I didn't read your original essay, but I see this follow-up essay, and your explanation makes sense to me.

We writers sometimes pick the wrong words. We really, really try to pick the right words, but sometimes we don't know until we get post-publication feedback. Our preexisting work may provide needed context, and we can also issue a follow-up with our explanation. That's it. You have done it and are doing it. This is hard work. I appreciate the lesson I am learning from you.

On a related note: I follow Jared Yates Sexton’s work. Though I haven't read The Man They Wanted Me To Be, that book title—I mean, the seven words of the title itself—does seem to me to oppose a premise of "inevitability," or at least logically he'd be excluding himself from that deterministic trajectory. In my reading of his work: He was raised working-class white evangelical in the Midwest, and today he interprets that kind of evangelicalism as a political apocalypse cult that he chose to reject (as per his other book, American Rule), and he is devoting his career to explaining where U.S. political badness comes from and what side people should pick. Hate, violence, and fascism wasn't inevitable for him, and if he really believed it were inevitable for everyone else then he wouldn't bother explaining his reasoning in such detail. So perhaps the Sexton sentence you flagged—which I agree has the problem you pointed out—may be another example of a miscommunication, i.e., something he ought to have thought through longer and phrased better and should phrase better in the future. Just a possibility.