thronged in front of the Court.

Back then, Trump was a longshot, an unsavory joke. That July, a CNN/Pivit analysis said he had a one percent chance of becoming president. “Donald Trump will not be the 45th president of the United States. Nor the 46th, nor any other number you might name,” James Fallows wrote the same month in The Atlantic. “The chance of his winning nomination and election is exactly zero.” This was the conventional wisdom: The national immune system would kick in, liberals and Never Trumpers said before Trump won the Republican nomination for president. They said the same thing afterward, too. The fever would break and Hillary Clinton would win.

Photo: W. W. Norton

She didn’t. Trump lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, and his frenzied bigotry had mass appeal far beyond what the professionals expected. I had been working my first job in journalism for six weeks when he secured the presidency. That night, as silence descended over the newsroom, dread caught me by the throat. The America I’d fled in my early 20s had come for the America I’d chosen. There is a popular conviction, at least among liberals, that the Civil War is in the past and such conflicts are now unthinkable. But I had learned something different as a child. I learned that liberalism was the enemy, that the country was in danger, and that when I grew up, I’d have to take it back through politics or at gunpoint. Nobody specified which.

The election of Joe Biden might have slowed the rate of our disunification. What it has not done — and cannot do — is alter the existential conflict that we face. There are many Americas, and they have never been at peace with one another. That tension simmers throughout The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War, journalist Jeff Sharlet’s latest work of reportage from W.W. Norton. In his books C Street and The Family, Sharlet tracked the political influence of Christian fundamentalism. Now he encounters the foot soldiers and propagandists of an authoritarian movement that is gathering strength.

Much has been written about the figure of Trump: his biography, his appeal, his hold on the Republican Party. Some too have written about Trump’s antecedents in the broader conservative movement. But Sharlet offers something new. He follows the fever to where it burns the hottest, at the base of the Republican Party. The underlying disease is bone-deep, his reporting suggests, and the implications extend far beyond the trajectory of either political party. The triumph of multicultural democracy is in danger. At Trump rallies and church services and meetings with the devout, Sharlet uncovered a country that holds many realities at once, but perhaps not for much longer.

In the centuries since the Founders said all men were created equal, there has never been unified agreement over what this might mean, and for whom. The friction between America’s promises and its practices erupts regularly into violence: into the degradations of chattel slavery, a civil war, and the white terrorism of the Jim Crow South; then into police killings, mass shootings, and the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. On that day, depending on your interpretation, Ashli Babbitt was either martyred or got herself killed when a police officer shot her in the act of rushing the Speaker’s Lobby. The two perspectives cannot be reconciled.

A more authentic Babbitt emerges from Sharlet’s reporting. “She was not a hashtag,” he writes. He fills in the small details of her life. Before she joined the Air Force at 17, she used to ride her horse to 7-Eleven. She voted for Obama and then, in 2016, she “fell hard for Donald J. Trump.” In death, she has become a meme. “Two words in the mouth of the man for whom she died, who did not bother to say her name for six months after that death, until the day it proved useful. To him,” Sharlet observes. Later, at a rally in Babbitt’s memory, Sharlet spots white nationalists. Fascists start a fight with anti-fascists. “What her death does, when we compare it to Crispus Attucks, is—it calls for a revolution!” a speaker says.

As Sharlet chases Babbitt’s ghost across a fractious landscape, he documents a new kind of civil war. States do not face one another on the battlefield; there is no rebel government. Instead, the battlefield is everywhere, and combatants have, in a sense, already seceded from the United States. That the secession occurred in their minds makes it no less real. They are armed, and they are backed, too, by power and money. They have successfully enthralled a major political party, and their allies are capturing courts and state legislatures. The other side is still catching up to the danger it’s in.

Some perspectives, of course, are more accurate than others. Ashli Babbitt’s America is hostile to pluralism, egalitarianism, and the very notion of democracy. The people who live there long for a strongman and believe they have found him in Trump. Sharlet knows this and contends with the implications throughout The Undertow. Sharp and probing, this book doesn’t indulge in cheap scares. Sharlet is here to inform, and The Undertow is a more powerful warning as a result.

Sharlet greets his subjects with sensitivity and brings forth their humanity, but he is uninterested in false equivalencies. When a protester interrupts a Trump speech, a man in the crowd turns to his woman and says with a smile that he would beat the shit out of him. “He stands up there and says what we all think,” the man tells Sharlet. “We all want to punch somebody in the face, and he says it for us.” Later, Sharlet observes, “Why not take pleasure in power? It feels good to be strong. It is, for the believers, whom Trump calls ‘my people,’ a blessing.”

This is fascism at work, he argues. In footnotes, he says he had once believed that “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.” He has changed his mind. The movement Trump has inspired “cultivates paramilitaries,” Sharlet writes. It “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.”

In the figure of Babbitt, this new fascism sees something holy. She was “transformed” after her death, Sharlet writes, into “yet another flag, like a new tarot card in the deck of fascism,” a unifying symbol. A fringe belief, yes, but a consequential one. “The politics of the fringe may not be rational, but they’re cunning, surrounding the center and moving inward, until suddenly there they are, at the heart of things,” he writes. There is the QAnon Shaman standing in the Senate chamber, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert, and Babbitt herself. The threat is not distant. It’s already here.

The America I once knew, which has become the land of Babbitt and Greene, always planned for expansion and conquest, not coexistence. This nation within a nation wants to triumph over all others. Trump was a means to an end, but he has become more than that, too. Like Babbitt, he is a symbol: an earthly father figure, a reflection of their God.

The Undertow is no mere guide to Trump or how he came to be, however. Sharlet’s ambitions are sweeping. The road to our present state of disunion began long ago, that much he makes clear. He writes first of the late singer and civil-rights activist Harry Belafonte, who pitted the power of his celebrity against the might of white supremacy (Klansmen chased him and Sidney Poitier one Mississippi night in 1964), as American too as the racism that would one day make Trump a power. To struggle for freedom is to live with death, Belafonte knew. He had been close to Martin Luther King Jr., then lost him to hate. “After every great victory, a great murder,” Belafonte tells Sharlet.

Surrender is not a real solution. America contains many possibilities, not all of them grim. Sharlet writes of Occupy Wall Street, which also began in the middle of the Obama era’s ascendant liberalism. A writer from Occupy Nashville tells Sharlet they are no longer operating in ordinary time but in something she calls “movement time.” “What she meant was a sort of slow motion, sped up, outside of the flow of minutes and days, the temporal experience suggested by the Christian theological term kairos, ritual time, a moment that is unique and suffused with moments past,” he theorizes. This made Occupy a kind of holiday. “There is nothing frivolous about that,” he adds. “Holidays are not escapes; at their best, they deepen our experience of things.” The Occupy movement did more than condemn inequality and attack corporate greed; it showed us all a different way of being. That is the power of movement time. It alters reality, and the consequences ripple outward where they take unexpected paths. The result can bring us closer to a future worth living.

Trump may yet be president again. His followers remain devoted, and there are enough of them to make him the early front-runner for the Republican Party nomination. His general-election chances are good but not guaranteed; his movement is a minoritarian one. Even if he loses to Biden a second time, the forces that coalesced around him could outlast his political career. How does the body of the nation come apart? Sharlet asks himself. He writes, “The answer is in the question I’d learned to ask the believers: ‘Do you think there’ll be a civil war?’ They all said ‘Yes.’ Most thought it was coming, soon, and some said it was already here.” A second Trump loss won’t quell such violent conviction.

When I left Evangelicalism over a decade ago, I did so for intellectual and moral reasons but felt, also, that I was joining a winning team. The disappointments of the Obama era radicalized me; I know now that liberalism was more fragile than it seemed. The right regrouped after Obergefell. Intent, still, on pushing LGBTQ+ people back into the closet — or eradicating them altogether — the right presses its case through so-called parental-rights candidates and anti-trans bills. At the same time, it has embraced insurrection and violence, a trend Sharlet depicts throughout The Undertow. In recent months, Trump has been promoting a single recorded by jailed January 6 defendants, and he speaks often of Babbitt as a “Great Patriot” who was murdered.

As the liberal order frays, something new must come into being. “We say we are in crisis,” Sharlet writes. “But that word, crisis, supposes we can act. It supposes the outcome is yet to be determined. The binary yet to be toggled, a happy ending or a sad one, victory or defeat. As if we have not already entered the aftermath.” If the aftermath is here, it demands an honest reckoning. A united America has never existed, and the illusion is now impossible to maintain. When one version of this nation is determined to erase another, a conflict of some kind becomes inevitable. It may well be the slow civil war of Sharlet’s title, waged by conspiracy theorists and donors and legislators, punctuated by the occasional blast of violence. But a slow civil war is still a civil war. The only recourse is to win.

 

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‘Disgraceful:’ N.S. Tory leader slams school’s request that military remove uniform

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HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.

Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.

A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”

Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.

“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.

In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”

“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”

Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.

Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.

Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.

“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.

“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.

“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”

Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.

“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”

NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”

“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Saskatchewan NDP’s Beck holds first caucus meeting after election, outlines plans

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REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.

Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.

She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.

Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.

Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.

The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.

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Nova Scotia election: Liberals say province’s immigration levels are too high

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HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.

Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.

“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.

Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.

“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”

The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.

In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.

“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”

In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.

“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”

Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.

Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.

“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”

In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.

In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.

“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”

Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.

“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”

The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.

“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.

“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.

— With files from Keith Doucette in Halifax

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