We know how Trump thinks, and a distinguishing feature of it is that it includes precious few ideas, and no ideology: it is driven mainly by personal relationships and loyalties, plus the quirks of his psychological disturbance. Bannon, by contrast, has ideas and an ideology, and this is the best synthesis of what they are. (See also this and this, and recall an earlier post about his speech to the Vatican traditionalists.) It is a strange brew, about what you would expect from a working-class Irish-Catholic kid without any real intellectual discipline or sophistication. He notices real events--e.g., Wall Street bankers being bailed out after the 2008 fiasco while working-class Americans see their retirement savings or their property values collapse--but has no serious diagnosis about cause and effect, instead interjecting as an interpretive rubric various petty bigotries and prejudices that he probably learned in his youth with crackpot theories about the "real" trends of history. He correctly sees that there are elites, but fails to see that he shares with them the most crucial commitment, namely, to capitalist relations of production. He understands too little about capitalism to realize that his silly nationalist bromides are actually incompatible with the capitalism he cherishes, that the "Davos class" of elites he bemoans are the necessary consequence of the economic system he still supports. This is apparent to other members of the ruling class, e.g., this billionaire investor:
“President [sic] Trump may be able to temporarily hold off the sweep of automation and globalization by cajoling companies to keep jobs at home, but bolstering inefficient and uncompetitive enterprises is likely to only temporarily stave off market forces,” he continued. “While they might be popular, the reason the U.S. long ago abandoned protectionist trade policies is because they not only don’t work, they actually leave society worse off.”
Bannon once professed that, like Lenin, he wanted to destroy the system. He should read some more Lenin, and then he might even develop a coherent world view and understand the actual role of Republican policies in it.
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