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The Disenchantment Of American Politics (And The Coming Uproar)
Submitted by James H Kunstler via Peak Prosperity,
Considering the problems we face as a nation, the torpor and lassitude of current politics in America seems like a kind of offense against history. What other people have allowed circumstances to run over them like so many ‘possums sleeping on the highway?
The financial disturbances of recent years especially have trashed millions of households, yet the fat middle (no pun intended) of the broad public (ditto) seems strangely content with all the tawdry sideshows of the day - Black Thursday, the Kardashians, the NFL playoffs, Twitter, texting, twerking, side boobs - taking little-to-no interest in politics while their prospects for a habitable future swirl around the drain. How might we account for such supernatural passivity?
And, since human affairs don’t remain static indefinitely, in what direction might things go when the political mood finally heaves and shifts? The possibilities are unsettling.
A Failure to Lead
If you care about poll numbers, they tell a simple story of contempt for the current crop of US political leaders. Congress rates a 12 percent approval rating and President Obama, at 35 percent, scores lower than Richard Nixon did in the midst of the Watergate fiasco. I’m surprised that Obama’s numbers aren’t lower (and I voted for him, twice). After all, few American lives were actually touched by the lies and shenanigans that spun off of Watergate, and money was an inconsequential part of it. But a whole lot of people were affected by Obama’s dissimulations around the Affordable Care Act, while his tragic failure to reestablish the rule of law in banking from the get-go in 2009 probably amounts to impeachable malfeasance. Add to this the NSA domestic spying operations revealed by Edward Snowden plus the troops indefinitely garrisoned in Asian countries and you have a portrait of a creeping Orwellian contagion.
The only whiff of rebellion in the air lately has emanated from the so-called conservative end of the political spectrum: the Tea Party. Its complaints mainly range around the offenses of Big Government, though a certain incoherence pervades its agenda as a whole. (I will get to that presently.) I am sympathetic to gripes against the size and reach of government but I’m convinced that the swerve of US politics in the not-distant future will hinge on the failure of government at this scale to conduct any business competently. Anyway, as a veteran of the hippie uprising of the 1960s, when the Left was insurgent against an obdurate “establishment,” it’s interesting to observe the perverse flip-flop of history that has now put the Tea Party in charge of rebellion central.
The failures of the Left these days are pretty obvious and awful. They got their storybook change-agent elected president and he hasn’t done a darn thing in five years to halt the wholesale racketeering that pervades our national life. Obama’s Department of Justice is home to more zombies than the Grand Cemetery of Port-Au-Prince. The Attorney General’s office essentially signed off on prosecuting bank fraud when Lanny Breuer, chief of the Criminal Division, declared some banks too big to jail. End of story, as Tony Soprano used to say.
Obama promised to brick up the revolving door between Wall Street and the federal agencies and he only added more turnstiles to the gate. Most of the government officials involved in the 2009 TARP program and related crisis management operations are now pulling in six figure salaries at the banks and hedge funds they formerly regulated, while a veteran fixer (Mary Jo White) from the whitest white shoe fixit law shop in the land (Debevoise & Plimpton) was appointed to head the SEC a year ago.
The Left, as represented by President Obama and a majority in the US Senate, did nothing to arrest the ongoing corporate hijacking of the USA. When the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case (2010) that corporations could buy elections via unlimited campaign contributions under the free speech clause of the constitution, Obama had the chance to propose new legislation or a constitutional amendment to redefine the distinction between human persons and corporate “persons.” You’d think that as a constitutional lawyer, he would have been eager to lead on this. But he just ignored the historic opportunity and, anyway, he was on the receiving end of gobs of corporate “free speech” money to run his reelection campaign.
Apart from its pitiful roll-out bugs, the Affordable Care Act has the odor of the biggest insurance scam in history. People joke these days about Obama serving George W. Bush’s fourth term. The internal contradictions of Democratic Party behavior under Obama have only driven political cynicism to new heights. The millennial generation must feel horribly swindled by it.
A Paucity of Good Options
As for the rebellious conservative Tea Party faction, it is hard for me to square their umbrage at Big Government with their avidity for foreign wars (and support for the military-industrial rackets behind them), their failure to oppose the security-state activities of the NSA (while branding whistleblower Snowden “a traitor”), their love of corporate commercial tyranny a la Wal-Mart, their devotion to economically suicidal suburban sprawl, their zeal to control the social and sexual conduct of their fellow citizens, and their efforts to impose religion in civic affairs — all of which is to ask, what do they mean when they shout about “liberty?”
These contradictions probably seem abstruse compared to the gritty plight of ordinary citizens getting monkey-hammered in an economy that can provide neither decent incomes nor dignified, meaningful social roles for classes of people who could be earnest, honest, and enterprising given the chance. This gets to a more general failure across the political spectrum to apprehend the larger changing dynamics of our time — resource scarcity, capital impairment, contraction, environmental collapse, population overshoot — and to frame a coherent response to these developments. In short, the politicians seem to have no idea where history is taking us, and no road-map to prepare for the journey to get there.
There will probably always be some alignment of Left and Right in politics, but from time to time the packages they come in and the ideologies they contain are in desperate need of either rehabilitation or dissolution. I’d bet that we may soon see the demise of both the Democratic and Republican parties as they are currently structured. They’ve been around an awful long time now, and their presence probably provides a certain reassuring familiarity, but that is also the same growth medium as contempt. The useless and tiresome public quarrels they spawn these days, the kabuki theater debt ceiling showdowns, the can-kickings, and other evasions of responsibility, erode basic institutional trust to a dangerous degree; the people lose faith in the courts, the news media, the banks, the value of their money, and eventually all authority. The two major parties function as mere conduits for all the racketeering operations that define life in this nation today. The mature two-party system may prove to have been a transient product of America’s industrial heyday, which is now over despite the euphoria over stock bubbles, shale oil, computers and other new technology. If the two old parties dry up and blow away, will anyone shed a tear for them? When that happens, there may not be enough political vitality left at the federal level to reconstitute them in new packaging.
Trouble Brewing
If party politics are weak, muddled, and contradictory, the divisions between Americans are starkly clear: wealth in America has never been so unevenly distributed — the fabled one percent versus everyone else. Despite the election of a mixed-race president, and the wish-fulfillment fantasies of Hollywood, race relations in the USA remain tense. 2013 was the year of the “knockout” game for black teenagers randomly targeting “woods” (i.e. non-black “peckerwoods”), some of whom died. It was the year of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the Trayvon Martin case and the echoing recriminations.
Divisions between men and women are tragically compounded by the dangerous dynamics of work in America that leave many men (especially men) in a vacuum of purpose, meaning, and potency. It is almost impossible these days for low-skilled men to support a family. The indignity of this thunders through broken communities and the penitentiary cellblocks. But the anomie is also expressed in the higher ranks of an economy where office work can be done by anybody, and gender confusion lately has been valorized as a compensating mechanism for the marginalization of men and the failure of manhood. The political blowback from this, when it comes, is apt to be fierce. Look no further than Duck Dynasty.
The ongoing national culture war pits the “traditional values” faction against the sexual libertarians; the red states against the blue states; urban against the conflated suburban and rural; the Christian fundamentalists against an array of other positions and belief groups; the entitlement “socialists” against the “free market” conservatives.
Perhaps most divisive of all will be the schism between the young and the old over the table scraps of the dying industrial economy.
These tensions will not remain unresolved indefinitely.
In Part II: Get Ready For Strange Days, we'll forecast the direction that this resolution may follow. The last time the USA faced a comparable political convulsion was the decade leading into the Civil War, but this time it will be more complex and confusing and it will have a different ending. A dominant theme will be a continued loss of faith in the Federal government to solve our ills, and a re-emergence of reliance on local support networks at the state, municipal, community and family levels.
This devolution will likely play out very differently across the major regions of the US. And most will follow this course unwillingly.
Strange days are coming.
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Yeah, how the hell you going to do that when ADP writes your paycheck? Nice plan, zero chance of execution. Typical stupid conservative stupidity.
Sorry, too many purposefully nondescript terms out of the political posturing book:
...“traditional values” faction against the sexual libertarians
So everyone upholding traditional values has to be a Victorian prude at the same time? And on the other end someone valuing sexual liberty must be an anything-goes "sexual libertarian", a complete bullshit phrase in itself?
...between the young and the old over the table scraps of the dying industrial economy.
So what's the point here? Which of these two factions killed the industrial economy or let it happen? Or is it who more deserves the table scraps? Or might it be the unfounded expectations that constitute the biggest problem? (Also see CogDis latest contributor post.)
J00000s!
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b2e_1360548535&comments=1
Like to see this guy provide some actual evidence of the Tea Party's "avidity for foreign wars (and support for the military-industrial rackets behind them), their failure to oppose the security-state activities of the NSA (while branding whistleblower Snowden “a traitor”), . . . their zeal to control the social and sexual conduct of their fellow citizens, and their efforts to impose religion in civic affairs" and no, believing homosexual behavior is abnormal or a sin is not the same as "impos(ing) religion in civic affairs".
Attempting to protect the unborn certainly does involve civic affairs, but it is not an active position of the Tea Party movement. No doubt some people who support the Tea Party movement are also opposed to abortion, and many people opposed to abortion are not aligned with the Tea Party.
The author admits he twice voted for Obama, so his views of the Tea Party are hardly objective. Just another leftist fascist who wants to use the state to force others to conform with his beliefs, and disappointed that Obama has not gone as far in doing so as he wants.
3 categories of everybody else...
Those who are prepared to function at a higher level
Those who will manage to function at a sustaining level
Those who will cease to manage or function completely..................................
We're on our own, and have understood this for quite some time.
It's about the message, not the messenger.
Good post Vincent.
The institutional framework of US federal structures, apart from private FED and all powerful PDs and WS, aka the Big Business lobby culture and crony culture, is good.
Its the people in power and the Oligarchy lobbies that are corrupt.
Undo that and find honest people to run the Institutions.
A divided nation under dishonest neofeudal control is the recipe for Despotism; for a fascist regime.
The whole western culture is moving fast in that direction.
Broad brush much Mr. Kunstler? Tea Party membership and sympethizers such as myself, are a part of a loose confederation of literally thousands of organizations. The two largest; Teaparty Express and Teaparty Patriots both profess to want to reduce the role and size of government, as envisioned under the Constitutionally enumerated limitations on said power of the national government. I just went to both of their web sites. Teaparty Express has front page articles defending Rand Paul against Rep. Peter King, R-NY, calling King a "neocon." Most TP people simply want gov't greatly reduced. Your David Brooks (NY Slimes resident alleged Conservative) screed is pathetically uninformed and probably purposely so. "Conservatives" are generally disgusted w/ the GOP, and it appears that the party establishment feels the same about us. The TP and Senate Conservative Fund (Jim DeMint's creation) fought against Mitchell McConnell's candidate for Kentucky's vacant Senate seat in 2010 and beat the establishment electing Rand Paul. The TP and SCF are openly fighting to unseat one the most corrupt unworthy repubics, who just happens to be the Senate Minority Leader, Mr. McConnell. The TP and SCF got Senator Cruz elected. Again, against the establishment candidate. There are several additional examples of TP candidates that got elected and actually try to represent their constituents, rather than the Party apparatus. What are you doing Mr. Kunstler to attempt something positive, even if it won't be successful?
Even MSNBC is bringing on "traditional" or "middle-of-the-road" (their language) "conservatives" (my language because that is bullshit when applied to all sects of the republican political party) to bash Libertarians and Tea Party candidates.
So if even MSNBC is bringing these people on....you know the establishment is at least a little bit scared, not so much of them having any real political power soon, but because people are starting to talk to each other and people are spreading new ideas.
The indignity of this thunders through broken communities and the penitentiary cellblocks.
"thunders"? tee heeeee really?
I love haftin' to be uproared.
Haftin' To Be Uproared - #OccupyAtlanta - YouTube
I don't even need to watch it to know what's in it. :D
It is impossible for low skill workers to support a family. The solution is to not get married so the single mom with kids can qualify for gubmint bennies, while the boyfriend works so they can get extra money for things the gubmint won't let them buy.
Once again I stopped reading the second I saw Kunstler wrote this.
Wow CUNTsler. I'm not sure what Tea Party member you are listening to, but the rest of the movement despises our foreign occupations of sovereign lands, the NSA, and crony capitalism. Considering you voted for Obama twice and cannot articulate the proper message of what the Tea Party represents you earn no points and may God have mercy on your soul.
Conniving, oBUMMER sucker knows he is misrepresenting TEA. His lame ass attempts at objectivity are laughable. ZH paying him for this crap is not. Just another nyc liberal who spent too much time in the fantasy world of broadway. An insult from this ass is the compliment of all. His resentment of any group that calls him out on his weak bullshit is obvious to everyone but him. It is painful to watch his contortions as he desperately tries to be relevant, and mostly to sell another article. Fuck him.
Congress rates a 12 percent approval rating and President Obama, at 35 percent, scores lower than Richard Nixon did in the midst of the Watergate fiasco. I’m surprised that Obama’s numbers aren’t lower (and I voted for him, twice).
Thats all i needed to see, voting for Obummer ONCE tells me U R a retard. What kind of idiot would vote for a POS the first time??
Congress rates a 12 percent approval rating and President Obama, at 35 percent, scores lower than Richard Nixon did in the midst of the Watergate fiasco. I’m surprised that Obama’s numbers aren’t lower (and I voted for him, twice).
Thats all i needed to see, voting for Obummer ONCE tells me U R a retard. What kind of idiot would vote for a POS the first time??
A well written summation of much of what ails this country on a political level.
If only the solutions to these problems were as easy to identify as the problems themselves.
Kunstler has it wrong as far as this site is concerned. It is not divided. All the inhabitants are citizens of RightWingWorld!
Not quite completely accurate, there Baldski. There are a few MilitantJewBlackLibs and FreeThinkers here as well, whose main goal in life is to piss off the Right enough that they get off the couch and go take a long-needed shit.
When the machinists don't machine and the meat cutters don't cut and the mechanics don't turn a wrench any longer you will find out how "low skilled those jobs actually are. Tell you what you two time Obama voting white collar prick, I will take you to a slaughterhouse kill floor to gut a steer like I did for a summer job in college. I will then let you break a quarter of beef and even tell you it is a front quarter and then have you cut a 3lb arm cut pot roast on a band saw. Unskilled my ass. It is the influx of illegals that have ruined the living wage for most skilled work. My brother owned a drywall company and when I moved to Chicago in early ninties due to a job assignment I called him over in Michigan and told him to sell the company. He had eight trucks and hard working crews but the illegals hadn't gotten there yet. They had in Chicago and I saw what was going on in all trades here already. Well they made it there and he pretty much gave the business away. They no hang and tape board at 80s prices. Oh, and who is in on it? Every damn politician and business owner who allows them EBT cards, free govt bennies, earned income tax credits. Families of four illegals with two kids who not only pay no federal taxes but get 8 or 9 grand in earned income credits. F me, unskilled,,, I have a name for it, it is lawlessness and it has gripped this country by the short and curlies and it runs from top to bottom. I am done talking to people about it,, but kunstler you better hope you don't need any of my services or my "unskilled" friends. Flyover country some call it. You better keep flying you smug prick, by the way,, you coulnd't lift a front quarter of beef so nevermind.
i like to call it being born into a disadvantage. the guy trying is getting his ass kicked because of what your talking about. this is why i say... put the illegals on the fast track to citizenship. i'm pretty sure they can collect welfare with the best of them.
You forget that Chicago and the West would never have been built if it hadn't been for immigrant labor. All white kids ever did was sit on Daddy's horse and flick their whips at the workers. Fucking assholes. The mirror has caught up with you. So what you can flip a fucking cow. Can you stop the tide? Have you kept one stinking banker from stealing your neighbor's house? Maybe one day you'll have to flee the liberals and wetback your way to Honduras, and the coyotes will fuck you and your family from start to finish. You'll be hunted when and if you ever arrive by people who neither appreciate why you fled nor care how hard you have it.
It ain't hard to understand why its still legal to beat your wife in OK and KS- just have to read the shit that passes for thought out of the anus you have for a head.
Hey Spumoni, fuck you. You don't know I am white and I call in and shoot coyotes and then skin them. I won't wet back my way back anywhere as I was born here and dad grew up in a log cabin in Canada and became a citizen legally. I will never be hunted and it is none of your business how many I have helped or don't help but most of my neighbors will take a bullet with me when the liberals come. If your name isn't Cochise you are an immgrant too. And if it is well,,,,, you came from China if you go back far enough. I run from no one, steal from no one and will share my last meal with you if you need it. Just don't spew your shit at me about how immigrants built this country cause my dad did and he was an immigrant. You don't know me so don't pretend you do. I get real tired of this liberal bullshit that they only come here to support their families. There is a house behind me with three married couples and 11 kids going to public schools. Single family residence is what this neighborhood is called. 7 grand a year in property taxes divided by six adults working. Ah ,, nevermind. And when you have to "wetback" your way out of America with your liberal friends don't head north,, just a word of advice.
Yeah, and when your Pa and mine emigrated here they were welcomed and encouraged by land speculators and the government-not a favor bestowed upon today's immigrant. You think you own your land, but it will be right there long after you have died and gone, belonging to someone else, who came from somewhere else.
I haven't noticed that Liberals steal from anyone any more often than anyone else, and I know more than one who built his house and family from scratch and hard work. You just call something liberal when you disagree with it, haven't thought about it, really, or informed your thinking with facts. I don't pretend to know you, and you aren't the only one with Little Tijuana in your backyard, R-1 zoned neighborhood. Liberal thinking is about extending a smile and a little friendliness - it goes a lot further than the xenophobic racist bullshit so common among conservatives - especially those in the midwest.
Really, dude - read your own retort. You contradict yourself three times. How you going to "share" your last meal with me if I need it if you already shot me for being a liberal? We all [taxpaying, working stiffs] get tired of bullshit, amigo, but all the bullshit ain't liberal. Read the fucking Webster's definition and then explain to me why you aren't one.
This guy is unbearably tedious.
I like a lot of what this author says, but he shouldn't be so quick to admit voting twiice for Obama. Given that one can write in Ron Paul or vote libertarian, a vote _for_ Obama isn't a protest vote against anything, it's sociological masturbation (2008) or biting the pillow for evil (2012).
He should also update his ideas about the tea party wanting to regulate people's sexual activities. WE DON'T CARE what you do with your genitals as long as you don't do it in front of - or advocate it to - our children. Kunstler's view is the High School newspaper editor understanding of religioius politics.
The federal government should have nothing to say about morality of any kind, sexual or otherwise - it's all unconstitutional. What is constitutional is is state control - or libertarianism - regarding sexuality and all other moral questions. In a proper constitutional nation, one might drive through a dry county with a minimum of advertising and churches on every corner, straight across a state or country line to be greeted by cathouses and drug stores that sell it all.
That world will never exist if one supports the left; their worldview demands uniformity, particulary in taxation. There can be no escape. The left can only promise stifling uniformity. The right - religious and otherwise - offers the only true hope for freedom. Most on the right will concede the right for others to live as they choose if they can be left alone to do the same.
both parties are big government parties - europe is far worse
should be interesting to watch deflation kick into high gear as the masses are fucking broke and have stopped spending on anything other than essentials
re "Failure to Lead":
PLEASE - JUST FN SHOOT ME.
These pscyopaths are supposed to be our SERVANTS - not our "leaders".
The only place they'll lead us will be to our own slaughter.
What a load of crap. It's peak peak prediction time.
For example:
"U.S. crude oil production will surge faster than expected to a near historic high by 2016, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which sharply raised its annual output forecasts on Monday due to the breakneck speed of shale oil development.
The EIA's forecasts show that shale will help oil output in the world's largest consumer increase by 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) every year until 2016, when it will total 9.5 million bpd, just below a 1970 record of 9.6 million bpd. That is some 2 million bpd higher than its forecast in last year's Annual Energy Outlook."
and
"A Boston Consulting Group study from September 2013 found that over 50 percent of surveyed executives at large U.S. manufacturers said that they have plans to reshore production from China or are "actively considering" it. Recent events demonstrate that U.S. companies are serious about reshoring: Boeing, Ford, and Little Tikes are only a few of the well-known companies that have already brought jobs back to the United States or have announced plans to do so. This recent trend is not exclusive to U.S. companies. The Wall Street Journal reported in September that toilet manufacturers from Colombia and Japan are also expanding production capacity in the U.S. and creating jobs in communities in Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri. Multiple factors explain why manufacturers are reshoring jobs and production to the United States. Labor and transportation costs in China have increased. Manufacturing a product in the United States both reduces transportation costs and mitigates transportation risks. Another important factor that multiple companies cite is the growth of U.S. energy production, which has reduced the costs of inputs, transportation, and production in the United States."
"Apple is making good on its promise to boost manufacturing in the U.S., with plans to open a new plant in Arizona that is expected to create as many as 2,000 jobs." (11/2013)
"Foxconn, the Taipei-based electronics manufacturer that builds Apple's iPhone, is planning to invest $40 million to build robots in Pennsylvania."
http://www.chemweek.com/Assets/Image/Imports/20131125/cwk_112513_cover1c...
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21573279-shale-gas-and-oil-...
Actually, there was a move to re-shore jobs in recent years as shipping and fuel costs rose and Chinese workers started to make enough money to demand higher wages. My wife's company, for example, re-shored accounting services from India because the perceived savings was overshadowed by incompetence, the distance between corporate HQ and the accountants, and the many errors in the process. A few years ago, the news was industries were going to dump China because the shipping costs were starting to erode any prior advantages of moving production overseas. My personal guess, however, is any jobs coming back from China will go to Mexican maquilladoras (sp?) just across the border where cheap labor, no regulation, and shorter supply chains make it more affordable than trying to deal with the US fedgov and unions.
Y'all want to see something different? How about an anti-propaganda propagnda video from North Korea?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQBPWv11izc
They may be The Devil!, but they're so outside the system, their perception of things can be interesting.
Any solutions to the problems in modern American society are complex, but I suggest an easy first step is this:
Step 1: anyone who voted for BHO twice and GWB twice to all be gathered together on a free cruise on the Titanic II and sent to the Artic Sea.
Step 2: drill holes in all the lifeboats
.....
Step 100: throw the last dead oligarch into the burn pit
You morons perpetuating this right vs left bullshit are simply willing pawns of TPTB. Good job.