The Second American Civil War

Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

It’s hardly a secret at this late date that America had a significant and organized population of small-f fascists and fascist-adjacents before WWII. Some were relatively well known, including Father Charles Coughlin, the pioneering televangelist, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was rumored for president before he squandered America’s national good will. We remember these names today, though, because they made themselves memorable. Thousands of others strove to be forgotten.

Rachel Maddow made herself a darling of progressive basic cable with her understated sardonic humor and her casual camera presence. It’s potentially easy to forget that her background isn’t in journalism; she’s a former Rhodes scholar with a doctorate in political science. Maddow brings a scholar’s eye for detail and a journalist’s knack for storytelling to this, her accounting of how America faced—and frequently flubbed—its domestic fascist menace.

Drawing entirely on public-domain documents, including one damning file which President Truman personally buried, Maddow reconstructs the pro-German PR machine. Her approach herein is more narrative than analytic; she retells events approximately in sequence. This approach tends to emphasize the movement’s leaders and their bombastic speeches. Many pro-German leaders were intellectuals, industrialists, and freelance agitators. Others were elected Senators and Representatives, actively misusing their offices.

Maddow’s history of the pro-German movement contains more names than a Dostoevsky novel; the hardcover helpfully includes a dramatis personae. It’s sometimes easier to remember the groups these men (they were indeed mostly men) represented. Some were directly subsidized by the German propaganda machine, including America First and the Christian Front; others, like the Klan, received their backing indirectly. Maddow demonstrates they were definitely coordinated.

The anti-fascist opposition wasn’t nearly so harmonized. The Department of Justice and Hoover’s FBI cared more about the Communist Left, and largely ignored right-wing insurgency. When public pressure finally forced the government to prosecute far-right seditionists, it failed to support its designated prosecutors, and actively submarined one. In an appalling precedent, literally nobody was held legally culpable for supporting Germany or undermining American democracy.

Rachel Maddow

Perhaps Maddow’s most engaging passages describe how ordinary citizens, acting without government support, sought to shine daylight on the nightcrawlers of America’s pro-German machine. Leon Lewis, a Los Angeles attorney, organized a private spy network to uncover Bundist activity in Southern California. Advertising executive Henry Hoke exposed the extensive direct-mail PR campaign Germany used to widen division in American public opinion, often with help from elected federal legislators.

Perceptive readers might recognize a pattern developing. The Roosevelt Administration, condemned by American conservatives as dangerously leftist, was terrified of too aggressively prosecuting anti-American forces, lest they open themselves to more criticism. Ultra-right conservatives, meanwhile, present themselves as merely honest Americans, faithful Christians, and grassroots activists. Then they actively attempt to conceal the vast transfusions of German money. Both sides fought each other brutally, and Germany reaped the benefits.

Only in the closing pages does Maddow acknowledge what her readers recognized from the beginning: that Maddow sees this as instructive for dealing with home-grown authoritarians today. The anti-fascists fought their battles without government support, and often faced official indifference. However, they persevered, and they eventually saw the tide of public opinion shift. Authoritarians generally don’t handle civilian pushback very well, and their lack of preparedness is frequently their undoing.

She doesn’t call it Prequel for nothing.

The hardline authoritarianism described herein doesn’t always parallel with today’s politics. Maddow lingers, for instance, on Huey “Kingfish” Long, the Louisiana governor who came closest to creating an American dictatorship. Long’s stranglehold on Louisiana politics was paradoxically generous and progressive. Maddow describes Long taxing the wealthy, endowing schools, and dismantling racial barriers (which mostly were re-erected after his assassination). She also describes him taking bribes and submarining regulators for profit.

In this and other examples, Maddow’s analogies are sometimes imperfect. But analogies generally are. The oft-repeated maxim, often misattributed to Mark Twain, holds that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Maddow highlights the consistent use of division, plain-folks rhetoric, and working class paranoia to keep Americans divided and infighting. She also emphasizes ordinary Americans’ willingness to resist, even resistance at great personal cost.

Maddow’s narrative has the suspensive form of a paperback political thriller, but she also emphasizes recurrent themes driving the story. She unpacks exactly as much as she expects her audience will need to understand the stakes, and little more, ensuring her narrative never bogs down. The story is sometimes bleak, and sometimes terrifying; but it’s ultimately triumphant, as the anti-fascists win, reminding us that we can win, too.

For the Love of Armageddon

“It’s pure spiritual abuse to tell children we’re living in the end times,” an acquaintance said recently. “It causes trauma to tell kids, at the beginning of their lives, that the entire world is about to end.” (I’m paraphrasing from memory.) This acquaintance has suffered years of religious trauma from her evangelical upbringing, and is dedicated to ensuring no kid endures what she endured.

However, this comment underscored for me exactly how much younger my acquaintance is than me. She believes that this apocalyptic message is both uniquely religious, and particularly new. Since I don’t travel in highly conservative religious circles, and I don’t have kids, perhaps some parts of the message have changed. Yet I grew up in Reagan’s America, where the constant threat of massive nuclear conflagration defined my, and everybody else’s, childhood.

I’ve written before about how my generation grew up with two all-encompassing cultural messages:

1. With hard work and determination, you can be anything you can dream; and
2. We’re all going to die at any minute

I came along late enough that schools had abandoned the delusion of duck-and-cover drills for nuclear war. Nevertheless, we grew up hearing how the bombs would inevitably drop a week from next Tuesday, and nothing we did could prevent it. In the 1980s, Armageddon wasn’t a religious dogma, it was a looming reality permeating American lives. Religious and secular Americans differed only on what we believed would follow: salvation, or devastation.

Perhaps most important is that, in the popular memory, these years enjoyed (if that’s the word) a degree of popular unity scarcely seen before or since. As the Cold War reached its climax, the Reagan coalition managed to corral Americans into a political alliance that swept the presidential elections three consecutive times, the only time one party has done so since World War II. All powered by fear of imminent flaming death.

This unity didn’t really exist, of course; memory has a whitewashing effect. Oh, the Reaganite electoral domination was real. But America’s largest-ever anti-state protest occurred on June 12^th, 1982, when a ban-the-bomb rally pulled a million people to New York’s Central Park. Reagan, as President, dominates our 1980s mythology, but that was also Gary Hart’s heyday. Hart’s 1988 presidential bid was considered a cinch, before Lee Atwater blitzed him.

Support for the Cold War gave Americans a shared sense of identity. Ironically,
opposition to the Cold War often had the same effect.

But for many American conservatives, that perceived unity was totally real, and totally tied to two facts: religion, and the Cold War. They forget that a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, ushered the term “born again” into America’s political lexicon. Instead, for them, it was the power duo of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell. Reagan, like Donald Trump, spoke the language of Christianity, without much darkening a church door as an adult.

People who believe their culture’s heyday existed in the past, usually pinpoint that heyday approximately thirty years ago. And thirty years ago as I write is 1993. Thirty years ago, the Cold War had ended, putatively behind Reagan-Bush’s muscular displays, giving America over to Bill Clinton, who guided the country through a profoundly diffuse era of moral wishy-washiness. Conservative Christians in 1993 already mourned the unity provided by death from above.

Seriously. To my eternal regret, I was one of them back then. I know what it means to miss the moral certainty you once had.

When Christian Conservatives, at least of the American stripe, yearn for the Apocalypse, they aren’t really asking for anything described in the Bible. Maybe they want the Lion of Judah, but they have no patience for the Lamb Who Was Slain. What they really want, is the perceived social unity and moral swagger they remember themselves having when Reagan’s muscle and Falwell’s religiosity dominated America’s political map.

Western civilization has always contained the ability to destroy itself. Indeed, Western civilization has already collapsed, twice, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t do so again. This time around, though, the consequences will be much more dire. Whether through nuclear war, as I grew up anticipating, or through climate change, as currently seems more likely, when this civilization collapses, it will leave the Earth a lifeless, uninhabitable husk.

I’ll agree that telling children Armageddon is imminent causes trauma. Perhaps that’s why so many elder GenXers shuffle through life, dead-eyed and disengaged, because we’re still recovering from Reagan’s malaise days. But the apocalyptic message also offers something to unify behind, and that’s something today’s body politic sorely lacks. Apocalyptic Christians aren’t malicious; they simply miss the days when imminent death offered cheap, easy unity.

The Power Politics of Fairyland

Sarah J. Sover, Faed to Black (Fractured Fae Book Two)

Gwendolyn Evenshine is settling uncomfortably into her role as the fairy kingdom’s first and only licensed private investigator. But a mysterious stranger appears in her office with the magical world’s equivalent of chloroform, and Gwen wakes up trapped inside a box. A little tense log-rolling reveals that Gwen’s been kidnapped by her own family. Because Gwen’s secretly no mere PI; she’s a runaway member of fairyland’s ancient aristocracy.

It’s hard to imagine a second series novel which departs more abruptly from the first. Sarah J. Sover’s first Fractured Fae novel followed the time-honored pattern set by Jim Butcher or Laurel K. Hamilton, a crime novel set against a background of creatures from myth and folktale. But just as protagonists Harry Dresden and Anita Blake have secret birthrights, so does Gwen Evenshine. Sover just skips the several-book buildup.

Exactly who kidnapped Gwen, the mystery that dominates the first few (very short) chapters, gets resolved quickly. The more important question becomes why. Gwen abandoned her aristocratic birthright years ago, and resents getting dragged back. Meanwhile her friend and business partner Chessa, having determined who nabbed Gwen, taps some old allies to mount a rescue mission. She apparently thinks it’ll be easy to spring a prisoner from Avalon.

Yes, that Avalon. Gwen and Chessa’s fairy lineage descends from the enigmatic kingdom that brought King Arthur and Morgan le Fay to power. The first novel occurred in the fairyland corresponding with Boston, and the Revolutionary heritage that city contains, but this second goes back even farther, to the English-speaking world’s pre-Christian heritage. Fae can survive for centuries of nothing kills them, so their grudges can last equally long, apparently.

Sarah J. Sover

Sover’s prior novel was a conventional PI story, like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler wrote. A protagonist with internal scars chases a deeply personal definition of justice, although “justice” doesn’t necessarily correspond with “law.” This novel swerves into Ian Fleming or John le Carré territory. It continues the notion that justice and right are ad hoc creations without conventional morality. But rather than crime, it focuses on politics and world affairs.

Or anyway, the first half does. Sover initially focuses on the enemies of free society, and the lies and backroom deals that society conducts to preserve freedom. How free are we, she asks, if our leaders must engage in skullduggery to conserve that freedom? Then, somewhere around the halfway mark, Sover swerves again. She abandons the pretense of James Bond-ish subterfuge, and pushes her characters into a full-on insurgency.

The parallels with current affairs are inescapable. In the war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of fairy, Sover presents the Unseelie as amoral, reveling in cruelty and sacrificing innocent civilians to their power schemes. Yet the Seelie, supposedly just and liberated, are obsessed with forms of order, unaware that the world has changed without them. The Unseelie are evil, but successful; the Seelie are benevolent, but aloof.

On some level, mass-market fiction is always about its audience. Sover shows how the twin idols of power or morality blind authorities to the common suffering outside their doors. Gwen and Chessa serve the Seelie Court, each in their own way, and therefore the forms of order, and they’re shocked by the Unseelie’s casual cruelty. Yet the streets of Avalon teem with fae whose lives are neither cruel nor orderly.

Gwen abandoned the Seelie Court, with their hoity-toity ways and cold politesse, years earlier. Her one regret was that her abandonment forced her to leave her brother, a bright-eyed and optimistic kid. The intervening years have seen Gwen become independent, but poor and plagued with second thoughts. When politics reunites her with her baby brother, she sees that Liam’s gone the opposite direction, becoming a creature of order and bureaucracy.

Any readers who fail to anticipate that Gwen’s reunion with Liam will ultimately result in disappointment, are probably new to paperback fantasy. The only question is what form that disappointment will take. As the stakes continue to increase, and Gwen must relearn the methods of power politics she once rejected, she finds herself willing to countenance many kinds of disappointment.

If anything, this second novel in Sover’s Fractured Fae novel is better than the first. In the prior volume, Sover experimented playfully with the conventions of the urban fantasy genre. Here, Sover throws the conventions into a blender and spreads them around ecstatically, more in love with her characters and story than her marketing niche. The result is fast-paced, breathtaking, and feels much, much shorter than it actually is.

Free Will, Determinism, and Time Travel Fiction

DC Iris Maplewood discovers one of the titular bodies in Netflix's Bodies

Something about science fiction makes writers feel compelled to break down the story’s speculative core somewhere around the halfway mark. Though Obi-Wan Kenobi introduces Luke to the Force early, halfway is when he explains its principles of mindfulness and flow. Similarly, though Kyle Reese has introduced Sarah Connor to his dystopian future, only around the halfway mark does he explain it to Dr. Silberman in any detail. Same applies to Netflix’s recent limited series, Bodies.

In episode four (of eight), the breakdown comes in two increments. First, we witness physicist Gabriel Defoe’s (Tom Mothersdale) lecture summation, describing the hypothetical Deutsche Particle, which simultaneously exists forward and backward in time. Later, speaking privately with Detective Constable Iris Maplewood (Shira Haas), Defoe extrapolates that, if the future already exists, free will is illusory. Maplewood demurs. Though structurally, Bodies is a police procedural, this science fiction rumination of liberty drives the series premise.

Recent philosophy has seen the resurgence of a previously endangered idea: determinism. Medieval Thomist philosophy contended that everything which happens in the material world has a prior cause. Yet every cause is, itself, an effect of a prior cause. Thus, reality exists in a causal chain descending through history to what Thomists call the First Cause. As Christians grounded in Aristotelean philosophy, Thomists correlated this First Cause with God, who set all reality in motion.

Determinism, this belief that all reality was set in predeterminate motion at the moment of creation, came under conflict during the Reformation, when many reformers contended that humans have the capacity, within our sensory limits, to accept or reject God. (Replace “God” with “philosophy” if that streamlines your thinking.) Reformers called this capacity “free will.” By the Enlightenment, free will became the operant European philosophy, mutatis mutandis, and arguable remains so through to the present.

Free will has recently come under fire from prominent atheists and sceptics. John Gray and Sam Harris are probably the most prominent, but an entire subthread of philosophy of science contends that free will is an illusion. Because our choices are conditioned by outside events and circumstances, most of which we cannot possibly comprehend, choice therefore isn’t real. (It’s more complicated than that, but bear with me.) This philosophy has limited traction outside narrow circles.

Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn)
near the culmination of their journey, in The Terminator

Okay, our choices are conditioned; anybody who’s had a job or otherwise interacted with complex human society will accept this. But to what degree are our choices determined? Philosophers consistently fail to close this gap. In Bodies, Defoe himself leaps that gap, even within himself; though he argues verbally that our choices are determined, we discover, eventually, that he attempts to change their conditions. (No spoilers; this is about Bodies’ philosophy, not its story.)

In the early seasons of the resurrected Doctor Who in the mid-2000s, the Doctor avoided intervening in history with two arguments. Sometimes he couldn’t revisit preceding actions, claiming that “we’re part of events now.” (This was mainly the Tenth Doctor, who couldn’t stomach contradictions or paradox. The Eleventh Doctor actively sought paradox.) Other times he claimed “a fixed point in time,” something so important that, even if it was terrible, intervening would create something far worse.

James Cameron’s first Terminator movie ends withSarah Connor’s realization that, though she and Reese defeated the monster, the monster’s creation was inevitable. Time, in the first movie, is circular, and attempts to alter it instead create it. But Cameron couldn’t stomach that forever, and reversed himself in the second movie. History can change; no fate but what we make. Cameron, like Bodies, initially accepts that we’re trapped in a causal loop, but finally resists such fatalism.

Thus, time travel fiction manifests a recurrent theme: history is contingent, without necessarily being inevitable. Just because events occurred in a certain way, doesn’t mean they had to occur that way. We cannot always know what contingencies define our actions, and some contingencies we can never know. Yet that doesn’t mean our choices are determined. Humans aren’t inevitable products of physics. We have the unique capacity to pause, think, and change our minds.

Bodies is, essentially, an allegory of the human capability to change our minds. Professor Defoe’s lecture on determinism stems from the assumption that, because time exists both forward and backward, the entire past and future already exist in fixed forms. But DC Maplewood realizes, as James Gleick has written elsewhere, that the laws of physics are a description of reality, not reality itself. We can accept our contingencies, she reveals, without our contingencies owning us.

The Beatles and the Past That Never Ends

The Beatles, photographed at the peak of their star power

When the surviving Beatles released two new songs in 1995, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” built around John Lennon’s home demos, I was giddy. I bought the CDs promptly, and listened to them repeatedly, with the devotion a better-connected audiophile might’ve dedicated to finding a lost 78 by Billie Holliday. I mean, okay, the Beatles were never going to tour again, and these two tracks were in-studio novelties. But c’mon, man, it was the Beatles!

This week, a third and final post-breakup track dropped, “Now and Then.” This time, instead of whirling anticipation, I felt a gut-clench of dread. The landscape has changed since 1995. Just as important, though, I have changed. Yet despite my trepidation, I listened when the track dropped. Of course I did; millions of people worldwide listed simultaneously. And while the overall response has been positive, I heard the new track and felt… nothing.

“Now and Then” reads like a sweeping homage to everything the Beatles recorded post-Sgt. Pepper. The combination of psychedelic guitars, lush strings, and tight vocal harmonies, all reflect the forces driving the Beatles’ late-stage sound. It’s a perfect Beatles encomium—too perfect. The track sounds like something a particularly skillful Beatles tribute band might’ve composed after too many all-night benders, striving to unlock that elusive Lennon-McCartney magic.

I’ve written before about my efforts to become a baby boomer. I styled myself according to hippie peacenik conventions, listened to boomer rock, and told anyone listening how much I disdained the sounds of my generation. I imagined myself quite the activist, fighting the battles of 1968 with committed aplomb. The battles of my generation? Meh. By committing myself to the causes and culture of my parents’ youth, I convinced myself of my innate goodness.

Classic rock radio was the mass-media manifestation of this commitment. By hearing the great songs and great songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s repeated constantly, with new music never treading upon my consciousness, I convinced myself that I was a branded soldier for civil rights. “Branded” turns out to have been right, too. Only years later would I realize how thoroughly classic rock radio curated a well-scrubbed, anodyne version of that generation.

America has over 2,000 “classic rock,” “classic hits,” and “oldies” stations. Together, that’s more than any format except country music, and all three formats play the Beatles at least occasionally. Both separately and together, the Beatles continue to steer the sounds of Anglophonic pop culture, their repertoire ransacked by countless rock and pop bands, their style mimicked by acts eager to recapture their mojo. All these acts sound distressingly the same.

Since radio ownership regulations came down following the Telecommunications Act of 1996, radio has become monolithic. Three conglomerates control almost eighty percent of America’s radio broadcasting: iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), Audacy, and NBC. Likewise, three conglomerates dominate the recording industry, and three conglomerates control music publishing. These conglomerates almost don’t matter, though, since half of all music gets heard through one outlet: Spotify.

In other words, the music industry has become less diverse, more concentrated, and less receptive to public taste since the Beatles’ last new recordings in 1995. While the occasional Justin Bieber squeaks through, recording home cover versions for YouTube, most hitmakers’ careers are tightly controlled. Olivia Rodrigo and Selena Gomez, who appeared to emerge from nowhere, were cultivated by Disney for years before their breakthroughs.

In past generations, most music executives were musicians. George Martin, who produced every Beatles recording except the final three, was a jazz keyboardist who released several sides which went nowhere. Nowadays, music executives are bean counters with MBAs, monumentally risk-averse and beholden to what’s worked before. Therefore, today’s new releases persistently sound identical. New rock music is risky; let listeners re-hear the same “classics” their parents and grandparents loved.

From this milieu emerges a Beatles recording that sounds like a perfect amalgamation of everything the Fab Four recorded after 1966. And yes, it’s indeed perfect. It’s exactly what the band created in their notorious overnight sessions after they’d stopped touring and began investing full-time in their passion projects. Beatles fans like me should gobble it up; most will.

Yet I feel cold. George Harrison died twenty-two years ago, and John Lennon has been dead longer than he was alive, but their bandmates, and their label, won’t let them rest. The demand to produce a capstone song, which nobody knew was missing, sixty years later, has resulted in a paint-by-numbers product. Some things are just supposed to end.