On America's 'long emergency'
of recession, globalization, and identity politics.
Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all
this trouble with our republic. — Tom McGuane
Can a people recover from an excursion into
unreality? The USA’s sojourn into an alternative universe of the mind
accelerated sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global financial
system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an array of
accumulating threats to the postmodern order, which include the burdens of
empire, onerous debt, population overshoot, fracturing globalism, worries about
energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the specter of climate
change.
A
sense of gathering crisis, which I call the long emergency,
persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into question our ability to
carry on “normal” life much farther into this century, and all the anxiety that
attends it is hard for the public to process. It manifested itself first in
finance because that was the most abstract and fragile of all the major
activities we depend on for daily life, and therefore the one most easily
tampered with and shoved into criticality by a cadre of irresponsible
opportunists on Wall Street. Indeed, a lot of households were permanently
wrecked after the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2008, despite official
trumpet blasts heralding “recovery” and the dishonestly engineered pump-up of
capital markets since then.
With
the election of 2016, symptoms of the long emergency seeped into the political
system. Disinformation rules. There is no coherent consensus about what is
happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. The two parties
are mired in paralysis and dysfunction and the public’s trust in them is at
epic lows. Donald Trump is viewed as a sort of pirate president, a freebooting
freak elected by accident, “a disrupter” of the status quo at best and at worst
a dangerous incompetent playing with nuclear fire. A state of war exists
between the White House, the permanent D.C. bureaucracy, and the traditional
news media. Authentic leadership is otherwise AWOL. Institutions falter. The
FBI and the CIA behave like enemies of the people.
Bad
ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they
actually dominate the scene on every side. A species of wishful thinking that
resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class,
awaiting magical rescue remedies that promise to extend the regime of Happy
Motoring, consumerism, and suburbia that makes up the armature of “normal” life
in the USA. They chatter about electric driverless car fleets, home delivery
drone services, and as-yet-undeveloped modes of energy production to replace
problematic fossil fuels, while ignoring the self-evident resource and capital
constraints now upon us and even the laws of physics—especially entropy,
the second law of thermodynamics. Their main mental block is their belief in
infinite industrial growth on a finite planet, an idea so powerfully foolish
that it obviates their standing as technocrats.
The non-technocratic cohort of the thinking
class squanders its waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy the remnant
of an American common culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization
they blame for the failure in our time to establish a utopia on earth. By the
logic of the day, “inclusion” and “diversity” are achieved by forbidding the
transmission of ideas, shutting down debate, and creating new racially
segregated college dorms. Sexuality is declared to not be biologically
determined, yet so-called cis-gendered persons (whose gender
identitycorresponds with their sex as detected at birth) are vilified by
dint of not being “other-gendered”—thereby thwarting the pursuit of happiness
of persons self-identified as other-gendered. Casuistry anyone?
The
universities beget a class of what Nassim Taleb prankishly called “intellectuals-yet-idiots,”
hierophants trafficking in fads and falsehoods, conveyed in esoteric jargon
larded with psychobabble in support of a therapeutic crypto-gnostic crusade
bent on transforming human nature to fit the wished-for utopian template of a
world where anything goes. In fact, they have only produced a new intellectual
despotism worthy of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.
In
case you haven’t been paying attention to the hijinks on campus—the attacks on
reason, fairness, and common decency, the kangaroo courts, diversity tribunals,
assaults on public speech and speakers themselves—here is the key take-away:
it’s not about ideas or ideologies anymore; it’s purely about the pleasures of
coercion, of pushing other people around. Coercion is fun and exciting! In
fact, it’s intoxicating, and rewarded with brownie points and career
advancement. It’s rather perverse that this passion for tyranny is suddenly so
popular on the liberal left.
Until
fairly recently, the Democratic Party did not roll that way. It was right-wing
Republicans who tried to ban books, censor pop music, and stifle free
expression. If anything, Democrats strenuously defended the First Amendment,
including the principle that unpopular and discomforting ideas had to be
tolerated in order to protect all speech. Back in in 1977 the ACLU defended the
right of neo-Nazis to march for their cause (National Socialist Party of
America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43).
The
new and false idea that something labeled “hate speech”—labeled by whom?—is
equivalent to violence floated out of the graduate schools on a toxic cloud of
intellectual hysteria concocted in the laboratory of so-called
“post-structuralist” philosophy, where sundry body parts of Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze were sewn onto a brain
comprised of one-third each Thomas Hobbes, Saul Alinsky, and Tupac Shakur to
create a perfect Frankenstein monster of thought. It all boiled down to the
proposition that the will to power negated all other human drives and values,
in particular the search for truth. Under this scheme, all human relations were
reduced to a dramatis personae of the oppressed and their
oppressors, the former generally “people of color” and women, all subjugated by
whites, mostly males. Tactical moves in politics among these self-described
“oppressed” and “marginalized” are based on the credo that the ends justify the
means (the Alinsky model).
This
is the recipe for what we call identity politics, the main thrust of which
these days, the quest for “social justice,” is to present a suit against white
male privilege and, shall we say, the horse it rode in on: western civ. A
peculiar feature of the social justice agenda is the wish to erect strict
boundaries around racial identities while erasing behavioral boundaries, sexual
boundaries, and ethical boundaries. Since so much of this thought-monster is
actually promulgated by white college professors and administrators, and white
political activists, against people like themselves, the motives in this
concerted campaign might appear puzzling to the casual observer.
I
would account for it as the psychological displacement among this political
cohort of their shame, disappointment, and despair over the outcome of the
civil rights campaign that started in the 1960s and formed the core of
progressive ideology. It did not bring about the hoped-for utopia. The racial
divide in America is starker now than ever, even after two terms of a black
president. Today, there is more grievance and resentment, and less hope for a
better future, than when Martin Luther King made the case for progress on the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. The recent flash points of racial
conflict—Ferguson, the Dallas police ambush, the Charleston church massacre, et
cetera—don’t have to be rehearsed in detail here to make the point that there
is a great deal of ill feeling throughout the land, and quite a bit of acting
out on both sides.
The
black underclass is larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated than it was
in the 1960s. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that the civil rights
legislation of 1964 and ’65, which removed legal barriers to full participation
in national life, induced considerable anxiety among black citizens over the
new disposition of things, for one reason or another. And that is exactly why a
black separatism movement arose as an alternative at the time, led initially by
such charismatic figures as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Some of that was
arguably a product of the same youthful energy that drove the rest of the
Sixties counterculture: adolescent rebellion. But the residue of the “Black
Power” movement is still present in the widespread ambivalence about making
covenant with a common culture, and it has only been exacerbated by a now
long-running “multiculturalism and diversity” crusade that effectively
nullifies the concept of a national common culture.
What
follows from these dynamics is the deflection of all ideas that don’t feed a
narrative of power relations between oppressors and victims, with the
self-identified victims ever more eager to exercise their power to coerce,
punish, and humiliate their self-identified oppressors, the “privileged,” who condescend
to be abused to a shockingly masochistic degree. Nobody stands up to this
organized ceremonial nonsense. The punishments are too severe, including the
loss of livelihood, status, and reputation, especially in the university. Once
branded a “racist,” you’re done. And venturing to join the oft-called-for
“honest conversation about race” is certain to invite that fate.
Globalization
has acted, meanwhile, as a great leveler. It destroyed what was left of the
working class—the lower-middle class—which included a great many white
Americans who used to be able to support a family with simple labor. Hung out
to dry economically, this class of whites fell into many of the same behaviors
as the poor blacks before them: absent fathers, out-of-wedlock births, drug
abuse. Then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 wiped up the floor with the
middle-middle class above them, foreclosing on their homes and futures, and in
their desperation many of these people became Trump voters—though I doubt that
Trump himself truly understood how this all worked exactly. However, he did see
that the white middle class had come to identify as yet another victim group,
allowing him to pose as their champion.
The evolving matrix of rackets that
prompted the 2008 debacle has only grown more elaborate and craven as the
old economy of stuff dies and is replaced by a financialized
economy of swindles and frauds. Almost nothing in America’s financial life
is on the level anymore, from the mendacious “guidance” statements of the
Federal Reserve, to the official economic statistics of the federal agencies,
to the manipulation of all markets, to the shenanigans on the fiscal side, to
the pervasive accounting fraud that underlies it all. Ironically, the
systematic chiseling of the foundering middle class is most visible in the
rackets that medicine and education have become—two activities that were
formerly dedicated to doing no harm and seeking the
truth!
Life
in this milieu of immersive dishonesty drives citizens beyond cynicism to an
even more desperate state of mind. The suffering public ends up having no idea
what is really going on, what is actually happening. The toolkit of the
Enlightenment—reason, empiricism—doesn’t work very well in this socioeconomic
hall of mirrors, so all that baggage is discarded for the idea that reality is
just a social construct, just whatever story you feel like telling about it. On
the right, Karl Rove expressed this point of view some years ago when he
bragged, of the Bush II White House, that “we make our own reality.” The left
says nearly the same thing in the post-structuralist malarkey of academia: “you
make your own reality.” In the end, both sides are left with a lot of bad
feelings and the belief that only raw power has meaning.
Erasing psychological
boundaries is a dangerous thing. When the rackets finally come to grief—as they
must because their operations don’t add up—and the reckoning with true price
discovery commences at the macro scale, the American people will find
themselves in even more distress than they’ve endured so far. This will be the
moment when either nobody has any money, or there is plenty of worthless money
for everyone. Either way, the functional bankruptcy of the nation will be
complete, and nothing will work anymore, including getting enough to eat. That
is exactly the moment when Americans on all sides will beg someone to step up
and push them around to get their world working again. And even that may not
avail.
James Howard Kunstler’s many books include The
Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking,
Technology, and the Fate of the Nation, and the World Made by
Hand novel series. He blogs on Mondays and Fridays at Kunstler.com.