Authored by James Howard Kunstler,
“. . . it’s subversion and nothing about it is accidental. it’s a well worn playbook to use the democratic institutions of a high trust state to destroy a civilization.”
- El Gato Malo on Substack
The days might still be long, but this is a dark season in our country’s politics. Everybody’s nervous and many are furious, and yet all that emotion goes nowhere, just eats you up while you watch and wait for signs that help is on the way. What would that help even look like? Maybe a concerted effort to bum-rush a whole lot of bad ideas out of American life and replace them with better ideas that are worth building a life around.
Of the two political parties that used to vie between the interests of property and of labor, there is almost nothing left — nothing coherent, anyway.
Mr. Trump & Co. still stand outside a feckless Republican establishment that can only say “no.” That is bad enough, when it comes to vital matters like election reform and sound fiscal policy. But the President is methodically wearing them down with tactical work-arounds such as this week’s use of State Department visa control to prevent foreign visitors coming here just to drop birthright citizens.
Things will get super-serious when the president has to manage the government’s functional bankruptcy, the bond market crack-up under our impossible debt-burden, and all its knock-ons. It’s coming for sure, and will require a stringent reorganization of American finance, probably even of our money itself. That will be a moment when the nation understands what leadership really means, not just endless deception and fakery.
Speaking of which, you have the other party, the Democrats.
The Dems, unmoored from the interests of labor (whatever is left of it), are now strictly just the party of bad ideas and crime.
One way, or another, we’re gonna find you, we’re gonna gitchya gitchya gitchya. . . .
The party is also, at this juncture of history, caught in a gruesome four-way squeeze that could easily drag it into extinction. Let’s count them.
First, is the basic basket of ideas that comprise the party’s platform, readily identifiable for some years now as the “Woke” catalog. Virtually all of them are ideas that a majority of the public rejects as insane. A wide-open border. We tried that for four years under the fake president “Joe Biden.” Didn’t work out so well. Added many millions to the free everything dole that actual citizens resentfully have to pay for. Took jobs away from said citizens. Got a lot of (mostly) women murdered and raped. Let in Gawd knows how many foreign terrorists.
“Woke” also includes the DEI products of manufactured race animus and gender confusion, especially as applied in school from K all the way to PhD. Apart from the sheer hatred and idiocy these things generated, they also led to the scrapping of merit and excellence as organizing principles for civilization. Americans increasingly reject all of that.
The second squeeze point is the Democratic Party’s criminal portfolio. The Covid-19 operation was basically theirs. It killed and injured millions, wrecked the integrity of medicine, and brought on the deliberate perversion of our election procedure. It gave us fake President “Biden” and the autopen gang that ran him. Along the way, the party weaponized the law and produced one hoax after another: RussiaGate, Impeachment, J-6, the 2024 Trump trials — treason, sedition, deprivation of rights under color of law, obstruction of justice and much more. These crimes are a huge burden for the party and they are in the process of being adjudicated, and a lot of the party’s heroes will end up in prison.
The third squeeze is the party’s widespread and atrocious racketeering operation. The process of uncovering it has been going on since Jan 20, 2025, but still has a long way to go in terms of courtroom action. The Somali Learing Center in Minnesota, fake hospices by the hundreds in California, Medicaid fraud in state after state. It was generally allowed to go on by state officialdom. We await the eventual indictments of Governor Tim Walz, Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Janet Mills and many other Democratic politicians.
The Democratic Party racketeering apparatus also included the money-laundering system that kicked back millions of dollars from a matrix of NGOs that washed taxpayer money into the party coffers. USAID was a major mechanism, and has been mostly shut down, but thousands of NGOs still exist and function as employment centers for young party “activists” who otherwise would have to work the espresso machines. A lot of that activism depends on funding from the likes of George Soros, the Tides Foundation, Bill Gates, Neville Roy Singham, and other criminally-tinged philanthropy outfits. Justice is coming for them now, too.
Which redounds directly to the fourth squeeze: the rise of communism and jihad as the Party’s new rallying cries while the other three squeezes work to put the party’s old guard out of business. Communism is the fad-du-jour among Democratic Party youth because the over-production of elites (i.e., college graduates) are increasingly closed out of cushy jobs in the besieged NGO matrix, threatened further by the advent of artificial intelligence, and have been trained-up by the lefty-left college faculties to fall in love with the utopian nostrums of Karl Marx.
Communism is the Party’s last resort and most of America will not buy it, no matter how heartfelt the youth faction appears these days. Americans believe in property rights. They want to own things. They don’t really enjoy being pushed around by kommissars. They want to keep Thanksgiving and Christmas.
As for jihad, it’s hard to imagine a less likely route to the hearts and minds of America. No matter how pissed off you are about Israel, jihad is not the answer to America’s problems. No, Dorothy, Kansas will not be joining the Ummah. You will not have to don the burka. Sharia will not replace English common-law. This is a hill that somebody’s going to die on, and in America it’s not going to be Americans.
Personally, I don’t see how the Democratic Party as currently configured survives this four-way squeeze. If President Trump can succeed in starting to reindustrialize the country — even considering A-I and robots — there will still be a need for human labor and labor will seek some kind of political representation. Maybe they can find it in the hollowed out husk of the thing that used to be the Democratic Party. Otherwise, fuggeddabowdit. The party is toast.
Tyler Durden Fri, 08/07/2026 - 16:20