Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America
Journalist Sasha Abramsky Takes Us into the Heart of Trump Country
Abramsky will be discussing his book at 7:30 PM on Wednesday, September 11th at Warwick’s at 7812 Girard Avenue in La Jolla
Sasha Abramsky has taught at UC Davis for close to twenty years and has been doing journalism and publishing books for thirty. He is freelance journalist, weekly columnist for The Nation, and has written pieces in the New Yorker online, the Atlantic, the American Prospect, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Salon, Slate, the London Guardian, the Observer, the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Magazine and many other publications. His nine books include The American Way of Poverty, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: the Extraordinary Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar, Breadline USA, Inside Obama’s Brain, and more.
I first met Sasha back in 2010 when I was marching with other unionists from Bakersfield to Sacramento in the March for California’s Future, a labor-community initiative that led to a campaign for the Millionaire’s Tax (which, after much political wrangling, was merged with Proposition 30, a measure that taxed the rich to help fund education and social services). Abramsky met us along the way in the Central Valley when he was writing a piece for the Sacramento News and Review. We hit it off as we walked past almond groves and farms talking about the march, camping in trailer parks, poverty, inequality, and American politics. Some of that eventually made its way into his fine book, The American Way of Poverty, in which I was pleasantly surprised to find myself and the March briefly featured.
Just as that book hits the nail on the head regarding the lives and struggles of the American poor, Abramsky’s new study, Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America, illuminates the significance of the organic development of rural extremism in the United States. With a keen eye and an openness to his subjects, Abramsky dives straight into the heart of an emergent American fascism and the fight to defeat it.
As Jeff Sharlet observes, “There are real people in this intimately reported book, real consequences—and also real hope. The great achievement of Chaos Comes Calling is what it reveals about how communities become captive to the little fascisms of would-be tyrants, and how some, at least, free themselves. This story about small places has big implications.”
The book is a case study that, as the publisher notes: “investigates the empowerment of the far-right over the past few years, stoked by the Trump presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic. He tells the parallel stories of two communities, Shasta County, California and Sequim, Washington, where toxic alliances of QAnoners, anti-vaxxers, Christian nationalists, militia supporters and other denizens of the far-right have worked to take control of the levers of power.”
What follows is a brief interview with Sasha Abramsky on the social and political implications of the rural right and how it may impact the coming election in November.
What have you learned about the nature, growth and evolution of the American Right over the past several years while researching Chaos Comes Calling?
Sasha Abramsky: I've learned that the right-wing media ecosystem is a powerful thing, that the accelerated breakdown of the newsgathering, distribution, and consumption culture in the US has been key to the right's recent success, and also that the right isn't monolithic. Much of the growth and evolution of the right in recent years goes back to the Tea Party and the remarkable rise of a fiercely anti-governmental right. But there are new strains also, some of which are deeply authoritarian and some of which clearly flirt with a fascist ideology and worldview. Under Trump these various strains have come together in a sometimes-uneasy alliance; that alliance was turbocharged by the dislocation of the pandemic and by reactions to government public health measures. It was further accelerated by the growth of a conspiracy culture spread via the internet (witness Alex Jones, QAnon, etc). The danger in this is that all levels of government, from the very local to the Federal get impacted, and that the dysfunction and cruelty of the MAGA movement at a national level gets replicated locally, destroying the processes of good governance that we all depend on to keep basic services running properly.
In Thomas Frank’s work, he argues that the right has grown by substituting cultural issues for economic concerns, essentially redirecting anger away from the actual economic elite toward “the cultural elite.” Does your research align with his thesis or not?
SA: I think that's broadly true, though I think it's often hard to disentangle cultural from economic. A lot of the places that feel most economically disempowered by the forces of post-industrialism and globalization and technological change are also the places that are very conservative culturally and feel left out of the loop by rapid cultural shifts around race, gender roles, sexuality and other key issues. The genius of the MAGA movement (and of earlier incarnations of a populist resurgent right) has been to fuse the two, and to use an exceptionally aggressive bait-and-switch technique to recalibrate the national conversation. [Steve] Bannon has been particularly effective in this.
Part of your book deals with the right in Northern California. Tell us about what has happened in places like Shasta County and what lessons there are to be learned from it.
SA: Shasta was a county that for decades had been shifting rightward. It was a solidly Republican place, but regularly elected mainstream Republicans to the county board of supervisors. Then during the pandemic, there was this huge groundswell of discontent around business and school closures, mask mandates and then vaccine mandates. And the mainstream GOP figures were increasingly driven out—including via the recall process—by militia-aligned hard-right candidates. That happened at the school board level as well. The result was chaos: the firing of public health and other social service officials, a rolling burn-it-all-down extremism. The county became harder to govern. The climate of intimidation—against public health workers, teachers, liberal journalists and so on—grew, including really vicious online threats and even on-air radio threats. And as the situation deteriorated, the ability to speak across ideological divides shrank, and people started regarding each other not as opponents but as enemies. What scares me about that trajectory is that's how civil, fratricidal strife begins. It's a dehumanization process that, historically, doesn't tend to end well.
How does your research speak to the rise and persistence of Trump, the transformation of local politics, and the upcoming national election?
SA: I think it shows that a demagogic figure such as Trump, and the cult-like MAGA movement, has the potential to do extreme damage very quickly. What my book explores, in both Sequim and in Shasta County, is how a rightward drift, if allowed to accelerate, can break down democratic norms and systems quickly, and that waiting in the wings are extremists and conspiracists who thrive in chaos. Local politics is usually more pragmatic and less ideological than is national politics, but recently the extremes and fissures present in national politics are being replicated on the ground locally. It makes governance that much harder and makes civil discourse that much more toxic.
Regarding the national election, there are two distinct lessons here: what happened in Sequim, when the good governance league coalesced among people of many distinct ideologies, all of whom were infuriated by the slide into irrational extremism, shows one way forward; there, over two electoral cycles, the good governance league successfully beat the extremists in one election after another, and the region returned to moderate, consensus-building governance. In Shasta, by contrast, the slide rightward continued unchecked for four years—only in this year's primaries was there the beginning of a reaction against it. That storyline represents a very real danger that once extremism gets embedded, either locally or nationally, it can prove very hard to defeat. My hope is that in November the US story will more align with Sequim's than with Shasta's, and I do think there are some signs that that is what might unfold.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
SA: The book is immersion reportage, and it contains the voices of many people from many different parts of the political spectrum. My intent is not to caricature or to satirize, but to show political realities in all their messy complexities. I strongly disagreed with many of the people who I write about in this book; but one has to understand where they are coming from, and how their worldviews have been shaped, in order to see what sort of a society they are hoping to create.
Abramsky will be appearing at Warwick’s at 7812 Girard Avenue in La Jolla on Wednesday, September 11th at 7:30 PM.
You can also buy the book here.