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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A SOUNDTRACK OF IRRATIONALISM  
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Blaire Briody
December 12, 2024
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ Reviewer Briody calls this book "a tightly written and
well-reported account of the rise of extremism in small-town America."
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Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of
Small-Town America
Sasha Abramsky
Bold Type Books
ISBN-13: 9781645030430

WHEN I WAS growing up in a small California town over 200 miles north
of any major metropolis, my friends and I often claimed we lived in
the “real Northern California.” The implication was that our
mountainous part of the state kept a rugged distance from the more
cosmopolitan Bay Area to the south.

Over the years, this feeling has fueled a population that prides
itself on self-sufficiency and living without government intervention,
even spawning a secessionist movement to break from the rest of
California and create the State of Jefferson. My home county of
Siskiyou is also a magnet for cult-like religious movements and
spiritual gatherings, inspired by the region’s beauty and the
freedom to express oneself in the remote terrain. Yet both these
groups can be particularly susceptible to snake oil salesmen and
magical thinking, a dynamic that became abundantly clear during the
first election of Donald J. Trump.

Far-right extremism, anti-vax campaigns, and secession efforts were
once obscure movements, but Trump’s presidency and the COVID-19
pandemic poured fuel over them and set them ablaze. In his new book
_Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of
Small-Town America_, journalist Sasha Abramsky documents the rise of
extremism in communities such as Shasta County, near my hometown, and
Clallam County in Washington State. “Loud and often ugly dramas have
been playing out on local stages with increasing frequency in recent
years,” he writes. “There is, in modern America, a soundtrack of
extremism and often irrationalism, transforming even the most obscure
corners of the body politic into potential battlegrounds.”

Abramsky starts the book with the COVID-19 pandemic and how public
health officials struggled to implement public safety measures amid
intense backlash, including death threats and intimidation tactics. In
what follows, extremists take over county supervisor boards and city
councils, and chaos ensues.

While the book covers the national forces impacting these rural
communities, the most fascinating sections are the ones where Abramsky
digs into the details of the local political battles raging in these
areas. In Shasta County, right-wing groups organize a recall against
three supervisors, one of whom is a solidly conservative ex–police
chief yet still gets voted out of office for not fighting hard enough
against COVID-19 restrictions. In Clallam County, an extremist who
peddles QAnon conspiracy theories becomes the mayor of the small town
of Sequim.

Much attention is paid to national politics, but we often don’t
realize how much the political drama playing out on the national stage
impacts small towns and communities across the United States. Yet
it’s typically within these communities that movements take hold or
gain traction. Abramsky makes it clear that when we ignore city
councils and small-town elections, the consequences are grave. “All
these conservative people snuck onto the [Sequim] city council when
nobody opposed them,” says Ron Richards, a former Clallam County
commissioner, “and then they appointed their friends to government.
It resulted in the most right-wing people you could imagine running
the city of Sequim.”

One of the most harrowing episodes in the book is when a journalist is
attacked in Shasta County after she shows up to a public meeting with
a recording device. She is quickly surrounded by dozens of hostile
attendees and blocked from the exit. When she is finally allowed to
leave, someone approaches her from behind and yanks a strap around her
neck, violently pulling her as if she were being strangled. She
suffers damage to her neck vertebrae and is so traumatized by the
incident that she struggles to function for months. Despite filing a
police report, her attackers face no consequences. Shasta County
“was beset by increasingly acrimonious and often irrational and even
violent turmoil,” writes Abramsky.

What’s interesting is that extremist, far-right candidates, once in
power, seem far more interested in their social media followings than
in the tedious day-to-day work of governing the communities that
elected them. The locals notice. Sometimes before they can even finish
a term, they’re recalled. It’s an encouraging end to the book.

We learn that persistent organizing, door knocking, and voter
engagement in local elections is the only way to keep these candidates
from power. And even then, it’s sometimes not enough, as was the
case in Redding, California, where one far-right candidate prevailed
by a mere 50 votes in a recall election. While the election was
exceedingly close, it showed that not all communities succeed in
rejecting these politicians.

According to Brandon Janisse, a moderate conservative who was elected
as Sequim’s mayor in January 2024, middle-of-the-road candidates are
successful when they “put ideology to one side and knuckle down to
tackle the hard work of local government.” They must focus on
“grassroots, baseline, everyday ‘what do our constituents need to
live their fullest lives?’” It’s an astute lesson, and
throughout the book, we hear from several rational voices on the right
like Janisse’s. The balance of perspectives takes readers out of the
liberal-versus-conservative trenches.

_Chaos Comes Calling_ is a tightly written and well-reported account
of the rise of extremism in small-town America. But more analysis of
what this means for the United States’ future would have
strengthened the book. How widespread is the retaliation against these
types of candidates, and can recall efforts succeed in other parts of
the country? After facing the challenge of actually governing, do
far-right candidates tend to fizzle out or, as the recent election
seems to suggest, will we be fighting these local government battles
for years to come?

Regardless of national trends, Abramsky provides hope in these two
distant West Coast communities. In rural Northern California
communities like the one where I grew up, residents feel that little
can be done about the slide to extremism. But Abramsky’s reporting
shows that moderate, reasonable voters and candidates exist in even
the most conservative regions. What it takes is hard work and
dedication from local residents to keep these far-right forces at bay.

Extremist voices are certainly the loudest—and most
intimidating—in the room. _Chaos Comes Calling_ provides a road map
to bring back reason and levelheadedness to our communities—and
hopefully in time, our country as well.

Blaire Briody is a journalist and the author of_ The New Wild West:
Black Gold, Fracking, and Life in a North Dakota Boomtown _(2017). She
grew up in Mount Shasta, California.

* Small towns
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* elections
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* right wing extremism
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* Trumpism
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* local politics
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* governance
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