An Interview with Author A.R. Moxon About 'Very Fine People'
'Very Fine People' comes out on June 25, 2024.
I recently had a chance to exchange a few emails with writer A.R. Moxon about his new book, a collection of essays about the state of modern politics called Very Fine People: Confessions of an American Fool. As a fan of his writing for as long as I’ve been seeing it on social media and later reading it at The Reframe, I wanted to chat with him about the book and offer new readers an introduction to his work (stick around to the very end for 3 links to get you started).
Very Fine People is available now for pre-order. It comes out on June 25, 2024.
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An interview with author A.R. Moxon about Very Fine People.
Parker Molloy: Tell me a bit about yourself as a writer, the essays, and what led you to put them into a collection.
A.R. Moxon: When I started out, the main thrust of my writing was speculative fiction, and that's still very much my thing—my debut novel, The Revisionaries, came out in 2019, I co-wrote the fictional podcast Sugar Maple in 2022, and I'm working on a new novel now—but the reason I'm talking to you is because of my political writing, which has earned me enough of a following to I guess be a modestly prominent Social Media Guy. I wrote a few viral threads back in 2017 or thereabouts that brought me a sizable Twitter audience back when Twitter was still considerably more relevant than it is now, and from there I was off to the races.
As for the essays, they started as my attempt to make sense of a country I'd failed to see. It's the same reason that I was politically activated and writing twitter threads into the void back in 2017, really; I've been some version of "left" or "progressive" my whole life, but (as I now see it), that alignment existed within the sort of complacency that privilege allows. I'd describe myself pre 2015-2016 as the sort of person who was on the side of justice, but who thought that the arc of the universe would bend toward justice automatically, which was very nice of it to do, and which I found very convenient indeed. And to some degree or another, without realizing it, I thought America really was a shining city on a hill and a bastion of democratic ideals etc etc. Ho-ho-ho. I'd uploaded those myths in ways I hadn't really bothered to get around telling myself, until proof of the contrary truth so grotesque and incontrovertible that even I couldn't miss came along. As a result, the rise of Trump's MAGA cult was eye-opening for me about the reality, which is that American dominant empowered political/spiritual culture is fundamentally supremacist, and it was devastating to me in ways that it might not have been for others who hadn't been afforded such luxurious myths—others for whom it might have simply been another day of the week in supremacist America.
When much of what you thought was right is proved wrong, you can either curl into a ball or you can look around. I looked around. This was literally the least I could do, but since so many don't even do that hey good for me I guess. Most of what I saw when I looked around didn't match the templates I'd been handed, which I'd been using all my life without really thinking about it. So I realized it was time for me to start to work out new templates that did fit the reality I saw. I did this primarily by listening to others who are further along in their journey of awareness, and who knew and still know better than me about the reality of our situation, but eventually I turned to the tools I have at my disposal, and started writing it out—not necessarily new thoughts (because again I'm early in this journey of awareness) but my way of thinking about them. Writing it out turned into this book. I've found it helpful to write,and I'm glad that others have found it helpful to read.
As for how the essays became a book, what happened was that eventually I started putting some of the things I'd been working on into long-form essays on my newsletter, and people actually read them, which they didn't have to do, so that was very friendly of them, and most of them liked them, which was even less required and more friendly still. After maybe a year of that, readers started suggesting it would be good to have them in a book—enough that I put the question to my readership at large, and the response was positive enough that I decided to make it happen. And here we are.
P.M.: Obviously, the title comes from Trump's response to Charlottesville, but I wanted to know if there's a deeper significance to the title beyond that?
A.R.M.: I'm glad you asked! Yes, the title is (as you might expect) central to the overall thesis. Charlottesville, like the rise of Trump, was a moment in time when a lot of previously comfortable people started to contemplate supremacy in a different way, I think. There was something in the way public opinion and authority all the way up to the president seemed not only incapable of meaningfully opposing as obvious a hate group as can be imagined, but almost allergic to the moral implications of what it meant for so many of our fellow citizens to have found common cause with such a group. Trump's "very fine people" comment was a defense of the Nazis' cause, of course—using the presence and support of non-Nazis around their shared "Unite the Right" cause in order to defend the cause. And that cause was, it's sometimes forgotten, a defense of monuments to the Confederacy, and the Confederacy was an empowered campaign of mass murder waged to defend and expand the racist and genocidal institution of human chattel slavery. So the monuments are genocidal white supremacist monuments, and the cause is a genocidal white supremacist cause, and most of the other supremacies are implied and bundled in there too. It should be said, the niceness and kindness and regularness and normalcy of very fine people are indeed what allow any genocidal supremacist cause to rise. The very fine qualities empower and protect the less-reputable members of its cause to commit its brutality on behalf of all. And of course the Nazis did commit murder and other acts of violence on those days.
And the President of the United States wanted us to be sure to remember as a first priority that those acts of violence should not impugn all people who had gathered around a white supremacist cause, because—when the cause is supremacist— it's always important to remember there are on the one hand the Nazis who commit acts of violence, and then there are the other good people who are not Nazis, but who want what Nazis want and frame things the same way Nazis do, but who must be understood to have absolutely nothing to do with Nazis, because they are so very good and nice and kind and generous and are in fact very fine.
It's a lie, but it's a popular one.
In fact, whenever you mention that Trump's "very fine people" defended the Nazis, you'll always get people—even proudly anti-Trump people, good liberals who want to be sure that no matter what we do in this struggle against facism, we always play fair—who rush in to take on the fascist framing uncritically, and let you know that well actually Trump was defending the non-Nazis that marched with the Nazis, not the Nazis themselves. It's a distinction we are meant to find meaningful; a sort of indestructible exoneration offered to supremacists and their allies.
Revealingly, the exonerations that these sorts of fine distinctions allow are never extended to demonstrators whose cause is justice rather than supremacy. In fact, whenever supremacists commit acts of violence against demonstrators for justice, the blame for the violence gets attributed to all those who march for justice, not to the supremacists responsible or to the underlying injustice that made the demonstration necessary. This is a state of affairs that makes it impossible for a demonstration for supremacy to ever be considered intrinsically violent, and impossible for a demonstration for justice to ever be considered intrinsically peaceful. A litmus test for institutional supremacy if ever there was one.
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The supremacists committing violence against demonstrators for justice are more often than not agents of authority itself, well-funded and badged and uniformed and enjoying almost total impunity for their acts of retributive brutality. And those authorities enjoy such impunity not only because our leaders permit it, but because so many of us demand it, and see the violence committed by our militarized brute squads not as the threat it clearly is, but as safety itself—to the point that, at even the suggestion that we might stop funding and protecting those squads, many of us—even those of us who claim that we support the cause of justice in theory—find some reason we no longer feel that we can extend justice our support. Incidentally, the police are only an example. This dynamic plays out across any number of other supremacies and other abuses. For many of us, we can't pay the cost of defunding the police or any other act aligned with justice, as soon as there is any cost at all for doing so. We'd rather pay the much higher cost of funding the police, and treating the many symptoms of supremacy as "the way things are," meaning "the way things have to be."
And the question for me then is: what is that cost we can't pay?
I think it's our share of supremacy—whatever that share might be for each of us.
Trump told the lie of the Very Fine People because Trump is, like most fascists, a chintzy huckster, and so he knows what lies are effective and popular. The lie of the Very Fine People says the brokenness you're involved with has nothing to do with you, that there is no cost to pay for all the brokenness you see—not for you.
The revelation to me is that supremacy is, at its very core, a system of blame management. Supremacy believes itself supreme, after all. It uses its self-declared supremacy as the justification to harm and abuse and exploit others, and credits the profit it receives for having done so as proof of its superiority. Supremacy cannot possibly accept blame for the brokenness this causes, because if it were to blame for brokenness, it would be at fault, and therefore not supreme.
If something is supreme, it is perfected already; incapable of improvement. So, anyone who aligns with supremacy begins to see any suggestion of improvement as a threat and any cost of repair or maintenance as theft, and insists that any brokenness that exists is the fault of others, even while working to ensure that things that are broken stay broken, to go on reaping the unnatural benefits of that brokenness.
One of my central questions, in this book as in life, is, why can't we fix what is broken? I think the answer is that many of us would rather not pay the lower cost of repair, in particular the blame of it, and the unfair advantage we receive. We'd rather stay very fine people instead. We'd rather receive the share of what supremacy offers: the profits that attend being deemed white, or Christian, or male, or cis, or able-bodied, or employed, or property owning, and so on, even if it means paying supremacy's much higher costs.
What this means to me is that anyone who wants to align with repair is going to have to be willing to pay the costs. Being willing to pay the costs means being willing to see repairs done. Being willing to see repairs done means understanding what is broken. And, when I'm honest with myself, I know that not all brokenness is external.
Ultimately, the answer means looking within.
So this book asks: Who are the Very Fine People, anyway? And why can't we fix what is broken?
When I interrogate myself honestly, I often find the answer isn't so comfortable.
P.M.: Earlier you mentioned "new templates.” Can you elaborate on these “new templates” and how they have reshaped your understanding and actions? How have these templates influenced the way you approach your writing now compared to before? Like many people, I find myself sometimes still stuck thinking like it's the mid-2010s and wondering why things aren't just automatically, naturally progressing in society. Then, I have to snap myself out of it. I think a lot of us could use new ways of thinking.
A.R.M.: I think the first thing I had to grapple with was (before November 2016) that Donald Trump might very well be president and then (after November 2016) was going to be president because people really, really liked what he represented. There were those who were disaffected by politics and bamboozled by a constant barrage of false equivalency and bad framing in media, who were not really aware of what Trump really represented, and there were those who were understandably cynical and sick of decades of Democratic triangulation and capitulation, who stayed home (or maybe even threw a protest vote Trump's way), and there were any number of other factors that could be (and have been) dissected at length, but at the root of it, there was undeniably also a deep, abiding, energizing and unmistakable enthusiasm for the very worst of what Trump promised and the very worst of what he represented.
My old template accounted for this sort of sickness in society, but I assumed it would be handled by our national immune systems: our norms and institutions and laws, and so on. My new template began with a realization that we were a much sicker society than I had realized—a sickness that suddenly felt like it might be terminal. The immune systems I had counted on—norms and institutions and laws, and so on—seemed incapable of countering this it. Worse still, as the Trump presidency barreled down the bowling lane of 2017-2020, the norms and institutions and laws didn't even seem to want to counter it, or realize that they should. They seemed to treat Trump's authoritarianism and open bigotry not as a foreign object to neutralize and expunge, but as something that had been an intrinsic part of the body politic all along. Even worse still, those norms and institutions and laws seemed to behave in this way in large part because our population—or, to be more precise, the part of our population that those norms and institutions and laws regarded as worth listening to and representing—wanted them to behave in this way. As a result, we'd see that while obvious improvement and needed remedy was popular in theory, it became impossible the moment we got down to actually trying to make it happen.
Even people who despised Trump only really seemed to despise the grotesqueness of him; when it came to the authoritarian abuses he proposed, they weren't only on board, they saw these abuses as necessary, even intrinsic to safety. For example, try suggesting that the answer to ongoing systemic nationwide open corruption and brutality in policing is to maybe not fund the police as if it were a wartime army. Or suggest that maybe we don't need to spend all our money on the military industrial complex. Or suggest that a country that imprisons people for profit as part of a growth industry needs to engage in prison abolition.
A significant portion of some value of us want open authoritarianism, fueled by every kind of bigotry and abuse and corruption, and this portion of us was the portion of us that power listens to and prefers. Some of us preferred for all this bigotry and abuse and corruption to be less open, and to stay more polite and less embarrassingly overt than Trump was making it, but it was nevertheless exactly what we wanted, and if one wanted to know that, one had only to ask.
This effect seemed to transcend politics in many ways.
So—while politics are still very important—I stopped seeing our problem as primarily a political sickness, and more of a spiritual one.
I should be clear that when I talk about "spirit," 'm not talking about woo-woo ghosts and angels. I'm talking about "spirit" in the sense we mean when we talk about the spirit of the law or team spirit. It's something tangible and observable, when belief becomes collective and creates a collective intent, and that intent generates a reality that defines the range of what is and is not possible—what we might call "the way things are."
"The way things are" is something we all create, after all—or at least in a healthy system, we would all get to join in creating it. In a sick one, maybe the mechanisms of order would only pay attention to certain people and certain beliefs, and the beliefs might be unsustainable lies.
So that's what I mean by "a spiritual sickness"—a preference within a society for lies over truths, and a preference within society's norms and institutions and laws to show preference to those who believe the lies over those who tell the truth. I began to suspect that—while we should work for political change, and while we ought to work to make our laws just, and their application and enforcement fair—it wasn't going to be enough to simply readjust the mechanisms of our existing order. We were going to have to do something foundational about our underlying beliefs—the architecture of our collective belief that defines and determines the shape of reality upon which that order sits. And then we were going to have to translate those beliefs into actions that reflected those truths—this particularly if we are in that specific subset of we to whom our society's norms and institutions and laws show preference and deference: men, and "white" people, and wealthy people, and employed, and able-bodied, and straight, and Christian, and so forth.
So I started to wonder what these lies are, that some version of us all believes. And I started to wonder what the collective intention of that spirit might be.
To look at what the collective intention of the spirit is, I figured I could look at what it creates.
It seems to create corruption and genocide and slavery. A pretty bad sickness!
To work out what the lies were, I talked to people who seemed opposed to improvement, often without seeming to know that it was improvement they opposed.
At the end what I heard expressed were three core lies, each of which rested upon the next. The first lie is that we bear no relation to one another; that society is purely individualistic—which negates any suggestion of the truth that we live in an interconnected system, and allows us to see the abuse and suffering and death of others as something that poses no threat to us. The second is that life must be earned, and profit is how you earn it—which means that some haven't earned it, and makes all abuse and suffering and death that a spiritually sick society produces the fault not of those who cause the abuse but those who suffer it. The third lie is that violence redeems the crime of having not earned life—which means that when those who are deemed to have not earned life are abused or harmed or killed, the violence is not only something that doesn't threaten our safety, but represents safety itself.
And these lies seemed so intrinsic to people's beliefs as to be foundational. And indeed, these lies could be found in the very founding of our country. So I think of them as our founding lies.
This resulted in a new (to me) diagnosis of our old traditional spiritual sickness: A series of interconnected lies that insist that some people matter, and others don't matter, and that those who don't matter have not earned life, so it is good if they are killed; but even better if, before they are killed, they are used for the benefit of those who do matter.
I would name the spiritual sickness supremacy.
This new template led me to a few questions.
The first is how did we get here?
The second is where do we go now?
The third is how do we get there?
Thinking about those questions is most of what Very Fine People is about.
P.M.: And finally, is there anything else you’d like my readers to know? I’d like to wrap this up with a small sampling of the essays that can be found in Very Fine People. If you don’t mind, would you be willing to share links to some favorites?
A.R.M.: The only other thing I'd really like to say is that in no way did I work these things out on my own. I'm still a fool, still early on in this journey, following people who are much farther down the path than me. For a lot of people, my journey of awareness is still much farther back than the place they've been for a very long time, and I proceed much more slowly down it than they ever did. My budding knowledge very much depends on listening to voices that I had previously not heard, mostly because I had not been listening, so I hope that my expression of the ideas I'm grappling with honors that reality, and I hope that execution reveals the great debt of gratitude I owe to people who have been telling me uncomfortable truths to replace the more comfortable lies I've held within the spiritual and political architecture of my worldview. And of course, I stand ready to acknowledge and learn from the ways I will inevitably fall short. For those who are like me, newly aware of these things, I hope that I am able to put language and structure to concepts that are known, but which can often get drowned out in the daily tide of obfuscation and denial and complacency and cynicism that we all have to deal with every day.
On to the essays. Due to the nature of publication, the essays in Very Fine People are older. The oldest of them was published on The Reframe in 2023, and some of them predate the newsletter. Additionally, for the book, I did a certain amount of reshaping them from their original publication, so some pieces that first appeared on their own may appear embedded within a larger piece, and so forth.
I think I'd like to select these three as indicative of my work:
First, from 2022, a piece titled "The Supreme Problem," which appears in the book. I think it does the best job I've managed so far of laying out the idea of supremacy as I see it.
Next, from last year, a piece titled "The Owners of The World," which is about people who think that other people are their possessions, and what it says about them, and how they are fated to wind up.
Finally, more recently, a piece titled "Never Remember," which I published last year on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and which I think speaks closest to my heart about the current moment in which we find ourselves.
(I'll also mention that not all of my posts are about the politics of supremacy, even if it does make up the main portion of that work. I occasionally publish short stories and silly things, and if anybody wants a much deeper dive into the TV show LOST than they'd ever thought possible, boy howdy is my newsletter the place for you.)
Love it. Long live Julius Goat
I followed A.R. Moxon on Twitter (his Groucho Marx photo!) during the horrors of 45 - a lifeline of sanity. Thank you for the interview, Parker Molloy.
Never surrender.