The Ghost On May 2nd that great and eloquent prophet of constant doom, James Howard Kunstler, posted a new blog entry on his website that is worth reading. Sadly, I only caught up with it a few days ago, but it features the ominous sounding title of “Worse Than 1789?” where Mr. Kunstler floats the prospect that America’s elites are heading towards a French Revolution-style catastrophe that will spell their end as a social class. He believes that things will start disintegrating soon and will fall apart completely in a short time period. Although I do not personally subscribe to that timeline, it is nonetheless impossible for me to get away from the sick and dreadful feeling that what we know as “American society” is headed towards imminent and violent collapse. My blog here on this website – Civil War Watch – is called that precisely because I have noticed the same signs that Kunstler has. To briefly quote his article:
It seems to me, lately, that the crack up we’ve entered is liable to play out more gruesomely for our privileged elites than the orgy of bloodletting that attended the French Revolution. That historical moment was a sharp transition between old, settled, social relations and the new political realities of imminent industrialization and a rising middle class. The elites in charge of things to that moment, an ossified aristocracy, responded to rising discontent with utter feckless stupidity. To make matters worse, a great many of them were hunkered down in the fantasy-land royal palace of Versailles, enjoying what was for practical purposes a nonstop, mega house party. They must have thought they were safe 12 miles outside Paris.
And:
I continue to wonder how it will all go down this summer in the Hamptons where, like Versailles in 1789, the elite mega-wealthy of today cavort shamelessly in a semi-private fantasy land of status vamping for the Vanity Fair shutterbugs. The Hamptons are not defensible – unless you count private hedge as an effective fortification. Any bloody-minded gang of unemployed, grievance-maddened mudlarks can creepy crawl down the Sunrise Highway to Gin Lane with firearms bought at the Walmart (and modified to full automatic in the garage). What if hundreds – thousands! – of them get the same idea? Louis XVI and his homeys probably never thought the mobs would scale the ha-has of his fabulous estate, either.
Kunstler’s blog has the usual posting system that allows users to write replies, and not all of the responses were in agreement with his predictions. For instance, one user wrote:
Americans are so passive politically that it’s hard for me to imagine such a violent scenario. Nothing remotely like that–even peaceful demonstrations–have not happened since the seventies. Our bread and circuses keep the masses passified.
Another wrote:
Fat chance. American’s a little more than brainwashed monkies (no offense to monkies). If any bunch of cheese doodle eating morons can be run off a cliff like so many cattle, its them.
What I find interesting about this skepticism is the assumption that we Americans are such a docile people that we do not have a breaking point. I’ve had conversations, many of them, with fellow liberals both here in California and in my home state of Maine about the prospect of civil war and/or violent revolution in the coming years, and the possibility of such a terrible event coming to pass is almost always derided by them. Typically the argument goes that a second American civil war will never happen because, first of all, anyone, militia or otherwise, who tried to revolt against the government would get blown away in ten seconds (also known as the “firepower argument”, which you may read more about here), and second of all Americans are too lazy to actually rise up against the elites. These conversations therefore follow the same trajectory as those seen on Kunstler’s blog, with my friends arguing that our fellow countrymen are too spoiled, too addicted to their big screen TVs and creature comforts to actually fight back against the oligarchs.
There is a dark mood of pessimism that has hung over the progressive movement ever since the Tea Party came to prominence. We all know now that Barack Obama is not going to accomplish anything close to what he was supposed to accomplish for our nation, and the meager progressive feats he has achieved so far have been counteracted by his consistent selling out to the Republicans and corporate America. And that has led to a strain of thinking, visible during the Bush years but much more pronounced now, that lays the failure to fix anything at the feet of the average, everyday Joe Six-Pack just as much as it does at the feet of big business and the political class. Progressives in 2010 have written off the possibility that regular Americans will ever get off their asses to do anything about our problems, therefore they become just as much to blame as the corporations and the elites.
Progressives are still smarting from the George W. Bush years and the fact that their anti-war, anti-everything-GOP efforts never garnered the active participation of more than a sliver of the population, even though Bush and his policies became bitterly and widely unpopular. After all, where were those masses of Americans that were supposed to rise up and end the Iraq War? Progressives tend to view the Bush presidency as the dark age of American politics, the lowest and most horrible ebb in our history as a nation. Because they have this apocalyptic view of that time they assume that, because the American people never rose up during those most terrible years, they therefore never will.
I have some news that will shock some progressives. Are you ready for it? Here goes: by historical standards things really aren’t that bad right now, nor were they really all that bad during the Bush presidency.
“But that can’t be true!” some progressives in the crowd are surely going to respond. “What about the torture? What about the wars? What about the economic crisis and the warrantless wiretapping and the erosion of all our democratic rights?”
The years of 2001-2009 in which George W. Bush was in power were certainly a low point for our country in many respects, and I firmly believe that future historians will judge him to be the worst of the first forty-four American presidents, if not possibly the worst American president of all time. But the reality is that, despite his terrible incompetence, the average American did not suffer terribly under Bush’s watch. Because there is no longer a draft the average young American did not need to worry about being forced to fight against his will in Iraq and Afghanistan and the average middle class parent did not need to worry about their precious offspring being sent overseas to be killed. There was no terrorist blowback in the United States from those wars and because they were financed by deficit spending there were no tax increases to burden the average citizen. Practically the only inconvenience faced by the ordinary American was a dramatic rise in the cost of gas and heating oil caused by the resulting Middle Eastern instability.
On other issues it’s a similar score. Torture and the indefinite detention of suspects was horrible, but again, the average American citizen was not being plucked off the street and taken to Guantanamo Bay. Warrantless wiretapping was illegal, but again, it did not affect everyday life for most people. The botched response to Hurricane Katrina was a travesty, but the majority of Americans did not live in New Orleans. Bush’s mismanagement of the economy is the one thing that did touch practically all Americans, but then again this terrible recession has still been milder than the Great Depression. Americans are losing their houses, their savings and their retirement accounts, but they are not yet paupers begging for food in the streets and living in cardboard box shantytowns. The average American seems aware of the fact that Wall Street screwed them over, but they do not care about the swindle as much as progressives want them to because there is still much more room for them to be deprived. And as bad as the erosion of our rights were under Bush the United States is still not Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or modern North Korea.
Progressives can throw up their hands in disgust and exclaim that ordinary Americans should have cared about all these things. And I agree. I would also agree that the Atlanta Falcons deserve to win a Super Bowl and that every old ‘B’ horror movie deserves a sparkling new high definition restoration. But that belief doesn’t make either of those things any less unlikely. It’s human nature – people who are reasonably able to feed and care for their families, people who are reasonably safe from violent oppression and who are reasonably free from major affronts to their human dignity are predisposed to avoid risking what they have. Men like Noam Chomsky and Bill Ayers, men who were willing to risk the comfortable lives that they had in pursuit of radical activist goals, are typically going to be in the minority. I’m not saying that this is a good thing, but I am saying that it is an obstacle which has to be understood and worked around. Because we failed in our communication strategies, or perhaps because we were simply drowned out by the right wing noise machine, progressives were unable to convince Americans at large that we were pursuing anything other than lofty ideological goals of apparently dubious relevance to their day to day lives
In fairness to most of the people who responded to Kunstler’s article, those who believed that Americans didn’t have a breaking point were in the minority. Most of the skeptics believed that things would have to get much, much worse before the breaking point was reached, but they did not deny that there was one. Those who try to argue that there is no breaking point work on the implicit assumption that the elites will always be able to make our distractions run. There will always be enough junk food to satisfy our appetites, there will always be DVDs and Blu-Rays and there will always be the NFL and the NBA and MLB. But when he predicts imminent disaster for the oligarchs Kunstler is coming at it from a different perspective. Those familiar with his writings know about his obsession with “peak oil” and his belief that it will make our current way of life completely unsustainable.
While it’s highly implausible that any elites will be guillotined in the Hamptons this summer as Kunstler predicts, it’s not implausible that the elites are slowly digging their own graves underneath their Hamptons hedge rows. Having grown up in a Hamptons-like playground for the wealthy, I can give you all a little insight into this world. My childhood was spent in a tiny village on the coast of Maine, a village which practically hibernated during the winter months but which sprung to life in the summer because a huge number of affluent out-of-staters owned vacation homes there. We called them simply “the summer people”, and despite longstanding ties between the local and seasonal communities the relationship has frequently been subject to difficulties and tensions. But having interacted with these people in varying capacities my entire life, I can attest that they really do inhabit a different world than you and me. One longtime summer person I met, a retired foreign service officer who had spent decades working for the State Department, described the experience of being a seasonal resident to me the best when he compared it to the experience of working at an embassy overseas. You’re there, but you’re not really a part of it, he explained, and there is a distinct artificiality to the whole thing. I would also add that there is a distinct vulnerability to the genteel world that they inhabit. Perhaps the best summation of the elite’s attitudes in the face of that vulnerability was put forth by David Goldman in his Spengler column for the Asia Times Online. Goldman wrote that:
Not because of what they do, but because of who they are, the very wealthy consider themselves above the fate of ordinary people. They know the right people, they join the right clubs, and they have access to the right advice. Sometimes it takes a national catastrophe to teach them otherwise. The slaughter of the subalterns in World War I destroyed the flower of the English gentry, and the Russian revolution left counts driving taxicabs in Paris. There was no recuperation from such punishment.
Goldman was writing about the Bernard Madoff scandal and how the affluent investors in Madoff’s hedge fund allowed themselves to be fleeced, despite clear evidence that something was not right with his trading strategy (see the original article here). But he correctly identifies the stupidity and arrogance that have taken hold amongst so many members of America’s elite, an inevitable result of a generation of well-to-do citizens that have been more or less handed wealth built up by previous generations (ironically, Goldman supports some of the economic policies that allowed this social class to spawn).
In a previous article here I argued that, in the event of a civil war against some hypothetical Tea Party and militia uprising, the elites who rule our country would bring a huge number of military, judicial, political and economic advantages to the fight. Their weakness however is that they would also bring themselves, and their track record of handling the country’s problems and crises over the past decade has been abysmal. From the Iraq and Afghan wars to their stewardship of the economy to the unfolding environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, their leadership has been marked by one unmitigated failure after another. In their isolation from the rest of the country, tucked away in their gated communities and their coastal summer resorts stretching between New York and downeast Maine, and their decadent pursuit of their own interests while the rest of the country withers, the elites have put themselves in a highly vulnerable position, and their leadership failures lay the groundwork for their world to come crashing and burning down.
While I predict civil war, I have no expectation that I will wake up tomorrow and find the country being torn apart by violence and revolution. But I don’t believe that the oligarchs can keep doing what they are doing indefinitely. The economic “recovery” being touted is a sham. The American economy today is like one of these severed animal limbs from a high school science lab, made to move artificially by stimulating it with electric shocks. There will be more hard times ahead, and they will be harder still as the economic fallout from the oil leak in the Gulf becomes visible. We progressives can prevent the wanton spilling of blood only by taking collective and strong political actions before it is too late for all of us.
