Bannon finds platform in coming Toronto debate
Rogue populist disinvited from other events
There was a time when Steve Bannon was a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, inexplicably dressed in three overlapping shirts, as is his unusual personal style.
That was a year-and-a-half ago, when the rogue populist intellectual who managed Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was running his White House in its early days.
But the air of mystery has fallen from Bannon. Now it is clear who he is, what he believes and what he is up to as a global adviser to farright nationalist politicians. So when he started turning up as an honoured guest on the schedules of high-minded “ideas” festivals from London to New York to Toronto, he roused outrage where once there was fascination.
“There is nothing more to learn from Bannon about his particular brand of populism, with its blatant overlay of white supremacy,” wrote Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post. “We all understand by now the unsavoury blend of factors — including a hefty serving of straight-up racism — that brought (Donald Trump) to power.”
The latest was Toronto’s Munk Debates, which on Wednesday announced Bannon would headline its November event just before the American midterm elections, debating former George W. Bush speechwriter and Trump critic David Frum, on whether the future of Western politics is populist or liberal.
Faced with instant criticism on social media that this would lend a prominent platform to a modern fascist, the festival declared that, on the contrary, the debate will be a “public service” that will help resolve challenges in an “increasingly polarized” society.
In New York earlier in the week, The New Yorker magazine did the opposite when editor David Remnick rescinded his invitation for Bannon to be interviewed on stage at the magazine’s festival next month.
“To interview Bannon is not to endorse him,” Remnick wrote in a statement. “By conducting an interview with one of Trumpism’s leading creators and organizers, we are hardly pulling him out of obscurity. Ahead of the midterm elections and with 2020 in sight, we’d be taking the opportunity to question someone who helped assemble Trumpism.”
But having heard the criticism, and watched as other participants pulled out of his festival in protest, Remnick said he simply changed his mind.
In London, The Economist stuck to its guns and will host Bannon at its Open Future Festival next week.
“Our goal is to remake the case for liberal values in the 21st century by engaging in a global conversation about our world view with our supporters and, crucially, our critics,” said Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor-in-chief. “Mr. Bannon stands for a world view that is antithetical to the liberal values The Economist has always espoused. We asked him to take part because his populist nationalism is of grave consequence in today’s politics.”
Also in Toronto, American Dharma, a film about Bannon by celebrated documentary director Errol Morris, is set to première on Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival. An early review suggests Morris, who is known for similarly intense treatments of Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, “doesn’t question Bannon, let alone push him to the wall” and the result is “a toothless bromance.”
All of this illustrates how leading media organizations often approach the ascendant right wing in Trump’s America and around the world — gingerly, uncertain of their own footing and guaranteed a backlash.
Bannon, a former naval officer and investment banker, co-founded the rightwing Breitbart News, whose founder Andrew Breitbart once called him the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party. He left the White House a year ago to rejoin Breitbart, which he then left earlier this year after Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury reported his intemperate comments about Trump’s children.
He is a right-winger, but more a revolutionary than a conservative. He sees an overthrow of the system as inevitable and necessary. He sees chaos as cleansing and renewing. If he is a kook, he has at least read some books, even if they are by notorious fascists like Julius Evola, whom he admires.
“What we are witnessing now is the birth of a new political order, and the more frantic a handful of media elites become, the more powerful that new political order becomes itself,” Bannon once told The Washington Post.
Critically engaging with those influential ideas is difficult and risky for businesses that traffic in ideas, as the latest controversies show. Remnick, for example, said his interview would have been “rigorous,” but he acknowledged Bannon was never going to “burst into tears and change his view.”
Mark Pitcavage, who monitors the far right for the Anti-Defamation League, has offered a series of considerations for inviting extremists to mainstream events, such as whether they offer opportunities to grow their audiences; whether their ideas are already well-known; whether the interviewer is likely to be exploited or ill-prepared; and whether anything new is likely to emerge.
In a series of tweets about The New Yorker, Pitcavage said a positive answer to more than one of these questions should be reason to cancel.
Rudyard Griffiths, organizer and chair of the Munk Debates, declined to be interviewed Wednesday, but issued a statement noting that previous Munk debaters have included such controversial figures as Nigel Farage and Henry Kissinger.
“For over a decade the Munk Debates have provided a neutral public forum to discuss challenging issues and ideas. In this context, the rise of populist politics in Western societies was an obvious topic to tackle at our upcoming debate,” Griffiths said. “We believe we are providing a public service by allowing their ideas to be vigorously contested and letting the public draw their own conclusions from the debate.”
LETTING THE PUBLIC DRAW THEIR OWN CONCLUSIONS.