Kunstler asks “where are America’s leaders?”

Larry Kummer, Editor

6 years ago

Summary: In this chapter of my podcast with James Howard Kunstler, we discuss America’s leadership. Dysfunctional leadership is the core of our national weakness. This is one of the most interesting discussions I have had in many years. It provides a great introduction to the FM website’s themes.

“Are these the Crazy Years in America?”
— Looking at America’s leadership.

Part 2 of a podcast interview by James Howard Kunstler.
KunstlerCast 322 is 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 second quarter of the podcast, with links added for more information.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_322.mp3?_=1

JHK – I had an interesting conversation a few hours ago with an old friend of mine. One of the things you’re talking about was the interesting and strange vacuum of leadership in America. That would seem to be a companion problem to the failure of institutions. People of real standing won’t come forward and take a role in the Republic. Look at the Democratic Party’s candidates for president now!

I prefer to look at this in terms of supply and demand. We want clowns, info-tainment. I have a post about one of the big insights – understanding how our politics relates to our class structure. The one percent own most of America. There is the Inner Party, the rich and the executives, who are our leaders. The Outer Party is the vast middle class, the professionals and small business owners that run America according to our leaders’ policies.

The Outer Party – the middle class, only wants entertainment – not political responsibility but the feeling of involvement (engagement) without doing anything. Then there are the proles (the “blue-collar” working class) and the underclass. They watch sports and do drugs and booze to get through each day. Once you see this is the schema, you can’t expect anything good from it. {See this post for more about new social classes.}

We do not want a Lincoln. If John Kennedy returned and said “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” – we wouldn’t give him 12 votes.

JHK – One of the things that has impressed me from watching Congressman Schiff’s Intel Committee impeachment hearings is that we seem to have this weird wish to control the Ukraine absolutely. That the State Department has become kind of an alternative government for Ukraine without anybody really saying anything about it. There seems to be a great deal of resentment that we were not allowing the State Department to run Ukraine instead of Ukraine running itself.

The American empire is a wonderful example of how our system has gone completely bonkers. Empires have existed throughout history. They are wonderful – for the people running the empire. Look at Britain’s looting of India. What a party! In America, we have an empire. As you can see on its frontiers, like all empires it seeks to expand. Ukraine is a frontier. It obsesses us now much as during the English empire’s growth they were obsessed with Afghanistan. You can say who cares? The people running the empire care. The American empire is special because it is unprofitable to the nation. It costs us money. Every aspect of our society is becoming dysfunctional. We can’t even make a buck from our empire. {See this post about our mad Empire.}

JHK – Yeah that’s amazing because the British Empire did get a lot from its colonies. We’re not getting anything except a lot of mischief, trouble, and cost.

Yes. The imperial machinery is a method for extracting money. Not from the foreigners we rule, but from us. It extracts money from us to funnel to the 1% through the defense contractors and such. It is a parasite on us.

JHK – Speaking of that, you live out in the heart of fly-over land – in the Midwest, in one of the cities of Iowa. Tell us how that is manifesting in fly-over land, as you see it.

I came here from San Francisco and was astonished to find out how liberal Iowa’s cities are. Also, I am astonished at how homogeneous this country has become. In my career, working inside the giant financial institutions, I traveled to almost every large city in America. This was back in the 1980s. They were fairly diverse. I come to Iowa and find that it’s not much different than California. It is not as leftist, but it’s very liberal. When I drive through this town it looks similar to a town in the San Francisco Bay Area. The American Mixmaster has created a fairly uniform culture – and it’s an increasingly leftist dominated. The centers for conservative power in this country are the towns and small cities that are dying. They are the old people that are dying in the congregation of the mainline Protestant churches, that are themselves dying.

JHK – I think you’re saying that you’re seeing a certain amount of dynamism at there as well.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Iowa is having a little growth boom from the exodus of people like myself from California and Illinois. This is a major trend that I expect to shape America in the next decade or so: the collapse of many leftist dominated urban areas. I don’t mean collapse to “Road Warrior” “Mad Max” conditions, but urban bankruptcy and other forms of severe decay. Out-migration is a killer of local prosperity. This process is already starting. Iowa is a beneficiary.

JHK – The lodestar for that would be Chicago Illinois. It is in desperate financial condition, and there seems to be no prospect for them to avoid going into a black hole of insolvency.

There is a black hole coming: outmigration, tax income falls, bankruptcy, rising crime, services cut, more outmigration. They’re diving into it with engines blazing. Light all the engines and dive into the sun.

There is a great article by Bill Bonner (he writes about finance at The Daily Reckoning) that I often quote. He says that sometimes societies decide to die. I’m seeing that in the way the Left governs these urban areas. They’re just destroying them. They’re now at the point where they’re in effect running through streets starting fires. {For more about this, see Visions of America if the Left wins,}

JHK – It is a kind of a Freudian death wish.

Yes, I don’t know how else to explain it. It is over my pay grade to understand. But you can see this happening in California, in Chicago, Baltimore, and St Louis. When the problems accumulated over generations from these government have become obvious the Left’s reaction has been to double down on their policies in these urban areas.

JHK – That’s also happening on with RussiaGate and its Ukraine offspring. I’ve often said that I’m allergic to conspiracies and I maintain that I am but I don’t see how you can interpret RussiaGate and its offspring as anything other than a coup.

Yes, the conspiracy metaphor works. But political and economic is collective action, so kind of everything’s a conspiracy. If I’m starting a new company, it’s a conspiracy because I don’t stand out there and tell everybody about it. If I’m starting a political party – if we’re organizing against Trump or Obama – the first step is to do it quietly, and muster resources and supporters. So I never understood the concept. I’m sure you’re familiar with the origins of the whole conspiracy theory thing in the CIA’s propaganda.

JHK – Yes, I know.

So I get it as a metaphor. But I think it’s vital that we stick with useful metaphors that are enlightening and point us toward solutions. I don’t believe “conspiracies” is one of those. But I agree with you that there is an effort to overthrow Trump by “lawfare” – that’s another very powerful metaphor. We are using these legal mechanisms in ways that violate the spirit.

JHK – It seems to me to be an extremely bad faith effort.

There are only 3 kinds of institutions these days. Those that have gone dysfunctional, those that are falling, and those will go. Our political institutions are clearly falling right now. RussiaGate is a horrible symptom. One of my seminal posts was on July 4^th, 2006: the death of the American constitution. It was very speculative then. I look back now and it’s “well, that was kind of obvious.” Our constitutional republic is dying. News of it appears every day left in the papers. They should have a separate corner for “next steps in the death of the Constitution.” {See my most recent version of that forecast.}

For years I wrote a lot about ways to save the Republic. I now fear that it might not be possible to save it, and we have to begin thinking about what that means. This one has lasted for 250 years. We’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Many of the features of the Constitution clearly don’t work well. We need to plan for a new Republic. Or perhaps we’re just going to lose it and go into a period of opposition until we can overthrow it and create a new Republic.

JHK – I could see a great deal of reluctance on the part of the people in charge of things to dissociate from this Republic and start a new one. I mean it’s a big task to do that in a coherent way. It also seems to be a little bit at odds with the way paradigms rise and fall. When a paradigm falls it produces a great deal of disorder as emergently something else begins to form. We’re in that period of disorder now, wouldn’t you say?

Yes, it’s not a smooth process. Look at Rome. The last several generations of the Republic were pretty awful. There was a lot of bloodshed. It wasn’t blood of the Roman people shed in defeat, it was blood shed by the various powerful elites fighting for control. We may not get that. Our powerful elites have learned much in the past 2000 years. They might act together to produce a new regime.

One thing you mentioned is how they we will react when is they see that happening. When Octavius created the empire he didn’t say “I just created the empire.” He was kept the forms of the Roman Republic. He called himself the “First Citizen” and kept the Senate. The emperors slowly phased in the imperial forms over 200 years. So we’ll probably still have elections even if we lose the Republic and we become subjects. We will keep all the Republic’s forms and comfort ourselves by the fact that we still have the constitution.

JHK – That’s very interesting. I can see a scenario in which the 2020 election ends up in litigation. This gets back to your comment a few minutes ago about the country being at the mercy of lawfare – a lawyers’ insurrection. I can see the 2020 election being litigated so heavily and deeply that the election ends up being completely inconclusive – and that we can’t have an orderly continuity of regimes. Do you think about that idea?

There are many scary scenarios out there!

JHK – Let’s spend a few minutes talking about your ideas, about a few of those scenarios.

The one you mention is very central. There are no clean hands in this process. The Republicans started this game by questioning Obama’s legitimacy with the whole BirthGate folly. Both parties have been taking turns knocking down the Regime’s supports. The Democrats are course now doubling down. The possibility of getting an inconclusive election is very high. At that point all bets are off.

JHK – That was the last election. It was not accepted.

In the important sense, it was accepted. Trump is in the White House. They’re fighting him, but there is no massive group of Senators telling Trump that “you’re illegitimate and we won’t pay attention to you.”

JHK – There is a massive group in the House of Representatives.

Well anyway, we could a situation where there is serious uncertainty about who should be in the White House – and the system glitches. We flirted with that in 1960, where the election was pretty clearly stolen by Kennedy. And there were people who urged Nixon to fight it out – and he just said “I don’t want to do it.”

JHK – …because it would be bad for the country.

Absolutely. So we’ve we flirted with this before. The Democrats push to do away with the Electoral College is almost suicidal because you can’t have an election with 300 million people – you can’t count the votes with a half percent accuracy. When you get a very tight election, you could count 50 times and come up with 50 results. We had an election in Iowa that was decided by 8 votes. They asked the loser if he wanted a recount. He said “no.” Being mayor of a city is nice gig, but he passed on it because he realized that we could count the votes again, and could just keep on recounting and never settle the result. That’s one of the reasons you need the electoral college: to give some legitimacy to the result.

————————- End of part two of the interview. ————————

Other chapters of this interview

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.