What's The Matter With James Howard Kunstler?

Does anyone remember when James Howard Kunstler was the most trenchant social commentator and urban planning critic in America?

Kunstler, who turns 71 today, first made a name for himself in 1993 with his book "The Geography of Nowhere," a brilliant polemic of American automobile suburbia and how the United States' man-made landscape of tract housing, shopping malls, highway strips, and office parks littered the countryside with cartoon architecture and left our cities - especially old industrial metropolises like Detroit - as dead zones while turning us into an antisocial people.  He offered a bit of hope for the future and proposed that we were ready to move on from the egregious mistakes we made in building our nightmarish human habitat and the horrible effects on society that created, such as life revolving around television and the growth of the "pathological ghetto culture" (his words) in our cities that begat hip-hop.  His two follow-up books, 1996's "Home From Nowhere" and 2002's "The City In Mind," cast doubt on reason for hope despite the New Urbanist movement that advocated (note tense - the movement didn't last) traditionally designed neighborhoods and towns, and his 2005 book "The Long Emergency" and 2011's "Too Much Magic" went further in explaining how our overreliance on technology and insatiable appetite for fossil-fuel energy was leading to Armageddon.

Kunstler isn't writing about that so much on his blog anymore.  He's too busy defending - yes, defending - the Trump administration in its efforts to thwart impeachment and removal from office.  He's not a  Trump fan - he mockingly calls Trump the "Golden Golem of Greatness," and he thinks he's a buffoon - but he's angry at Democrats for trying to nullify his election to the Presidency, which he sees as legitimate, and he regularly attacks them as being part of the "Deep State" that's trying to subvert the will of the people in the 2016 election (54 percent of the electorate, including Kunstler himself, voted against Trump), as if the Democratic Party and the federal bureaucracy were trying to overthrow the elected government like the CIA tried to overthrow elected governments in Latin America.  He sees Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as being part of a cabal trying to restore control of Washington, and he sees the Mueller report and the impeachment process as part of this . . . when he isn't dismissing the New York Times and the Washington Post as organs of the state.

In other words, Kunstler has drunk the right-wing Kool-Aid that Trump's base has been sipping for years.  Some of his rage stems from his understandable and justifiable hatred of political correctness and the demonization of white men, but he seems to think that there's some sort of nefarious plot on behalf of female and non-white Americans to to try to create some sort of PC Utopia that will get not just Trump but all white guys out of the way.

One point Kunstler has still been making on occasion is that he thinks we're going to run out of oil any day now.  We'll more likely run out later than sooner, which is why so many people are investing in alternative, renewable energy sources, but Kunstler doesn't have faith in any of them to create a sustainable civilization based on present-day standards or even mid-century-modern (i.e., 1950s) standards, and he views electric cars, from Bolts and Volts to e-Golfs and Teslas, as a joke.  (Though Kunstler supports conventional passenger rail, he doesn't hold out hope for high-speed rail in America , arguing that the age of cheap energy has peaked and that it is too late to have here what Japan has had for half a century.)  Because of all this, Kunstler has gone into some sort of survivalist mode, preparing for an inevitable civil war where identity politics will lead to a multifaceted struggle pitting Americans of different races and ethnicities against each other and also pitting men and women against each other . . . which, again, he blames on Democrats.

What's shocking is what Kunstler is not saying.  He doesn't talk about the need to revitalize our cities and leave auto suburbia behind like he once did, and he doesn't talk all that much about solutions to our long-term energy needs like he used to.  He may still write on his blog about the inevitable end of fossil-fuel energy from time to time, but, given his disdain for solar power and fuel cells, doesn't offer ideas and solutions of his own so much now.  He's focusing virtually all of his attention on his hatred and paranoia on the governing class and how they won't accept Trump's election as fair and square.   I actually accepted Trump's election as fair and square - hey, Hillary blew it! - but I don't see some sort of wicked Democratic-Deep State plot to make their opponents suffer and pay for voting for Trump.  That's tin-foil-hat talk.  

James  Howard Kunstler has lost his interest in critiquing America's autocentric living pattern and its disregard for decency and culture.  He himself has taken an indecent turn on his own blog, spewing out the same Fox News-type vitriol that coarsens our culture.   He's not only lost his edge . . . he's lost his mind.

What a loss, indeed. :-(

I hope he enjoys his birthday today, but it seems like he isn't capable of enjoying much.