!
asaculturesection.org24
SECTIONCULTURE Spring/Summer 2017
By Jeffrey C.
Alexander, Yale
University
A version of this
contribution was
delivered as a
lecture to the Yale
Political Union,
April 13, 2017.
S t e v e n K .
Bannon has been
called “Trump’s brain,” the man identified by Da-
vid Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux
Klan, as the “individual who’s basically creating
the ideological aspect of where we’re going.” And
as Duke helpfully reminds us, “ideology is ultima-
tely the most important aspect of any
government.”
Let’s get beyond the sound bites and photos of
Bannon in unbuttoned Barbour and rumpled
cords. Let’s look under the hood of Bannon’s
mind. What is the ideology of Steven K. Bannon
actually like?
One thing for sure: It is pretty much antitheti-
cal to the ideas and the spirit of democracy.
When he references big thinkers – he’s a bril-
liant intellectual and voracious reader, his admi-
rers claim -- Bannon gestures admiringly to fa-
scists, bigots, dictators, and theocrats.
Charles Maurras, for example: The rabidly
anti-Semitic French Catholic political intellectual;
fan of Mussolini and Franco; leader of the “anti-
Dreyfusards” who persecuted the Jewish Army
Captain falsely accused of treason; decades
long-agitator against the democratic and
secular Third Republic; sentenced to life
imprisonment after World War II for colla-
borating with the Nazi occupation.
Or Julius Evola: Italian professor at the
weird but aptly named “School of Fascist
Mysticism”; ferociously anti-Semitic; intel-
lectual and spiritual advisor to Mussolini;
god father of the Racial Laws that sent
thousands of Italian Jews to their deaths
in the late 1930s.
Alongside admiring allusions to such heinou-
sly reactionary intellectuals, one finds nary a refe-
rence, amidst Bannon’s many words, to icons of
American democracy, such as Washington, Jeffer-
son, Lincoln, Theodore or Teddy Roosevelt, John
Dewey, or even Ayn Rand.
Bannon sees himself as an outsider, just like
the political heroes he has cinematized, such as
Reagan, Palin, and Trump. And just like all the
mythical “lost men” whom candidate and then
President Trump, under Bannon’s direction, has
ostensibly dedicated himself to resurrecting. Ban-
non is Irish-Catholic; raised blue collar; matricula-
ted at Virginia Tech; worked at Goldman Sachs
but didn’t get to be partner; and hung around Hol-
lywood for years without ever making it. In 2004,
Bannon turned his hand to writing, directing, and
producing his own crudely bombastic right wing
pseudo-documentaries. They proved catnip for the
base, but made nary a ripple in the wider world of
Indie or pop.
The sense of being left behind, of being dissed
and excluded by the establishment, has fueled in
Bannon not just resentment but powerful anger,
the kind of life-long, supercharged aggression that
creates extremists, sociopaths, sometimes even
assassins -- just overall really bad and dangerous
stuff. His younger brother recounts that, even as a
boy, Bannon (like Trump) couldn’t get enough of
physical altercation. The adult Bannon as been
described as a “screamer” for whom “everything
has to be a fight. “He loves the idea of war,” re-
counts his long-time Hollywood collaborator.
Bannon himself tells audiences: “You have to have
the fighting spirit of a warrior!” And he described
the ethos of his influential megaphone, Breitbart
News, in this way:
Our big belief, one of our central organizing prin-
ciples at the site,!is that we’re at war … It's war. It's
war. Every day, we put up: America's at war, Ame-
rica's at war. We're at war.
This furious fighting-from-behind mentali-
ty certainly qualifies Bannon as an ideological lea-
der of the contemporary American right. Since the
days of such progressive reformers as Theodore
and Franklin Roosevelt, and more fervently and
frantically since the 1960s, conservatives have
Raging Against the Enlightenment:
The Ideology of Steven Bannon
The sense of being left behind, of being dissed
and excluded by the establishment, has fueled
in Bannon not just resentment but powerful
anger, the kind of life-long, supercharged ag
-
gression that creates extremists, sociopaths,
sometimes even assassins -- just overall really
bad and dangerous stuff.
asaculturesection.org25
SECTIONCULTURE Spring/Summer 2017
been flaying in frustration at what they see as the
seemingly inexorable expansion of liberalism --
social, cultural, sexual, environmental, and politi-
cal. Conservatives have reached the highest per-
ches of political power, from state house to White
House, from Congress to Supreme Court, from
Nixon to Reagan, Bushes I and II, and Donald
Trump. But even the full force of conservative sta-
te power seems to have failed to put a stop to the
steady march of social incorporation, from indu-
strial workers in the 1930s and Jews in the 1950s,
to blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, immigrants,
and non-conforming sexualities in the long 20
th
century, from the 1960s until today.
It is impossible to underestimate how this fai-
lure, as extraordinary as rarely acknowledged, has
infuriated America’s cultural and political right. It
has made them rabid with rage. And this anger
has boiled over with the decades long decline of
American global power; China’s rise; stalemated
military ventures; the glo-
balizing, post-
industrial
economy that
rewards educa-
tion and puni-
shes unskilled;
and with eight
years of the high
profile, unflap- pable, deeply pola-
rizing but also unusually effective reign of Ameri-
ca’s first African-American president (lest we for-
get the “Birther” movement that launched
Trump’s own bid for national power).
By the middle of Obama’s second term, the
American right was beside itself with frustration.
Steven Bannon, Donald Trump, and the “alt-right”
-- alternative right, new right -- are the result.
* * *
Bannon’s ideology is constructed around binary
codes and temporal narratives, the former deeply
othering, the latter dangerously, frothingly apoca-
lyptic.
At the core of Bannon-ideology is a series of
extraordinarily simplistic contrasts between good
and bad, sacred and profane. This series creates
dangerous others whose continuing existence th-
reatens the good folks who make up what Bannon
describes as the “real America.”
Bannon heaps scorn on non-white immigrants
– Hispanic, East Asian, South Asian – and purifies
the people he describes as “native Americans.”
This fantasy category most definitely does not in-
clude our nation’s actual natives, America’s indi-
genous “Indians,” much less the most culturally
“American” racial and ethnic groups of all, Afri-
can-Americans.
What are some of the other simplistic binaries
that animate Bannon-ideology?
* Nationalists are sacralized, globalists despi-
sed.
* Property is praised, poverty considered evi-
dence of disqualification.
* Religion is given a god-smacking yes, secula-
rism always disparagingly framed.
* Christianity is equated with Godliness and
civilization and, while Bannon sometimes re-
members to add the “Judeo” adjective, as in “Ju-
deo-Christian” civilization, neither Jews as a
people nor Judaism as a religion is part of B a n-
non’s view of the national mainstream. As for non-
Western world religions, most especially Islam,
forget about it. Bannon dismisses them as u n -
Godly, barbarian enemies of Western civilization.
*And let’s not forget our own national “elites.”
Vilified as rootless, cosmopolitan, selfish and self-
enriching, Bannon contrasts them
with “The People,” that vague, my-
sterious, pious entity he and other
populists so reverently evoke.
While one must resist argument ad
homonym, in regard to this last bi-
nary we indulge ourselves to pause,
for just one moment, to consider
Bannon’s blatant hypocrisy. After
Virginia Tech, Bannon went to Georgetown for an
MA and Harvard Business School for his MBA. He
has a personal fortune estimated between twelve
and fifty million dollars, derived in some part from
his work as a deal-maker at super-elite Goldman
Sachs, in larger part from the partial rights to
Seinfeld reruns from the sale of Castle Rock the
helped broker in 1993. Who are more rootless, co-
smopolitan, do-nothing, navel-gazing liberals than
Jerry and his Jewish clan? Bannon’s personal
wealth is deeply implicated in the cosmopolitan,
cultural and economic elite.
But I digress. Back to the binaries.
Us (pure)
People
Real Americans
Nationalists
Property
Religious
Christian
West
Civilization
Bannon’s ideology is constructed
around binary codes and temporal nar
-
ratives, the former deeply othering, the
latter dangerously, frothingly apocalyp
-
tic.
asaculturesection.org26
SECTIONCULTURE Spring/Summer 2017
Between the people and institutions arrayed
on one side or the other, one can imagine relations
of different kinds. They might view themselves as
aggressive opponents, but not necessarily as ene-
mies. In a democratic social order, the adversarial
conflict between partisan opponents is agonistic,
not antagonistic. Bannon sees it otherwise. There
is no space for comity in his universe. Just as there
is no room for supra-national governance, there is
no space for constitutionally authorized third par-
ties to mediate conflicts on the domestic scene.
If the opposing sides are, not frenemies but
enemies, there can be no mutually binding rules of
the game. We find ourselves in Nixon-land, a
world of plumbers, spies, and liars, of fierce, extra-
constitutional confrontations with congress, press,
and courts. Clausewitz remarked that war is poli-
tics by another name. Bannon sees politics as war
by another name. No wonder he has vowed that
“every day, every day, it’s going to be a fight.”
* * *
Bannon weaves these tensely opposed binaries
into an apocalyptic narrative that pits good against
evil in a fateful, bloody, battle-to-the-death fight.
Narratives are stories with a be-
ginning, middle, and end. Such
stories transubstantiate ab-
stract moral binaries into flesh
and blood characters, protago-
nists and antagonists. Stories
plot the struggle between he-
roes and villains that ends in
glorious triumph or nightma-
rish death.
In his 2004 documentary about Ronald Rea-
gan, In the Face of Evil, Bannon condenses his
long list of dangerous others into a meta-antago-
nist that, drawing from the Old Testament’s Book
of Daniel, he metaphorically identifies as “the
Beast.” Against a dark mélange of martial images
and music, the film narrator recalls the blood lust
killing and desperation of World War I, dramati-
cally intoning, “from this fever swamp grows the
Beast.” Ominously referencing the “dark side,” the
voice over cites “Bolshevism, Fascism, Communi-
sm, Nazism, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Tojo [and]
Stalin.” It’s clear that Bannon’s Beast really is not
about history but the present day. Those who have
occupied the dark side are bestial, his narrator ex-
plains, because they sought “control of the state,”
not for the sake of value but “power as an end in
itself.” They were the secularists and cosmopoli-
tans of their day, their Nietzchean “will to power”
creating what Bannon would later term “the Ad-
ministrative State.” The Beast is Bannon’s “face of
evil,” and it’s voracious. In the course of the 20
th
century, the Beast grew strong and stronger, it
feasted not only on the real America but on gene-
rations of weak-kneed liberals too cowardly, pa-
thetic, materialistic and pleasure-seeking to stand
up to the monster in righteous fight.
Only Ronald Reagan knew “how to confront
the Beast.” A “radical with extreme views,” Reagan
was “the only true outsider elected in the century.”
Before Reagan, liberals “had been hoping that the
wolf had passed by the door,” the narrator intones,
but Reagan knew better. The Beast may have been
quiet, but he was still there, lingering just outside.
Against this monstrous presence, Reagan laun-
ched a vast military build-up, a saber-rattling fo-
reign policy, and a domestic agenda foraged from
the far right. Faithful Christian from the hinter-
lands, anti-communist, gutsy crusader for God
and Country, Ronald Reagan won the Cold War
and saved the day -- and not a second too soon, for
Apocalypse was imminent.
Today, three decades after being saved by Rea-
gan, Bannon’s America is back in the worst kind of
trouble again. In Generation Zero, his 2010 do-
cumentary that cinematizes the pseudo-science of
generational upheaval proposed by William
Strauss and Neil Howe, Bannon’s narrator omi-
nously warns, “History is
seasonal, and win-
ter is coming.” Fir-
st came “The Unra-
velling,” from 1982
to 2004, when mo-
ney culture ruled,
the work ethic dis-
solved, and “the self
was really god.” Now we face the “Cri-
sis,” the time of final reckoning. What we do now
determines whether the America experiment fails
or can be raised. If the right prevails, it will lead,
in Howe’s words, to “a new founding moment in
American history.” If the left wins out, America is
finished. As one critic put it, Generation Zero pre-
sents a “hellishly bleak vision of past, present, and
future, driven by magical belief in historical de-
terminism.”
Violent times require violent tactics. In speech
after speech, interview after interview, movie after
movie, Bannon connects his prophecy of the co-
ming “radical upheaval” with aggressive, often vio-
lent, apocalyptic confrontation. “I want to bring
everything crashing down, destroying all of today’s
establishment,” he declares, menacing not only
the left but moderate forces on the right. Bannon
characterizes himself as a Leninist, and he has
winked at the Weathermen, the militant Maoists
who tried to foment the violent overthrow of capi-
talism in the twilight of the sixties.
Bannon is not a conservative but a revolutio-
Clausewitz remarked that war is politics
by another name. Bannon sees politics
as war by another name. No wonder he
has vowed that “every day, every day,
it’s going to be a fight.”
asaculturesection.org27
SECTIONCULTURE Spring/Summer 2017
nary. Philosophical conservatives, such as Ed-
mund Burke and Michael Oakeshott, despise radi-
cal and apocalyptic thinking, championing com-
mon sense and incremental change. Enlighten-
ment thinkers often felt the same way. Kant war-
ned that, “from the crooked wood of man nothing
straight can be built.” No master plan, but rather
small steps for “man” adding up to one big step for
humankind. Bannon is having none of this. Pro-
claiming, “darkness is good,” he likens himself to
such pulverizing figures as Darth Vader, Dick
Cheney and, I kid you not, to Satan himself.
A former Breitbart collaborator suggests,
“Bannon has no hard and fast political philosophy,
only an apocalyptic theory.” But this would reco-
gnize narrative form at the expense of the substan-
tive binaries upon which it builds. For Bannon,
victory in the climactic struggle will pave the way
for reactionary policy and belief, about property,
class, immigration, race, religion, nationalism,
gender, and sexuality. Victory would turn back the
clock to good old American time, when Americans
really were God’s Chosen People.
* * *
In 1973, a Frenchman named Jean Raspail pu-
blished a novel called Camp of the Saints. It pain-
ted a phantasmagorical story about brown and
black immigrants destroying Western civilization -
- literally. An Indian demagogue called “the turd-
eater” leads an “armada” of 800,000 impoveri-
shed dark skinned Indians from the subcontinent
to Europe’s southern shores. Rampaging through
the countryside, these
“dark
hoards”
proceed northward, multiply-
ing like bunnies, raping white women and killing
white men. Finally, they take control of major ci-
ties, Paris, London, and eventually even New York.
In 1975, Scribner published an English transla-
tion, splashing across its cover, in large capital let-
ters above the book’s title: “A CHILLING NOVEL
ABOUT THE END OF THE WHITE WORLD.”
The English publication met with withering re-
views, to wit this observation by Kirkus: “The pu-
blishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as
a major event, and it probably is, in much the
same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”
The novel, which went quietly out of print, is fla-
grantly racist, as is its author, now 91 years old
and living comfortably in the 17
th
arrondissement
of Paris. “This Western world … I am sorry to say,
is white,” Jean Raspail recently told an inter-
viewer; “there is no other Western world other
than white. That’s how it is.”
Why do bring up an obscure book forty years
after its failed publication? Because in 1983,
Camp of the Saints was back in print, thanks to
hefty subsidies from right-wing donors, and, re-
published two more times since, it has gained a
cult following among the online alt-right. This is
where Bannon comes in. Time and again, this alt-
right ideologue has employed Camp of the Saints
as a metaphor to frame immigration in our own
times. “It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type
invasion into Central and then Western and Nor-
thern Europe,” Bannon suggested in October
2015. “It’s not a migration. It’s an invasion. I call it
the Camp of the Saints,” he explained in January
2016. “I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it,”
he rhetorically asked an interviewer in April, 2016,
going on to suggest that the refugee crisis “didn’t
just happen by happenstance. These are not war
refugees. It’s something much more insidious
going on.” A conspiracy, a dark skinned demago-
gue, an Armada, an invasion?
* * *
I’ve entitled this talk “Raging Against the En-
lightenment.” Perhaps you are thinking this eleva-
tes Bannon a wee bit. Has he
read Locke, Voltaire, Rous-
seau, and Diderot, perused
the Encyclopedia, or been
down with Kant and Tocque-
ville -- the big thinkers who
champion science and hu-
manity, freedom and equali-
ty, and the universal rights
of man? Doubtful. Has he
read Burke, Herder, or De
Maistre, Hegel, Nietzsche or Oakeshott -- the
big thinkers whom Isaiah Berlin famously dubbed
the “counter-Enlightenment”? While this, too,
seems pretty unlikely, it is vital to see that Ban-
non-ideology is deeply imbedded in this counter-
narrative, in the line of conservative thinking that
has challenged the emancipatory humanism upon
which democratic politics and a hopeful view of
modernity are based. Bannon is the ideological
heir of the intellectual backlash against modernity
that has been unfolding from the Counter-Refor-
mation right up to the present day. He is the foe of
every idea, institution, and movement that idealize
the universal and raise high the banner of truth,
truth, liberty, and equality.
Understanding Bannon-ideology allows us to comprehend,
not Trump the person, but the political actor. To journa
-
lists and politicians, Trump’s performances appear impul
-
sive, pragmatic, and banal. If we read these performances
against the background of Bannon’s ideological scripting,
they seem coherent; they have a compelling sense about
them, in a radical, alt-right way.
asaculturesection.org28
SECTIONCULTURE Spring/Summer 2017
* * *
Why did the President of the most stable, ef-
fective, and long lived constitutional democracy in
the history of the world choose such a figure as
Steven Bannon as his Virgil, his Sancho Panza, his
sidekick, his “Chief Strategist”? As the string of
awkward blunders and downright failures mar-
king Trump’s first six months demonstrates, one
should not look for an explanation to Bannon’s
political skills. Trump chose
Bannon, rather, because Bran-
non’s velvet glove fits so snugly
around Trump’s iron fist. Ban-
non-ideology is the water in
which Trump swims, in which
he has always swum, without
knowing he was in the sea.
Bannon crystallizes Trump’s
inchoate but raging outsider
feelings, completes his half-formed ideas, raises to
college level his fifth-grade syntax.
Understanding Bannon-ideology allows us to
comprehend, not Trump the person, but the poli-
tical actor. To journalists and politicians, Trump’s
performances appear impulsive, pragmatic, and
banal. If we read these performances against the
background of Bannon’s ideological scripting, they
seem coherent; they have a compelling sense
about them, in a radical, alt-right way. We see
Trump acting and speaking, but it has, more often
than not, been Bannon’s words we actually hear;
it’s he who has set the scene. “As far as political
reality goes,” a Politico critic observed in the
weeks following Trump’s election, “it’s Bannon’s
movie, we’re in it, and the opening credits have
just started to roll.”
Bannon has been a performance-enhancing
drug. The secret of his power over Trump, and
over some large swath of the American people, has
been his mythopoeic abilities, writing the script,
setting the stage, finding the actors, and directing
the mis-en-scene so effectively that anti-democra-
tic ideas seem for many sensible and sometimes
even inspiring, while democratic ideas appear ir-
rational and profane. Bannon once called Trump a
flawed vessel, but into that striving, overheated
human container Bannon has poured a magical
potion, a fearsome brew.
Bannon is a mythologist. He scripted and pro-
duced a new and pernicious political movie, which
he continues to direct. Donald Trump plays the
heroic protagonist, and Hillary Clinton, Barack
Obama, Democrats, and Enlightenment ideas play
the dark Beast that the barking, bleached blond
populist President has entered the arena to slay.
Bannon once confided to Variety that he had a
“kinetic editing style that seeks to overwhelm au-
diences.” In the months that led up to Trump’s
election, the greater part of America’s citizen-au-
dience were subdued and some offered Bannon’s
production a standing ovation. In the months after
the election, some of these same viewers have be-
come restless in their seats, and some are getting
up to leave. The left, meanwhile, is creating coun-
ter-performances, writing new plots and casting
around for new heroes.
Democracy is sustained by a discourse that
celebrates autonomy, rationa-
lity, and moral equality, and
by independent institutions
that encourage skepticism,
participation, and free expres-
sion. Trump, as made visible by
Bannon, wants to convince us
that universalistic discourse is
outmoded and independent in-
stitutions dysfunctional. He
spouts Bannon’s othering binaries, and he attacks
core democratic institutions: journalism is fake,
public opinion polls fixed, courts biased, voting is
not dispositive, office not binding. The aim of
Trump and Bannon is deceptive, for they are par-
ticipating in a political process that democracy has
constructed. When we reconstruct Bannon-ideo-
logy, however, the truth comes out. They are parti-
cipating in democracy in order to destroy it.
But nobody can predict performative success.
The best funded shows, with accomplished actors,
crash on opening night. Unknown plays, perfor-
med in obscure venues with untried actors, beco-
me dark horse hits.
“I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the
Tudors,” Bannon once remarked. Cromwell was a
clever and far-sighted political man. Still, he en-
ded up dead, hung out to dry, and die, by the very
King he had so slyly and violently served. Three
months ago, this was widely thought to be Ban-
non’s fate. “Dead strategist walking” is what New
York Times’ Op-Ed writer Frank Bruni called him,
in a column headlined “Steven Bannon Was Doo-
med.” But the announcements of Bannon’s death
have been greatly exaggerated. The “cosmopoli-
tan” team led by GQ-esque son-in-law Jared Ku-
shner has fallen on hard times, performing in the
failed Russian version of “Let’s Make a Deal.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s withdrawal from the climate
accord, his persistence with the Muslim ban, his
“decline of Western civilization” Poland speech –
these efforts promoting particularism over univer-
salism, in the guise of protecting national soverei-
gnty, have Bannon’s fingerprints all over them.
Can Trump the Scarecrow afford to live without
his brain?
Bannon once called Trump a
flawed vessel, but into that
striving, overheated human
container Bannon has poured
a magical potion, a fearsome
brew.