‘I see this as a global fascist moment’: author Jeff Sharlet on interviewing far-right Americans

Jeff Sharlet and I meet outside the Titanic museum in sleepy Springfield, Massachusetts. It seems an opportune place to meet Sharlet - journalist, author and professor - halfway between his home in Vermont and mine in Brooklyn. We are here to talk about the fragmentation of American democracy, and I knew the Titanic museum would strike Sharlet as an apt spot: a reliquary of dissolution, another ship lost at sea.

Sharlet's latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is the culmination of more than a dozen years' reporting on the US religious right and its machinations. The core of the book is Sharlet's reporting from the midwest and the high plains, talking to ordinary people about their extraordinary predilection for violence. They see a country gone wrong under decades of "immoral decadence" and often see the expansion of rights for women, the poor and people of color as proof of this turpitude.

Sharlet has been sounding the alarm for a long time - but in this moment, when newscasters and senators alike use "Christian nationalism" and "fascism" fluently, the rest of us are finally catching on.

His reporting has at times been mischaracterized as sensationalist or unduly obsessed with the bleakest, darkest fringes of the US's raiments. This criticism - in the wake of our climate crisis, millions of Covid deaths and the withdrawal of the Republican party from any effort at governance - simply no longer sticks. The stories are as necessary as they are harrowing. The writing is explicit and expansive, almost cinematic, like looking at a battlefield from above. Altogether, it's a rare achievement, a cultural-political book that is literary.

Sharlet's work has turned out to be a warning, not of the grief to come but of the grief that is here, in places urban and rural, large and small, at the hands of politicians, police, the January 6 "protesters", Proud Boys and the ongoing plagues on national health. "I've got to figure out their grief," he says.

The book has a narrative arc that captures the fever pitch of the past decade. How did you pull it together?

I've been writing about the right for a long time; I'm always interested in the margins of things that tell us about what's happening at the center. An undertow is a metaphor for that, for the force that's been pulling us to this place for a long time. If you'd asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought another civil war would be possible in the United States, I would have said no. But to think so [now] is to not understand that the right in America is as dangerous as it is.