Authored by James Howard Kunstler,
“We really are living through Bloody September”
- Will Chamberlain
When the newly-formed Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, April 1861, they ignited the Civil War. They, at least, had a clearcut goal: to maintain an economy (and society) based on slavery. It was patently evil, but it was firmly established and it was their engine for daily life, and they didn’t want it to end.
When Charlie Kirk was murdered in 2025, Civil War 2.0 kicked off. The enemy this time are not Confederates with a coherent command structure and a goal. They are an army of nihilists like the gang in The Big Lebowski, who, for one reason or another, have failed to launch lives of meaning and purpose, and so have adopted the purpose of destroying the country they cannot thrive in. Unlike The Big Lebowski, this is not a joke. But, it’s obviously a different sort of civil war than the first one.
It appears that many of these nihilists, especially the ones amalgamated as Antifa, are straight-up mentally ill - crazed young women too untamed to find a mate, many obese and self-mutilated like tattooed savages with steel bones in their noses. . . young men, hormones afire, likewise frustrated, escaping into sexual fetish and psychotic obsessions with demons, violence, blame, enmity. They are warriors for their own deformed ids.
There is, for sure, plenty to complain about in American life as currently organized. It abounds with swindles and ruses, and much of the ill effect falls on young people who were rooked into college loans, are drowning in unpayable debt, are unable to find meaningful work in an economy dominated by cruelly gigantic companies, are unable to afford a place of their own to eat and sleep in, and whose bodies and minds are ravaged by junk food and pharma products.
Do not overlook the deleterious effects of the everyday environment we have created: the world of American suburbia. Above all, it requires a reliable car to even begin to function in, and that is beyond the reach of many newly-minted adults with no job or a shit-job. The sheer ugliness of American suburbia is punishing to human neurology. It induces anxiety and despair to a degree we can’t begin to reckon. Try walking a mile down a six-laner between the Sam’s Club and the DMV sometime.
Suburbia atomizes social relations, making everyone an isolated unit and it defeats any attempt to form real communities. Its schools function like minimum security prisons, generators of anomie and ennui. On top of all that, suburbia has entered its arc of economic failure. Even the gainfully employed middle-aged can no longer pay for it. It was built out of crappy materials that are falling apart now. A sane person would opt to not live in it, but since escape is so difficult from sea to shining sea, the other option is to go insane — especially if you’re just setting out in life.
All of this discontent gets converted, abracadabra, into political ideology. The old, reliable package of Marxism works whenever people feel cheated out of meaning, purpose, and a livelihood. And so, this anguished cohort of the young, defeated in making a life, driven mentally ill by their surroundings, hounded by the endless prompts of their beloved smartphones, wrecked by the things they put in their bodies, and broken by their demoralizing failures, become the useful idiots of their political elders.
And the Democratic Party, having become little more than a grifting machine of hustles and hoaxes, uses the young to generate ever more ill-feeling across the land over issues that self-evidently are against the interests of the young — so that the party can survive its present existential crisis.
It was not in young America’s interest to receive “Joe Biden’s” flood of illegal migrants across the border. Apart from their criminal histories, or the hidden agenda to form subversive cells for foreign enemies, the illegal migrants compete with young people in many realms of employment like the building trades, while they drive down wages generally. So why are the Antifas out there in front of the ICE facility affecting to “rescue” the deportees?
Because the mind-scrambling language of Marxian revolt has persuaded the Antifas that the illegal migrants are their “marginalized intersectional allies.” It’s bullshit, of course, but the mentally ill swallow it because they are desperate for meaning and filled with animus for all-and-any authority responsible for constructing and managing a system they have failed in.
Mr. Trump, the primary demon in their fantasies, and certainly the enemy of the Democratic Party’s corrupt grifting machine, attempts to restore an economy based on producing things of value, rather than financial flimflams. The catch is, he may not be able to do that using the old armature of gigantic corporate organisms operating on rollover debt. That phase of history is probably over.
We need a new armature, but one based on voluntary exchange, which is to say economic liberty, not top-town communist-type centralized planning. Everywhere that has been tried, it failed and blew up. Euro-style Socialism Lite is not a workable choice anymore, either, because we are leaving behind the cheap energy economy and the geopolitical deals that made six-week vacations, retirement at 60, and free medicine possible.
Neither the Democratic Party nor their Antifa foot-soldiers have a sane and coherent approach to this set of problems. The remaining option for them is to stay insane, to fight for crazy things like men in the women’s swim lane, and to act out their inchoate rage. If they keep escalating, the remaining sane sixty-percent or so of America will opt to put them down briskly and harshly, and it looks like that is about to happen.