The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

If that seems obvious, consider the light-eating vanity of Trumpism, the delusion of a golden brand that will shine eternally. Consider this immediate post-Roe meme: “a thousand-year White Boy Summer starts today.” But nothing lasts forever, not even White boys. A death trip, meanwhile, summons us to the precarious real. Not the myth of greatness. The pulse—the life—of uncertainty. The living, such as we are.

When Rob thought about abortion, he started with guns. The question for him was not whether abortion is right or wrong. The question was: When will China invade? The question was: Can we afford to spare potential infantry?

Rob called himself “pro-choice,” but that term, too, meant something different in his vernacular. He meant that the choice of whether or not to murder a baby is up to you.

“If you choose to do something that’s medically possible, I’m going to leave it between you and God, until it affects me in the state of readiness of my defense.” Readiness. It required panopticon paranoia, looking for threats down every sightline.

A mission to colonize Mars, James let himself hope, would make us great again. It’d be like the Old West, like our forefathers. A chance to be men with guns again—as, despite the fact that he and most he knew were armed, he thought “we” no longer are.

Jerry didn’t consider himself a zealot. Almost nobody I met was particularly pious. Jerry liked wearing his Trump shirt, he said, because the ladies gave him hugs. James, concerned about the exile of God from the schools, growled many times that he didn’t give a fuck what anybody else thought. Christian nationalism reaches far beyond the pews.

The Menominee, though, were worse in his view. “A lot of them I believe are the type of people who want what you and I have. And they’re willing to take it.” What you and I have. He didn’t ask whether my politics were like his. The latter to him was implied by what he observed, correctly, as the Whiteness we had in common.

“You know how it is—twenty-four-, twenty-five-year-old little smartass girl.” He did his own imitation, same fluttering fingers. “ ‘Y’all keep your hands of my body, my body, my body!’ ” Wayne’s clever friend had said, “ ‘It’s just you’re out runnin’ around and you spread your legs for every gentleman round, and chance of you getting pregnant is very high whether or not you use protection.’ ” Brian laughed hard—a forced laugh. I’d heard it from other men when they spoke of sex and women’s bodies. It wasn’t that they found it all funny, it was that they wanted to. They willed themselves into becoming men for whom women are a joke, not a threat. They couldn’t imagine other possibilities.

This was also his answer to the question of exceptions for rape: men killing men. He had an idea of good men gathering to kill bad ones, God-fearers executing rapers. To spare the mother the pain, so she might raise the rapist’s child, because every child is of God. I thought of the man’s brightly smiling son. A father’s protective euphemism, “Let’s Go Brandon” for “Fuck Joe Biden.” His anger growing with age. What he described as the quiet pro-life views of his childhood. The murderous fantasy of now. I thought of the brightly smiling son and my own children, who must now forge their future selves at the precipice of rage to which we’ve brought them.

He recited the right-wing rosary—borders, crime, stolen elections, stealing our guns, “our” guns—and added his own variation to my growing toxic bouquet of reproductive disinformation: man traps. The dark marriage plot. Abortion as “birth control,” he thought, allowed women too much leverage. He pitched his voice high: “ ‘I got pregnant because I wanted this guy to marry me’ ”—so many men I met discussed abortion by imitating voices they considered feminine—“ ‘and now he’s found out I’m pregnant and he doesn’t want to marry me. So I’m going to have an abortion done. Until the next guy comes along that I can maybe chicken into marrying me because I’ll get pregnant with his baby.’ ”

He nodded at a rack of dozens, more than he’d ever get to, an abundance that brought him as much joy as a trout on the line. He never ate them. Always threw them back. Fish love life, too, he observed. He was very gentle, until he spoke of the deep state, and then something foul ate at his mind.

Slender Man; Let’s Go Brandon; the Christmas Parade. And the Highland Park Fourth of July mass murderer, Bobby Crimo III—seven killed just days past—who once attended a Trump rally dressed as Waldo of “Where’s Waldo?” fame, and who may or may not have been truly aware of “politics” as such at all. His online life rippled with right-wing hatreds, but he dedicated the panicked days before his crime to a sped-up aesthetic of images and ideologies crashing into one another, sometimes called “schizowave.” It is a vile term, a grotesque romanticization of mental illness; an awful metaphor for the quickening of our fragmentation: the great acceleration, a simultaneous explosion and collapse of meaning.

Predicting violence the night Dobbs came down, Fox News pundit Monica Crowley described pro-choice America as a “death cult.” The Left calls the Right a death cult too. But for all its guns and Punisher skulls and actual killers,

Then he got out, big-bellied and bearded, looming over Maddie, who at eighteen stands 4’11’’. He told her she was going to hell. “See you there,” she replied. He insulted her mother. “Get the fuck out of here,” she said. “I’m done with your ugly ass.”

She would claim to have smashed $50,000 worth of glass around Wisconsin, and she never did say why. Rage? “Every time she would get out of jail,” theorized Don, “she’d break the window and they realized there was nothing they could do about it. And what did they do? They gave her a bus ticket somewhere.” They did not; there were no buses in 1892, but there are buses now, and sometimes cities and towns dispatch those whom they have no call to imprison and yet wish gone with free tickets. I’ve seen it happen. I wanted to ask Don if he’d seen it, too, but his river of speech kept rolling: “And they had no choice but to be kind to her.” No choice but to be kind. “They realized she had a condition.”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “It’s unfortunate, but I feel the revolution won’t start until something happens that affects White men. Like BLM, that came close”—it was, they all agree, the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd and the demonstrations, that opened their eyes to the state of things—“but it didn’t take off because it’s Black people. This”—the fall of Roe—“probably isn’t going to take off, because it’s women. But when something happens to a White man?” “They ban golf,” said Karsen. We all laughed. “They ban golf,” agreed Paige, “and that’s when the revolution starts.”

sign at the outskirts that declared peekskill is a friendly town was joined by another, hastily printed, replicated in store windows up and down Main Street. wake up america! peekskill did. If this is America, Lee thought, it’s not mine.