Requiem for a Sensei, Democrats, and Democracy
James Howard Kunstler's transformation into Trumpism offers clues into the demonization of the "enemies within." We can still stave off Civil War 2, but so far, we seem only to be itching for it.
Of all the writers who’ve influenced my thinking and scribbling over the years, so far I know of only one who has succumbed to Trumpism. And while he is not in the first tier of my influences, he was not far beneath that plateau. This would be James Howard Kunstler, the internal combustion engine-hating master of anti-fossil fuel screeds and lover of walkable cities and unspoiled pastoral vistas.
Sometime after the 1994 publication of his non-fiction masterpiece The Geography of Nowhere, Kunstler explained its rationale:
"Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work."
Having grown up in both Houston and the possibly even more developer-ravaged Nashville, with a year here and there in ever-booming Austin, and then enjoying a taste of life in Europe, those words really resonated with me, as did his book, which contained page after page of electrifying prose like this:
Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last 50 years and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading: the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the 'gourmet mansardic' junk-food joints, the Orwellian office 'parks' featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call 'growth.' "
In the decade after this book’s publication and the mid-2000s, Kunstler became a leading mouthpiece for the “Peak Oil” movement, which posited that the world was rapidly running out of petroleum and was hurtling fast toward a reckoning for which it was ill-prepared. He espoused variations on this theory in his book (The Long Emergency) and on his Clusterfuck Nation blog. Those endeavors brought him attention from both friends and foes — among his speaking engagements were not just appearances in front of environment groups but also at places like Texas A&M and another in Houston, for Kunstler, America’s Belly of the Beast. In 2007, he was a featured speaker at a Peak Oil conference and was put up at downtown’s Hilton Americas Hotel.
To say the Bayou City left a bad impression upon him is to say Genghis Khan was a tad on the ambitious side:
“It is hard to imagine a more horrifying urban construct than this anti-city in the malarial swamps just off the Gulf of Mexico. And it is hard to conceive of a more desolate and depressing urban district, even of such an anti-city, than the utter wasteland around Houston’s convention center.”
Remember, this was before Discovery Green existed. Back to his rant:
“Luckily, we didn’t have to enter the convention center itself across the street -- a baleful megastructure the size of three aircraft carriers, adorned with massive air-conditioning ducts to counter Houston’s gym-sock-like climate. And when I say ‘street’ you understand we are talking about four or six-laners, with no curbside parking, which is the norm for this town. The effect is that every street behaves like an extension of the freeway at the expense of pedestrians – but pedestrians have been eliminated anyway because in ninety percent of Houston’s so-called downtown of glass towers there are no shops or restaurants at the ground-floor level, only blank walls, air-conditioning vents, parking ramps, and landscaping fantasias. We were informed that in parts of downtown there existed a network of air-conditioned underground corridors with shopping, but that everything in it closed at 7 p.m. when the last office workers straggled home. Anyway, none of it extended as far as the convention center. The rest of the district was devoted to surface parking.”
He went on to discuss how our lack of zoning is no better than strict zoning as a method of urban planning, eviscerate the aesthetics of the George R. Brown:
It has often been stated that Houston’s ghastly development pattern comes from having no official zoning laws. But all it really proves is that you can achieve the same miserable results of typical American boneheaded zoning with no zoning – as long as your don’t give a shit how people feel in their daily environments.
The convention center itself, though, demonstrated something beyond even that degree of thoughtlessness. Its pharaonic hugeness was a metaphor for the fatal grandiosity at the heart of contemporary life in American today, the utter disregard for a scale of human activity consistent with what the planet has to offer within its ecological limits – and of course the oil issue was at the center of that story.
And finally, Kunstler moved on to a reading of the Chron, citing a litany of Bayou City bedlam he seemed to imply proved his point: that a hideous built environment resulted in unimaginable acts of deranged madness:
“Oh, one final thing about Houston life per se. Judging by the local items in the daily newspaper, the so-called city enjoys a level of mayhem that makes Baghdad look like a Sussex garden party. Sample headlines: “10 Charged in Burglary Spree,” “Pit Bull Shot Dead After Pony Attack,” “Jury Gives Man Life in Carjacking Death,” “Two Killed in Home Invasion.” One particularly insane story told of a man who shot and stabbed a visiting friend who ‘dissed’ his dog. We didn’t see any of that action around the convention center's Hilton Americas, where the ASPO conference actually took place, but the news didn’t exactly make you want to venture out beyond the lobby. Anyway, you couldn’t buy a stick of gum within a mile walk of the place, and the thought of traipsing past all those surface parking lots in 90-degree heat was like an invitation to reenact the Bataan Death March.”
Again, pre-Discovery Green, the man had a point. Only a few weeks before his visit, I had the insane idea of a weekend staycation with Jacqueline and toddler John Henry in that same Hilton Americas One “highlight”: our sheer terror in getting caught in a vicious electrical storm between our dinner destination (Josephine’s Italian restaurant; RIP) and the shelter of the Hilton Americas, scarcely a tree to cower under as we dodged lightning bolts streaking down to the asphalt parking prairies that stretched for seeming miles in every direction. (I can pinpoint the exact date; not long after we made it back to our room, we lucked into Marvin Zindler’s final broadcast, literally delivered from his deathbed at MD Anderson, him blissfully unaware that another Houston muckraker almost beat him to the grave along with his whole family in a parking lot five miles up Main.)
Anyway, that’s a hell of a tangent…Back to Kunstler.
At first I agreed with his assessment of Peak Oil but the more his jeremiads I read, the more I began to detect an unseemly and downright ghoulish aspect to his dystopian futurism. The man positively seemed to be rooting for Armageddon, often as not, and while in my darker moods I sometimes long for meteors to obliterate certain people or even entire populations, these fantasies of mine are generally confined to individuals like Elon Musk or Musk along with the rest of Silicon Valley.
Meaning, not the entire planet.
And after I’d read one too many such gleefully doom-laden rants, I got on with my life and sort of forgot about him, as a living writer, though never able to shed his influence. Not that I wanted to, then or now: I hold the same beliefs about the ills of America as a hideous and shoddy built environment today that I did then, and The Geography of Nowhere was of great comfort, a balm against incipient madness, just as The Daily Show was a tonic against Dubya’s Decade-long Daily Double of Downers.
And my Kunstler hiatus persisted for a decade or more until one day in 2019 I idly checked in on this old sensei of mine, and…
I soon discovered that the Democratic Party had joined the GOP in his line of fire. Which was fine — by that point, I too had veered away hard to the left of its mainstream as well, or it had had veered to the right of me. Take your pick.
Anyway, back in 2010, he was writing things like while “Republicans gravitate toward superstition and the traditional devices of improvident religious authorities — persecution of the weak, torture, denial of due process, and dogmas designed to spread hatred,” Democrats, at the very least, “tended to oppose institutional cruelty and injustice, and notice that it has also been the party for keeping religion out of government."
Fast forward to the final years of that damnable decade and Kunstler had taken to calling Donald Trump, of all people, the “Golden Golem of Greatness” and calling for mass arrests of everyone from Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to Hillary Clinton to Robert Mueller to, ….basically the entire Democratic Party apparatus and its flunkies in the Deep State.
You could see the seeds planted in 2015, when he explained his disillusionment with the Democratic Party to which he had long been a card-carrying member thusly:
But the Clinton turning point was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which opened the door to an orgy of financial mischief so arrant and awful, and to a plague of corruption so broad and deep, that American life is now pitching into a long emergency.
Add to that the signal failures of Barack Obama: 1) no prosecution or attempted regulation of widespread financial misdeeds 2) no effort to counter the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allows corporations to buy elections; 3) no end to dubious military operations in distant lands, and 4) healthcare “reform” that only fortified the existing rackets — take all that together and you can only recoil from whatever it means to be a Democrat.
And now the return of Hillary, gliding above the election arena like Rodan the Flying Reptile — caw! caw! Get me outa here! It’s not just her, of course. It’s the whole disgusting circus parade of identity politics, and PC witch-hunting, and trans-sex drum-beating, and girl-lugging-a-mattress-around-campus idiocy, and blame-it-all-on-Whitey whinging, and drone-strike-du-jour warfare, and out-of-control NSA surveillance monkey business, plus throw in the outrageous scams of “civil forfeiture” under a president who was supposedly a professor of constitutional law — the list of Democratic-sponsored absurdities and turpitudes gives me the vapors.
He most especially and personally loathed the identity politics aspect, and came to blame it for his steep decline in income from book sales and speaking fees. He began to rant with real venom against “cancel culture” as only one who believed himself canceled can. Per Wikipedia, he claimed in one interview to be making only a few thousand dollars yearly. (He has since discovered Patreon and is now making $3,562 monthly. Not bad, but not the killing some are bringing down. The two hosts and producer of my beloved True Anon podcast are raking in about $66k/monthly after less than two years on the air.
At any rate, while he retained his bile for both the Democrats and the Republicans as institutions, Trump fritzed his brain completely. James Howard Kunstler has somehow come to see this frazzle-haired heffalump and avatar of gaudy, gilt-edged avarice and base hoggishness as a titanic John Galt like figure, the One Man capable of cleaning out the Augean Stables of the DC Swamp.
And his audience went with him. That doom-laden chorus from his Peak Oil diatribes morphed into giddy cheerleaders for the Donald as he lurched from one harebrained, greed-stained crisis to another like Inspector Clouseau in a clunky disguise. It was breathtaking in its willful and desperate suspension of disbelief to see these hundreds of former radical American dissidents desperately latch on to Trump like he was a floating Igloo cooler in hurricane storm surge waters, their last chance at survival in a tidal wave that had caught them unawares.
And it was here, among those commenters, that I began to understand, to a degree, the mind of the Obama-Trump voter.
Please note I do not sympathize wholly with these disaffected Baby Boomers. But in reading comment after comment, I came to understand how so many once idealistic, well-meaning mainstream Democrats came slowly to a place where they would just as soon Burn It All Down. (Wild-eyed Q Anon-addled Ashli Bobbitt, the Air Force vet who caught a Capitol Police bullet in the jugular at the Capitol Insurrection on January 6, herself voted for the Hope & Change that never came after 2008.)
A lengthy selection follows:
FallenHero:
I think I speak for many who are on the right, alt-right, white or male when I say this doesn’t feel like our country and we are now hated citizens in our own land. I was born into a heavy Democrat family, union and all that, and I believed many of the core OLD democrat values: anti-war, pro-environment, pro-worker – of course we have not seen those values espoused for 20 years. Obama paid some small lip service before proceeding to disregard everything and switch hard into identity politics.
YoHannon:
Me too. We were Union. On the walls of family home were pictures of JFK, Jesus Christ, and my Uncle, a priest. I was a staunch Democrat – until they spat in our faces.
abbybwood :
I was running for Congress in 1992 and was deep into the thick of Democrat politics here in Southern California.
There was a big hoop-tee-doo here at a swank hotel ballroom and I had been invited as a candidate.
But I was also doing research on Bill Clinton and his Mena, Arkansas cocaine trafficking/South American troop training operation along with Poppy Bush.
Terry Reed, the author of “Compromised” actually showed up to my house one night and did an interview with me and an associate of mine. Sarah McClenden (who I am proud to say endorsed me) actually asked Bill Clinton about Mena at a press conference and he denied all.
So I knew Bill Clinton was out in the hallway of the shindig waiting to be introduced and I made my way through his detail and started asking him questions about Mena. He shifted back and forth, tried to pull his charm on me but I pressed on. Finally his face turned beet red and I was scooted away.
That was the day he made a big DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) speech and we all knew this would be a huge shift in the party away from being anti-war, pro-environment, pro-union, Medicare for All etc.
After he was elected and gutted Glass-Steagall in 1999? the Democrat/Corporate/Big Banking coup was in full steam ahead mode.
But being a fool I fell for the whole Obama schtick TWICE then when they had the gall to try to crown the criminal Hillary Queen that was when I walked away from the Democrat Party for good and supported Trump. Not because I supported him, but because I really wanted to be a part of sticking it to her.
emmewood:
Abby wood, your political journey is similar to my own, minus a run for political office. Raised by lifelong pro-union democrats, who became anti-war as a result of serving in WW2 and watching Viet Nam unfold. Pro Medicare for all and pro environment in the sense of conserving resources and cleaning up our messes. Think Jimmy Carter’s learn to live well with less, not the 4IR high tech gizmos and gadgets being touted as the solutions to our energy woes today.
That party disappeared, bit by bit, mostly during the Clinton years. And it is not coming back. The progressives say they will push the Biden administration to the left, but other than M4A, their agenda is identity politics and techno fabulous energy solutions. The whole Build Back Better schtick. The question is, better for whom? Not us, I suspect.
Islander:
This parallels very closely my own trajectory. I come from a very liberal background. Father pacifist/socialist, mother. I would never had dreamed of voting for a Repug!! Even though we all hated Johnson—remember how much we hated him?—I would NEVER have voted Repug!!!
I saw what was going on under Bill Clinton but couldn’t put the three worst things that went down on his “watch”—Glass-Steagall, NAFTA, welfare reform (at that time I couldn’t comprehend the significance of the attack on Yugoslavia)—into a bigger context. It was only when the s— hit the fan with the Maidan, with Syria, then with the Hillary candidacy—that I became really disgusted with the Dem Party and decided to vote for Trump just to put a wrench in the Hillary works!! I am from a blue state, so it was just a gesture to weaken her expected mandate. Ha ha!!
I was appalled by Trump, but even more appalled to witness the response to him, the attempt to utterly degrade him personally, and his voters, and the office of the presidency that he had won. I couldn’t believe the pink pussy hat BS–who was behind it? Then the Russiagate thing got cranked up in earnest. I checked out of the Dem Party.
I tried to talk to Dem friends and family—to explain that something was very wrong with *our* party and we had to fix *our* party, not just emote all day long about Trump. But these people only wanted to emote about Trump, not have a conversation about what was going on in the US of A.
Then came the C’ville incident. One of my relatives thought it was wrong of the ACLU to (at first) defend the right of the C’ville march to take place. Major rot, IMO. Not to understand that the point of civil liberties is that they don’t depend on your agreeing with your adversaries to guarantee their right to express their own views. Down the toilet. Trump was excoriated for saying that there was violence on both sides. Which was true.
More and more I saw that the “left” in this country was being driven crazy by Trump! What was doubly disturbing was that I actually couldn’t stand Trump either—for example, his kowtowing to Israel— but I was actually more disgusted by the obviously unhinged obsession on the left with bringing Trump down by any means, including torturing the public with the impeachment farce. They were never going to accept that he had managed to win the presidency.
Hence for me now the big theater about “concession” is ludicrous, after what the Dems have put the country through. It is really no wonder that Trump voters have been driven ever more mad by the crazy show put on by Washington. Topped off by suppression of genuine news regarding Hunter Biden and the general “canceling” of the president. Extraordinary. “Leaders” in DC are pretending to be “sane” while uttering crazy stuff like Nancy Pelosi’s rantings. Who believes that Biden is anything but an empty figurehead for backroom manipulators? But all of the “emptiness” and “fakeness” and “ranting” is hung on Trump.
SW:
[Clinton] was the Grim Reaper of unions, industrialization in America, protection from predatory bankers, hope for universal health care, and he opened the door wide to private prisons. But he is staunchly defended by most Democrats I know and Obama is untouchable.
Bear in mind, dozens, maybe hundreds more of the comments (and some of these) were tainted with dubious conspiracy theories (Poppy Bush and Slick Willie running a cocaine slinging operation out of Mena, Arkansas, together), whining about the alleged persecution of White people, a bizarre and kind of disgusting both-sidesism over the Charlottesville Hate Parade, and a general sense of a world passing these people by.
And yet — it is 100 percent true that the Democratic Party has shunted these people off to the side. They are casualties of the Neoliberal takeover of the Democratic Party, the one that consciously decided to trade in the waning white working class for the shiny happy people of the meritocracy all while retaining its hold over Black Americans, because, as was once bluntly pointed out to them en masse, that they had nowhere else to go. They do — as one Black voting rights activist said: “They can go fishing.” And one reason the 2020 election was as close as it was is that while Black did vote overwhelmingly for Biden, it was not with the same strength or fervor that they did for Obama in 2008 and less so in 2012 and still less, by a historic margin, for Hillary in 2016. The same erosion of hope in the prospect of change applies across the color line. (Biden failed to thrive in the enthusiasm department for everyone, not just White Bernie Bros.)
And while the Black vote in Georgia helped immensely in tipping Biden over the finish line, can it be counted on to do the same against a less odious Republican in 2024? Would Biden have stood a chance, Black Wall or no, against a generic Republican who at least paid lip service to Covid-19, or even against Trump, had that virus not descended upon the planet?
There are signs of cracks in the foundation of that Black Wall, and the loss of the Rust Belt as a reliable bloc vote proves that the modern-day Democrats are fully capable of alienating great masses of voters in fell swoops of neglect and even scorn.
And so while we all watch in horror as the Republican Party implodes in hate, rage and bloodshed, the Democrats seem safe for now. So safe, in fact, that while the US Capitol was still draped in clouds of pepper spray and tear gas fumes, Joe Biden was assuring us that America needs a strong and principled Republican Party. I still don’t know why, if he is sincere in wanting to better the lives of the Democrats’ traditional constituents. Why do we need a well-financed juggernaut of knee-jerk opposition to any and all actual progress? Could it be that Joe Biden’s billionaire donors don’t see things the same way as the 99 percent of Americans?
Just asking questions, folks.
Meanwhile, as the mass arrests of the failed insurrectionists unfold coast to coast, my schadenfreude at their comeuppances is tempered by the reaction and spin I am seeing from the Halls of Power. A Yahoo News article I came across today was, well, chilling.
After ransacking the U.S. Capitol and threatening the lives of members of Congress on Jan. 6, they walked down the building’s broad steps unmolested and into the mythology of right-wing extremism. Many wore shirts identifying them as acolytes of QAnon, riders in “the Storm” who believe the fever-dream conspiracy that they are foot soldiers in a war against Satan-worshipping pedophiles in the government’s “deep state” bureaucracy. There were also neo-Nazis and anti-Semites in the overwhelmingly white crowd, including a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt. Racists rallied to the Confederate flag of rebellion that some of the insurrectionists waved in the halls of Congress.
Yes, there was that one guy in that horrible sweatshirt, and I know of at least two Confederate flags. And the crowd was overwhelmingly White, to be sure. But the Houston cop arrested was Vietnamese, and I saw at least one banner of the failed Republic of South Vietnam in the crowd too. And many, many more flags for American states, but most of all flags for Dear Leader Donny. Yes, most of this crowd was likely pretty racist, but this was not a race riot. I find it more ominous that slowly but surely, American Fascism is becoming a bigger tent, welcoming in refugees and their children from failed client states like Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, and Venezuela. I mean, we have one such in the United States Senate as a senior cheerleader — Ted Cruz — and among the scariest Gen Z stormtroopers are youngsters with names like Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tarrio.
With President Trump only days away from an unceremonious departure from the White House, the vision of a mob desecrating the citadel of democracy felt for many observers like the end of a shameful period of norm breaking and tradition smashing. But for counterterrorism experts who have spent the two decades since the 9/11 terrorist attacks closely studying and fighting violent extremist groups overseas, the spectacle looked like something altogether different: the likely birthing of a violent American insurgency.
Retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal was formerly the head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the commander of all U.S. and allied troops fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan. “I did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaida in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence. This is now happening in America,” McChrystal told Yahoo News.
A radical group of citizens have adopted a very hard-line view of the country, he noted, that echoes the Lost Cause narrative that took root in the old South after the Civil War. “Only President Trump has updated Lost Cause with his ‘Stop the Steal’ narrative that they lost because of a stolen election, and that is the only thing holding these people down and stopping them from assuming their rightful place in society,” McChrystal said. “That gives them legitimacy to become even more radical. I think we’re much further along in this radicalization process, and facing a much deeper problem as a country, than most Americans realize.”
The article went on to liken this violent radicals to ISIS, completing the trifecta of Axis of Evil with al-Qaida and the Confederacy.
I agree with McChrystal’s characterization — both of the scope of the problem and it’s cause: those very poor prospects facing a generation of angry American youth.
The question is what is to be done?
The solutions offered in this article were two-fold: censorship and spying on the Internet and elsewhere, and a massive nationwide law enforcement crackdown.
Which won’t work, as McChrystal all but admits:
McChrystal has thought long and hard about what happens to this extremist movement when its leader exits center stage, and for the near and middle term he sees the potential for great peril to the country. “As this extremist movement comes under increasing pressure from law enforcement in the coming days and weeks, its members will likely retreat into tighter and tighter cells for security, and that will make them more professional, and those cells will become echo chambers that incubate even more radical thinking along the lines of armed insurrection,” he said. “So even if Trump exits the scene, the radical movement he helped create has its own momentum and cohesion now, and they may find they don’t need Trump anymore. They can just wait for another charismatic leader to appear. So the fabric of something very dangerous has been woven, and it’s further along than most Americans care to admit.”
No doubt such measures are necessary in the here and now. Triage is the order of the day. But what of the future? Do we really plan to jail and kill our way out of this problem? Because barring reform on a fundamental level radiating out of DC and every state, county, and local government, this will fester.
Those disaffected Democrats in Kunstler’s choir of misery tell us where we went wrong.
We need reforms in access to education, debt relief, better jobs, and an overhaul of our healthcare system, with an emphasis on mental as well as physical well-being. We need sensible regulation of guns and ammunition, for while the cat may be out of the bag in terms of guns, it’s relatively easy to make bullets harder to come by. We need WPA-style infrastructure projects, providing good jobs to young Americans and sprucing up our roads, parks, bridges, and public buildings. Housing should be considered a basic right, with shelter taking precedence over real estate as investment vehicles. Renters and homeowners should not be made to compete with billionaire investors in a global free-for-all.
And we need strong, principled labor unions. What we really don’t need are Republicans, strong and principled or not, delaying or killing outright all these vital and necessary reforms, and we don’t need Democrats who believe those national soul-devouring ghouls are somehow, against all evidence, necessary to the well-being of this country. Democrats like that are even more useless than those Republicans, as they raise hopes only to dash them again and again.
What Biden seems not to know is that we already have a strong and principled Republican Party. It’s called the Democratic Party. (Thanks, reader Ken Watkins.)
And we need to stop thinking of these radicalized young Americans as irredeemable racists, enemies within. They are products of a country that has failed them, no matter what we might think of them. That is, of course, unless you are quite prepared to jail and kill them by the hundreds of thousands or even by the millions. Are you prepared for vast tracts of the heartland to feel like no-go zones for all those who appear to the locals as enemies? An America of big cities and Pakistani-style “Tribal Areas”?
So long as Dems and the media continue on this track of painting disaffected White youths in shades of radicalized members of ISIS, al-Qaida, Nazis, or the Old South, and seeing everything through a lens of race and nothing through a lens of class and economics, this is where we will be heading.
The forces of wealth and power will win again, of course, but we must be ready to pay the costs -- decades of bloodshed and fear and darkness and the end of America’s lead role on the world stage.
Or, like I said, we could undergo some fundamental reforms in terms of access to jobs, housing, education, and healthcare. Perhaps that’s the more expensive of the two options we now have. Perhaps the bean counters have decided a low-intensity civil war and system of American gulags would be better for Wall Street, and Wall Street’s usual crack-addled quarterly report focused brains won’t grasp the big picture, that this is all or nothing.
Because I fear that most sensible of options will be the last we take up, for as a wise man once said, America is no exception to this universal law of humankind:
“Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”
Still don't understand shy many think a civil war and turn to fascism will be a good thing