Quartz - What Steve Bannon Really Wants
Steve Bannon is probably the top adviser to President Trump and has recently avoided extended public interviews about his worldview. In this long article, the writers comb through Bannon's speeches, documentaries, writings and radio shows to intuit three philosophical positions that are supposed to interlock. The article gives a biographical sketch on Bannon, but most of the time it focuses on his three core political-economic-cultural beliefs:
1. Capitalism is in crisis and needs rescuing
2. Judeo-Christian values are in decline and need reviving
3. Nationalism in Western nations is a good thing
Briefly elaborated,
1: Capitalism used to be about "moderation" and concern for each other (within the Christian charitable framework)-- a kind of "enlightened capitalism". This declined in the 60s and 70s as a new culture of selfishness destroyed the hard work of the greatest generation. In short, society needs to change conservatively, not through the kind of cultural revolution that took place during those decades. Here Bannon sounds like Edmund Burke. The cultural revolution swept the old mentalities away and "liberal" pluralism and globalistic concerns infiltrated US institutions. This created a global elite who did not care for the borders of any country as defining their morality. While this explains his opposition to "welfare for the rich", it does not seem to underwrite his animus toward regular welfare. [Perhaps because it robs from the moderately successful and gives to the lazy, and he believes it is unsustainable & establishes some sort of "dependency"?]
2. The traditions that each generation should be passing to the next, in a kind-of Burkean manner, are those of the "Judeo-Christian tradition", which reinforces capitalism (with moderation and charity); in turn, capitalism (when done right) provides the wealth and success of western civilization and its hegemony. The ultimate belief in God as a grounding for the moral order (and therefore government) is what moors government from becoming tyrannical. While not everyone must be a believer, this must be the dominant position of the country and its inhabitants must continue to inculcate that tradition. Hence...
3. Nationalism is essential to protect the traditional values but also to protect against the interests of the global elites. Incoming people must adopt the traditions of the nation or they are unwelcome. To Bannon, global capitalists will move their capital to more favorable places (with lower wages), or engineer laws to flood the country with immigrants who work for less (leaving the middle class to pick up the bills for educating, housing, etc them). This must be fought in order to protect the accumulate wealth of citizens who are less mobile than the global elites.
These three pieces do form an interlocking philosophy [except, perhaps, for his tea party love of limited government-- how can you have nationalism without a government?]. On top of all this, Bannon believes in a loose kind-of "generations" or cyclic nature of history (Neill/Strauss), which goes through stages every 80 years or so, from High to Awakening to Unraveling to Crisis. There was the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression/WWII, and now? Time for "Crisis". Bannon sees the crisis of capitalism as needing a resolution, and, historically speaking, it is a violent, bloody one. It appears, too, given his nationalism and emphasis on Judeo-Christian values as the key pillars of Democratic government, that Islam is his bete noir.
The last parts of the article tries to capture some of Bannon's loose comments and threads and then tries to find evidence of his philosophy in the speech and actions of Donald Trump, perhaps his unwitting thrall.
