In Washington, the struggle within Trump’s coalition between MAGA and Musk is picking up steam. Alex Gourevitch thinks MAGA’s fascist-saluting champion Steve Bannon is likely to be on the losing end.
It has been strange watching Steve Bannon not just stalking DC but having nearly reclaimed his place on stage. Even for a culture that is a sucker for a sequel, it wasn’t obvious that this one would get the green light. Like a minor character there just to move the plot along, Bannon was killed off early in the first season. While there were many casualties of Trump’s first season, Bannon barely made it out of the pilot episode. But not only is Bannon unfazed, he seems to think he has a starring role in the second season, mainly because Trump has learned the lesson he was teaching: you have to take the fight to the Republican Party itself. To take his country back he first has to take his party over. That is the service Bannon provides. In fact, in Bannon’s world, he is not just Trump’s instrument, Bannon is using Trump: to destroy and reconstruct the Republican Party. In various interviews over the past six months, with David Brooks and more recently Ross Douthat, as well as on his podcast, Bannon has laid out elements of the plan, with characteristic directness. Listening to Bannon, one cannot help but admire the confidence, combativeness, and relative lack of concession to the ordinary pieties of American political discourse. But in the end, Bannon is still a prisoner of the postmodern liberalism he claims to hate.
Bannon’s vision of how to restore the nation is built out of a now familiar story of betrayal. American elites were once committed to the nation but they have abandoned it for a soggy, liberal globalism. They once sent their sons and daughters to the military, ran disciplined businesses according to long-term industrial policy that was good for capital and labor alike, and prayed for the nation from pew and pulpit.
Bannon has any number of anecdotes to illustrate the point. For instance, for Bannon’s father, “AT&T stock was right next to the Catholic Church. In fact, it would be like having shares in the Catholic Church.” But then the 2008 crisis hit. His dad listened to financial-media guru Jim Cramer, dumped the stock and joined the short-term, me-first thinking of the rest of the elites. Piety, corporate loyalty, and patriotism were once the virtues of a people committed to the general welfare of a nation. That spirit seeped into the habits of ordinary people in Middle America, who expressed it in civic bonds, corporate loyalty, and investment behavior – they didn’t dump stocks in the middle of a crisis. Now, nobody is for the nation and everyone is for themselves.
Bannon thinks the elites are to blame: “the ruling elites of the West lost confidence in themselves. The elites have lost their faith in their countries….They are more and more detached from the lived experience of their people.” They have built up all kinds of structures, like the administrative state, insular parties, or cosmopolitan institutions, to conceal their inward feebleness and outward disdain. But Bannon thinks the Davos elite are weak because they are fundamentally unpopular. A new national vision can be genuinely popular.
Bannon’s vision is not entirely coherent, but it is easy to see why he thinks you can build mass appeal around some idea of the nation. During Trump’s first term, Bannon pushed a comprehensive industrial policy, built around tariffs, borders, and above all infrastructure. He saw this as a way of re-employing the workforce to physically rebuild the nation. By Bannon’s own admission, he lost the infrastructure battle, subsequently retreating to immigration and attacks on the administrative state: “the concrete deliverable first is the deportation.” His aggressive immigration policy, aimed not just at the low end of the labor market, but also at clearing non-citizens out of the professions, would, on Bannon’s account, open up opportunities for citizens otherwise shut-out of the meritocracy. In Bannon’s words, “we’re never going to get a Hispanic and Black population in Silicon Valley unless you get them into the engineering schools”. This is an immigration policy for a conservative, multi-racial nation. It not only explains why he found himself attacking Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on H1-B visas, but also why he has been desperate to split the budget into two bills, with the first funding mass deportations and the later one dealing with other issues.
Bannon knows he has his finger on something. Immigration is an issue where the Left is weak and unpopular – in part because they tend to have most prominently culture wars answers (‘it’s xenophobia’) to a core question of state authority and political economy. There is a democratic truth in Bannon’s otherwise defensive and reactionary mass deportation proposal. The United States does a very poor job of educating its own citizens. It does not equip nearly enough citizens with the skills to become doctors, nurses, teachers, coders, to name just a few places where demand outstrips domestic supply. Rather than do something about this severe neglect, the American state cooperates with employers to solve the labor supply problem with immigration. These immigrants have weak bargaining power, either because they are not present lawfully, or work under extremely restrictive visas that are not far off from indentured servitude. This drives down wages and reduces opportunities for citizens. That solution not only pits citizens against migrant workers, it also generates a severe brain drain from those nations that lose the skilled workers they happened to educate. All in all, current US immigration policy is not just the path of least resistance available to the capitalist hegemon, it also expresses the relative inability of most citizens to get their government to take them very seriously. Durable majorities want some kind of enforced and enforceable border policy and are consistently ignored. These are facts Bannon is happy to seize on and use for his purposes.
On foreign policy, Bannon can only muster a half-break with the Blob. He was anti-Iraq and Afghanistan interventions, is anti-Ukraine (“not one more penny in Ukraine, and massive investigations about where the money went”), super-hawkish on China (“We want to see an elimination of the Chinese Communist Party”, whatever that means), and pro-Israel, conditional on American Jews accepting a “hard weld with Christian nationalism”. Bannon is right that the Ukraine proxy war is globalist adventurism. But he cannot sort out whether the national interest he prefers is defined by cold, geopolitical calculations of power and interest (China rivalry), or by a conservative version of the liberal strategy of using bombs to fight international culture wars (Judeo-Christian foreign policy). In a February 4 episode of his podcast The War Room, Bannon enthusiastically interviewed someone who explained that the US had a claim to Greenland because of the historic role the US played in defending that territory when the Danish ruling class voluntarily capitulated to the Nazis. Only a few weeks later after reveling in the anti-fascist accomplishments of the Greatest Generation, Bannon made a fascist salute (which he calls a ‘wave’) at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.
The incoherence is symptomatic of Bannon’s attempt to create nationalism without the nation. On the one hand, he has a refreshing readiness to talk about politics in terms of principles and conflict, rather than bipartisan bullshittery. In one delicious moment during last year’s interview, Brooks complains, “you’re not about conversing with the other side, you’re just fighting with the other side”. Bannon then invites Brooks to the big-boy table: “What do you mean, not conversing with? There’s nothing to talk about….We are two different worldviews. And those worldviews can’t be bridged.”
Like the simple child at the seder table, Brooks doesn’t get it: “That’s not the way George Washington communicated. It’s certainly not the way Abraham Lincoln communicated.” Doesn’t Bannon want to be like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln? Bannon might seem like an angry person, but he learned some humor in his days producing Seinfeld: “good god, man, I can’t believe you used that example. After he burned the South to the ground….” Poor old Brooks seems to have forgotten that Lincoln took over the war effort because his generals were too willing to reach across the aisles and see the Confederacy as ultimately allies not traitors. The generals were too communicative, ready to make concessions to the South, unwilling to, as Bannon put it, “[fight] the Civil War as a warlord.” Once Lincoln took over, he replaced those generals with leaders like Grant and Sherman – figures not normally associated with compromise and restraint.
If Brooks is dustbin of history material, Bannon isn’t quite in position to make history. He is right that politics, when it matters, involves decisive conflicts. His apparent honesty about the fact is especially refreshing in an American context, where the ‘bipartisan’ two-party system exists as if to suppress all articulations of principle. Bannon is also more clear-eyed than most that there is no route to a new politics without a willingness to break the parties and either replace them or take them over. That process includes taking the risk of vote-splitting and disarray, which could give the Democrats power for a time (as happened in recent British elections, with Farage’s Reform Party splitting conservative votes to put Labour in power). But the risk is worth it when there’s something worth fighting for. “We control all these political parties from Utah to Arizona to Georgia. Governor Kemp doesn’t control that”, preened Bannon, referring to the Governor of Georgia who resisted Trump’s calls to overturn the 2020 vote in Georgia: “It’s all controlled by the grass roots.” All in all, listening to Bannon one gets the feeling there is more insurrectionary spirit and political fight on the new right than the meandering left. A feeling confirmed by the swiftness with which the left-wing of the Democratic Party, led by AOC and Sanders, rushed to shore up Joe Biden’s hapless candidacy last summer, just as it sank – after which everyone closed ranks around Kamala Harris.
Yet for all his eagerness to “flood the zone” (a currently favored Bannon phrase), and his frenetic activity, Bannon and his MAGA populism isn’t running the show. A conflict between nationalists and globalists cannot really anchor the politics that Bannon wants. That is because the core problem is not Bannon’s much lamented “loss of nerve” among the elites, or their sudden loss of patriotic virtue brought on by greed and watching too much daytime financial television. Bannon does not see that the ruling class he misses had to be forced to care about and for the nation in the first place.
The idea of a nation, independent of any particular interests in society, to which each particular interest is subordinate, was forced on the ruling class by the working class. The early American state was dominated by a racially and culturally integrated, wealthy WASP ruling class and identified the national interest with protection of property and the market. Only a series of epochal mass struggles broke their hold.
It was the extermination of slavery, the affirmation of national sovereignty through the Reconstruction Amendments, followed by the extended period of post-Civil War labor militancy, that created the nation, in the sense of a living people attempting to give substance to some common framework of law and citizenship. The constitutional transformations of the New Deal period, an era Bannon still admires, were significant as the high-water mark for separating property from the Constitution, such that it could not be assumed that the interests of property were identical with those of the nation. The nation was now the standpoint from which one might use the democratic state to discipline and limit the ruling class itself.
From that angle, the signature achievements of the New Deal were not its welfare state elements but the politically consequential recognition of labor rights. Yes, these New Deal achievements were limited and partial; they did not protect all workers, and they were quickly weakened; they prepared the incorporation of labor into the capitalist state; they also helped lay the foundations for the defeat of the Left. It is also true that, under pressure, the ruling class turned to nationalism to divide the working class and undermine the democratic and internationalist potential of the political community workers reached for. Nevertheless, that the ruling class was forced to limit particular interests by general ones, to cooperate with labor in anything like a national project, and submit to democratic law as the expression of a general will, was an achievement of the labor movement and major portions of the paleo-Left.
But the one thing that Steve Bannon has no stomach for is independent organizations of the working class. True, he favors certain welfare schemes, like Medicaid, that poor workers depend on, and he abstractly supports a kind of pro-worker industrial policy. He can occasionally bring himself to defend the NLRB against people like Musk and Bezos. He cares about workers, but he does not desire their independent political and social power. He can barely bring himself to recognize the integrating and solidaristic functions of unions when they are understood as basic mutual aid societies, never mind their role in generating collective action and political power for those who otherwise find themselves prey to predatory elites – the same anti-labor ‘broligarchs’ that Bannon somewhat desperately rails against.
In fact, Bannon can’t even find his way to the historical recognition that the national conservatism he loves played a major role in destroying unions and the rest of the traditional Left, thereby freeing the elites of their (partial and limited) subordination to national power. When it mattered, those conservatives endorsed labor repression and anti-communist hysteria, Red Scare purges and every other instrument for eroding the independent, collective power of the working class. They gloried in the legal and illegal acts of deep state repression, the routine expansion of its powers, the romance of spy, surveillance, and deep cover.
Once that political defeat succeeded, there was not much nation left. Just the immense coercive apparatus of the executive and the bureaucratic bloat of a defunct welfarism. The “loss of nerve” is not just some impulsive choice that the ruling class made because it took too many classes with liberal professors. It expresses that historic shift in class power and worker self-organization that sometimes goes by the name neoliberalism. No longer forced into political cooperation with the working class, elites (on the Left and Right) were happy to abandon them and the nation with it. Silicon Valley transhumanists and those, like Musk and Bezos, trying to escape the people and their nations on Earth for empty Mars are just the most perfected expression of that anti-national, globalist trend. That is a shift conservatives helped bring about. Given its material, historical roots, that shift is not reversible by just a recovery of nerve or weekly uploads to Patreon. The disorganization of national political life that conservatives helped usher in runs deep.
Which is why Bannon is ultimately dependent on random, disconnected sources of spontaneous support activity. While he points with great excitement at the way his own movement combines women “over 40 years old…[many] brought in by the pandemic” with assorted nameless men, that is hardly a substitute for enduring organizing around mass institutions through which millions might exercise their own power and judgment. No wonder, then, that Bannon’s activism revolves around that oh-so-post-modern tool of politics: ‘media narratives.’
This is, after all, a guy running the revolution from behind a microphone. His political theory rides on that now tread-less tire, Marshall Mcluhan: “I call Trump a Marshall Mucluhanesque figure.” He explains electoral defeats and victories by reference to who has “better casting” or even “perfect casting.” And when describing his strategy, he sounds like one of those college students he hates who just finished doing the reading for an introduction to hermeneutics class: “we’re in a battle of narrative. Unrestricted narrative warfare. Everything is narrative.”
This is post-modern nationalism. The nation is always in some sense an idea. But Bannon’s nationalism reduces the nation to who captures that imagination by telling the most popular story, and where telling the most popular story is about controlling the Discourse. Controlling the Discourse is about podcasts and tweets, about getting sucked into the culture industries and losing yourself there. That, I think, is why Bannon found himself making a weird, occult fascist hand signal to his very online audience. He is on the inside – the inside of a worldview that is, anyhow, exceedingly unpopular to most Americans, including many who are looking for someone who will actually build a new American nation.
Bannon is savvier than most. He is better at ignoring the dumbest aspects of our politics. In contrast to our immensely sclerotic parties and hapless politicians, he can seem like a political dynamo. But he’s more like a vulture picking at a corpse than an eagle soaring above the expanse. His postmodern nationalism cannot invent a nation. You can’t remake a nation with podcasts and narratives. Intra-elite rivalry between globalists and nationalists won’t generate the vitality of the conflict between the paleo-Left and the old Right, between workers and bosses, that once powered the mighty political forces that made the old nation; the nation subsequently disintegrated by the victory of neoliberal globalism. Bannon might succeed in helping to break apart the Republican Party, maybe even start remaking it, not least because he is willing to take the risks that few if any on the Left are willing to take. But like the semioticians who took to advertising and press rooms, he can’t quite distinguish between speech and action, media and the military. A fact he registers poorly. “We run this like a military command post”, says Bannon, explaining why he would prefer to keep hosting his podcast “War Room” over a role in a future Trump administration. A man of action who prefers his words.
Bannon thinks he’s using Trump, but that’s just the kind of person most likely to be the first victim of the con. Trump cares more about winners than the nation. He wants to be a boss among bosses, and to cultivate his wealth and celebrity in the meantime. Which is why Musk and the oligarchs are running the show, while Bannon and his national populism are thrown the scraps.
The Northern Star 
Leave a comment