I’d been hearing about The Eliminationists for a while via diaries here and when I saw two fellows sitting at a table at Netroots Nation with half a dozen copies I figured they were selling them and I stopped to chat, not realizing I was about to get a copy signed by David Neiwert.
I didn’t attend any of the NN09 sessions on the radical right but I just plowed through the book and it’s very interesting in light of our energy, economic, and environmental issues.
I knew the lands we occupy now were appropriated from the Native Americans over a two or three century expansion by European settlers. I knew slavery was legal in parts of the United States until 1865 and that a century later it took a fight of another sort to correct some of the lingering inequality. I knew that we’d interned Japanese-American citizens during World War II. I was less aware of the anti-Chinese activities in the west.
Each of these ethnic groups was demonized. They were ignorant and lazy, they were educated and too industrious, they were wild and feral and a threat to ‘civilization’. This blatant racism is evident throughout the narrative:
An eternal law of nature has decreed that the white cannot assimilate the blood of another without corrupting the very springs of civilization. – An Asiatic Exclusion League speaker circa 1905
I could flip the book open to any page and find a quote like this one, but another book comes to mind in conjunction with this one – John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Eliminationist rhetoric was applied to the economic/environmental refugees who arrived on the west coast from the nation’s blasted midsection during our last depression.
For those who aren’t following the banking mess closely may I suggest that you catch up by reading The Automatic Earth for a few days? We’re at an ugly confluence of problems in our economy, environment, and energy supplies. The U6 unemployment is 15%+ right now and I’m expecting that to double. Kossack plf515 hopefully suggests we might be facing a transition as dramatic as the industrial revolution; I fear it’ll be much worse.
We’d thought that global oil production peaked in May of 2005, but we got just a tiny bit more out than that in July of 2008. There might be enough oil for one more hurrah if the economy weren’t getting under foot, but the industry trends are clear: 50% of all natural gas drilling rigs are out of service right now. Oil lacks such a clear cut indicator of reduced production but the same issues are there – all of the big fields are in decline and with dramatically reduced economic activity we’ll never make the investment required to drive those oil reserves harder than we did last summer.
These economic and energy issues can still be contentious, but I’d hope no one reading here needs to be schooled on the climate problems we face. If I’m wrong about that there’s no better resource than Real Climate.
Consider how these three factors interact. Our economy has a long, long way to fall before the bubble of the Bush years is deflated. We’ve had maybe 120 of our 8,500 FDIC insured banks fail. The conservative estimates I’ve seen from professional rates indicate that about 15% of them will die at a bare minimum. We’re just 10% of the way through that process and we’ve got at least four more years of subprime style grief in the commercial real estate market that’ll keep sucking banks under as bad investments unwind.
The last time we had a depression we still had the oil patch, with the original find at Spindletop almost played out, but plenty of other fields were going strong. If we don’t get a renewable energy foundation as the underpinnings of our economy we aren’t going to have much of an economy to speak of in the future.
And all of this is dependent on environment. Drought in the Central Valley has shut down California agriculture. The relentless wet in the Midwest is impacting corn crops this year. The Dakotas flooded while the southeast has faced drought that threatened the operation of power plants on the Gulf coast. Declining precipitation in the mountain west has reduced generating capacity from dams and reduced fresh water supplies.
As macro trends we’re going to see much more unemployment. The U6 number, currently at 15%, will likely double. An unemployment rate of roughly one third makes the prediction that somewhere between a sixth and a third of our housing going empty believable. Some of it is too inefficient, some poorly built, but mostly the ones that are too far from work, shopping, and services will be the ones that go empty. This is already seen in the southwest, where models homes for new divisions that aren’t selling are simply bulldozed to reduce the lot owner’s tax liability.
Much like the industrial revolution, climbing down from our unsustainable high energy lifestyle is going to create dramatic socioeconomic realignment. That’s a polite way of saying "permanent underclass". I’ve suggested before that we might end up Homesteading The 21st Century but we won’t get there without tremendous change. I’ll warrant very few of those 30% joining the permanent underclass have ever uttered the phrase "landless peasants", let alone viewed themselves as members of that set.
These people, these newly dispossessed Eliminationists, at least the white ones, are going to have a hell of a shock - they’ll be demonized by their former peers. More than anything I think the lower socioeconomic tiers are going to have a hard time adjusting to the loss of their stipend – that psychic wage that comes from being members of the white "master race".
We’ve progressed from tribalism to feudalism to constitutional monarchy to various forms of democracy, but these paralleled a rising mastery of the energy sources available to us. As we skid back down I don’t believe we’ll be stopping off at organizational methods that have had their philosophical underpinnings knocked out, say the constitutional monarchy, but the tribe and the warlord are natural organizational elements.
We’re going to have diminished resources and in that scenario humans always fight. George Monbiot puts it more poetically:
In the presence of entropy, virtue might be impossible.
I think that lack of virtue is already showing: faked intelligence, torture of prisoners of war, and a poorly conceived and poorly executed war of choice that just happens to be in the vicinity of the last surviving supergiant oil field and the ethnic group for whom we’ve been providing close air support for the last twenty years.
You get what you give and that goes for empires as well as individuals. Our collective national karma is going to ripen; Mexico as a failed state on our southern border and internal convulsions as federal authority frays. There just isn’t any place to write "happily ever after" in the telling of this story.
Will Kossacks pushed out onto the road form those prole mobs Bruce Sterling posits in his post collapse political thriller Distraction. Will Joel’s Army mimic the Revealed Aryan Nazarene of William Gibson’s Virtual Light haunting the edges of remaining civilization ad dealing harshly with race mixers, or are they already creepy enough in their own right?
I don’t really want those questions answered, but we are going there ...
