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President Trump may have a hard time getting re-elected without Bannon. This analysis is spot on:
The Ominous Political Genius of Steve Bannon
In his fateful interview with Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, Steve Bannon’s remarks about taking a tougher stand on trade with China, battling his enemies within the administration, and the futility of military action against North Korea generated the most headlines. But it was a widely overlooked comment about identity politics that offers the most important insight into the brilliant and cynical political mind of President Donald Trump’s now-departed counsellor and former campaign CEO.
Rare does a political strategist so explicitly reveal his game plan. Rarer do his opponents utterly fail to recalibrate their tactics in response. From the day Trump announced his candidacy for president with a smear maligning Mexicans as rapists, to the release of a tape in which he joked about groping women, the American left has campaigned against Donald Trump largely on claims pertaining to identity: that Trump is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, an Islamophobic bigot. When Trump hired Bannon to run his presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton and her allies doubled-down on this line of attack, with Clinton going so far as to deliver a speech in which she attacked Bannon by name, a rare feat of notoriety for a campaign CEO. Notwithstanding the merits of these charges against Trump – which I happen to agree with – it was clearly an unsuccessful strategy, as Trump not only won the election, but did so with a higher portion of the black and Latino vote than his Republican predecessor, and with a respectable 42 percent of women.
This result came as a shock to people living in Democratic Party redoubts, like major metropolitan areas and college towns. And it came as a particular shock to the media, which had predicted with utter certainty that Donald Trump could never be elected president. They could not fathom how a man who so easily vilified minorities, who brought the concept of political incorrectness to such startling depths, could attain the presidency of the United States. But long before anyone took Trump seriously as a hypothetical presidential candidate, Bannon saw in the New York real estate magnate a potential standard-bearer for an increasingly polarising America. Trump became the vessel through which Bannon could implement an insight which has proven rather reliable in America (and elsewhere, too): forced to choose between a chauvinist, xenophobic, majoritarian, nationalist right and a smug, post-nationalist, identity politics-obsessed left, most will choose the former.
Throughout his short, eight-month tenure at the White House, Bannon – who has been described as a ‘Leninist’ – committed himself to effectuating this dialectic. His influence can be seen in three policy battles he helped instigate, all aimed at forcing Trump’s political adversaries and the media (dubbed ‘the opposition party’ by Bannon) onto political terrain where the right traditionally has a home field advantage: the so-called ‘Muslim travel ban’, the hastily-announced prohibition on transgender military service, and the just-erupted fight over statues and historical memory. In each case, Bannon nudged Democrats and liberals into adopting positions that, while fashionable with their activist base and media elite, are either unpopular or considered irrelevant to a wide majority of the American people.
[...]
Of all the shocks of the Trump presidency, it is the public reaction – or lack thereof – to Charlottesville and the ensuing aftermath that have caused the greatest disbelief among the political and media elite. In all of my time following the Trump campaign and presidency, I cannot recall a single occurrence to which there has been a more uniformly negative media outcry than Trump’s reaction to the events in Charlottesville. But what Trump was able to do – by taking Bannon’s advice – was pivot from the controversy over apportioning blame for violence to the politically safer issue of iconoclasm, where public opinion verges drastically from that of the elite media. (And even on the matter of Trump’s claiming ‘both sides’ were to blame for the melee in Charlottesville, remarks that earned him vituperation more intense and widespread than anything I can recall, 40 percent of Americans agree with Trump that far right and far left are equally to blame).
A large part of this disconnect between the media and the public has to do with the medium of Twitter and an obsession with cable news. The former has become an echo chamber for reporters and political commentators where the currency is moral outrage and the pastime is one-upmanship, with everyone trying to outdo each other in quick takes on the president’s latest atrocious behaviour. As for cable news, it is watched by relatively few people (no more than a couple of million in a country of 320 million), many of whom are political journalists. The 24-hour news cycle and its constant need for controversy, combined with the frenetic incompetence of the Trump administration, exacerbates the problem of hysterical news coverage by compelling journalists to frame every minor development with breathless stupefaction.
[...]
And so we should have every expectation that Trump will continue the Bannonite strategy of playing the role of culture warrior-in-chief. This appraisal of Bannon’s political acumen should not be interpreted as a moral judgment on the policy prescriptions he has advised Trump to follow. For what it’s worth, I disagree with Bannon and Trump on the travel ban, the transgender ban, and the removal of Confederate icons. But I’m not the sort of person Democrats need to win future elections. Bannon is a master storyteller and creator of narratives, skills he honed making political documentaries and sharpened in more lurid form at Breitbart. The grand narrative he’s spent the last several years shaping is one in which the Democrats gradually become the caricature villain of a Breitbart comments section.
In his fateful interview with Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, Steve Bannon’s remarks about taking a tougher stand on trade with China, battling his enemies within the administration, and the futility of military action against North Korea generated the most headlines. But it was a widely overlooked comment about identity politics that offers the most important insight into the brilliant and cynical political mind of President Donald Trump’s now-departed counsellor and former campaign CEO.
‘The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ‘em,’ Bannon gloated to Kuttner. ‘I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.’
Rare does a political strategist so explicitly reveal his game plan. Rarer do his opponents utterly fail to recalibrate their tactics in response. From the day Trump announced his candidacy for president with a smear maligning Mexicans as rapists, to the release of a tape in which he joked about groping women, the American left has campaigned against Donald Trump largely on claims pertaining to identity: that Trump is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, an Islamophobic bigot. When Trump hired Bannon to run his presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton and her allies doubled-down on this line of attack, with Clinton going so far as to deliver a speech in which she attacked Bannon by name, a rare feat of notoriety for a campaign CEO. Notwithstanding the merits of these charges against Trump – which I happen to agree with – it was clearly an unsuccessful strategy, as Trump not only won the election, but did so with a higher portion of the black and Latino vote than his Republican predecessor, and with a respectable 42 percent of women.
This result came as a shock to people living in Democratic Party redoubts, like major metropolitan areas and college towns. And it came as a particular shock to the media, which had predicted with utter certainty that Donald Trump could never be elected president. They could not fathom how a man who so easily vilified minorities, who brought the concept of political incorrectness to such startling depths, could attain the presidency of the United States. But long before anyone took Trump seriously as a hypothetical presidential candidate, Bannon saw in the New York real estate magnate a potential standard-bearer for an increasingly polarising America. Trump became the vessel through which Bannon could implement an insight which has proven rather reliable in America (and elsewhere, too): forced to choose between a chauvinist, xenophobic, majoritarian, nationalist right and a smug, post-nationalist, identity politics-obsessed left, most will choose the former.
Throughout his short, eight-month tenure at the White House, Bannon – who has been described as a ‘Leninist’ – committed himself to effectuating this dialectic. His influence can be seen in three policy battles he helped instigate, all aimed at forcing Trump’s political adversaries and the media (dubbed ‘the opposition party’ by Bannon) onto political terrain where the right traditionally has a home field advantage: the so-called ‘Muslim travel ban’, the hastily-announced prohibition on transgender military service, and the just-erupted fight over statues and historical memory. In each case, Bannon nudged Democrats and liberals into adopting positions that, while fashionable with their activist base and media elite, are either unpopular or considered irrelevant to a wide majority of the American people.
[...]
Of all the shocks of the Trump presidency, it is the public reaction – or lack thereof – to Charlottesville and the ensuing aftermath that have caused the greatest disbelief among the political and media elite. In all of my time following the Trump campaign and presidency, I cannot recall a single occurrence to which there has been a more uniformly negative media outcry than Trump’s reaction to the events in Charlottesville. But what Trump was able to do – by taking Bannon’s advice – was pivot from the controversy over apportioning blame for violence to the politically safer issue of iconoclasm, where public opinion verges drastically from that of the elite media. (And even on the matter of Trump’s claiming ‘both sides’ were to blame for the melee in Charlottesville, remarks that earned him vituperation more intense and widespread than anything I can recall, 40 percent of Americans agree with Trump that far right and far left are equally to blame).
A large part of this disconnect between the media and the public has to do with the medium of Twitter and an obsession with cable news. The former has become an echo chamber for reporters and political commentators where the currency is moral outrage and the pastime is one-upmanship, with everyone trying to outdo each other in quick takes on the president’s latest atrocious behaviour. As for cable news, it is watched by relatively few people (no more than a couple of million in a country of 320 million), many of whom are political journalists. The 24-hour news cycle and its constant need for controversy, combined with the frenetic incompetence of the Trump administration, exacerbates the problem of hysterical news coverage by compelling journalists to frame every minor development with breathless stupefaction.
[...]
And so we should have every expectation that Trump will continue the Bannonite strategy of playing the role of culture warrior-in-chief. This appraisal of Bannon’s political acumen should not be interpreted as a moral judgment on the policy prescriptions he has advised Trump to follow. For what it’s worth, I disagree with Bannon and Trump on the travel ban, the transgender ban, and the removal of Confederate icons. But I’m not the sort of person Democrats need to win future elections. Bannon is a master storyteller and creator of narratives, skills he honed making political documentaries and sharpened in more lurid form at Breitbart. The grand narrative he’s spent the last several years shaping is one in which the Democrats gradually become the caricature villain of a Breitbart comments section.
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