Review: In “The Undertow,” Jeff Sharlet examines the anger powering American politics today
Maybe not entirely faceless, though. One face, sporting a pale forelock, looms large. One name, deployed as a verb, whips and snaps. You know it, I know it: Trump. I’m writing this in rural Indiana, where I’m visiting family. Out the window I can see the neighbor’s house, where a TRUMP flag flies at full-staff. Even a house on a country road can become part of a crowd.Sharlet has spent much of his career covering the intersections of religion and right-wing politics, most famously in “.
found new life during the early Trump administration, when a documentary based on the book aired on Netflix.Trump, and Trumpism, benefited more than anyone could have guessed from this fusion of personal faith and political action. Sharlet has chronicled that rise in his dispatches for Vanity Fair, traversing the country to visit the faithful.
A hipster megachurch in Miami fills the sanctuary to capacity with a message of prosperity, and nothing else. A men’s rights conference held outside Detroit draws a host of men, and a surprisingly formidable contingent of women, to discuss the supposed dangers of feminists entrapping men with false accusations of sexual assault. The women’s presence highlights a running theme of the book: Look at these crowds, and you will see faces you never expected to find there.
. But there’s not even consensus on which of these issues matters most or in what way. One darkly funny scene finds a Trump-flag-waving homeowner in Wisconsin incensed withYet Sharlet believes there is a deeper fear, a deeper grievance, roiling beneath the copy-pasted outrage. The underlying cause of this potential civil war is not so different from that of the actual civil war of the not-so-distant past: race.
“They are angry about their own bodies, about how other people’s bodies make them feel,” Sharlet writes about these mostly White crowds. And how do other bodies make them feel? In a word, uninnocent. The very awkwardness of that term suggests the mental gymnastics these crowds struggle to perform. The crowds revere innocence, purity, blamelessness. Ashli Babbitt is transformed from a troubled young woman into a flawless saint, a martyr for the cause of freedom.
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