The Political Thought of Stephen K. Bannon

Evola disliked fascism and national socialism because of their modernism. He was for a pre-capitalist order ruled by warriors and priests, which he thought the world would return to when the current degenerate age (the Kali Yuga) came to an end.

The connecting thread among all of Bannon’s crank ideologies is fear. He is an intellectual and moral coward, in other words. He and his faction is vastly terrified by the world we have arrived in.

The last two times such fear came to ascendance we have global wars. Now…?

As far as I can glean without being able to speak Russian, much of modern Russia also celebrates historical greatness generically and without regard for contradictions. Like the majestic Russian Orthodox Church and the majestic USSR: both great! Even when they were enemies! And even though modern Russia has low church attendance, much of the non-attending population is quick to defend the concept-if-not-practice of the Church against Muslims, liberals, and other unwanted party-poopers. Pick your favorite historical regalia to wear to the party: there’s a lot to choose from and they’re all great. But celebration is mandatory and if you want to harsh the buzz with a lot of tedious thinking or criticism, be prepared to get a drink thrown in your face, or worse.

The historian, David Kaiser, wrote a column for Time Magazine, published after the election in November, in which he shared his impressions of Bannon and his fellow radicals among Republicans and Trumpsters. Kaiser had been interviewed by Bannon for Bannon’s documentary of the 2008 financial crisis, Generation Zero. Kaiser is notable among professional historians for his unusual enthusiasm for Straus and Howe’s generational theory of history, a theory Bannon also seems to find cordial to his own vision. (Kaiser identifies as a liberal Democrat.)

Their [the radical Republicans’] rhetoric and personalities, viewed in the context of Strauss and Howe’s theory of crisis, suggest that they will not be bound by existing precedents and that they will rely on their own view of the heroes and villains of our time.

Generation Zero slanted the story of the economic crisis rather cleverly. On the one hand, plenty of contributors pointed out that greed and shoddy banking practices had brought about the economic collapse, but the ultimate blame is placed on liberals, bureaucrats and established politicians. And just as Republican politicians and commentators have done for the last seven years, many of the contributors—speaking at the dawn of the Obama administration—pictured a horrible fate under Barack Obama, featuring economic catastrophe and attempts to impose socialism.

This, however, is one of the terrible things about crisis periods: many people will believe almost anything. The United States faces a terrible crisis right now even though our economy is much improved from eight years ago and we are not involved in a large war. And the Republican Party and Donald Trump are poised to take advantage of it. In my opinion, Trump, Bannon, Gingrich, Ryan and the rest will use their opportunity during the next year or two to undo as much of the Democratic legacy as they can—not only the Obama legacy, but that of FDR and LBJ as well.

Meanwhile, however, two other dangers lurk—one of them embodied in my most vivid memory of my own encounter with Bannon.

When I was first exposed to Strauss and Howe I began thinking how their ideas explained the histories of other countries as well, and during our interview, I mentioned that crises in countries like France in the 1790s and Russia after 1917 had led to reigns of terror. Bannon included those remarks in the final cut of Generation Zero.

A second, more alarming, interaction did not show up in the film. Bannon had clearly thought a long time both about the domestic potential and the foreign policy implications of Strauss and Howe. More than once during our interview, he pointed out that each of the three preceding crises had involved a great war, and those conflicts had increased in scope from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the Second World War. He expected a new and even bigger war as part of the current crisis, and he did not seem at all fazed by the prospect.

I did not agree, and said so. But, knowing that the history of international conflict was my own specialty, he repeatedly pressed me to say we could expect a conflict at least as big as the Second World War in the near or medium term. I refused.

Apocalyptic rhetoric and apocalyptic thinking flourish during crisis periods. This represents perhaps the biggest danger of the Trump presidency, and one that will bear watching from all concerned citizens in the months and years ahead.

There’s an old political joke about accusing your opponent of some shocking act (pig f*cking), just so the electorate can hear him deny it. It’s a clever strategy, that really does depend on the willingness of people to believe anything. As I watch the way the smoke of nebulous Russian electoral interference is being blown into Trump’s face, and Trump forced to deny it, I wonder if Trump and company are the only crazed people with completely incoherent views.

Kevin Phillips published his American Theocracy back in 2006, warning of the fetid alliance of religious fundamentalism, dirty oil and financial fraud that had taken over the Republican Party. Meanwhile, the center-left keeps re-reading Nixonland. There really has been a disconnect from reality on the center-Left that has failed conspicuously to even acknowledge what has been going on, and has now decided the best course is to ignore the consequences of its own neoliberal economics or failed wars, and gin up Russian electoral interference out of thin air.

Bannon’s political theatre of the absurd is something I gaze upon in wonder. The first task of political dialectics is to anchor everything to the construction of shared, consensus reality and we seem to have lost the thread.

Maybe, it is, as Kaiser speculates, a symptom of crisis that people are ready to believe almost anything. But, maybe it is also a by-product of a politics of denial and pretence on one side and relentless, radical aggression on the other.

Putting it all together, his worldview comes across as a fairly incoherent hodge-podge …

That’s not strictly accurate. The word ‘hodge-podge’ is accurate, and the word ‘incoherent’ is accurate, but the word ‘fairly’ is inaccurate. A good copy-editor would question it.

… neither of them [Trump and Bannon] seems to have any particularly coherent idea of what they believe in …

That’s not strictly accurate, either. I don’t know about Bannon, but it seems clear what Trump believes in: Trump believes in The Donald.

It’s interesting how America and Russia are confronting some similar issues after the Cold War has been over for a bit longer than 2 1/2 decades.

Russia has probably suffered more with the end of the Cold War with its economy undergoing profound restructuring and not being as prosperous as America overall, but they both have economic issues and both face some big cultural issues now post-modernity seems to have largely run its course. As well as both facing declining power globally as a multi-polar world comes to replace the 1st world-2nd world-3rd world world order of the postwar era.

I’ve got Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich and Hillbilly Elegy by J D Vance on my (Australian) Summer reading list, have only had time to read a little of Secondhand Time at this point, but the American-Russian relationship seems topical with what looks like proxy war in Syria, and the intelligence agency allegations about Russian involvement in Trump’s victory, and Russia’s and Trump’s counter allegations. Interesting times.

So, I watched Kaiser in Generation Zero on You Tube. I don’t care where he taught, his theory of ‘turnings’ (which no historian I ever trained under ever felt compelled to broach TG!) is as loopy and poorly-grounded as anything I’ve ever encountered anywhere.

Generation Zero is unwatchable. I stuck around just long enough to hear Kaiser. Pure bunk and mighty dull, too.

“Bannon claims that there is both a crisis of capitalism and a crisis of Judeo-Christian values, and the two crises are interwoven.”

I think the two crises are interwoven, but I don’t think there is any link at all between capitalism and Judeo-Christian values. Christianity (which was originally a radical sect of Judism) as such is communist. It is inherently capitalist values that are causing the crisis in the religions (which are basically feudally organised at root).

Always keeping in mind that “Judeo-Christian” ≡ Christian.

@reason

There are (at least) two broad interpretations of Christianity. “Strong Christianity”, focused on God’s dominance of man and (Christian) man’s dominance of nature and non-Christian man, derived largely from the Old Testament. In contrast, “Weak Christianity” is derived from the New Testament, focused on Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins, the meek inheriting the Earth and a variety of other proto-communitarian notions.

All debates about what “Christian values” are and what they’re in conflict with are largely a product of the interpretation one is indoctrinated into. In fact, I think that the American emphasis on “Judeo-Christian” values implies both the historical references at the founding of the nation and preponderance of Old Testament interpretations in many of the Evangelical churches.

bruce wilder @10

Kaiser is notable among professional historians for his unusual enthusiasm for Straus and Howe’s generational theory of history

It’s too bad in a way (assuming one’s inclined to find Strauss and Howe oversimplified or wrong or etc.), b/c apart from that Kaiser is a serious and prolific historian. That doesn’t mean one has to agree w him, but his bks are not, afaict, those of a crank. The one I’m familiar w and happen to have on the shelf is Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler (Harvard U.P., 1990).

Sorry for the digression. (Haven’t properly absorbed OP, just happened to see ref to Kaiser in the thread.)

Re: Kaiser

Kaiser chose to become a classic “Kings and Generals building the nation-state” kind of historian at a time when that choice was going from predominant to fatally unfashionable in the academy; thus, his career suffered. I read his recent book on FDR’s management of the U.S. entry into WWII and thought it a better than respectable, reliable journeyman’s effort. He did what historians are supposed to do: immersed himself in the documentary record and used methodically balanced judgment to extract an informative narrative that highlighted what was important to subsequent developments.

I expect his alienation from current mainstream fashions in historiography, which emphasize research on economic and social factors over the acts of great men, contributes to his openness to Strauss and Howe, who brought social and cultural evolution into history’s story in quite a different fashion. I’m interested in cyclic theories of politics and economics, but I, personally, cannot stomach Strauss and Howe; their insistence on assigning cutely named generations a character feels too much like astrology to me and overlooks a lot of institutional detail I think important. It’s goofy and, as ks says, ungrounded. In defense of Kaiser, I believe his own detailed research on state-building projects stretching back to Philip II and Louis XIV and how those expansions ground to a halt upon the exhaustion of spirit and resources prepared his mind for cyclic ideas, in a way that could be grounded in copious detail.

Kaiser: “The United States faces a terrible crisis right now even though our economy is much improved from eight years ago and we are not involved in a large war.”

Kidneystones: If the United States has a much improved economy and is not involved in a large war, the logical question would seem to be what exactly is this ‘terrible crisis’ that so worries Kaiser?

You hardly have to be Strauss & Howe to see our current politics in a frame that emphasizes, say, the end of the neoliberal era in globalizing economic policy, or the end of the American imperium in foreign policy. Or, to think that if history does not repeat, sometimes it does rhyme, as Twain supposedly had it, or that tragedy is echoed as farce, to which effect Marx famously purported to quote Hegel. It doesn’t need to be only a superficial literary conceit either. There are good reasons to think that the neoliberal policy regime has run out of road; ditto for the U.S. “empire” abroad.

So, Bannon is picking up on ideas that are filling the air, more than a little. And, what Kaiser instinctively pulls back from — Bannon’s affection for apocalypso — is worth noting.

I think the OP is excellent and valuable. It does bear re-reading more than once. (Is that terrible syntax?) If there’s a risk in the presentation, imho, it is in feeling superior or detached from the emergent madness. Trump is not all incoherence all the time and I am sure Bannon — an highly intelligent man — is not either. But, as the OP says, they seem to throw up a smokescreen. Something, though, is getting thru that has been stifled by the establishment — some truth, some perhaps feeble responsiveness to reality.

Actually competent and responsive governing elites do not willy nilly hand off power to a Trump or Bannon.

“Actually competent and responsive governing elites do not willy nilly hand off power to a Trump or Bannon.”

Enter Mike Pence (once Trump gets impeached).

Pavel @22
I was basing my argument on the view that Christ was not a part of the old Testament and that “Christianity” as distinct from Judeo-Christian is based fundamentally on the philosophy expounded in the gospels. I hope that clarifies my point.

Hi Bruce, thanks for the reference to Kaiser’s good work. I’ve never even considered cycles, but perhaps that’s just me. I certainly manage to repeat mistakes, and to some degree I’m sure these can be predicted by one more self-aware than I. Going into Iraq seemed like a fantastically bad idea simply on logistical grounds. The subsequent failures in Libya and Syria were equally predictable, but I’m not sure they qualify as ‘cyclical’ in the sense of seasonal cycles, or any other kind.

Anyway, I don’t see the US (or any other nation) facing the kinds of crises commonplace in the past three centuries. We’ve never had it so good. I woke up this morning seeing Kaiser’s piece in Time as post-election CYA. As he himself notes, he can’t complain about his treatment by Bannon in Generation Zero, and is likely quite aware that his role as a Bannon collaborator (among a cast of clowns) in a piece of propaganda is likely to attract some extra scrutiny of the negative career-killing kind. I’d have thought, btw, we turn power over to clowns all the time, but perhaps that’s just me.

Re: the looming apocalypse. Can’t see it, but that doesn’t mean we won’t manage to manufacture one. Cheers.

bruce wilder @26:
tragedy is echoed as farce, to which effect Marx famously purported to quote Hegel.

The first-time-tragedy-second-time-farce thing is not Marx “purport[ing] to quote Hegel”; rather, it’s Marx amending or adding to something he recalled Hegel as having said.

Opening lines of Marx’s ’18th Brumaire’ (with emphasis added):

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

There must be an underlying, unifying mindset, sentiment, impulse or instinct. Fear (4) sounds a plausible candidate. Specifically, fear of an Islamic takeover of Europe (27) and then the rest of the West. But there’s surely more to the fuel cocktail.

“…Bannon rails against “crony capitalism.” (This from a former investment banker working for Goldman Sachs!)” This doesn’t have to be self-contradictory. Some people have to have worked within the system to admit and understand its corruption.

“How do Bannon’s professed Christian beliefs comport with his commitment to hard-nosed capitalism…?” There is a large subset of American Protestants who seem to believe the righteousness of hard-nosed capitalism is a natural consequence of their tenets. Bannon, however, is a Catholic.

@17: In the 1920s, Mussolini’s fascism exploited the widely shared notion that Italy was a “proletarian nation.” That is, while Britain, France and even Germany had managed to industrialize themselves by the end of the 19th century, Italy remained backward (despite its leadership in some areas – think Marconi, Agnelli, Macchi) and, worse, trapped in some bad equilibrium that made industrialization virtually impossible under a liberal regime. Hence, a newly defined national unity, or at least detente, was deemed necessary for economic development.

Alex K: “Some people have to have worked within the system to admit and understand its corruption.”

Ah, so he saw the light, and returned the money…?

@10: “More than once during our interview, he pointed out that each of the three preceding crises had involved a great war, and those conflicts had increased in scope from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the Second World War. He expected a new and even bigger war as part of the current crisis, and he did not seem at all fazed by the prospect. I did not agree, and said so. But, knowing that the history of international conflict was my own specialty, he repeatedly pressed me to say we could expect a conflict at least as big as the Second World War in the near or medium term. I refused. Apocalyptic rhetoric and apocalyptic thinking flourish during crisis periods. This represents perhaps the biggest danger of the Trump presidency.”

Bannon’s general thesis, I would say, is that we are in a very big crisis, and very big crises eventuate in very big wars. That’s what he says in the Vatican talk, and that’s re-stated in the exchange with Kaiser. @27 is certainly right that in the Vatican remarks, Bannon sees that looming war as a war between the Christian West and “Islam.” But those remarks were in 2014, and ISIS looked a lot more formidable in 2014 than it does today. What matters in Bannon’s worldview, I would suggest, is more the apocalypticism and less any particular target of that apocalypticism, which borders on a yearning for World War III. One sees this quite clearly in the trailer linked in @13. So in 2014, the coming war is with Islam, but as @37 suggests, other civilizational enemies such as China can’t be ruled out: what counts is WWIII, not who the protagonists turn out to be. Clearly, this apocalypticism is not unique to Bannon, but runs through a bunch of scary contemporary ideologies. For those of us (including David Brooks) interested in the connection between Bannon and Dugin, it’s evident that this apocalypticism is the most salient common feature of these ideologies. The yearning for a cleansing apocalypse is to be found in the ideology of ISIS, in Duginism, and now in Bannonism.

It’s dangerous to look for logic where there may be none, but the preference for war with “Militant Islam” over war with China could be the preference for being an executioner over murder-suicide. The homicide of Others is a man’s most heroic calling of course, and needs the spice of occasionally taking casualties as well as inflicting them for best results, but there are limits. China has thermonuclear weapons. So does Russia. That’s too spicy.

Let the Pentagon spend $500 billion here and there on the fantasy premise that the USA could need to wage total-but-thoroughly-nonnuclear war with China or Russia at some future date. We all know that the real meat and potatoes of American warfare is bearded guys with pickup trucks and small arms. Kill a few bystanders while attacking funerals for the previous generation of militants and you’re guaranteed a fresh crop every year. It’s permaculture war, sustainable, just dangerous enough to restore the masculinity stolen when OSHA and the EPA stopped letting enough men die of forklift accidents and solvent exposure.

Collin Street @ 43

Do you think you can find war-mongering bombast and nationalist religiosity in the thought of, say, Milton Friedman?

“War is good for business”, from the “rules of acquisition”.
There seems to be a strong apocalyptic thread running through fundamentalist religion, Christian and Islamic. A lot of it among Christians can be blamed on The Revelation of St. John the Divine. But, I have no doubt that other Biblical justification could be found if needed. Just like justifications can be found in the Quran by those who wish to.
Other than Bannon and Gen. Flynn, are there other clash of the civilizations types among Trump’s cabinet nominees? I would be surprised if Pence does not lean that way.
Aren’t the themes of “the people” being betrayed by corrupt elites and an existential battle for the soul of the nation among the primary tenets of fascism? I suspect that Bannon is much more of an authoritarian that he would admit even to himself.
Even among many conservatives who are secularish, there is a view that religion is needed to mantain the discipline of the masses.

Layman @ 45

I don’t much like Milton Friedman or his ideas. He was a tremendously destructive guy. But I can tell that interview is not verbatim Friedman. He had distinctive patterns of speech. There are fragments there that might be genuine, but there’s been some heavy handed editing, because he would alternate between sweeping idealism and weaselly qualification and, though a Republican partisan in his way he never gave any politician unqualified support. I absolutely guarantee Friedman never said the exact words, “US President Bush only wanted war because anything else would have threatened the freedom and the prosperity of the USA”.

What follows is an interview transcript I found on Fox News from an interview that took place in 2004. There is some correspondence with the interview you quote, like the point about the proportionate size of war expenditure, but in other respects the tone is quite different and I think you are quoting something that does not represent Friedman accurately.

MF: . . . The facts are that during the Clinton Administration government spending did go down as a fraction of national income. However, that was almost entirely because of reductions in military expenditures.

DA: Which have gone up since then.

MF: Oh yes, because of the Iraq war. And war is an enemy of freedom.

DA: In a time of war, how do we maintain our freedom?

MF: We don’t. We invariably reduce our freedom. But that doesn’t mean it’s a permanent reduction. As long as we really keep in mind what we’re doing, that we keep it temporary, we need not destroy our freedom.

DA: Are you concerned that some of the measures we’re taking now to fight the war, like the Patriot Act, may be more than just temporary?

MF: It’s not clear. The Patriot Act is a very complicated issue, and I’m not going to get involved in that. But I think that on the whole, this war is small enough relative to our economy that it is not going to be a serious impediment to our freedom. But the sooner we can get rid of it and out of it, the better.

DA: Do you agree with President Bush that the actions in Iraq were necessary as a part of our war on terrorism?

MF: I think you can argue either side of that. Where I do feel strongly, is that having gone into it, whether we should have or not, we must see it through.

DA: Even if it costs some of our freedoms?

MF: There’s no way to avoid a burden on your freedom. The costs themselves are a burden on your freedom. The restrictions that are necessary in order to get rid of the terrorists are a burden to your freedom. So there’s no way in the short run to avoid a restriction on your freedom. But if we’re going to avoid a permanent reduction in freedom, we have to see this war through.

bruce wilder: “But I can tell that interview is not verbatim Friedman.”

Which are your other superpowers, bruce?

Guy Harris, thanks for providing the link. I didn’t think it was necessary, assuming that anyone opining about Friedman and war would be familiar with his evolving positions on the Iraq war.

bruce wilder:

Naomi Klein did the translation?

I said “Naomi Klein provides a translation”, with “provides” being in the sense of “the translation is available on a page from naomiklein.org”. The page does not indicate who performed the act of translating, so I don’t know (and didn’t state) whether she performed the translation.

I also don’t know whether Friedman was fluent enough in German for the interview to be conducted in German, so I don’t know whether the interview was conducted in English and translated into German for publication.

@ bruce wilder, if you don’t like the translation offered, then find another or do your own and tell us what Friedman really said. Short of that, I’d say you’re just being churlish about it.

My educated guess: The interview was done in English and then translated into German with very limited editing – the sentence structure sounds more natural in the English back translation.

He said it alright.

A postmodern, eclectic worldview mixed with vaguely apocalyptic (sometimes millenarian) fantasies is probably becoming more widespread among somewhat educated Russians. However, calling it Duginism is giving too much credit to the man: there is no need to invoke Dugin to explain these states of mind (or of the subconscious). Turning on a state-controlled TV channel would go a longer way; the philosophy of Russian TV chiefs such as Konstantin Ernst or Vladimir Kulistikov might be more relevant to this discussion.

In addition, most of the eschatologically-minded Russians would prefer an Apocalypse localized elsewhere, say, an Armageddon in North America or Western Europe, but not so much at home, since Russia’s 20th century was sufficiently apocalyptic in itself. These Russians’ doomsday wishes are extremely unlikely to reach the suicidal intensity of self-immolating Old Believers.