March 9, 2017
The night mare of Stephen Bannon
Arthur Kane Scott
Stephen Bannon has emerged as the Darth Vader of the Trump administration not only in domestic but also international affairs.
His agenda is broadly grounded, on what Naomi Kline described as the “shock doctrine,” a process of excoriating and attacking democratic institutions, in particular the press, as a way of undermining their credibility, so that centralization of power in the White House can accelerate way beyond the notion of an “Imperial Presidency.” His political goal is a coup d’état drawn from the Right.
Specific dangerous aspects of the “Bannon Shock,” besides the war on the media include:
- Rabid nationalism, “making America great again”
- Class warfare/increasing the gap between rich/poor
- Divide /rule, whites against Blacks/Latinos
- Exploiting religious differences: Muslim /Christian/ Jew
- Gender issues over who controls a women’s mind/body
- Economic nationalism/fortress America/isolationism
- Militarization of America with emphasis on Border Patrol, Swat Teams, ICIS
- Deconstruction of Federal bureaucracy and Congress. Both seen as inept and unable to govern/bogged down in fractional paralysis. Deconstruction further implemented byappointing cabinet leaders who are philosophically opposed to the agencies they lead. Their modus operando is to gut these agencies. Among others, Scott Pruitt, EPA, Tom Price, Sec. of Health, and Steven Mnuchin, Treasury, are outliers appointed to undermine these vital services to the public good. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/opinion/goodbye-spin-hello-raw-dishonesty.html?_r=0).
Bannon who headed Breitbart, an ultra-conservative news site, embodies a dark side of Catholicism that is totalitarian, exclusive, apocalyptic, moralistic, doctrinaire, white and misogynistic. This attitude has unleashed a terrible nastiness into the American culture.Breitbart has been described by Southern Poverty Law School as a white ethnic propaganda mill. This world view is the antithesis to democratic values. (https://www.splcenter.org/stephen-bannon-has-no-business-white-house).
Bannon andother conservative Far Right groups, TV and Radio, have gathered traction from Trump’s presidency. One of the worse expressions on Catholic radio is headed by Michael Voris. It’s called Church Militant, located in in Ferndale, Michigan, and its goal is to undermine the separation between Church/State that goes back to Thomas Jefferson. (Cf, USATODAY, 02.20.17).
Thisextremism has led to virulent outbursts of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in America.(http://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2017/02/rise-anti-semitism-donald-trumps-america;( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/islamaphobia/).
Bannon,as special assistant to Trump, brings asdivisive and inflammatoryworld-view into the White House. Here is a sampling of quotations:
Fear is good thing.
I am a Leninist. I want to bring everything down.
There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home…
Media should keep its mouth shut.
The media… is the opposition party.
You don’t come to us (Breitbart) for warm and fuzzy.
We are at war with radical Islam or Islamic fascism.
Feminists are a bunch of dykes from the 7 Sisters school…
Wow! And here are the outlines of a New America that has gone mad. It has nothing to do with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution/Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech.But it has everything to do with George Orwell’s i984which looked at the cultural implications of the Red Scars/Cold War paranoid on American civility and politics.
As David Frum put it The Atlantic, “If congress is quiescent and the public listless, Donald Trump can set the country down a path to illiberalism, institutional subversion, and endemic graft.” Kleptocracy are globally on the move with money, power and information manipulation being their dominant modus operands. (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/).
Trump’s flirtation with Putin is the other side of this nightmare. Trump sees in Putin authoritarian style his own reflection. In fact, during the election debates Trump encouraged Russian cyber-attacks on the American democratic process leading to Wiki-Leaks revelations, Bannon, too, has been a strong advocate of a Washington-Moscow rapprochement which would radically alter the post-World War II order. This thinking flows from his belief that America’s involvement in the Middle East since 9/11 was misguided and costed trillions. That the NATO alliance is archaic and too expensive. The real danger to the Christian West is radical Islam and not Russia, who is likewise challenged. (https://www.magzter.com/article/News/Time/The-Trouble-with-Russia).
Since Putin’s annexation of Crimea, he has been nibbling away at the map of eastern Europe.Putin has insisted that the worse geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The real prize is the Ukraine where Moscow is inciting a civil war, and which led Obama to imposeheavy economic sanctions.
The irony of the Trump-Bannon goal to cut a deal with Putin, to create, if you will, surreptitiously a new world order, was that it began even before the presidential election closed. As aconsequence, it has precipitated a serious political backlash in Washington. Questions being asked include: the nature of Putin-Trump relationship, what was communicated and how, the level of expectations, degree of Russian hacking, and what election laws were violated. These questions have led to the resignation of National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, and to the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, recusing himself from the Senate and House investigations into these matters.
In many ways, the slow drip of these issues around Russian influence on the Presidential election smacks of Watergate. Ultimately it could lead to exercising the impeachment clause, by which the power of the Presidency and his inner cabinet,would be seriouslycheckmated.
The Fourth Estate, the press, has again emerged as aheady beacon in defending and preserving democratic values. It must defend itself, however, from falling for the new normal of dishonesty, or to become complacent in its the role of “truth speaking to power.” The old adage, attributed to Joseph Goebbels, rings true: “Ifyou repeat a lie enough, itbecomes a truth,” when wrapped in the glitz of nationalism: “My county right or wrong, my country.”
Let’s pray that America under Trump does not fall prey to rabid jingoism.
Arthur Kane Scott is Professor of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the Dominican University of California and Fellow of American Institute of International Studies.
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