Perhaps it is all as simple as like calls to like, that politics is about locating patterns, about seeing the fractal shape of your own life at a bigger scale and letting that affinity guide your loyalties and your antagonisms. And so perhaps trying to see sociopolitical movements and transformation as the product of some unified and coherent -ism that connects the biggest scales and the smallest scales in a definitionally clear and typologically coherent way is a fool’s errand.
That’s a thought I had at any rate as the brimstone stench wafted up from my cellphone as I read about Sheriff Eddie Scott of Clay County Mississippi. The detailed investigative report published in the New York Times makes a strong case that Sheriff Scott, who has been in his post since 1992, has been sexually abusing and harassing women caught up in the local justice system and women who have worked in his office.
It’s more than that: the investigation underscores that Sheriff Scott has been aided in his long-time violations by his own office and by judicial colleagues. Files have been misfiled, camera records mysteriously lost, judges have looked the other way, preposterous excuses have been winked at. Around here, we take care of our own, as the song goes.
Tits were hung out, you see, and well, we all know what happens when tits are hanging out, whether you’re the top law officer or just some guy working the cash register at a convenience store.
Pictures of John Wayne hang on Sheriff’s Scott’s walls, because you know, back in Wayne’s day, everything was “good and decent”, but “they don’t build them like that anymore.” You see, “back when we were kids, we all went to church and we learned the difference between right and wrong.” It’s hard to know if Sheriff Scott is trying to confess something there or if his vision of Wayne’s common cinematic persona includes law officers coercing women under their authority to have sex and falsifying records to protect that conduct. Try as I might, I can’t really think of a Wayne film where his character acts like that. Back in the day. When they were built like that. Good ol’ boys, raised up right, as the song goes. When we learned the difference between right and wrong. Just like Scott’s former neighboring sheriff who was elected out of office after 40 years after “similar allegations” and is now being investigated for bribery.
In a sense, what unites Scott with Trump—the political leader he admires, surprise!—is not thus an ism in the sense of a concrete ideology, unless it’s warlordism. Someone like Scott might be against the federal government’s authority or the deep state or the urban elites simply because, well, checks and balances: they’re about the only thing left that can fuck with his power, because otherwise he’s got things set up just fine. Folks are either on his side or they’re afraid of him. He’s the one frog who has proclaimed himself King Log, and thus all he needs to fear is the frogs in the pond climbing on him all at once and making the log look less like a throne—or the arrival of a water snake.
If he likes Trump, it’s on some level simply a matter of recognition, looking in the mirror and saying “Don’t you look fine, you handsome devil”. He gets away with the same things: talking about how great America was when we knew right from wrong while he grabs women by the pussy and wipes himself with the Constitution. It’s a vision of power that is direct and personal and that scales up as far as it needs to and down to the family home down the lane.
And the problem really is that if in a county nearby Clay County there’s a sheriff who is benevolent and highly ethical, a kind of Atticus Finch with a badge—#NotAllSheriffs—the genuine attraction of this vision of power becomes plain. Within the boundaries of this fractal universe, there’s always the opportunity of acting directly, without all these bothersome forms and procedures and institutions. A good man acts directly for the good of his people and protects them from harm, a bad man acts directly for himself. And perhaps some bad men act directly for all the bad people in their domain. A rising tide floats all the boats, and drowns all the unfortunates who are just trying to dog-paddle through the phases of every moon. Every warlord, every dictator, has his scions, whether they’re there to share in the spoils or simply because they believe in this kind of power.
Thomas Edsall today complains once again that we are being politically consumed by “gut-level hatred”, that we now read everything in our lives against a sharply manichean backdrop where everything a person does, likes, hopes for, says, lives, immediately places that person in one of two camps and immediately makes that person hated in every way by the other camp. Two fractal patterns running up and down the scale of American life. Increasingly I guess I say to Edsall, “well, perhaps that’s the way it is”, that this is not an illusion or a media narrative, that there are things to gut-level hate out there in the world. Twenty years ago it was an illusion: there was a majority—or at least a large proportion—of Americans who were purple-ish in their politics, whose lives weren’t primarily referenced to an affinity that they would deem ‘political’, who crossed class and spatial boundaries more easily. That ended because people with power decided to call everyone home to them, to take away our choices—all kinds of choices.
It is not as if in my fractal-land, power is incorruptible, and there is no sexual misconduct. But there are more ways to constrain power, there are more inhibitions about using power, there is more complexity and institutional density around power. That is not all to the good. It’s why the world within this fractal never gets direct action, it’s why it’s hard to understand why things change or who decided to do this or that. It’s a world where there are shadow economies that can’t be seen or analyzed, where invisible hands push, pull and prod on ostensibly consultative or open processes of decision-making.
But there’s still a difference between warlordism and neoliberalism, if it’s dueling isms fired at high noon by gut-level hatreds. I’d give my life to see the worst aspects of the world I live in put behind us once and for all, but in a warlord’s world, I strongly suspect I’d never have that life to give.