Potemkin Party

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

How many of you brooding on the dreadful prospect of Hillary have chanced to survey what remains of Democratic Party (cough cough) leadership in the background of Her Royal Inevitableness? Nothing is the answer. Zip. Nobody. A vacuum. There is no Democratic Party anymore. There are no figures of gravitas anywhere to be found, no ideas really suited to the American prospect, nothing with the will to oppose the lumbering parasitic corporatocracy that is doing little more than cluttering up this moment in history while it sucks the last dregs of value from our society.

I say this as a lifelong registered Democrat but a completely disaffected one — who regards the Republican opposition as the mere errand boy of the above-named lumbering parasitic corporatocracy. Readers are surely chafing to insert that the Democrats have been no less errand boys (and girls) for the same disgusting zeitgeist, and they are surely correct in the case of Hillary, and indeed of the current President.

Readers are surely also chafing to insert that there is Bernie Sanders, climbing in the opinion polls, disdaining Wall Street money, denouncing the current disposition of things with the old union hall surliness we’ve grown to know and love. I’m grateful that Bernie is in the race, that he’s framing an argument against Ms. It’s My Turn. I just don’t happen to think that Bernie gets what the country — indeed what all of techno-industrial society — is really up against, namely a long emergency of economic contraction and collapse.

These circumstances require a very different agenda than just an I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill redistributionist scheme. Lively as Bernie is, I don’t think he offers much beyond that, as if cadging a little more tax money out of WalMart, General Mills, and Exxon-Mobil will fix what is ailing this sad-ass polity. The heart of the matter is that our way of life has shot its wad and now we have to live very differently. Almost nobody wants to even try to think about this.

I hugely resent the fact that the Democratic Party puts its time and energy into the stupid sexual politics of the day when it should be working on issues such as re-localizing commercial economies (rebuilding Main Streets), reforming agriculture to avoid the total collapse of corporate-industrial farming, and fixing the passenger rail system so people will have some way to get around the country when happy Motoring dies (along with commercial aviation).

The “to do” list for rearranging the basic systems of daily life in America is long and loaded with opportunity. Every system that is retooled contains jobs and social roles for people who have been shut out of the economy for two generations. If we do everything we can to promote smaller-scaled local farming, there will be plenty of work for lesser-skilled people to do and get paid for. Saying goodbye to the tyranny of Big Box commerce would open up vast vocational opportunities in reconstructed local and regional networks of commerce, especially for young people interested in running their own business. We need to prepare for localized clinic-style medicine (in opposition to the continuing amalgamation and gigantization of hospitals, with its handmaidens of Big Pharma and the insurance rackets). The train system has got to be reborn as a true public utility. Just about every other civilized country is already demonstrating how that is done — it’s not that difficult and it would employ a lot of people at every level. That is what the agenda of a truly progressive political party should be at this moment in history.

That Democrats even tolerate the existence of evil entities like WalMart is an argument for ideological bankruptcy of the party. Democratic Presidents from Carter to Clinton to Obama could have used the Department of Justice and the existing anti-trust statutes to at least discourage the pernicious monopolization of commerce that Big Boxes represented. By the same token, President Obama could have used existing federal law to break up the banking oligarchy starting in 2009, not to mention backing legislation to more crisply define alleged corporate “personhood” in the wake of the ruinous “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision of 2010. They don’t even talk about it because Wall Street owns them.

So, you fellow disaffected Democrats — those of you who can’t go over to the other side, but feel you have no place in your country’s politics — look around and tell me who you see casting a shadow on the Democratic landscape. Nobody. Just tired, corrupt, devious old Hillary and her nemesis Bernie the Union Hall Champion out of a Pete Seeger marching song.

I’ve been saying for a while that this period of history resembles the 1850s in America in two big ways: 1) our society faces a crisis, and 2) the existing political parties are not up to the task of comprehending what society faces. In the 1850s it was the Whigs that dried up and blew away (virtually overnight), while the old Democratic party just entered a 75-year wilderness of irrelevancy. God help us if Trump-o-mania turns out to be the only alternative.

Oh, by the way, notice that the lead editorial in Monday’s New York Times is a plea for transgender bathrooms in schools. What could be more important? For Transgender Americans, Legal Battles Over Restrooms

The third World Made By Hand novel

!! Is available !!

(The Fourth and final is finished and on the way — Spring 2016)

Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist

HistoryoftheFuture_Thumb

My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books (Autographed by the Author) … or Northshire Books
or Amazon

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kokoda
kokoda

Mr. Kunstler….why are you still a registered Dem. Are you that fuking lazy to go to the town hall and change to Independent. Same for all registered Dem’s and Rep’s

Imagine if 70% of eligible citizens were registered Independent; the bastard Parties would change their thinking.

Persnickety
Persnickety

No one should be registered as any party. The very idea of political parties is oligarchical.

robert h siddell jr

Kokoda: I did that but florida is closed primaries so I didn’t get to vote except the general election and that sucked so I held my nose and registered as a republican. There shouldn’t be parties and closed primaries.

kokoda
kokoda

Mr. Siddell jr….you are correct on the primaries; it is a device they originated so that people would register as Dem or Rep so they could vote in primaries.
But, IF 70% of the population was registered Independent, the primaries would be not only meaningless, but absurd as the turnout numbers would be so low.

They would have to change the primary voting rules.

Member Account
Member Account

I visited friends this weekend in Charlotte. On the Sunday drive home to Virginia, I took a short detour to visit Mount Airy, North Carolina, home of mythical “Mayberry” from The Andy Griffith Show. I parked at the east end of the few blocks comprising the one-way Main Street and entered an era of time gone by. I casually walked past turn-of-the-last-century brick buildings housing places like Floyd’s Barber Shop, Snappy Lunch, antique stores, and memorabilia merchants, stopping to capture photographs along the way. I eventually settled on Barney’s Cafe, one of a handful of diners, for a fantastic breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes and crisp chewy bacon (for a grand total of $5.35). I left a 100% tip to the hustling waitresses and considered the $10 total a bargain.

I drove to the edge of town to see Wally’s Service Station, the old squad car parked out front, and paid my respects at the WWII memorial, smartly appointed with colorful flowers and a a flowing center fountain.

I made one final stop to see Andy Griffith’s modest home of three decades and the playhouse theatre and museum bearing his name. In front of the theatre is a touching sculpture, cast in bronze, of Andy and Opie (his son from the show), fishing poles in hand, exchanging a genuine look of love and mutual respect. The plaque beneath them said as follows:

a simpler time • a sweeter place
a lesson • a laugh
a father and a son

Tears welling in my eyes, I walked back to my car, sat down, and wept for 15 minutes. I haven’t cried that much since my grandfather passed. I wasn’t born until 1981, over a decade after the show ceased filming, but was struck with an overwhelming sense of what’s been lost during the past 50 years of “progression.” The past is always more perfect now than it was then, but my goal is to do my part to reclaim for the next generation what’s been stolen from mine.

Dutchman
Dutchman

@John Angleo: Wait until the place is overrun with Spics, Muslims, Dot Heads – then you’ll have a reason to cry.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/26/new-california-mass-immigration-turning-virginia-blue/

bruce
bruce

Why do we even need these elections? What do we need a Federal government for?

Why does Texas have to be part of a nation of States that are fucked up in different ways when we like our own local fuckedupness better?

Aren’t the individual States capable of screwing their own citizens hard enough?

Can’t the Cities, Counties and Municipalities ass rape the local population hard enough?

Yes they Can.

I contend that the moron public of this nation is more than capable of screwing everything up big time on a State and local level without any Federal or Centralized Government assistance whatsoever.

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