Summary: This podcast with James Howard Kunstler touches on many of today’s hot topics, to which he adds his insights. It is one of the most interesting I have had in many years, and provides a great introduction to our content.
“Are these the Crazy Years in America?“
KunstlerCast 322: podcast interview by James Howard Kunstler.
Posted with his generous permission.
Kunstler is a skilled interviewer, and led our discussion into some fascinating areas. I will be using some of his insights in future posts. This is a cleaned-up transcript of the first quarter of the podcast, with links added for more information.
JHK – You have also said that the spirit of an age can be seen in terms of its metaphors. What are some of the reigning metaphors of our time and how do they explain some of the disorders that we’re seeing?
It’s a fascinating question, one that I hadn’t even thought of. People interpret what’s happening based on their past. What we’ve fallen into is a Manichean or Christian perspective. We’ve broken into tribes. We look at the world in terms of simple morality tales. We want to find good guys that we can cheer and bad guys we can boo. People do not want to assume personal responsibility for America.
JHK – So what are some of the metaphors that you’re seeing out there?
If you look at the 1960s, Left and Right threw bricks at one another now (Left and Right). But now it’s seen in Christian terms. “They’re evil” or Devils. In the modern metaphor, they’re “Nazis.” But when we start talking about Nazis we might as well just take a picture of Hitler, add horns and a tail, and write our foe’s name on it. Political dialogue becomes impossible if you see your opponent as evil.
JHK – How much of is this a collective neurosis and how much of this is due to anxiety over the dimly apprehended end of the industrial age?
I don’t look at it that way. We’re dealing with metaphors to describe realities that we can’t really understand. I prefer the metaphor used in The Matrix films: it’s all about choices. People make choices. The metaphor I use is that we’ve – the American people – have gone to sleep. We don’t want to make the effort to govern ourselves. That’s a choice. We can try to change that collective choice.
JHK – America had a party to celebrate the end of the cycle, the end of the age. What was that party? How are we celebrating? Are we heading into the hangover stage of the party?
Let me go back to one of the fundamental differences between our views. I don’t think we’re at the end of the industrial age. I’ve written a lot of posts saying that it’s likely that we’re at the beginning of a new industrial ship. I think the signs are visible every day that we are in a period like Britain in the 1840s. They believed that their growth was over. Out of that turmoil came their greatest period ever: their strongest economic growth and greatest political growth. Everything became more wonderful for the next 70 years. I think that’s arguably where we are now. It fits my Roman metaphor – that our time is like that of the late Republican era –because the Rome Republic fell but the Roman Empire that followed saw an expansion of economic and political power.
JHK – I think one of our disagreements may be over how the future energy supply can support the kind of booming economic economy that you’re speaking. My view is that it’s probably not going to be able to do that, and we’re more likely to head into something like a dark age.
We are guessing about these things. As you know, the future is the unknown country. But, for example, fusion hit a tremendous milestone. It has been gestating now for 2 generations. But now fusion is attracting private capital, venture capital. These are people are uninterested in dreams. They have perhaps a 10 year time horizon. Private capital invests on the basis of very expert analysis. There are a variety of other technologies coming.
The basis of the climate emergency is that the late 21st century will be a completely coal-driven global economy. I think what we eventually do reach 2100, people look back on that and think “wow, those people in 2020 were really stupid.”
JHK – Maybe. I refer you to the old saying that fusion is the energy of the future and always will be.
Those sayings are fun, but I don’t believe they’re particularly accurate or useful. Some people who were involved in the early fusion program back in the seventy’s said that this was just a complete total waste of time now believe that they’re actually starting to make some very serious progress. People said the same thing about flight.
JHK – I will have to stand by on that. America today to me seems to resemble the Weimar Republic of Germany in the 1920s. What do you think about that?
I totally agree. See the cultural decadence and political polarization. The sequential collapse of institutions. They really should rename The New York Times the Weimerica Times. But it important to remember that the leaders of Weimar were survivors. They navigated through the horrible consequences of the defeat in World War One. They went through the great inflation. They were masters of muddling through. What brought them down was not the Nazis, it was the Great Depression. I think that might happen here. We are doing OK. But coming to something you said earlier, I think there’s a pervasive fear that we’re very weak and that our institutions and social structures are a house of cards.
JHK – How much of the gender wars of the past several years is just simple depravity rather than a meaningful ideology?
Again, we come to our different perspectives. I do not use a moral perspective. Maybe that makes me a creature of our times, exactly as you mean. The gender revolution is a confluence of modern technology opening up new possibilities along with the Left realizing its longstanding dream of completely dismantling Western civilization. I’ve written a lot about this. My early posts about this appear prescient. This is probably the greatest social engineering experiment in the history of humanity. I’m sure you watch just as many B-grade science fiction films as I have – and that they don’t always end well.
JHK – Among the dispiriting trends these days is the extreme confusion over social relations between men and women. It seems largely due to the loss of purpose in men and specifically fewer meaningful jobs or meaningful niche is in society, and in particular the inability to support a family. This has made men appear to be unnecessary and in some way an impediment to women’s happiness. What’s your view of the confusion of over social relations between men and women?
To touch on your economic point – Elites have always tried to crush the proles going back to you when we started growing wheat in Mesopotamia. In the late 19th century, one of the untold American revolutions, was that the elites – the one percent of the day – succeeded in almost exterminating the craftsman, small merchant, and small farmer classes. The people that Jefferson saw as the foundation of the republic. People fought back with unions and a variety of other things. As we could do again today. The phenomena you’re talking about are about distributing the wealth. The 1% is taking all our productivity growth.
JHK – Now let me interrupt you for a second. Apropos of what you began talking about, the passivity of the public and their unwillingness to take responsibility for democracy. I see a component of that being their willingness to roll over for big corporations’ destroying their local economies. I saw that, for example, in the Wal-Mart permitting battles of the late 1990s and early 2000s where Wal-Mart would come into a town. They do a lot of public relations and get the locals all stirred up for in favor of bargain shopping. Then they would destroy every business on Main Street. The public went along with it.
That is a beautiful example in miniature of these large trends. The Roman fasces is out of fashion but represents the key thing to understand about a democracy. The fasces consists of many small poles tied together to make a large powerful ax.
JHK – Larry, tell me you tell us the listeners what the fasces actually was.
It was one of the symbols of the Roman Republic. They understood that as individual people are weak before our elites. We are atomized. It is only when we have cohesion, the ability to act together, that we are strong. The fasces was a bunch of thin rods. When bundled together with straps and put a metal blade at the top you have a giant ax. Standing shoulder to shoulder we are strong. This is a theme in much of my writing. Look at men’s response to the gender revolution. We’re weak alone, but we will be strong when we learn to stand together. The same thing politically. The same thing economically.
Going back to your earlier point, which is I’m really going to remember, is to look at metaphors. Superheroes, lone rangers, are very destructive images.
JHK – Because they’re so unreal and they’re grandiosity that men really can’t live up to. Unlike smaller heroic acts they could actually do.
That’s true, but I’m talking on a different level. We cannot succeed as lone rangers. We can’t succeed as Batman. We can succeed by collective action, standing together. Another facet of this is the libertarian movement. “I’ve got my guns!” “I am a super Lone Ranger.” These are paths to dead ends. We must learn to stand together. This is something we’ve lost. It is one of the reasons we’re so weak.
JHK – I’ve said often that I remain a registered Democrat despite the fact that I’m at odds with the current disposition of the party. But the political Left has always been kind of a vehicle for the thinking classes in America and yet the thinking classes appear to have lost their minds – and done so worse than any other group in America. At least, that’s my view. Does that register anything with you?
Absolutely. I think the reason is clear. The thinking classes are in a {Leninist} sense the “Vanguard” and they’re – to use again another metaphor – they are the canaries in the coal mine. We have entered into – this is one of my major themes – the Crazy Years. In the 1950s, Heinlein predicted the arrival of the Crazy Years his stories. He said that rapid rates of social and technological change would destabilize society and we would lose our minds. He was 50 years too early. If you have read Heinlein’s future history, you look at the newspapers and say “Oh my God, we’re in the crazy years.” We’re now in a new phase: Clownworld. It is the next chapter in the progressive toppling of our institutions that constitutes the Crazy Years.
JHK – You said clown, as in, you know a clown.
Right. It’s like Weimerica (Weimer – America), ClownWorld, the Crazy Years. We have a lot of metaphors circulating to allow people to help people understand what’s going. I think these all have big futures because they describe what’s happening so well.
JHK – Let’s really dissect this a little bit because it is so hard to understand. For example, how does the Left get away with such obvious hypocrisy as declaring that “diversity” gives them a right to shut down the public debate, and that “inclusion” leads them to militate against freedom of speech? These are such obvious hypocrisies, and yet nobody seems to call them on it. I don’t get that.
As a small example of how we got here: Bill Clinton revitalized, reformed, the American Democratic Party with the realization that they could align with Wall Street. This was one of the seminal events in modern American history. Now the Left has realized that they can tie in with powerful elements of our society and – the sky’s the limit. You know the Left is seeking a massive expansion of government power.
I talk to people, such as climate skeptics, and they don’t understand why the major corporations – who are potential victims of this – don’t object. Why should they object to a massive expansion of government power? They know that they’re going to wind up doing OK from it. You know the Left wants open borders. Is there any possible policy that is better for America’s elites than a policy that smashes wage rates down, and brings in new people from nations that have client patron-politics (which they’re bringing to America). The Left has made some beautiful strategic alliances.
JHK – Yeah, except that the one that you’re just described vividly disconnects from the public interest.
Of course it does. But when we say we have a policy that the elites love implies that the rest of us are getting screwed by it. But remember the great line by Calvera, bandit leader in The Magnificent Seven
“If God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep.”
It’s all about choice, they say in The Matrix. If we don’t want to be treated like sheep, don’t act like sheep. If we decided to be sheep, let’s not whine about how we’re treated. Go up to slaughterhouse happily and smile. If not, organize. The machinery the founders bequeathed to us is quiescent because it lacks our energy. But if it is put into action, it is all-powerful. It requires us to work. Again, this is a very powerful metaphor – we were intended to be the crew of the ship America, but somehow we got the idea that we’re cruise passengers. We’re sitting here in the third class restaurant whining that the service just isn’t what people of our awesomeness deserve. We should be in the kitchen.
JHK – What institutions do you see failing most obviously these days?
I was optimistic when I began writing, but have become increasingly pessimistic. Some of my posts are milestones. I wrote one of those a few months ago: A new, dark picture of America’s future. I said that our institutions are toppling like a row of dominoes. There are 3 kinds of institutions in America: those that have crashed (like the State Department one of the 1st, in the 1950s), those that are falling now, and those that will fall.
JHK – How did the State Department fail in the 1950’s in your view?
China had very close ties to America. To the various Protestant churches, and had invested a lot of money in it. China going communist was a tremendous shock and surprise. And so they had the “who lost China” madness, which assumed that China was ours. The far-right blamed the State Department because there were people in the State Department, Foreign Service officers who were on the ground and accurately predicted the outcome. China was one of the great posts for foreign service officers, and got many of the best. Instead of being promoted for their tremendous reporting, they were demonized – blamed for it, broken and driven out. That was the end of the State Department as a functional unit. Since then it has drifted along. Now there are more people in there in the US military bands that there are foreign service officers. This is the key point: we’ve never been able to regenerate DoS.
It is a sign of senescence in a society where you can’t heal anymore. Every administration has realized DoS is broken and useless, but they do not fix it. They created the National Security Council as an extremely imperfect workaround to it. So here we are 70 years later and the darn thing still doesn’t work. {This makes DoD the major voice in our foreign policy.}
Now we’re seeing our institutions fall. Climate science is going collapsing right now. The banking sector has become a parasitic cancer. But you know they’ve metastasized grown throughout the society and they’ve become completely parasitic on us. Even worse, we learned in 2008 they were completely incompetent – a deadly combination.
Our political parties barely function. This is why Trump’s election was so important. It showed that the Republican Party is so hollow that a clown outsider was able to take it over. I believe that powerful people understood this significance, that our parties are Potemkin Villages in which anyone can walk in and declare himself sheriff.
“Although Nero’s death had at first been welcomed with outbursts of joy, it roused varying emotions, not only in the city among the senators and people and the city soldiery, but also among all the legions and generals; for the secret of empire was now revealed, that an emperor could be made elsewhere than at Rome.”
— From The Histories
by Cornelius Tacitus (56 – 117 A.D.).
————————- End of part one of the interview. ————————
Other chapters of this interview
- Kunstler asks “are these the Crazy Years in America?
- Kunstler asks “where are America’s leaders?”
- Kunstler asks “are Americans ready for tyranny?”
- Kunstler asks “what is America’s future?”
About Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler (Wikipedia) worked as a reporter and feature writer for several newspapers, before working as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he began writing books on a full-time basis. Kunstler is the author of 12 novels and has been a regular contributor to many major media, writing about environmental and economic issues. He is a leading supporter of the movement known as “New Urbanism.”
He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, and many other colleges. He has written five non-fiction books.
- The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape
- Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century
- The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition
- The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Cent
- Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon. Also, see a story about our future: “Ultra Violence: Tales from Venus.”
If you found this post of use, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Also see these posts about ways to reform America’s politics, and especially these…
- Reviewing “Ball of Collusion”, the big book of 2019 about RussiaGate.
- Political impeachment: Trump’s foes might give America a new & better government.
- The amazing Trump-Ukraine-Whistleblower story in a nutshell.
- Women are driving America into the future.
- America’s giant corporations are decaying.
- Climate science has died. The effects will be big.
Useful books about what happened to America
I have not found a good book explaining what happened to American politics, making it so dysfunctional. Here are some to start the discussion.
The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
Shakespeare’s Politics
The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust
