We, or at least many of us, seem to be living in one of the dystopian futures from novels or film. There was no atomic war. But there is a great plague, mass death, economic dislocation, an environmental tipping point, and political unrest. The future hangs in the balance in the now.
The confluence of recent events you know. Including the Republican Party’s descent into madness behind an unbalanced huckster of a president. Insane conspiracy theories ate the brains of who knows how many Americans. But enough to follow the president’s prompting to riot and storm the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn a presidential election.
In a 1968 B-movie, a hippie youth movement put a popular rock star in the White House and his lieutenants in Congress. “If you’re thirty, you’re through” ran the tagline for Wild in the Streets. Anyone 30 and over was consigned to detention camps and fed hallucinogens to keep them docile. Half a century later, the wilding is on the right, only it is not fiction. As the real world struggles to move forward, it is as if the American right inhabits a parallel, new Dark Age.
“The New Yorker Radio Hour” over the weekend reprised a 2017 interview with Rev. William J. Barber II of The Poor People’s Movement. The summary reads in part:
Politics and religion go hand in hand for Barber, but his agenda is diametrically opposed to that of the Christian right, which has so deeply influenced U.S. politics. Barber thinks that conservative Christians who focus on banning abortion and limiting L.G.B.T.Q. rights—rather than ministering to “the poor, the broken-hearted, the sick, … the stranger, and all of those who are made to feel unacceptable”—may be guilty of “heresy.”
The Christian right has in a sense created alt-Christianity for an alt-America organized around the QAnon conspiracy cult. Donald Trump is its messiah. The cult believes an international cabal of Democrats and elite, pedophile cannibals torture children, drink their blood and extract life-extending chemicals from their young bodies. QAnon “patriots” now sit in Congress, packing heat and ready to battle their colleague-adversaries from the prime universe the rest of us inhabit.
The cult’s conception of America is something out of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-apocalyptic novel first published in 1959. In a distant future, a new Dark Age, Catholic monks of the Order of Leibowitz collect and preserve ancient texts, much as Irish monks did during the first Dark Age. But so much technology and raw knowledge was lost in the “Flame Deluge” that (IIRC) the monks cannot comprehend many references in their manuscripts, They treat a 20th-century Leibowitz grocery list as a sacred text, not recognizing it for what it is, or was.
The alt-right’s version of both the United States and Christianity has the same feel of things misremembered, half-understood and corrupted by time.
“The so-called white evangelicals surrounding Trump say so much about what God says so little and so little about what God says so much,” Barber repeats frequently, condemning the “false and distorted narrative of Christian and religious nationalism.” Similarly, white nationalists say a lot about the 2nd Amendment while exhibiting far less veneration for the responsibility of government for the general welfare, public investment, etc., in the rest of the U.S. Constitution.
I suggested the other day that USA (o͞o´-suh) is an idol whose name the Trump cult spells out in shouted chants: U – S – A! U – S – A! Like the faith of the monks, their alt-America bears as little resemblance to the republic conceived by Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, et al. as the prosperity gospel does to the teachings of Christ.
Dennis Hartley in 2017 cited a description in A Canticle for Leibowitz of the impulses driving our brethren towards this new Dark Age:
“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.” – From the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.