I was, perhaps, too curt about the how serious Steve Bannon is compared to the who most of the liberal and even neoconservative press portray him as being. You don’t fight a media mogul with mind like Otto Von Bismark like he is a caricature from American History X. Bannon may or may not be a racialist, he definitely doesn’t have problems of Richard Spencer. Indeed, the mainstream media realizing that Richard Spencer exists has been a boon for Radix as they keep trotting him out to scare liberals into not trying to play politics with the GOP. From what I can’t see why liberals are having so much trouble with this, but this gives Steve Bannon cover: Bannon is not an alt-rightist a la Spencer, and only tried to wrestle the brand away from Spencer as a way of conveying mystique. Furthermore, Spencer himself had forgone that brand in favor of Radix several years ago out of differences with some of the bloggers. People outside of /pol/ or readers of the most dark and obscure corners of American Conservative and Taki Magazine probably have no idea of this history or how they are playing into it.
When Steven Bannon says he wants that dark power, he isn’t kidding, and Bill Kristols and liberal bloggers of the world are giving it to him. Even the National Review is on watch. When the Daily Kos and the National Review agree on something, people take notice, but often for the wrong reasons. Bannon isn’t wrong that making Dick Cheney and Karl Rove names progressives used to scare their children to sleep at the end of Bush era and the beginning of Obama’s presidency was a source of real political power for both Cheney and Rove. So you respond by him saying that by giving it him? The DailyKos is literally giving Bannon what he wants:
Hurrah for honesty, at least. Even Dick Cheney, who certainly inhabited the dark side, didn’t—at least publicly—praise Satan. Bannon could have mentioned some others imbued with the darkness-is-good vibe: Silvio Berlusconi, Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco. But that would have been too honest.
Indeed, in fact, by listing Berlusconi in the same league as Pinochet and Franco, they are try giving Bannon and Berlusconi (and by proxy Trump) more power. After all, Pinochet and Franco successfully used left and liberal idiocy against itself and buried their opposition: literally. Bannon would love for the American public to think he can do that, because if they think that, he can.
The National Review is smarter, but still doesn’t see the irony, when Tuttle says, “The problem is not whether Bannon himself subscribes to a noxious strain of political nuttery; it’s that his de facto endorsement of it enables it to spread and to claim legitimacy.” The National Review is also spreading the message of that nuttery by looking like elitists denouncing it, and making Bannon look like the sane option who is just a Machiavelli using tendencies of degenerated capitalist democracy against itself.
This is where the contrast with Karl Rove really comes in, while Karl Rove was a Machiavelli. He didn’t have the vision or real focus of Bannon. Rove was a political operative who wanted a generation’s long GOP dominance for a New American Century. A century that was just an extension of the post-war American dominance. It was Reagan’s America, but also Kennedy’s America. Rove used Kennedy’s model for tax cuts, encouraged mild flirtation with direct stimulus, and saw how to get aging boomers out to vote against social norms of changing since the 1960s. Yet, while in the seeming blinkered vision of US politics, this was only extending the tactics of the Boomers into another generation: a bit of Kennedy, a bit of Nixon, and a large dose of Reagan.
Bannon makes Rove look positively myopic. Rove’s permeant GOP majority was generational, and would just extent the current out 40s years. Bannon is talking, and has been talking, in terms of epochs going back to World War 2. Yes, his sensationalist media seems like the worse excesses of the Drudge Report, and its support for the GOP in the Bush 43’s Presidencies, but Breibart under Bannon was playing a much longer came that Breibart under Breibart. Don’t believe me? Read the speech Bannon had linked to Buzzfeed:
And we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.
Now, what I mean by that specifically: I think that you’re seeing three kinds of converging tendencies: One is a form of capitalism that is taken away from the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity and, really, Judeo-Christian belief.
I see that every day. I’m a very practical, pragmatic capitalist. I was trained at Goldman Sachs, I went to Harvard Business School, I was as hard-nosed a capitalist as you get. I specialized in media, in investing in media companies, and it’s a very, very tough environment. And you’ve had a fairly good track record. So I don’t want this to kinda sound namby-pamby, “Let’s all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’ around capitalism.”
But there’s a strand of capitalism today — two strands of it, that are very disturbing.
One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that’s the capitalism you see in China and Russia. I believe it’s what Holy Father [Pope Francis] has seen for most of his life in places like Argentina, where you have this kind of crony capitalism of people that are involved with these military powers-that-be in the government, and it forms a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people. And it doesn’t spread the tremendous value creation throughout broader distribution patterns that were seen really in the 20th century.
The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. And, look, I’m a big believer in a lot of libertarianism. I have many many friends that’s a very big part of the conservative movement — whether it’s the UKIP movement in England, it’s many of the underpinnings of the populist movement in Europe, and particularly in the United States.
However, that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the “enlightened capitalism” of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost — as many of the precepts of Marx — and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation [that] they’re really finding quite attractive. And if they don’t see another alternative, it’s going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of “personal freedom.”
Bannon is mixing capitalism with Catholic social teaching in a way that resembles a Nationalist form of Post-Keynesianism. Deficit spending priming the pop on investment within a polity, currency manipulation maintaining that, and lots of infrastructure investment being made. Even after that infrastructure is non-productive. If that resembles Peron’s Argentina or China, it is important to remember that most of respectable non-neoliberal left believes the same thing. Bannon has swept their own policies out from under them.
Furthermore, is Bannon wrong about his analysis of post-World War II “West”? He is right, for example, that Christendom more than race defines its borders. Iranians are caucasians after all. He is right that secular capitalism and Islamism have worked together to accidentally create ISIS. What Bannon does though is combines Paleo-conservatism and neoconservatism while rebuking both:
They have a Twitter account up today, ISIS does, about turning the United States into a “river of blood” if it comes in and tries to defend the city of Baghdad. And trust me, that is going to come to Europe. That is going to come to Central Europe, it’s going to come to Western Europe, it’s going to come to the United Kingdom. And so I think we are in a crisis of the underpinnings of capitalism, and on top of that we’re now, I believe, at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.
The language mirrors the New American century, but the goal absolutely does not. Bannon agrees with Elizabeth Warren about the problems of Goldman Saches, and he should know, he worked there. Bannon agrees with Putin about the decline of the West and the decline of Christendom, and he agrees with Marxists that the middle class was under attack by large global powers. There is a reason a why people in both old centers of power are afraid of him, and some of it is his nationalism, but others is that he has found a mixture to show them all as empty and use parts of all of their rhetoric.
If Rove’s ambition of a generational GOP majority in congress, Bannon’s is more akin to František Palacký than James Carvel. Trump may be cheeto Benito form of Huey Long, but Bannon is far, far more serious. Continue to make him into a caricature, he’s already told you he’s fine with that.
Symptomatic Commentary 