Cornpone Nazism

James Howard Kunstler’s paranoia about ordinary White folks is segueing over into his writing again. In the latest example, he trembles at the thought that a growing number of unemployed and disentitled Whites might turn against “the Jews” and “brown-skinned people” over the financial swindles of Goldman Sachs. Last week, he peered into the soul of Sarah Palin and discerned that she represented “Naziism US style.” Dire warnings about the cornpone Nazis of the future have been a staple of Kunstler’s writing for over a year now.

In this dark scenario, the dispossessed White middle class of the United States turns against the Obama administration and elects a rightwing fundamentalist who promises to restores the happy motoring way of life in the wake of a Peak Oil economic collapse. Underneath the surface of consumerism, Kunstler detects a growing barbarization of American life, which is best symbolized by the expressivist non-conformists who disfigure their bodies with tattoos and piercings. According to this Mad Max line of reasoning, strip White Americans of their suburban homes, SUVs, air conditioners and TV dinners and they will lash out like drug addicts desperate for their next fix.

There is a congruence with White Nationalist thinking here. Racialists have long suspected that materialism is to blame for White political apathy. Whites have insulated themselves from America’s racial degeneration in a number of ways: through the suburban living arrangement which minimizes their interaction with “diversity,” through gated communities and expensive home security systems that deter non-White crime, through harsh drug laws which funnel young blacks into the penal system, through racial preferences and other types of extortion which pacify the non-White underclass at a price.

It is too easy for the White middle class to live the quiet life in suburbia and forget about the type of country they are leaving behind to their descendants. As individualists, they are not inclined to think much about the future or the world beyond their own immediate circle of family and friends. Embracing White racial consciousness comes at too high a social price under the prevailing cultural norms. There are no selfish incentives to do so. This is the fundamental reason why White Nationalists have spent decades dreaming of a general social and economic collapse. A revival of White racial consciousness would seem to require extreme conditions like a peak in world petroleum production.

Ultimately, I think James Howard Kunstler’s fear and loathing of Whites has little to do with Peak Oil. It is a common Jewish trait to see Nazism always lurking beyond the corner: in conservative Christians, in segregationists in places like Mississippi, in rank and file GOP voters. This inspires the seemingly endless waves of Jewish cultural critique and political action that generate anti-Semitism in places where it didn’t exist before. If “cornpone Nazism” ever becomes a political reality in the United States, it will hatch first in the Jewish imagination.

From Occidental Dissent, July 28, 2009