Salon has published an article with author Jared Yates Sexton who believes that “the apocalyptic mindset is Republican orthodoxy at this point.”
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Sexton, who wrote “The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis,” places the “delusional thinking that drives Trumpism” into historical context – where people often descend into “paranoid fantasies in order to justify their worldview.”
Extremist thinking is widespread
Sexton was compelled to write about extremist thinking in large part thanks to his own background being raised in a paranoid Christian family – what he called a “really problematic, radicalized environment.”
Sexton has discovered, however, since branching out into the world, that the radical and paranoid environment that he grew up in was not isolated to his family or his community or his church.
Rather, the extremist thinking he was exposed to as a child is widespread, “not just [with] QAnon, but with the rise of Christian nationalism and the conspiracy theories that they’re telling themselves.” Extremist thinking, according to Sexton, has taken root in America and around the world. “The things that I had grown up with, that I had heard my family and community talk about – t’s starting to hold sway over the political process and possibly over the future.”
Life or death struggle
Sexton believes that the January 6th riots were indicative of a larger problem stemming from the extremist, apocalypse-centric version of Christianity he grew up with.
Sexton argues that people shouldn’t view January 6th as a one-time thing, that things will not just go back to normal. Instead, “when you start to take a look at what actually happened on the ground,” Sexton argues, “you start to realize that the apocalyptic mindset is just Republican orthodoxy at this point. It literally says, this is a life-or-death struggle.”
Sexton argues that the right believes there is a powerful and well-resources conspiracy underway to suppress the right – and that unless the right fights tooth and nail “it is going to mean the difference between living and dying.”
Given the high stakes, the result – according to Sexton – is a group of people willing to commit violence or anti-democratic acts in the name of saving their own spiritual power. “And when you take a look at it from that standpoint, you start to understand that these stories and these mindsets are precursors to something larger, as opposed to being the end result of something.”
Paranoia is nothing new
According to Sexton, “the paranoid roots of this country run very, very deep.” The colonialists “felt like anti-Chirstian conspiracies were coming after them,” which is why they felt like they needed to find some place for themselves, Sexton said. Similar paranoias drove the American Revolutionary War. According to Sexton, the Revolutionary War was not some “spontaneous uprising of patriotism” but instead was a reaction, in part, to a variety of conspiracy theories.
For example, rumors persisted that England was going to incite uprisings amongst the colony’s slave population – or enlist Native Americans in some grand army. The presidential election of 1800 suffered from similar paranoias. The Federalists smeared Thomas Jefferson as “an Illuminati conspiratorial agent who’s trying to destroy Christendom.”
Sexton argues that it’s not all about Trump; Trump “was a symptom and not the disease.” Sexton believes that we are now in the middle of a “cataclysmic crisis” and that Trump was merely “an opportunist” who took advantage of a moment and was able to turn it into “a consumer identity.”
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Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison lives in Oregon and listens to Dokken.
