American Faithlessness

When an Insurrection Is the Beginning of a Crusade

It’s no longer the future: the year is 2023 and terror rules the land. Constant surveillance, a deadly pandemic, an app that tells the police you had an abortion—what was once science fiction is now mundane fact. At the same time: autocratic rulers, genocidal policies and rhetoric, feudalistic inequality—what was once world history is now domestic affairs. These literary entertainment values (science fiction as a fascination with the future; history as a compulsion to understand the past) close in on us here in the present. Between the relentless, can’t-look-back pressure to pay for your life—to keep renting your body, as Wojnarowicz put it—and the terrifying, can’t-look-forward curtainfall of climate change, existence has become a little cell where what’s in front of you is what there is: a life we don’t live so much as “react” to.

Instead of living, we dread. That is, we wait—for Congress to pass a law, for the President to cancel debt, for an ice shelf to collapse. A supposed constituent power, “the people” can’t seem to do anything but look—at celebrities, at violence, at news, at jokes—and wait. For the meteor, maybe the miracle. In place of democracy, the people respond to and participate in spectacles of desperation; whoever is seen seizing or antagonizing power is whoever constitutes power, and the surest route to being seen is to commit or to threaten violence. Without altering these circumstances, not only is terrorism the most effective political tactic¹; it is also our only shared future.

In his essay on superheroes, David Graeber notes their perennial reluctance: “They do not wish to conquer the world.” They never “make, create, or build anything,” and are “purely reactionary,” meaning they rely on villains—who, “in contrast, are relentlessly creative.” In these stories, violence is the only form of power. Politics, law, society—none of these are of much interest to superheroes, who “remain defenders of a legal and political order which itself seems to have come out of nowhere, and which, however faulty or degraded, must be defended… They aren’t fascists. They are just ordinary, decent, super-powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility.” In a parallel way, those who wish to alter the course of American history in the early twenty-first century don’t wish to become terrorists; they just happen to be ordinary, desperate, constituently powerless people living in a nation where terrorism is becoming the only political possibility. Maybe this kind of violence was inevitable in a country that quickly learned to present itself as a divine project, but I don’t think it’s too late to develop a different politics—to learn a new way of being a people and reimagine the space we make together.

Some definitions: 1) Terror is a spectacle of desperation created by those who fear to become invisible or irrelevant, relying on violence or the threat of violence; 2) A terrorist is anyone who creates, participates in, shares, or amplifies these spectacles of desperation; 3) Legitimacy is a modifier that often appears in conversations about terrorism in relation to other forms of violence, notably war and occasionally torture, which are assumed “legitimate” whereas terrorism is “illegitimate”; these adjectives are exclusively determined by those who do not fear becoming invisible or irrelevant; 4) Desperation is a state of being where adjectives like legitimate and illegitimate are themselves irrelevant; and 5) Terror is a language everyone can read.

Terror is on my mind for two reasons. The obvious is that, two years ago, the sitting president urged his followers to overthrow the government, and it was terrifying. The other is that the judges who sit on this country’s highest court say they are afraid. In his year-end report, Chief Justice John Roberts reflected on a case that taught “the importance of rule by law instead of rule by mob.” In 1957, when a federal judge—Ronald N. Davies—ordered the state of Arkansas to comply with the Court’s 1955 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education to integrate public schools nationwide, “Judge Davies was physically threatened for following the law.” Not everyone wanted their white children to sit in school with Black children, Roberts reminds us—“not everyone was convinced” that the Court had (unanimously) made the right decision.

Unmentioned in Roberts’s report, despite his repeated insistence that “a judicial system cannot and should not live in fear,” is the specter of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade and dissolved all federal protections guaranteeing women the same bodily autonomy as men. After a draft version of the decision appeared in May, an armed man was arrested near Brett Kavanaugh’s home and charged with attempted murder. “Nothing like that had happened in the past,” said Samuel Alito, referring to the leaked draft. He added that it “made those of us who were thought to be in the majority in support of overruling Roe and Casey targets for assassination.” Closing out his report, Roberts thanks the undoubtedly militarized “U.S. Marshals, Court Security Officers, Federal Protective Service Officers, Supreme Court Police Officers, and their partners who are on duty as we ring in the year, working to ensure that judges can sit in courtrooms to serve the public throughout the coming year and beyond”—all but kneeling to lick their boots. Thank God (old American stalwart that He is) our federal courts now feel as secure, as safe, as our airports.

There is of course no mention of those whose lives are in danger because of the Court’s arbitrary and transparently political decision—not its first and not its last—made possible only by Trump’s presidency. Nor, of course, is there any differentiation between Brown and the implied Dobbs—cases whose politics, consequences, and opinions are wildly different, as are their public reactions. But, in the neoliberal imagination, getting angry about desegregation and getting angry about women losing the right to reproductive healthcare are the same thing—it’s all “the mob” being “uncivilized.” There is no politics under neoliberalism, only tactics. As ever, the people who make these decisions or police the way we discuss them (or get paid to write op-eds about them) never have to face the consequences of being asked—civilly, politely—to suffer or to die. They rarely have to concern themselves with safe spaces, or sanctuary, as they only experience terror in anomalous circumstances rather than everyday life.

Graeber died in 2020. His work was always shocking in its prescience. In his 2011 treatise on coinage and human relations, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, he observes that

The last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world—in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives… To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a perverse climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy… About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

In the context of twenty-first century capitalism, Graeber’s description of an intentional, totalitarian hopelessness is what I mean by “desperation.” If catastrophe is the only thing one can see on the horizon, catastrophe becomes our politics—our language of participating in society and constructing the space we share. This would certainly explain why, after four years of bigotry, lies, economic ruin, sickness and death, vicious cruelty, anti-democratic statements and demonstrations, white supremacy, and sheer unforgivable stupidity, 74 million people voted for four more (in effect: indefinitely)—and many of whom still refuse to believe the results. Facts, logic, history, and even morality have all proven useless against the intensity of this extremism—which is exactly why the far-right finds it so effective to manipulate and agitate the deeply religious. Indeed, those who opted for president “apocalypse now” vs. “apocalypse not yet” have demonstrated that they did so out of convictions—that is, out of feelings—it would be perilous not to acknowledge.

Maybe we feel this desperation acutely because our country understands and presents itself mythically, not historically. Myth, like our “founding principles” of equality and freedom, is always and never simultaneously: frenetic agitation frozen in place. After spending the last several years writing about images, it’s clearer and clearer to me that, while the United States is a country, America is an image. It doesn’t matter that we’re no longer a democracy as long as we look like one. It doesn’t matter than we’re not free, that we’re not equal, and that everywhere we turn there’s a constant threat of random, meaningless violence: “May God continue,” as Nancy Pelosi said last November, “to bless the United States of America.” Continue. No, we are not a Christian nation, but we are a nation whose secular politics is mutilated by Christian aesthetics: religious in form, capitalist in content. What was once imagined as a sanctuary for your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, is now an asylum in the more disturbing sense of the word. Most of us didn’t ask to be here, no one will listen, no one will help us, and there’s no way out.

Violence is the specter that haunts all sanctuary, literal or conceptual. It also haunts all government. Violence requires no explanation, no persuasion, no argument. A victim does not need to understand their perpetrator to feel the force of their will. Like terror, everyone can read it. Left without an avenue to address grievances, to convince the guilty party of their wrongdoing, the victim of violence requires a safe space to regain and reestablish their humanity, their dignity. Which is precisely why the increasingly violent administrations of US presidents sow their legacies with the salt of dismantling refuge. America’s victims (or casualties), it is imagined, should have no place to go to recollect their humanity, to reenter the realm of dignity. To do this would be to recognize them as political entities, as persons with the power to speak.

As Graeber points out in Debt, physical currency (as opposed to credits and ledgers) assumes central importance in times of extraordinary violence: “It was only in the hands of soldiers, fresh from looting towns and cities, that chunks of gold or silver… could become simple, uniform bits of currency, with no history, valuable precisely for their lack of history… Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons.” Reading this, I was reminded of Elias Canetti’s “crowd symbols.” Drops of water, for example, “only begin to count again when they can no longer be counted, when they have again become part of a whole.” The forest “is the first image of awe… a preparation for the feeling of being in church.” Canetti extends these to nations: “Every member of a nation always sees himself, or his picture of himself, in a fixed relationship to the particular symbol which has become the most important for his nation.” The Swiss: mountains. The Germans: the forest. The English: the sea.

But money, Canetti writes, is unique as a crowd symbol: “The individuality of its units,” unlike ocean water or sand, “is always emphatically stressed.” During periods of inflation or recession, it can bring about an identity crisis: “It is no longer like a person; it has no continuity and it has less and less value… A man who has been accustomed to rely on it cannot help feeling its degradation as his own.” Each coin “has a clear and firm edge and its own specific weight.” Bills and coins signify fluidity, classlessness, mobility; they have no past. For Americans, it’s difficult to find a more fitting crowd symbol than money. For each person, one can ask, “Do they add or subtract?” In fact the government itself did ask this question for the first time in its history under the Trump administration. As the New York Times reported in November of 2019, the executive branch announced that it would “begin charging asylum seekers $50 for applications and $490 for work permits, a move that would make the United States one of four countries to charge people for asylum.” Rather than grant refugees sanctuary out of compassion or respect for their human rights, our nation would rather consider adding them to its balance sheet—another import to tax or, in the smallness of its carceral imagination, to confiscate.

For a state to view human beings as financial assets or liabilities is to demand that those human beings cease all independent movement. This, as Graeber writes elsewhere, is the true impetus behind global capitalism, which has “almost nothing to do with the effacement of borders and the free movement of people, products, and ideas,” and is “really about trapping increasingly large parts of the world’s population behind highly militarized national borders within which social protections could be systematically withdrawn, creating a pool of laborers so desperate that they would be willing to work for almost nothing.” A vision of sanctuary—a zone protected from violence, political or otherwise—would seem at odds with a nation that not only tolerates but exacerbates, through punishment and neglect, the violence felt by the poor, by those who lack adequate access to healthcare, those who are hungry, those who are unhoused, those who’ve turned, seeking a different kind of sanctuary, to opioids and other anxiety-soothing drugs.

These are lives, in other words, not offered sanctuary in their own country, but instead torment and humiliation. In persons suffering from trauma, it’s not only rare to achieve the spiritual moments of reflection, of meditation, that constitute a religious life—it may be impossible. So it seems to me not surprising but inevitable that an angry yet deeply vulnerable population that considers itself religious should feel that it’s someone’s fault that they are no longer able to form a personal, meaningful relationship with God². If what you are shown within this “asylum” of America is not plenitude and forgiveness and peace but scarcity, revenge, conflict, punishment—and if repeatedly your attempts to communicate have been ignored, overlooked, or dismissed—your preferred language when deciding to interact with your elected representatives, no matter who they are, might quickly become violence; in addition, you might look for extreme and reductive narratives, such as QAnon or other right-wing conspiracies (which our government has not only made legal, but highly profitable), to explain away the terrifying truth—that your life in America is as worthless as your bank balance.

An old joke is that “get out and vote” is the liberal’s “thoughts and prayers”—and about as useful against fascism as crossing oneself is against bleeding to death in some grocery store. But sure, go get that sticker. Call your senator. Write a letter to your congressperson. Tweet at the president. Voice your concerns—and find out just how much of a voice you have left.

Terror, then. The universal language. After all, from Al-Qaeda’s perspective, the September 11th attacks provoked a predictable and satisfying response from the world’s only superpower: economic and political ruin in pursuit of a twenty-year war that only created more extremism, at home and abroad. Another coordinated terrorist attack, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, was equally effective in generating and organizing violent extremists. Only two years ago, the invasion of the US Capitol in an attempt to maintain Trump’s presidency was successful in opening the rift in American politics even further. Making large groups of people afraid is, unfortunately, an effective tactic. In another register, the protests that swept American cities in June of 2020 after George Floyd’s murder were also effective: the spectacle of it not only transformed attitudes toward policing, but deeply intimidated the police themselves.

These two phenomena—the storming of the Capitol by right-wing extremists and the anti-fascist protests in American cities—are each a result, I think, of a certain vanishing credibility. While visiting Berlin in 1989, Susan Sontag told Heiner Müller that she believed the wall would be down in two years. She was wrong: it was down in two months. (He’d responded that it wouldn’t come down in their lifetime.) But it was clear to her, she said, how “the Communist system was finished, because absolutely nobody believed in it in those countries… A system has to have a certain credibility. It had no credibility left.” This idea of credibility is, I think, what people are arriving at in much more mundane registers across American society—in “quiet quitting,” for example, which has informed employers that the idea of working hard today for an ambiguous reward tomorrow is no longer something Americans are willing to tolerate. The Protestant backbone of the American work ethic is broken if everyone’s faith in tomorrow evaporates. But more broadly—and more seriously—credibility, or faith, is at the heart of whether or not Americans believe that their vote matters, that their representative cares how hard their lives are, that the Supreme Court is actually concerned with the interpretation of the law rather than a deeply conservative agenda, that their own retirement savings or social security will be worth anything. And there’s simply less and less that our government is doing, across all its branches, to convince us that a democracy based entirely in capitalistic ideology is credible, that it’s at all worth believing in.

In a paranoid nation with little credibility, it’s naïve to declare that terrorism—again, a spectacle of desperation created by those who fear becoming invisible or irrelevant—is an “illegitimate” political tactic³. A people whose voice has been taken away does not care if the only method of communication you’ve left to them is legitimate or not.

But it remains an undesirable one. Because of this, I want to re-conjure the “wall” Thomas Jefferson imagined and that the Supreme Court used to cite (cf. Everson vs. Board of Education and Lemon vs. Kurtzman). I don’t think it’s ironic to talk of walls in relation to sanctuary, nor in the context of a president who promised to build a wall between one suffering population and another. Jefferson, in fact, was channeling Roger Williams, who wrote in 1644 that, “if He will ever please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and all that be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the World.” Jefferson, too, had read and admired John Locke, who considered property to be among man’s most sacred assets, and who likened piety to financial prudence. For the rich man, which Jefferson was, to wall oneself off from the troubles of his nation is a unique, self-given kind of sanctuary—a place not even God could reach.

As the twentieth century dragged itself deeper into “globalism,” that wall separating church and state went from “high and impregnable” (Justice Hugo Black, 1947) to “a blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier” (Justice Warren Berger, 1971). Now, in the twenty-first century, an ultraconservative Court has begun dismantling the wall altogether; and in the meantime we are all invited to imagine that it is somehow “the other side”—the religious or the secular, depending on where you stand—at fault.

This year, another case the Court will decide is whether or not a web designer can refuse clients seeking services for same-sex weddings. Obviously, the Court will rule in favor of the homophobe. Here are two things that are true: it feels humiliating to have a business refuse to accept your money in exchange for a service they would happily offer someone else—someone who is not like you. And it feels humiliating to have to accept money to support something you do not believe, something that you feel mocks your deepest beliefs (if in fact you truly have those beliefs).

One wonders how much stronger this wall would be if one did not have to accept money, nor base one’s value as a citizen in the capacity to spend it.

Classical liberalism—the philosophy we are told undergirds this nation’s civic framework—did not abolish hell, but relocate it to earth: “With the decay of the belief that sin leads to hell,” as Bertrand Russell put it, “it has become more difficult to make a purely self-regarding argument in favor of a virtuous life.” Locke tied this virtue to money. The slaveowners who wrote our Constitution seem to have agreed. The Protestant ethos is one of individuation, of isolation—and America took that personal relationship with God to a civic level⁴.

The poor, in the modern American imagination, are undeserving of sanctuary; if they were truly virtuous, they wouldn’t be poor. Indeed, what seems to have eradicated this “separation between church and state” is not the feelings of the religious right, nor those of the vocally secular, but the desperation of both. That is, the degradation—the sacrilege—of being trapped behind a national border where the most important thing about you is how much money flows in and out of your life.

More troublingly, that wall has not only been dismantled but moved and rebuilt. Is it the rich who are separated from the poor. It is the wealthy who enjoy peace within their sanctuary while the rest of us prey upon one another in our “wilderness.” Instead of the shining city upon a hill, the United States is a slum where it’s easier to get shot by a stranger than it is to pay for your child to survive a treatable illness.

As abstract as this all sounds, sanctuary is little more than an amalgam of public, pragmatic concerns: decriminalizing drugs, universal basic income, regulating the tech industry, returning bargaining power to employees, healthcare for everyone, rent control, privacy laws, demilitarizing borders, abolishing prisons, restoring full citizenship to formerly incarcerated persons and providing them with the same housing and labor protections everyone else takes for granted, and so on—we all know the wish list and know it’s possible. It’s possible because the State, as a concept, is a unique entity. Nothing else matches even a fraction of its power—to organize, collect, redistribute, levy, support. (Part of what makes the US government so dis-credible is its constant pretense of weakness: If only there was something we could do.) A continued reliance on charity or religious organizations only further separates those who control the dispersal of funds and those who beg for them; sympathy is not sanctuary. It is only in the State that we establish and control our own sanctuary, for we are the State; and it is only via the State that we can lend this sanctuary to others—not only, say, to climate refugees, but to global climate policies that can reduce the suffering these disasters will create; not only to victims of civil wars in nations overseas, but to defunding our own military and relying on international diplomacy rather than show of force. With such immense power and wealth, why not give everyone, at home and abroad, a place to sleep, food to eat, and all the medicine they need, regardless of who they are, where they’ve come from, or what they’ve done? This is the only justifiable wall, behind which everyone, no matter their origin or status, their circumstances or their past, deserves protection from violence and suffering—deserves, indeed, their dignity, their humanity, and their political free will. My advice to legislators present and future, presidents now and next, justices sitting and waiting, is simple: return constituent power to the people and alleviate our desperation. Just because you deprive us of a voice doesn’t mean you won’t be hearing from us.

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Thank you for reading! If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ve noticed this letter is now called Entertainment, Weakly. Since social media seems less and less reliable, I’m working toward making this a “weekly letter against feeling absolutely hopeless about entertainment, culture, and politics, and the way art touches all of them.” Please tell your friends if it seems like something they’d like to read. And, as ever, if you enjoyed reading this, you may be interested in my books, Image Control and Some Hell. Talk to you again soon <3

1. I feel like I have to tell the eff bee eye that I hereby swear I do not endorse terrorism. I’m just trying to say that nobody should be surprised that Americans resort to it when all other avenues of redress or complaint are effectively cut off.

2. Of course, it’s in the far-right’s interest that they not see the obvious: that it’s the business class turning every hour in the day into one of potential profit, which annihilates any capacity for spiritual reflection—indeed, any capacity for having an inner life.

3. See footnote no. 1

4. The overall civic response to a highly contagious pathogen, in recent years—encouraging “individual responsibility”—has made this quite clear.