Summary: In this chapter of my podcast with James Howard Kunstler, we discuss the growing power of America’s elites – and our drift to tyranny. 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.
Soon we’ll have statues of our own tyrant to bow down before!
“Are these the Crazy Years in America?”
— Are Americans ready for tyranny?
Part 3 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 third chapter of the podcast, with links added for more information.
JHK – That I think that’s a good point. How much of these battles between the Left and Right are the equivalent of an intellectual civil war? What might that lead to?
It’s an interesting question. I don’t have an answer. This comes back to what you were talking about earlier: what’s going on in the House? I believe it is all about power. They natter about RussiaGate, UkraineGate, and Trump grabbing women’s pussies – and therefore he should be removed from the White House. It’s just jousting. The actual words are irrelevant.
I think most people realize that by now in some way. They have tuned out. You either hate him or you love him. You think that he should be in or should be out, but the actual arguments are irrelevant. They started making the case that he should be impeached on inauguration day – so you know the actual arguments don’t matter. They’re just playing with the machinery to see if they can get him out.
JHK – Is there such a thing is the Deep State, in your view and how did it emerge into its current manifestation as something of an antagonist to the public interest?
I’m always amazed that people even question this? Eisenhower, who by the way knew about these things, didn’t use that phrase. But he warned about the Military-Industrial-Complex, which is of course the core of the Deep State. He warned about it in 1961. Since then is it has expanded by orders of magnitude. That we’re talking about whether there is the Deep State is, in my opinion, more a matter of we just don’t want to see it because it’s too scary.
I think this is a very common subtext to many of our discussions about our society. There are people who point to fairly obvious emerging phenomena. There are other people who have their eyes closed, saying “I don’t see it!”
The Deep State emerged from the WWI and WWII war mobilizations, combined with the mobilization to end the Great Depression. These created an unprecedented (in the US) political and governing machinery powered by alliances among our elites. During the Cold War, the Deep State took on a life of its own. Trump’s term is a milestone in its history. A milestone is a marker of no intrinsic significance by itself. It points to an important point on the path. To exert its full force, the Deep State has had to emerge from the shadows. As Gandalf says in Lord Of The Rings,“When the plot is ripe it remains no longer secret.”
The Deep State can only exert a fraction of their full power from the shadows. Now they feel their strength. They are standing tall.
For a clear warning of where we’re going, see this NYT op-ed: “Our Republic Is Under Attack From the President” by William H. McRaven (Admiral, retired, and former commander of Special Operations Command) – “If this president doesn’t understand their importance, if this president doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs {i.e., do what the Deep State commands)…then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office …the sooner, the better.” This is an explicit declaration of insurgency by the Deep State against the Constitution.
JHK – I did not cast a vote for Trump or his opponent. But I’m impressed with his resilience. If nothing else, he has stood up to an amazing amount of official adversity. Have you noticed that – or is that something that you might not agree with.
I believe that the Republicans have realized that they’re finished if they let the Democrats win this thing. They’re fighting about Trump like kids play a Capture the Flag – he’s the flag. They can’t lose. It’s an essential struggle. If the Republicans in the Senate vote to kick Trump out, they’re done.
The Deep State has moved against Trump because he’s a clown. They would never have tried this against LBJ. He would have declared special hearings, put all the senior guys of the Deep State in a special charter plane – which would have crashed over Iowa. He would have made a speech, saying “Oh my God, it’s so terrible” and declared a day of mourning. Trump’s weakness has brought the deep state into the daylight.
This comes back to your point. It’s a coup. Not a “coup” in a literal sense, but it is a tremendous assertion of power. Or perhaps the next stage in their assertion power
JHK – Do you have any expectations about the Barr investigation and the Durham investigation, and whether that will act as any kind of a corrective to these Deep State usurpations?
I’m not a believer that these commissions and reports are more than a bucketfull warm spit. Perhaps they will indict a bunch of people. But I’m a skeptic on that. On the other hand, I believe that Washington is like an iceberg. As you know, 90% of what’s happening in Washington is invisible to us. I know some very well connected people in this country and it’s invisible even to them. So something could come out of those that is much closer to your vision of what will happen than mine. I wouldn’t even be surprised.
JHK – What do you make of the whistleblower episode?
I can’t quite think of the right metaphor for it. They’re just manufacturing narratives. One of the structural strengths of the Left is that they have – not control, but dominance of the major media. This is one of the great requirements to control politics: to manufacture these narratives and sell them to us.
JHK – That was the next thing I wanted to ask. What we call the mainstream media seems to be seriously off its rocker these days, publishing amazing amounts of bad faith dishonest stuff. The Washington Post has been accused for decades of being the official errand boy for the CIA. You could say the same thing about the New York Times and the State Department. But the shamelessness of their dishonesty is just epic these days.
I don’t look at it that way. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it’s a choice of perspectives. It’s a battle and we’re now in the pursuit phase. Are you familiar with the phases of a battle? We are in the pursuit phase, the Deep State and its allies have won. They’re charging across the field after their broken and defeated enemy – us. You say “they’re off the rocker.” I say, “Wow, they are powerful!” You can see that they’re winning by the way they’ve liberated themselves from mundane facts.
JHK – What is it that they’re winning, exactly? Do you mean the narrative war? Because it doesn’t seem to me that they’re necessarily going to win the war.
The war isn’t about removing Trump. I mean that would be wonderful for them, but I don’t think that was ever the goal. Rather the goal was to cripple President Trump. It’s like when rich people sue a critic, or the sheriff arrests a critic. So then he fights in court for 2 years. Then he wins but he is bankrupt. Trump has spent like 80% of his energy fighting the Deep State and its allies, and this phantom that they’ve manufactured. They’ve already won. Trump can’t run in 2020 on a tremendous list of accomplishments. He will have to run saying that “I survive these attacks, and it has taken all my energy to do so.” That’s not too impressive thing. Imagine if Trump didn’t have to spend his entire term fighting the Deep State. Imagine what he might have done? We don’t know but it’s possible he might have done great things. They have won by preventing that.
JHK – Let’s switch to another kind of metaphorical bugbear: the globalists. Do the globalist, so-called, actually exist? Who are they? Who do they serve? How do they get away with what they are doing?
As we all know, the world has become smaller. That’s a good thing. Marshall McLuhan, the global village, and all that. One aspect of the global village is that it has one set of elites. They become a group – a class – because they realize that they have more in common with each other then they do with us.
I saw this in the Boy Scouts. I was on a Director and VP of a Boy Scout Council. I realized that it was essentially controlled by the 1%. The Boy Scouts used to be run as a grassroots organization by the local elites. The guy who owned the funeral parlor, the doctor, and the guy who owned 3 car dealerships, etc. Those people don’t count anymore because wealth is so concentrated. You have a handful of local leaders who now work with their peers across the country. They’ve developed a class solidarity.
It’s happening around the world. It’s a transformative event brought about by modern communication and transportation mechanisms. Their unlimited greed has provoked a great deal of opposition, which is beginning to get violent in many corners of the world. Peasant protests. …Peasants protests are a way for peasants to vent their frustration. They are the opposite of effective political opposition.
JHK – So you see this as being symptomatic but not necessarily meaningful.
They are meaningful because it shows that our elites’ power is so strong that there is no longer meaningful opposition to them. You see protestors dressing up as unicorns or twerking in the streets. That makes our elites really really happy.
JHK – Paradigms are known to flip pretty suddenly, though. Personally, I think we’re going to see that happen in the years ahead, and that a lot of the accepted conventional wisdom of the now is going to be regarded as ridiculous in 5 or 10 years. But I’ve also said that because we are floundering so badly in constructing a coherent consensus about what’s happening to us, that the time will come when the American people will beg someone to tell them what to do – and channel their energies into “useful” avenues. That sounds like a pretty authoritarian recipe to me.
You’re certainly right. A lot of our differences, our perspective about things, can move suddenly. But those are merely recognition of long term trends. You mention that we are moving toward autocracy. That has been happening for a long time. Look at Gallup’s Confidence In Institutions surveys that they do every year, there are 2 institutions that Americans have vastly more confidence in than anything else: the military and the police. The governing institutions by which we stand together to rule ourselves are at the bottom of the list. That tells me that we’ve already made much of the transition to an autocracy.
Another indicator: ask people if they would be willing to surrender freedom of speech. Large numbers are happy with that. Robust numbers of the young {see here and here} are willing to give up freedom of speech. They’ve grown up in the Administrative State, and are comfortable with its soft tyranny.
“Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man”
– Attributed to the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola.
The Left has been programming these kids since birth. Now they’re coming out of the assembly line, suited to grow up in a tyranny. Our elites are training us much like you train dogs because that’s how our elite see us. The Transportation Safety Administration treats us like dogs. You stand there in your socks, holding your shoes. The pretty young girls have to take their sweaters off for “investigation.” It trains us to be peons, and that the proper orientation to authority is to bow low.
————————- End of part three 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 leadership, about ways to reform America’s politics, and especially these…
- Important: A 4th of July reminder that America is ours to keep – or to lose!
- What comes after the Constitution? Can we see the outline of a “Mark 3” version of the USA?
- The Coming of a New American Republic – by James V. DeLong.
- A third American regime will arise from the ashes of the present one.
- Origins of what may become the 3rd American Republic (a plutocracy).
- We’ve worked through all 5 stages of grief for the Republic. Now, on to The New America!
- Our institutions are hollow because we don’t love them.
- After Independence Day, look to America after the Republic.
- Are there limits to institutions’ regulation of our actions?
Books about a possible future
The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook
