How to Tell Stories About Fascism Now

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Jeff Sharlet has made a career out of writing about “bad people.” In a way, writing about horrible people gives him some control. They influence our lives, whether we like it or not, and by seeking them out, Sharlet can see them for who they are, grounding the harsh truth that this is our world and these people aren’t that different from us. Someday the mirror could be held up, and that could be you on the other side of the divide.

In Sharlet’s new collection of essays The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, the journalist spends his time trying to understand Donald Trump and his devoted followers (“Heavy with Gold”; ‘The Trumpocene”), the men’s rights movement (“Whole Bottle of Red Pills”), the vapid emptiness of modern Christianity’s reality television pastor (“Ministry of Fun”), as well as the current of QAnon deaths and murders that we've been ignoring (“Tick-Tock”). Sharlet also writes about the oncoming civil war that started long ago, overlooked and now growing in strength ever since the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Sharlet argues that a large segment of society has become disillusioned and lost to conspiracy; they now have a martyr for their cause in Ashli Babbit (“The Undertow”), an insurrectionist shot and killed while storming the Capitol. The essays don’t dive into the pool of sharks, but instead slowly settle in, as the sharks surround Sharlet while he tries to find out how they all ended up in the same pool.

But there is hope in The Undertow. Sharlet bookends the book with stories about Harry Belafonte, the famed singer and actor who was also an activist. Sharlet thought Belafonte was a worthy subject as he tried to veer away from “bad people” after spending years uncovering the dark truths lingering behind closed doors. The book then ends with a story about the short-lived 1950s folk group the Weavers and its booming big man Lee Hays.

I met Sharlet one evening in New Hampshire, where he teaches at Dartmouth College. Snow fell and the streets filled with the brown mush from the wintry mix. We wandered in search of a place for a drink and eventually found a nearly empty sports bar in the midst of preparation for a sorority party. As the snow fell, we talked about what Sharlet calls a “civil war” that’s already underway.

Sharlet is an energetic man. Under the layers of jacket and hat, he comes across as warm, not some staunch academic or prideful journalist. He somehow scrapes into both worlds as a literary anthropologist looking at society and its ills, pondering what it means and how we got here. It’s that curiosity and energy that comes across in his writing, both smart and easy to read while also packed with context and information.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ESQUIRE: I found it interesting that you write "we" throughout the book whenever you are in the crowd. You don't look at this segment of America from a distance; instead, you write from within this group.

JEFF SHARLET: We're not far apart from it. The thing that interested me on and off is monstrosity. I've written about some bad people. Folks want to see them as monsters, and I'm fascinated by the whole concept of monsters that we've lost. I’m going to do that fake erudition thing: I was reading about werewolves in the Middle Ages and thinking about how what makes a monster monstrous is that they're part human and part us. Godzilla is an entertaining character, but he’s not the monster a vampire or a werewolf is—the kind of profane combination. And, yet, when we say these people are monsters, Trumpers, or whatever, we imagine that we're not connected and that we're not complicit. If these folks are monsters, they're human; I'm human. They can do this; I could do that. That should be obvious to us from the lessons of history and it's not.

It has always been about “we” throughout my whole writing life, because I am part of it. The whole point is not to figure out how those people are different than me. The point is to figure out: we are on the spectrum, and if they can do this poison, I can too, and I am complicit.

There’s something about allowing someone off without the tough questions, where you're not allowing them off, but you're not judging them on the page. You're not making them any less than us.

It's a chemical reaction and I'm not immune to it.

I had resolved to not write about monsters anymore because I was spending a lot of time on them. I first got this job at Dartmouth in 2010. I'm doing my job and within the first few weeks, somebody came around from this organization to interview my colleagues, which actually worked out great. They were all titillated. Then I got a letter threatening a lawsuit. I took it to a friend, a First Amendment lawyer, who said, ‘They’ve got nothing. They're going to bleed you; that's the plan. They know they have bottomless pockets and you don't.” I was like, fuck, I can't do this anymore. I have a young kid. So I resolved not to do it. The Harry Belafonte story came to me at that time. I'm like, I'm going to write about good people. Then Eric [Sullivan, at GQ then and now an editor at Esquire], who I didn't know, called up and said, “Do you still write magazine stories?” I felt so bad. Yes, I just haven't in a while. He said, “What do you want to do?” And I said, send me some place with bad people, because that is what I want to do. I felt comfortable with it. There’s something about it. If you can get close to these scary people, it's counterphobic. If someone is scary, pull it close.

Why do people let you in? There are references to the cages reporters were penned in, and you had to put on a MAGA hat because of the rain. Why did they talk to you and other reporters?

I've never had a press pass in my life. I don't know why you would want one. Why would I want to go and get the story everyone else is getting? Trump was the first thing I was writing about that other people were writing about. I don't like to write about things other people are writing about—not because I’m so original. It just makes me anxious. I'm not interested in the scoop. It's great, and I love reading it, but it's not for me.

If I want to understand what’s going on at those rallies, that means I need to get my ticket. I need to wait in line for six hours, or whatever it takes and stand around on the concrete. I need to be jostled around. This is the experience. You would see these preachers at these Trump rallies—the hardest right fundamentalists I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot. I've been to a lot of churches, and this was goddamn. You look at the press and they're like, “This is not the main event.” They're checking their phones. I'm like, that's fascism right there.

You write about faith a lot. Everyone here has faith, and you also have faith in writing and in humanity, which is interesting to read in a book that’s dark in a lot of places. But even when you write about people threatening you, you hope for the best.

This is what I mean. This is the solace.

There’s a guy in this book, Rob Brumm—he comes in the Wisconsin section. He is a militia commander. I was driving around in Wisconsin because my kid is in a program there—that's why I was in Wisconsin—and I was taking pictures of flags. I stopped to take a picture of his “Fuck Trudeau” flag, which is weird in Wisconsin. I ended up spending maybe about three hours talking to that guy and more time with his family. He's a fascist, but he was desperate to talk. He is surrounded by manly men, but he's not quite a manly man, because he loves to talk and think about history and so on. You find these connections, these people; they want to talk as much as you do. I think of it as you're leaning on each other.

There is a woman in the Trump stories: Diane G, Gnostic Diane. I was wandering around with the crowd, experiencing what the crowd was experiencing. I wanted to do that because I wanted to understand why you think this is funny. The reason they think it's funny is because it's funny. That’s a whole other thing about Trump: his timing, it's amazing. When he is on, he is one of the great orators of our time. I've seen Obama and I've seen Trump, and those are the two best of our time. He’s not always on and the language doesn't make sense, but that doesn't matter, because a good orator doesn't need that.

Then you find these individuals, and for whatever reason, Diane and I kept talking in the parking lot afterwards. The great advantage of having a heart attack is that they're like, oh I have heart issues too. Sitting there in a parking lot, we talked. Everybody left. It’s that strange intimacy. If you want to tell stories about fascism, the old ways aren't going to work. I know this because they haven't. It doesn't mean that we have to do this bullshit thing, like, what unites us? Me and Rob Brumm, we're not united. We're on different sides; let us talk honestly, now that we know that. None of these people think I am with them. I don't lie and I argue.

There has been a change, though.

The Undertow is the change. I could go anywhere partly because I am a straight white guy and being bald helps—it somehow makes me whiter and straighter and middle-aged non-assuming. It used to be that I could talk to anyone. You used to be able to talk to any fascist and they'd always want to talk to you, because they wanted to share their story and because they really believed they could convert you. I’ve been to so many churches, temples, and compounds, and for years people thought they could convert me. This is the first time, [while writing] The Undertow, I couldn’t.

The first militia church welcomed me. The second militia church in Omaha—they didn't draw a gun, but I thought, if I stay here for a moment longer I am in trouble, and this is going to be bad, and they do not care. They were not interested in converting me. They were not interested in using me. Fuck platforming. They didn’t care. The lines were absolutely drawn.

I believe it is because we are in a slow simmering civil war and headed towards a real war. I don't want this to be misread. We’re in a time when it is vulnerable and it's like, Sharlet thinks it's nice to talk to these people. It was clear that when I was in Wisconsin and I would drive around the state that a lot of these folks are lovely and they're fascists. Both are true. I use the word fascist and I don't use it glibly. In my first book The Family, I wrote a chapter called “The F Word”; the F Word was fascism. I was writing about the family's recruitment of Nazi war criminals after World War II. Until recently, I never used it like a lot of folks. I said, look there is more than one kind of bad under the sun, and this isn't fascist, and you need to build perspective. Now we have fascism. And it's not just here; it’s a global fascist moment.

The other thing about these guys is that they believe in magic, which is fascinating. Fascism is a magic system of belief. The gnosticism of Diane; Rob Brumm's whole white supremacist rant. Ashli Babbit is someone who fell into the magic, and her husband has since. Her husband could care less about this stuff before, and now he is horrific.

Will it come to violence?

Will it come to violence? What do you mean will it come to violence? We are in violence. Violence is happening all over the place, and not just in the Proud Boy and drag queen story hour brawls that you read about on Twitter. There are all these little things of people doing violence and their families doing violence. It’s already here. Will it blossom into this larger thing? That I don't know. For years, because I wrote about the Family, people said, “Sharlet is a hysteric,” and so on. I was the one saying they're not a conspiracy. It’s a social movement. I don't like it, but it’s a social movement. And now we are here. Nothing has changed and we're in such a tide of grief.

I hope the grief comes through. Fascism was growing, but we wouldn't have gotten to this point without COVID, without grief, without people denying the loss, and people accepting the loss.

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