Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

Sharlet, Jeff. 2023. The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 9781324006497. [publisher link]

Jeff Sharlet has been popping up on my favorite shows, especially On the Media, so I already knew this book was important. But wow… I urge you to read this book.

Did you even vote in the last few elections? Either way, read this book. Are you a Republican? Definitely read this book. A DNC moderate? It is absolutely critical that you read this book.*

*. Why is it critical for DNC democrats to read this? Because Democracies are lost in the nervous equivocations of moderates focused on the desires of the ego, maintaining their own power rather than ceding to save the Democratic positions they refuse to yield.

This is not another wishful ‘Why won’t everyone just get along?! Why won’t people stop being extreme?!’ kind of book. He is genuinely interested in working out the dynamics at play in the pull toward authoritarianism.

If I had to guess, I’d place him in Bernie Sanders’ territory. Anyway, what he doesn’t even mention, so far as I recall, is the usual counter claim of alleged ‘extremism’ on the left, which is an important absence when those like myself came from the Right to a position left of the DNC as a matter of our survival in the face of genocidal rhetoric and the recognition of our barest rights to existence: it’s not extremism to insist on one’s humanity in the face of dehumanization. There are not two legitimate sides in the case of oppression, let alone genocide, and Sharlet recognizes that.

If you’ve been paying attention and understand the stakes for what they are, the importance of this book is not that he’s going to give you new details of our situation in the US (although there were dozens new to me and I’ve been paying particularly close attention); the importance really is the framing he’s used: he talks about fascism as a fever dream, a fantasy politics, and deploys Gnostic ways of knowing in order to think about the Republican Party’s fascist turn.*

*. Neither I nor Sharlet use the word ‘fascism’ lightly. But we all must name it for what it is, especially as those fascistically inclined begin to attempt to redefine the word as a slander applicable to anyone who opposes them. Sharlet is especially admirable in this regard. He makes his case clearly.

Back in 1973 William Arrowsmith published a paper called “Aristophanes’ Birds: The Fantasy Politics of Eros,” interpreting Aristophanes’ Birds as a distillation of late-fifth century Athenian politics using Thucydides’ chronicle of the Athenians’ self-destruction. These three works—by Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Arrowsmith on Aristophanes—were constantly on my mind as I read Sharlet’s book.

Thucydides chronicles the fall of the Athenian Empire and the Athenians’ domestic demise, written as if he were a doctor assessing the prognosis of an epidemic. He is explicit on this: a master of juxtaposition, in the second book right after the dominant politician of the moment, Pericles, delivered the Athenian version of the ‘beacon on the hill’ speech so popular in our current exceptionalist rhetoric—and this at the state funeral for the first year’s war dead, from the war he managed to start—boom, plague hits. But this is not just any plague. It’s a two-fold pandemic.

On the one hand, there was an actual outbreak of something, either Typhoid or Ebola, or something like one of them; on the other hand, there was an ideological epidemic, an outbreak of something previously unrecognized at that point in Athens, something I myself couldn’t name until I was reading Sharlet’s book. For over a decade, my best answer to that missing piece has been imperialism, but it always felt off, too broad or something.

Reading Sharlet made me think about William Arrowsmith’s paper on Aristophanes’ Birds, which he takes as a declaration that ‘Athenianness’ is too deeply ingrained in Athenians for an Athenian to be able to get away from that mindset because that would’ve been tantamount to trying to outrun oneself. It is a fantasy politics. In Thucydides’ narrative, a moderate politician named Nicias diagnoses the malady as “a diseased longing for what is absent,” as Victoria Wohl translates in her Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens (2002). Or, as I translate it, based on Wohl, ‘a dyserotic longing for what is absent,’ getting closer to the Greek dyserōs, a dysfunctional Eros. Such is our condition as well, as Sharlet demonstrates at length.

Importantly Sharlet takes seriously the motivating beliefs of everyone he spoke to. Instead of demeaning them or turning them into hollowed out one-dimensional projections of themselves, he presents them as they presented themselves along with the context of those presentations. He notices, as I have, the objective goodness of people who would invite you to hospitality at one moment, but at another, at a political rally or within a political mind-frame, shout in favor of Crimes against Humanity. He draws us into the paradox I’ve been wrestling with for a while of how truly decent people could become so violent in a politicized context. Remember when Midwesterners were known for being welcoming? They still are—unless there’s even a whiff of politics to the situation…

So many things locked into place for me as I read this book. First, that the ideological pathogen in fifth-century Athens was fascistic.

But, beyond that, so many side-points brought important clarity, such as his blink-and-you-miss-it observation that after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 Republicans needed a new ‘enemy within’ and they landed on the LGBTQIA+ community, which is maybe not significant to you unless, like me, you began Kindergarten in the fall of 1992 and from then on you were faced with extreme heterosexism. I’d already half-realized that that torment was somehow unusually bad, but I had no evidence to support the thought. (Which is not to say that things weren’t bad for LGBTQIA+ folks before this, only that it was more intense once the Republican Party chose us for the internal enemies.)

Of course heterosexism has been ugly ever since “heterosexual” became a thing, literally, just over a hundred years ago—before that sexuality was something one did, not something they were.* But whoa… what I faced was unusual, extreme in the aggression I was subjected to.

*. See esp. David Halperin (1990), One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (London: Routledge), and also this lecture by Nancy Unger at Santa Clara University I listened to back in March in CSPAN’s Lectures in History called “Gays and Lesbians in Colonial America,” where Unger talks about ‘doing’ as opposed to ‘being’.

Now I get it: the RNC had lost the target by which they subvert systemic changes. ‘You’re hurting!’ say eager-faced Republic politicians—and yes, we are, we can almost all of us agree to that. But then there’s a redirection, channelling our distress onto an undeserving target to keep the curtain closed and the power they’ve enjoyed firmly in their hands. ‘You can’t afford to live, I see it.’ And that’s right. But then, and this is absolutely crucial, ‘It’s because of those “illegals”‘ or ‘It’s because of the gays’ or else it’s Soros or whoever else—but never them and the systems by which they are concentrating wealth, never those.

It is a well done picture of our unraveling. We can stop this unraveling, if only we can figure out where it’s coming from. This book helps us do that.