Culture wars are real ones
We should have taken her more seriously. It was the summer of 2018 when a Twitter user named Amanda Blount inadvertantly launched a viral meme mocking Alex Jones’ claim that Democrats were planning to launch a second civil war over the July 4th holiday to unseat President Trump. Mimicking the Ken Burns miniseries, lefties had a field day with #secondcivilwarletters.
Since then, “every accusation is a confession” has gained traction on the left. What conservatives accuse the left of doing is often what the extremist right is actually doing. A second civil war by “patriots” could look like the scattered, low-grade terrorism actually playing out across the country every day.
Jeff Sharlet’s “January 6 Was Only the Beginning” appeared in the July/August 2022 issue of Vanity Fair. But hearing his audiobook reading in “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War” delivers more punch. He lived it. He was there. At a Sacramento rally for MAGA martyr Ashli Babbitt. At Glad Tidings, a “militia church” in Yuba City afterwards, to hear David Straight, a guy from deep down the MAGA/QAnon rabbit hole, deliver the faithful the true facts:
Hillary, we learn, has secretly already been executed. You’ve seen her since? Green screens. There are, we learn, two United States: the one that “lives in our hearts” and the wicked one in Washington. Trump’s not only still president of the real one, he’s the 19th president, because most of the others since Lincoln, including Honest Abe, were illegal.
[…]
We learn that by signing our birth certificates, our mothers unwittingly made us slaves. Yes, slaves. It goes back to the 14th Amendment. You may think that’s the one that ensured the rights of formerly enslaved people—“equal protection of the laws.” That’s what they want you to think. “It’s not your fault,” Straight says. You were fed fake news. Critical race theory. You don’t know that the 14th Amendment made you—true American “you”—a slave.
Listening to Sharlet’s narration the other day creeped me out. The suspension of disbelief at Glad Tidings to Straight’s ravings parallels the mysticism in vogue at 90s New Age conventions I studied. The empowering thrill of possessing secret knowledge delivered by “internationally recognized” grifters. There were crystals and unspecified “energies,” angels and aliens (benign and malign), UFO cranks, and outlandish tales of dark conspiracies lapped up without question by attendees who checked their brains at the door. I witnessed it 30 years ago. Except New Agers weren’t stockpiling guns, ammo and body armor.
Revisit Digby’s Monday post, “The Education War.” Jonathan Chait does not name-check Seven Mountains Dominionism in “Indoctrination Nation,” but that’s the source of the right’s “existential need to use their political power to seize the commanding heights of the culture,” as Chait puts it. Because in their view, the enemy (that’s you) “permanently controls the cultural high ground.” Thus, “Republicans lose even when they win.”
Culture war is not a metaphor. Neither is “slow civil war.”