The Great Denial

Didion, Biden, Bannon, and that scary ticking sound

Didion ’68 / Biden ’21, when he, too, was still young

This is the kind of post I thought I wouldn’t write when I started Scenes from a Slow Civil War: horse race. I made this Substack to continue the work I’ve been doing for years—trying to read “the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.” That’s Joan Didion, of course, the famous first line of her 1979 book The White Album. One often hears it cited as inspirational, a testament to the wonderful power of storytelling.

But stories are only as true as the one who tells them. True not as in a matter of fact, though that does matter, a great deal; true in the sense that the teller is bringing to bear their most honest and searching account of their perceptions. Not framing a story according to what can only be their imagination of you, the listener. Not deciding for you that you can’t handle “the truth.” Not “getting on board.”

Consider the rest of Didion’s opening paragraph, what she means with her observation of how we use, and abuse, stories:

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Such are politics, of course, “narrative lines,” imposed, and also sometimes grabbed onto, lifelines. I was about to write “no candidate ever won on a platform of ‘shifting phantasmagoria,’” but then I realized that, in a sense, is precisely Trump’s method, to make of phantasmagoria, of instability, of confusion, of chaos, a different kind of “narrative line.” God’s Chaos Candidate, as one bestselling pro-Trump book called him back in 2016. Maybe Clinton lost because her campaign couldn’t believe that anybody really wanted chaos. Maybe Biden won in 2020 because his campaign realized that they had to remind enough of us that we don’t. Maybe he’s losing now because they’ve forgotten that.

***

My children, 10 and 15, were watching Ted Lasso the night of the debate, but they turned it off and insisted on turning it off and joining me in front of my computer, because they thought Trump’s lies would be funnier than dramedy, because they are scarier and they are also wrong and it feels good to laugh at our fears. Ten wanted Biden to school Trump on climate change; 15 hoped he’d be loud for trans rights. They looked forward to Trump’s vanity, the pinched, pursed lips they imitated as they imagined Biden—about whom they felt they had no illusions—handing him the truth. They were giggling as the ponderous debate music and red-white-and-blue graphics heralded the fun.

“Uh…” That was the 15 as Biden walked, very slowly, to his podium. There weren’t many laughs after that. More often they glanced at me, to see what they could see in my expression. They were looking for a narrative line. I didn’t have one.

***

I don’t know what is to be done, and right now I don’t believe anyone who says with certainty that they do. By “what is to be done” I mean the narrative line to be imposed, or, at my level of relative powerlessness and probably yours, accepted, with greater or lesser conviction. For the last year or so, when speaking with friends and colleagues on the fascism beat, or interviewers after the show is over, I’ve asked, “What time is it on your doomsday clock?”

The good news is that none of us are as pessimistic as The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which since 1947 has used a clock as a metaphor with which to measure the nuclear anxieties of those in good position to be anxious. This year, citing a burgeoning new arms race, the growing military use of A.I., they set it at ninety seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been.

Most of the scholars and journalists I speak to are more sanguine. “Ten o’clock?” they say, or “11:30,” and never later than “11:55.” Sometimes we mean simply Trump’s return to power via election, sometimes we consider the possibility of his return via coup—not something silly like the Proud Boys vs. the U.S. Army, but, say, the Supreme Court vs. the Constitution. Sometimes we mean what would follow, both the laws and the lawlessness, the gas poured on every kind of fire around the globe.

Implicit in these dark meditations is the election in November; the horse race. Biden’s “chances.” Not Biden’s merits or lack thereof, not our agreement or disagreement with anything he’s done. Simply a binary: Whether or not he can win. And then another binary: Having won, whether or not he can hold onto power.

The first question is on the minds of anyone who follows politics. The second should be.

***

I’m writing this sitting on the stone steps of a library in Pomfret, Vermont, a town last counted in 2020 as numbering 916. There has been some sort of library in this town since 1804, but it took a century for it to build a fully public one, in the sense that all were free to read within its walls. Its a small, well-designed box of red brick and purple-ish stone, handsome in the style of a Carnegie library, 1,689 of which were built around the U.S. between 1883 and 1929 with funds from the robber baron Andrew Carnegie, who thought his ego best-served by making books widely available to as many as he could. But this one was built by a Judge Ira A. Abbot, then of New Mexico but determined to give to his Vermont hometown its own well-housed collection. “Every resident of the town,” he said of his gift upon its dedication in 1905, “will, I trust, feel a certain satisfaction and pride in being part owner of them.”

Such was the vanity of another age. No less brutal in its concentration of wealth and power and yet, perhaps, gentler in its imagination of legacy.

When my kids and I go on drives we like to listen to audiobooks. Fifteen and I have been listening to Trust, Hernan Diaz’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner that revolves around the titanic vanity of a fictional early 20th-century financier. “My job is about being right,” declares the financier.

Always. If I’m ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake.

My younger child, the ten-year-old, has selected an audiobook of Max Brooks’ World War Z for driving time. He’d seen the movie, but he likes the book—structured, as millions of readers know, as a post-apocalyptic oral history by the survivors of how a zombie plague overwhelmed humanity. One of the speakers—I forget which, I was driving—describes an early period of the crisis, during which each piece of possible evidence could be explained away, as “the great denial.”

***

I’d originally planned for this post to be the next installment of a semi-regular round-up of the journalism I find most valuable in understanding the stories about ascendent fascism we’re telling ourselves right now. I’ve been keeping a list. But I’m going to include only one. It’s a sign of just how late it really is that I’m going to recommend reading David Brooks, the center-right columnist who has long been the epitome of smarm on the NYT’s op-ed page. It’s a Q&A with Steve Bannon (gift link) on the eve of his four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress, his refusal to testify about his role in the coup attempt of January 6, 2021, at which he led a “war room” in a hotel near the Capitol.

I don’t recommend it as journalism. Brooks seems unaware of the range of Bannon’s criminal schemes and, despite priding himself on his own intellectualism, seems not to have done enough research to press Bannon on his more violent influences, such as the late Russian ultra-nationalist Alexander Dugin and the 20th century Italian fascist Julius Evola.

Bannon plays Brooks, namedropping instead just the kind of thinkers Brooks prides himself on having read, Marshall McLuhan, the progressive Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. And he calls Brooks a “conservative,” a term the MAGAfied Right normally no longer affords establishmentarians such as Brooks. Brooks responds by calling him neither a fascist nor a criminal but a “populist.” It’s a flirtation. Neither is capable of seducing each other, but it’s in this tenuous space between them, ships passing in the night, flashing false signals to one another, that something about the hour is revealed.

Even Brooks can see it: “What he told me,” Brooks writes, “now seems doubly terrifying, given Joe Biden’s performance at the first presidential debate.”

Bannon lies, a lot. Take none of his statements of fact as such. It’s the meanings that matter, none more than this. “True” story:

The MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump. [The Left] will look back fondly at Donald Trump. They’ll ask: Where’s Trump when we need him?

So what is Trump good for?

[Trump] understands that to get anything done, you have to make the people understand. And so therefore, constantly, we’re in a battle of narrative. Unrestricted narrative warfare. Everything is narrative.

But Trump was just the door:

Our audience… may not be the biggest, it doesn’t have to be. It’s the people that are out there in the hinterland that are on the school boards. They now control so many state parties. Our mantra is you must use your agency. It’s a spiritual war. The divine providence works through your agency.

Just boasts? He’s keeping score:

Think about what this movement did. It did three things that have never been done before, with no money. It removed a sitting speaker of the House for the first time in history. It removed the minority leader, who I would argue is the most powerful Republican you’ve had in 50 years, Mitch McConnell. And then we removed the entire R.N.C. Think about it. Ronna McDaniel and all her people.

No accommodations:

Jews, not just safety but their ability to thrive and prosper as they have in this country, is conditional upon one thing, and that’s a hard weld with Christian nationalism.

There’s a confusing exchange about Abraham Lincoln, whom Brooks cites as a positive example of a unifying leader. At first, Bannon sounds like a neo-Confederate:

Hang on, hang on, hang on. After he had burnt — good god, man, I can’t believe you used that example. After he burned the South to the ground

But then it emerges that this is what he admires most about Lincoln. Nothing about ending slavery; it was his willingness to destroy:

He was a military dictator because he had to be, right? …. Remember, fighting the Civil War, as a warlord.

***

Yesterday, when the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling came down—in essence making Trump, should he return to power, an actual military dictator—I tweeted “Slow. Motion. Coup. Today is as much of a of blow to democracy—on you and me and everyone—as the violent assault of January 6.” Evidently, some Trumpish account with a big following quoted it, because hundreds of fascists rushed in to tell me that one, the U.S. is republic, not a democracy, and two, January 6 was totally peaceful, both of which are false. But a number also responded to something I hadn’t said, mocking me for what they imagined as my claim that Trump v. United States is as significant as September 11, 2001. Of course I denied it.

I had the facts right; but they’d stumbled onto a truer meaning. January 6 did not, as it should have, mark the end of an era, the close of the Trumpocene. 9/11, though, was the beginning of a very long imperial war, from which none of the countries involved, not even the empire—that’s us—have recovered. J6 was a clarification; 9/11 changed everything. So, too, I think, may Trump v. United States. My clock reads 11:55, 11:56, 11:57, and it looks to me like the horse race is ending, and the only thing I know for certain is that my metaphors are mixing. I’ve rarely had such a hard time finding an essay’s last words. I can’t “fix” the “phantasmagoria,” I can’t find the narrative line. I think, maybe, it’s a time to stop telling ourselves stories.