Going, Going, Gone…

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“Because they can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality, they are too crazy to lead this country, and Americans know it.”

– Sasha Stone on the Democratic Party

In case you’re wondering why the Democratic Party is in a death spiral, it is the proportionate response to the damage they have done to American culture and politics. You might think that they fell haplessly into error, but their turn to Marxian idealism was a cover for a matrix of hustles and rackets to make up for a void of any sane political program.

Coming into the 21st century, our country was beset by looming decline. Our industrial base was going, going, gone, and with it millions of well-paying blue-collar jobs, the Democratic Party base. It was replaced by a so-called “financialized economy,” which was sanitized language for sets of swindles and frauds allowed to operate in the de-regulated banking system, in concert with the politicized Federal Reserve and crooked Congressional interests — you notice how many politicians paid $175-K a year somehow acquired multi-million-dollar fortunes?

What mainly grew in this period was government and things that fed off of it, such as the war industries, computer tech allied with the Intel gang, and especially the burgeoning universe of government-sponsored non-profit advocacy orgs, which became the jobs program for otherwise unemployables churned out of higher education, a racket that fed on federal loan guarantees. It was in the racketeering ecosystem that billionaires such as George Soros and Bill Gates could use their fortunes to advance their own personal obsessions through webs of non-governmental orgs (NGOs) to influence public affairs.

By 2016, that was really all that the Democratic Party had left. It was the source of their money and their power. They also had the accumulated political capital of race advocacy, starting with the civil rights crusades of the 1960s. After our victory over manifest evil in World War Two, the Jim Crow system had to go, or else America could not pretend to lead the so-called “free world.”

By some paradoxical alchemy of government policy and human nature, the civil rights campaign eventually produced a larger and more intractable “underclass” than existed before. This baffled liberal idealists who had expected a new era of brotherhood and equality. They could only account for it by “structural racism,” and the Marxian trope of “oppressors-and-victims” fit into that scaffold perfectly. It lured them into Marxian “praxis” generally, which by then was already failing everywhere else in the world it had been tried as “communism.”

One way to counter “structural racism” was to declare a new ethos of “multiculturalism,” meaning each ethnic or racial group could behave according to its own particular standards and values. It was like waving a magic wand to make failure disappear and it worked through the 1990s, (which happened to be the fattest years of cheap oil production in America). The trouble with multiculturalism was that it negated the thing that had held America together through vicissitudes such as the Great Depression and World War Two: The American common culture, the thing that belonged to everyone.

The MAGA movement has largely been an effort to reconstruct an American common culture, a consensus of values and behaviors we can all agree on. The Democratic Party opted to oppose that — a poor choice. In fact, they apparently viewed that effort as an existential threat to the hustles and rackets that were sustaining the party. For instance, the jobs program for otherwise unemployable college grads who styled themselves as “activists” working for NGOs under the umbrella of USAID.

This was the party’s army of influencers, organizers, ward-heelers, and ballot-harvesters, laboring on behalf of the “victims of oppression.” Quite a few of them resided in Academia, where they cultivated a whole lexicon of arcane, gnostic, crypto-Marxian ideology aimed not just at opposing the recovery of a common culture, but destroying whatever remnants of it remained.

The catch was: they didn’t believe in “social justice” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” That was just a smokescreen of verbiage over their race hustle, which means extorting money, unearned advantages, and status dishonestly. Thus was DEI birthed. And, with it, colossal frauds of “victimhood” such as the beatification of George Floyd and a long line of similar “justice-involved” cases that generated an impressive revenue flow for the Democrats.

That revenue flow and its utility for holding power was all they had left in 2024. It explains the empty symbolism of running Kamala Harris for president. Now, the money flow is gone and so is the party’s power and perhaps its last remaining reason for existence: the maintenance of its own power. Notice that the Democrats can’t even advocate for the return of USAID, now that it has been unmasked as rife with financial fraud and crime.

There is surely a need for an opposition party to any in-party, which happens to be Mr. Trump’s Republicans at the moment, if only because power corrupts. You can see the outline of what that new opposition party might be: a party of re-localization, of small business and small farmers, of traditional towns as opposed to still-rampant and malignant suburban sprawl.

Some related issues already belong to MAGA, such as smaller government, the protection of privacy, respect for the Bill of Rights — but these would be implicit in the restoration of an American common culture, a set of values and standards of behavior that both parties in a two-party system can subscribe to.