“It’s 2024: an election year. A year many of us are dreading. A Biden and Trump rematch seems inevitable. Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has called it quits, and Nikki Haley has suffered two consecutive primary defeats. Trumpism is strong, stronger even despite his legal woes. Will Trump even be a candidate on the ballot? How will the Trump faithful respond if he’s not? How do we respond if he is and he wins? The January 6 insurrection had many talking of civil war? Is the United States about to enter a second Civil War? Is it already in one for insurrectionist the long awaited day had finally come. The tree of liberty was due for a watering so the blood of patriots and tyrants needed to be shed. Though unsuccessful in overturning the 2020 election, the insurrection served as a preamble of what was to come the 2024 election and assumed governmental takeover by an increasingly reactionary and fascistic right. But is this simply fear mongering on my part, to bandy about fascism and civil war? Is that leftist hyperbole? Or is the threat of civil war real?”

Those are the stakes that today’s host, Andrew Thomas lays out at the beginning of today’s program. Jeff Sharlet, the author of A National Book Critics Circle Finalist The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, joins Andrew to talk about the fracturing nation and the divisive reality in which we live.

The Undertow comes out in paperback on March 5th.

Jeff Sharlet is the New York Times best-selling author or editor of eight books, including The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War and The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. His reporting on LGBTIQ+ rights around the world has received the National Magazine Award, the Molly Ivins Prize, and Outright International’s Outspoken Award. His writing and photography have appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, for which he is a contributing editor; the New York Times Magazine; GQ; Esquire; Harper’s Magazine; and VQR, for which he is an editor at large. He is Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College.

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