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ABSTRACT
Donald Trump’s thinking is too erratic and scattershot to count as a real system of ideas. Steve Bannon’s version of populism seems significantly more focused, more self-conscious, and hence more open to theory-based critical analysis, which this paper attempts to provide. That is not at all to say, however, that Bannon’s ideas achieve intellectual coherence or consistency. Close examination of the defining components of his worldview suggest the opposite. Still, engagement with contemporary right-populism cannot, or should not, avoid Bannon and his attempts to cook up a new ideology.
Notes
1 The full transcript is available online; see Feder Citation2016.
2 This alt-right-like partiality for Putin’s Russia is also evident from Bannon’s recent activities vis-à-vis Bosnia: “The Serb politicians whom Bannon supports want to secede from [Bosnia], oppose the European Union, and ally themselves closely with Russia” (Varagur Citation2018). In an interview given as recently as March of 2019 and reported by the Associated Press (Citation2019), Bannon sticks to the same Russia-friendly line. He says that “the Judeo-Christian West” is in an existential struggle with China and needs to align itself with Russia in order to prevail in that struggle.
3 Two helpful and intelligent surveys of the alt-right devote a fair bit of discussion to Bannon’s oblique relation to this disturbing ideology: George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right, chapter 5; and Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right, chapter 9. For a collection of reactions to Bannon from alt-right figures themselves, see pp. 212-222 of Main’s book. Especially telling are assessments of Bannon by two of the alt-right figures contacted by Main, namely Hunter Wallace and Greg Johnson. Wallace states that Breitbart, under Bannon’s direction, “popularized a diluted version of our beliefs… . [He] is far closer to us in spirit than to the ‘conservatives.’ … Steve Bannon isn’t one of us, but he isn’t an enemy either. He has gone out of his way to stick up for the Deplorables. If politics is about friend vs. enemy, then we definitely count Steve Bannon as a friend… . His enemies are our enemies” (Main Citation2018, 213). Johnson’s view is similar: “Bannon is a civic nationalist. We’re racial nationalists. There are overlaps but disagreements on fundamental values. But Bannon is not stiffing us because his life is an experiment. He’s living as if the future he is fighting for has already arrived: a world where the Left has no power… . Bannon wants to win and actually roll back the Left. That makes him a radical and revolutionary conservative” (ibid., 212-213). See also the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on how Bannon relates to the far right (Hankes Citation2017).
4 For a fuller discussion, see Beiner Citation2015.
5 Cf. Jason Jorjani, former editor-in-chief of Arktos Media and Richard Spencer’s partner in the founding of the AltRight Corporation, as quoted in The Atlantic: what “we will see hopefully in the next few years, maybe sooner than that, [is] a total integration of the European New Right and the North American alt-right” (Gray Citation2017). Arguably, Bannon has, since leaving the Trump administration, been pursuing his own version of just that kind of project. The goal of remaking America’s civic identity in the image of European ethnic nationalism is also intimated in a comment Bannon supposedly made to a French official in 2016: “We are at the end of the Enlightenment. Have you read Charles Maurras?” (Weitzmann Citation2019.)
6 Another contradiction in Bannon’s thinking presents itself quite starkly in American Dharma. He clearly reveres the ethos of a military sense of duty and adores the existential drama of war. Yet he also inherits the foreign-policy isolationism that runs through the American far right, from the original America First crowd through the paleoconservatives to the contemporary alt-right. How can one yearn for civilizational conflict with Islam and China (as Bannon appears to do) if wars are illegitimate impositions on the working class by evil liberal elites?
One possible way of squaring this circle is suggested by Bannon’s response to Trump’s (conspicuously Bannonite) troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan: “Mr. Trump, [Bannon] said,” according to the New York Times, “wanted to end these military campaigns [in Syria and Afghanistan] so he could focus on the economic and geopolitical contest with China, which he views as America’s biggest foreign threat. ‘This is not about a return to isolationism,’ Mr. Bannon said. ‘It’s the pivot away from the humanitarian expeditionary mentality of the internationalists’” (Landler Citation2018). Unlike Trump, Bannon can articulate a reason for the policy; but it still doesn’t add up. How will withdrawing 2,000 Special Ops from Syria contribute to an eventual geopolitical showdown with China? Can one ever take what Bannon says at face value?
7 Shane Citation2016 reports that the Bannon-led Breitbart News had 45 million readers. For more detailed information on the scope of Breitbart’s readership relative to other political publications, see Main Citation2018, chapter 2. On p. 211, Main refers to Breitbart’s “monthly average of 64 million visits between September 2016 and February 2018.”
8 For Bannon’s denial that he is a white nationalist, see Strassel Citation2016 and Wolff Citation2016.
9 As regards the right-wing Catholic aspect of Bannon’s multiplex ideology, see Freedman Citation2016, Horowitz Citation2018, Hosenball Citation2018, and Mammone Citation2019. One is tempted to say that the idea of Steve Bannon as a pious traditional Catholic seems to be a joke—but of which of the various personae that make up the Bannon shtick could the same not be said?
10 Evidently it was the Bannonite aspects of the Trump Inaugural that elicited the discerning commentary on the speech reportedly offered by George W. Bush: “That was some weird shit.”
11 Main Citation2018, 83. Chapter 3 of Main’s book is particularly helpful, because the more one learns about the paleoconservative roots of the alt-right, the more one begins to discern significant ways in which those ideological precursors anticipated what became Trumpism and Bannonism.
12 Franz Neumann suggests that “whenever the outcry against the sovereignty of banking capital is injected into a popular movement, it is the surest sign that fascism is on its way” (Neumann Citation1942, 322).
13 To what extent has contemporary right populism in America been fueled by a racist backlash against the experience of having had a black president for eight years? Without question, Donald Trump was betting on such a phenomenon when he heartily embraced birtherism back in 2011 in order to begin pursuing his presidential ambitions. And we know that the bet paid off. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., put the point well when he told Stephen Colbert: “I think that having a beautiful, brilliant Black family in the White House for eight years absolutely drove a lot of people crazy.”