Don’t ignore Trump’s political philosopher

Steve Bannon no longer has a formal role in Donald Trump’s White House. He has also lost his job as head of the hard-right website Breitbart News.

But the former investment banker turned rabble rouser is still the closest thing to a political theorist that the Trump revolution possesses. Those who want to understand the right-populism that the U.S. president taps into would do well to pay attention to what Bannon says.

Last week, Bannon defied protestors to show up for a debate on the future of politics at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall. The 90-minute back and forth with establishment conservative David Frum gives some idea of where Bannon stands. But the most comprehensive exposition of his thinking is his contribution to a 2014 Catholic conference on poverty held inside the Vatican.

There, he lays out his view of the world. It is a grim view. Bannon argues that the Judeo-Christian West is in crisis — at the beginning of a “new barbarity” that threatens to eradicate “everything we have been bequeathed over the last 2,500 years.”

Part of the threat is external — the danger posed by Islamic terrorists or what Bannon calls “jihadist Islamic fascism.” This danger, he says, is not new. It is part of an age-old struggle between the Judeo-Christian West and Islam that dates back to Frankish leader Charles Martel’s defeat of the Moors in 732 AD.

“We’re in a war of immense proportions,” he says. “It’s very easy to appeal to our basic instincts and we can’t do that. But our forefathers didn’t do that either. And they were able to stave this off and they were able to defeat it and they were able to bequeath to us a Church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind.”

But part is internal. The moral capitalism that rebuilt the world after the Second World War has been replaced by new forms unlinked to the foundations of Judeo-Christian belief.

These new forms include state capitalism, where rewards are siphoned off by a small elite. They also include a strain of brutal libertarian capitalism that treats people as mere commodities.

The new right populism is a reaction to this. It is a revolt of the middle and working classes against what Bannon calls the “administrative state.”

In the Munk debate, he puts it this way: the modern liberal state embraces socialism for the rich and socialism for the poor, leaving the middle classes to pay the freight. The most egregious example of this was government’s decision to bail out the banks by driving down interest rates during the financial crisis of 2008.

That bailout, he says, benefitted the wealthy. But, by penalizing savers and pension funds, it put new burdens on the middle classes.

It also demonstrated that the traditional political establishment, which he mocks as the “party of Davos,” had lost all contact with ordinary people.

Is the new right populism racist? At the Munk debate, Bannon insists it is not.

“The populist movement is not racist,” he says. “Trump-style nationalism does not care about colour, religion or sexual preferences … We’re the true antifascists.”

But at the 2014 Catholic conference, he is more nuanced. Yes, he agrees, the new right-populism does contain antiSemites and racists.

“There are always elements who turn up at these things, whether it’s militia guys or whatever. Some are fringe organizations. My point is that over time it all gets washed out, right?

“When you look at any kind of revolution — and this is a revolution — you always have groups that are disparate. I think that will burn away over time and you’ll see more of a mainstream centreright populist movement.”

It’s the kind of argument that Preston Manning used to make when, in reference to his new Reform Party, he noted that a bright light attracts bugs. But it doesn’t explain Bannon’s clash-of-civilizations view of Islam. Nor does it explain Trump’s apocalyptic approach to illegal immigration from Central America.

The new right-populists may formally eschew racism. But they are willing to exploit it when the opportunity arises. That too, it seems, is a tenet of Bannonism.