Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and White House strategist, believed before the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Congress that a “Maga movement” of Trump supporters “could rule for a hundred years”.
“Outside the uniparty,” the Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes in a new book, referring to Bannon’s term for the political establishment, “as Bannon saw it, there was the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which he considered a relatively small slice of the electorate. And the rest, the vast majority of the country, was Maga.
“Bannon believed the Maga movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalised by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years.”
Arnsdorf’s book, Finish What We Started: The Maga Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, will be published next week. The Post published an excerpt on Thursday.
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Arnsdorf writes: “In his confidence that there were secretly millions of Democrats who were yearning to be Maga followers and just didn’t know it yet, Bannon was again taking inspiration from [Eric] Hoffer, who observed that true believers were prone to conversion from one cause to another since they were driven more by their need to identify with a mass movement than by any particular ideology.”
Eric Hoffer, Arnsdorf writes, was “the ‘longshoreman philosopher’, so called because he had worked as a stevedore on the San Francisco docks while writing his first book, The True Believer [which] caused a sensation when it was published in 1951, becoming a manual for comprehending the age of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.”
Bannon, Arnsdorf writes, “was not, like a typical political strategist, trying to tinker around the edges of the existing party coalitions in the hope of eking out 50% plus one. Bannon already told you: he wanted to bring everything crashing down.
“He wanted to completely dismantle and redefine the parties. He wanted a showdown between a globalist, elite party, called the Democrats, and a populist, Maga party, called the Republicans. In that match-up, he was sure, the Republicans would win every time.”
Isn’t he supposed to be in jail?
I know that Bannon realizes that Trump is a loser. He’s not stupid. He knows that he eked out a win in 2016 and couldn’t even rally the country to his side during a once in a century crisis. But It’s hard to know how much of this nonsense is part of his megalomania and how much is sheer grift. He’s making a lot of money from rubes who watch his podcasts. But he’s also got the ear of plenty of powerful Republicans who take him seriously so who knows?
But if you want to see a true Trumpworld fascist, this is your guy. He’s talkijng about a thousand year reich fergawdsakes. Do we need to hear any more?
*Back in the day I wrote about Bannon and his intellectual mentor Julius Evola, a real old-school fascist. This is is a real thing:
According to Joshua Green, who wrote “Devil’s Bargain,” the recent book about Bannon, Trump and the 2016 election, Bannon claims to believe that the world is entering a very dark phase which was caused by the Enlightenment and can only be averted by adoption of a belief system called “primordial Traditionalism,” one of the progenitors of fascism. Evola thought it was a pretty darned good system:
There are positive and valuable aspects. Those which I could value are the reconstruction of the authority of the state and the idea of overcoming class conflict toward a hierarchical and corporative formation, to some extent, of a military and disciplined style within the nation, in addition to some of their anti-bourgeois proposals. To me, all of that is positive.
Green says:
[Bannon] is trying to not only take over American politics, but look at what he’s doing in places like the European Union. He’s trying to destroy what he would call these globalist edifices, which he believes [are] a manifestation of the rise of modernity and something that needs to be destroyed to pull us back to a pre-Enlightenment era.
Not that he’s ambitious, mind you.
