Bannon Deconstructed: The World He Has In Mind for Us

Donald Trump had flirted with the notion of running for president in the past, but mostly drawn by the aggrandizement of self-image it would convey, one assumes, given how remarkably little he had done to prepare himself for the job. What
could make that any clearer than, 20 months into the political arena, he just said, "Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated", when everyone knows how complicated it is.

When he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015 to announce his candidacy, his only apparent motivation was more and better jobs for American workers — jobs taken away by trade on terms that made us fools, and by immigrants pouring across the southern border who took away what jobs were left. He would fix that by imposing a 45% tariff on goods entering the country from China, by tearing up NAFTA, and by building a "beautiful" wall to shut out Mexicans. That was about it.

Stephen Bannon had taken over the Breitbart News Network after the death of its eponymous founder. While there, he hosted a radio call-in show and often had Donald Trump as a guest. The media speaks of their shared views, but the knowledge imbalance had to be vast. Trump had simplistic attitudes supported, often as not, by "facts" he makes up. He disparaged other countries and people along with Bannon — an all-inclusive list — but was vacuously short on knowledge and specifics. Trump has in the past been back and forth, registering as Republican or Democrat, which says he had evolved nothing that could be called a political philosophy. He reads almost not at all. His ghost writer says he never once saw a book in the vast apartment in Trump Tower during the entire 18 months he spent interviewing for "The Art of the Deal".

In this empty vessel, Bannon, brimful of revolutionary zeal, had found his man.

Bannon reportedly told a writer for the Daily Beast who met him at a party that he was "a Leninist" because, like the Russian revolutionary he "wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal, too". Bannon was eager to "bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment".

So who do we now find installed in the Oval Office? Nothing less than a President Trump who is all in for an agenda of “deconstruction of the administrative state”, in Bannon's words, veritably feeding the country into a shredder. Trump runs the country by executive order, has rolled back recent regulations, cancelled the major Pacific trade pact, and deliberately appointed to cabinet posts people of a mindset the opposite of what the departments they will lead have worked toward. “If you look at these cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” says Bannon.

Alarms went off when Trump brought Bannon into the White House, a man acting as confidant to the president who had come from what the Southern Poverty Law Center called, "a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill" — anti- immigration, anti-gay marriage, slandering Muslims and Jews. Under Bannon, Breitbart had became "the platform for the alt-right", which Bannon defines as "younger people who are anti-globalist, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment". Others would say his re-working of Breitbart made it a platform for those who celebrated white nationalism. "I’ve never been a supporter of ethno-nationalism”, says Bannon, aiming to divorce himself from his Breitbart past.

So who is he, really, and where do his unorthodox beliefs come from?

Once an investment banker and a somewhat accidental part-owner of the unceasing residuals from the television series "Seinfield", Stephen Bannon has no need for money; he is in this to change history. "What we are witnessing now is the birth of a new political order poorly understood by cosmopolitan élites in the media", he emailed to The Washington Post.

His partner in a Beverly Hills firm that did entertainment deals was quoted in Time saying, "He's a sponge. He's very bright. He listens. He's a strategic thinker, about three or four steps down the road" and unwilling to take no for an answer. Others, like conservative talk radio host Dana Loesch, who had worked at Breitbart, calls him "One of the worst people on God's green earth". She is seconded by former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro, who said to a Time reporter, "He is legitimately one of the worst people I've ever dealt with".

Bannon likes to thinks of himself as a honey badger, an animal undeterred from killing its food by hordes of stinging bees and snake bites. For getting the election so wrong, he told The New York Times that the media "should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while", to which he added, "The media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still don't understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States". Of like mind, Trump, in addition to calling the media "dishonest" and bearers of "fake news", would brand the media as "the enemy of the American people". That last caused Sen. John McCain to say, "that's how dictators get started".

Born to a blue collar, Irish Catholic family, Bannon developed the view that the country's cultural and political élites are contemptuous of ordinary Americans. He has called himself "the patron saint of commoners". The 2008 crash, which saw the bailouts of Wall Street's investment banks, while the common folk, like his father, once a telephone lineman, took the hit in their savings plans and reduced paychecks, infuriated Bannon, who blasted “crony capitalists” in Washington for failing to prosecute bank executives, none of whom went to prison for engineering the financial crisis.

Bannon's thesis is that the "enlightened capitalism" and the values embedded in the culture of mid-20th Century America — the entrepreneurial spirit that simultaneously cared for one's fellow man — an ethos strongly held by a people that had endured the hardships of the Great Depression and the Second World War — have since become corrupted by immorality and rampant greed. The generation that followed indulged in the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s and was spoiled by the prosperity built by their parents' generation, leading to dependency and socialism at one end of the economic spectrum and the rampant materialism of the wealthy at the other, with those in the middle left to pay for the wreckage of American lives left behind. He calls the generation in question — the baby boomers — "the most spoiled, the most self-centered, most narcissistic generation the country's ever produced".

As encapsulated by Tom Friedman, a return to the mores and culture of the 50s would give Bannon…

"a country dominated by white Christians, not “cosmopolitans”; where no one spoke Spanish at the grocery store; where America’s biggest C.E.O.s weren’t named Satya or Sundar; where every worker could have a high-wage middle-skilled job; and where trade walls and the slow pace of automation meant you didn’t have to be a lifelong learner."

In place of enlightened capitalism has come the globalism of the élites that has so hurt working class Americans. His disgust for Republicans, whom he calls "the party of Davos", is as hot as his animus for liberals, both camps having arrogated to themselves wealth and power and left the middle class deprived of reward for the work that gave them those riches. Clearly Trump was reading Bannon's words in his inaugural address when he said:

"One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world".

Bannon calls the corruption that awards the power élite with wealth far beyond what their efforts have earned "socialism for the very wealthy" as ruinous to the social structure as the "socialism for the very poor" which is unsupportable and become a crisis.

Bannon describes himself as an economic nationalist. An America first guy. "I have admired nationalist movements throughout the world, have said repeatedly strong nations make great neighbors", he told The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel. For him, the president's withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership is “one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history”, signifying America's withdrawal from the world, the importance of which the media cannot grasp. At CPAC, the annual conservative gathering, Bannon lashed out at the "corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has”. In his inaugural address Trump said, "We’ve made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon”. Again surely Bannon's words. Trump does not write like that.

Pulling against nationalism is the globalism that Bannon decries. "I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs — there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado", he said at a speech given to a conference on poverty at the Vatican.

Bannon's thinking runs counter to the current liberal emphasis on multiculturalism, gender mixtures, secularism. It sides with the Irish 18th-Century political thinker Edmund Burke, who posited that what binds a society are traditions handed down from parent to child including most particularly, for Bannon, nationalism and religion. "These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron", Burke said.

The religious component of the Burkean traditions that should be handed down according to Bannon is the Judeo-Christian heritage that formed the country, an essential underpinning of principled capitalism in which workers share in its benefits. It is the values bestowed by those religions, not their practice, that Bannon is advocating, not the abandonment of the First Amendment and a Constitution that got us this far. Nevertheless, "Torchbearer", a documentary he wrote and directed, does declare "God's teaching" as "the ultimate check on the power of the state". The state falls apart and leads to tyranny when the secular get to decide what is right and wrong.

That emphasis on Judeo-Christian teachings carries over to nationalism — and nativism. Those not imbued in these values, those who would bring into this country alien beliefs such as the Sharia law of Islam, those who do not have Judeo-Christian values in their DNA, would pollute core principles that hold society together. "These are not Jefferson democrats", Bannon has said. And some might argue that the Judeo portion of Judeo-Christian is window-dressing. His ex-wife has said he made anti-Semitic comments about students at his daughter's school, that they were raised as whiny brats. Bannon pushed back hard against that allegation, telling Strassel last fall, "Breitbart is the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America" with 10 reporters in Jerusalem, a leader in stopping the BDS movement — boycott, divestment, sanctions — in the United States, and more.

Bannon holds no truck for multiculturism, which splits us into groups often quarreling among themselves. America has not always — and you could even say seldom — welcomed immigrants despite Emma Lazarus' stirring words under Miss Liberty, but those immigrants have always folded in, learned the language and the customs, and assimilated. That has worked. For Bannon, segmentation drives groups away from adopting Americanism, which is fully inclusive, inviting people of diverse origins to merge into a unified single sense of self that leaves minority separateness behind. Otherwise, how can we all come together?

Bannon has been swayed by theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe whose book "The Fourth Turning", argued that American history repeats in cycles that work out to 80 years long — the approximate gaps between the Revolution, the Civil War, World War II — which brings us to now, and Bannon's rationalizations for breaking everything and the proclamation in Trump's inaugural address that, "You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before". Bannon based his 2010 film "Generation Zero" on the Strauss-Howe book in the belief that with the 2008 financial crisis, the moment of upheaval was upon us.

More ominously, Bannon believes that the fourscore year convulsion doesn't end with simply throwing out political parties and deconstruction. He believes that war makes for the essential transformative cataclysm, massive war at that, making the point in talking to the two authors that the Civil War was bigger than the Revolutionary War and World War II was bigger than the Civil War, suggesting, although not said by him, that the time has come for nuclear. Was it Bannon, filling Trump with his vision of the future, that caused Donald Trump to ask a friend of MSNBC's Joe Scarborough about nuclear weapons, "If we have them, why can't we use them?". He speaks of the confrontation with radical Islam as against "Islamic fascism" being "a global existential war", of a looming war with China, and had said when still with Breitbart that "one of our central organizing principles…is that we're at war".

In the Vatican talk, Bannon mentioned an Italian artist and political theorist named Julius Evola, a supporter of the traditionalist movement that seems to have influenced Vladimir Putin. It was striking that Bannon had heard of someone as obscure as Evola — he died in 1974 — and that led researchers to dig further to find who Evola was and what he espoused and how Bannon, an avid reader, could have come upon him. They found that there were already references in Breitbart articles, such as one written by the controversial and now defrocked Milo Yiannopoulos that said Evola's writings influenced the "origins of the alternative right". Another admirer of Evola was Benito Mussolini.

One can see Bannon's inspiration when Evola argues that change is "not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up". Reacting against the decadence of modernity and materialism, democracy and individual liberty, Evola would substitute a society ideally ordered by "hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual". Bannon's list would doubtless be different, but the traditionalist philosophy of a firm structure, a continuity handed down generation-to-generation, is what Bannon also found in Burke.

And so, paces from the president, we find this extraordinary disheveled figure who rocketed to walk-in privileges to the Oval Office, where he unquestionably molds the thinking of the president. This is who Trump has given a permanent seat on the National Security Council and the principals' committee, neither being a place for a political strategist, as exemplified by George W. Bush's chief of staff Joshua Bolten banning the president's political adviser, Karl Rove. Sitting on that National Security Council council is someone who, as we have just reviewed, thinks we have reached an apocalyptic 80-year moment and for whom history says that massive war is needed to effect the next transformation.