I couldn’t have predicted a pandemic. Or a coup. Much less both of these catastrophes occurring simultaneously.
But I did think Something Bad was coming—since the night of Nov. 8, 2016, a nameless fear making its home in my chest. The fear only grew as I drove around the U.S. in 2017, trying talk with whoever I came across.
I wrote to a professional contact on July 12, 2017:
“It wasn't necessarily a coincidence that I began reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism at the beginning of this project. I had read all of Masha Gessen's insights on today's sociopolitical atmosphere, and it seemed to me that I was encountering, even just a state or two in, the kind of social deatomization that Gessen quoted from Arendt. So I knew that I would find some precedent for what I was seeing.
What I didn't expect was for the parallels between post-WWI Europe and Russia and America today to be so utterly stark. It is not mere anger that drives so much of the Conservative engine, or even fear, though there's a healthy aura of that in many places I've been: fear of oblivion, of obsolescence. You can see why Fox News and InfoWars are so successful. The editorial portion of their businesses builds that fear up to fever pitch, and the ads, for Viagra and medical cure-alls and brain food and Doomsday Prepper gear, offer the solutions to that fear, for $69.99 plus shipping and handling.
But no, what's so striking is the loneliness, the omnipresent sense of disconnect that leads so many people (middle-aged white men, usually) to spill their guts to me for hours at a time, to offer to fly me back for weird town festivals in September, to ask me to hold their gun just so they can see me holding it. We are a nation of isolates. Gone are the communities formed by churches and unions and even just neighborhood gatherings, fallen victims of the greed of a system that says if you are not working every waking second, you are lazy and valueless. In Germany and Austria and Russia, this isolation led to the mobilization of totalitarian governments, with large numbers of people willingly surrendering their individuality in service of a single goal. I don't know what will result here.”
We see now what will result: the same goddamn thing. We’ve had our Beer Hall Putsch. In little more than a week, another violent attack on the government will occur. While some portion (possibly a large one) of the frothing QAnon/anti-government/Pro-Trump/Doomsday movement will fall away after being publicly disavowed by their leader, enough will be further radicalized to “force the end” that we will experience some real problems.
I know this because I encountered so many of these people in their pupal stage—not quite frothing, not quite radicalized by QAnon (which wasn’t birthed until I was just about done with my reporting trip), but worrying enough to weigh on me.
Here was what I wrote about an encounter with a man at a bar in Utica, New York, on September 19, 2017:
“Justin, 32, is just up here doing a welding job. He hates cities—though Utica's population is only around 60,000, this is an unacceptably high number of people to have to deal with on a daily basis. He lives in north-central Pennsylvania, away from everyone and everything.
Justin doesn't particularly enjoy welding, either. He used to, but he's 10 years in now and is looking for bigger, better things. Like a Department of Defense job that is apparently his for the taking, as long as he can get his Top Secret Clearance. They want him to consult on matters of other nations' security, he claims. ‘North Korea, they've got to go,’ he says. He clarifies that he means the entire country, 25 million mostly innocent citizens be damned. To him, they are all guilty of the crimes of their leader, because they haven't removed said leader from power.
‘If we had someone like that here, you bet I'd rally all my friends and arm them and take a stand,’ Justin says. He can't quite seem to grasp the idea of a totalitarian government, the terror and brutality inflicted upon its citizens, who have been beaten and misled into submission. He also doesn't seem aware of the irony of being unable to recognize the creeping fascist tendencies of our own government—the militarization of the police, the unpredictable strongman Commander-in-Chief who threatens entire countries with annihilation and equates civil rights advocates with neo-Nazis.
But anyway, what Justin would love to do is get back into the military. He was over in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was a company leader, and he took it as a personal duty to ensure every member of his company got back to base. That made him a little "paranoid," he says, and he'd sometimes have an itchy trigger finger. That was all fine until some dipshit was put in charge and didn't like the way he did things. So he quit.
There's a problem in our society of letting criminals off the hook, he adds. Real criminals, he means, not, like, people who smoke weed; Justin smokes weed, it's not a big deal.
‘I don't like bad people,’ Justin says. If some bad people in his life—pedophiles and the like—have maybe gone missing, well, so much the better for the world. You're welcome.
An odd sense of calm steals over you when you realize you're being hit on by a confessed murderer, a trigger-happy guy who fancies himself a less-rich Batman and says he enjoys choking women and pulling their hair during coitus. The late-September evening is cool, and a couple of three-piece-suits have walked into the bar accompanied by young women. You notice the shoes the women are wearing—simple wedges, Adidas sneakers—and the welding burns on Justin's arms.
Time expands as you study the phone number of the business on Justin's chartreuse t-shirt, the grease stains that dot the neon fabric. He smokes Pall Malls. He has killed and will kill again, or maybe he's making it all up, trying to impress the girl from New York City. You wonder blithely if you will look up at a TV screen in an airport one day and see his face above a chyron that simply says ‘MANHUNT CONTINUES.’ You do not give him your phone number.”
I don’t know what to do about all this. I don’t know how massive deradicalization is possible when 60 percent of the country is fine with all this, or at least doesn’t think it’s worth stopping.
A book editor and two literary agents told me this conclusion was too depressing for a mass-market book about my travels. I wonder what they’re doing right now.