Steve Bannon: an American Rasputin

Last year, when few people had ever heard of Steve Bannon or knew anything about him, writer Ronald Radosh wrote a piece for theDaily Beast in which he recounted an informal conversation he’d had in 2013 with the former Breitbart News executive director and now top aide to US President Donald Trump. Radosh wrote that he had attended a book-signing party held at Bannon’s posh townhouse in Washington DC. He’d been observing a photo of Bannon’s daughter, Maureen, a West Point Military Academy graduate and an officer in the US Army’s elite 101^st Airborne Division.

According to Radosh, the picture had caught his attention because it showed Maureen Bannon in combat fatigues sitting with a machine-gun across her lap on an elaborate seat that turned out to be none other than Saddam Hussein’s gold throne. The casual conversation that ensued, according to Radosh, began with Bannon’s saying, of his daughter, “I’m very proud of her.” But what came next would be even more surprising to the writer than the picture of his host’s daughter. At one point, according to Radosh, Bannon declared, “I’m a Leninist.”

However, when the writer emailed Bannon last year to tell the by then campaign CEO for Donald Trump that he planned to use part of their 2013 conversation in an article for The Daily Beast and asked if he had anything to add, Bannon said he had no recollection of any such conversation and that, besides, he wasn’t “doing media” right then. Radosh wrote the story anyway and the renowned Daily Beast news site felt both Radosh and the story were credible enough to go ahead and publish it, but to this day it remains Radosh’s word against Bannon’s regarding the supposed encounter. That said, both the combative directness and the later “alternative fact” denial of the conversation’s ever having taken place have Steve Bannon’s dichotomous trademark, as we now all know it, written all over them. The writer was taken aback. He’d heard about the far-right-wing, Christian white supremacist, “populist” and “nationalist” agenda that Bannon was apparently hawking through his alternative news site and high-ranking political contacts, but a Leninist? When Radosh asked the self-styled political strategist what he meant by the term, Bannon reportedly responded, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Asked to expand on that thought Bannon allegedly told Radosh that he was applying Lenin’s strategy to Tea Party populist goals. He included in the group that he was targeting for destruction the Republican and Democratic Parties and the traditional conservative press.

After The Daily Beast article came out, a former Hollywood writing partner of Bannon’s, Julia Jones, briefly surfaced to tell what it had been like to work with Bannon a couple of decades earlier. In one interview, Jones, who worked with Bannon on the script for a documentary film about Ronald Reagan, called him “a strong militarist” and added that he was “in love with war.”

“It’s almost poetry to him,” she said. Jones claimed that when she visited Bannon’s home back then, she found books about war lying around all over the place. “He’s studied it (war) down through the ages, from Greece, through Rome …every battle, every war. Never back down, never apologize, never show weakness. He lives in a world where it’s always high noon at the OK Corral.”

She was asked to expand on her comments later in a segment of CNN’s New Day program. “Steve always tended to focus on military battles. His bible was The Art of War,” she told show hosts Alisyn Camerota and Chris Cuomo. But when Camerota pressed her further regarding Bannon’s alleged love of war, Jones appeared to freeze, as if suddenly frightened and cut the interview short.

At least in this early stage of a new US presidency, Bannon seems to have hit the political jackpot, in terms of his own ideology and goals, by getting on board with Donald Trump. Or rather, in terms of Trump’s having gotten on board with him. But Trump wasn’t his first choice. He just appears to have turned out to be the most fertile ground in which Bannon could plant his seed.

So it was that, in his role as political publicist, Bannon sought to craft positive images for such far-right Republican firebrands as former Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann and former Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin (who was also briefly on the short least to be Trump’s running mate). But he later also could be seen fluttering around then GOP presidential hopeful Ted Cruz—Trump’s toughest competitor for the candidacy—and sought to make inroads as well with former Republican Senator Rick Santorum and surgeon-politician Ben Carson (currently Trump’s secretary for urban housing and development).In the midst of the confusion bred by the amorphous multiplicity of politicians all presenting themselves as the “only choice” for the GOP, Bannon was hard at work trying to find a way to exploit the apparent lack of Republican Party unity. If we are to believe the content of the alleged conversation with Bannon that Ronald Radosh reproduced in his Daily Beast piece, then we can only imagine that Bannon was probably seeking candidates who shared the dark tenets of Breitbart’s alternative reality. A nationalist populist view that holds in contempt the globalist policies that have been fundamental in maintaining a semblance of world peace for the past 70 years since the end of World War II. A black and white view that envisions the “Christian West” crusading against “the evils of Islam”. A politically cynical international view that finds an uneasy alliance between the two most strongest military powers on earth—the US and Russia—preferable to a strong and united European Union, ostensibly led by the potent democratic and moral power of Germany, a nation that knows all too well the cost of populist nationalism and is thus highly critical of Bannon’s views.

Breitbart News leaned toward Cruz in 2015, but later embraced Trump wholeheartedly and became his unofficial campaign site once the presidential candidate’s main message began to focus on halting Islamic immigration. When in August of last year Trump ended up having to fire campaign manager Paul Manafort after allegations regarding close links between him and the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bannon left Breitbart and filled the breach as campaign CEO, seconded by Kellyanne Conway as manager.

In a recently published article in the online magazine Quartz, Gwynn Guilford and Nikhil Sonnad take a look at the American-style Rasputin that is Steve Bannon. Aptly casting Bannon as theéminence grise behind a kind of hallow, Wizard of Oz leader, they ask, “What does Donald Trump want for America?” They respond to their own question saying, “His supporters don’t know. His party doesn’t know. Even he doesn’t know.” They go on to say that “if there is a political vision underlying Trumpism…the person to ask is not Trump. It’s his éminence grise, Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist of the Trump administration.”Prior to that time, Trump’s campaign line seemed capricious at best—undefined and swinging wildly from one position to another depending on the audience he was talking to. But from that point on, for anyone familiar with the stances of Breitbart News under Steve Bannon’s command, it wasn’t hard to see that Bannon had crawled inside Trump’s head and become his voice and his political conscience. Kellyanne was to become the “talking head” who would come out after Trump spoke and seek to explain what he had meant, rather than what he had said. But the guy in the back office penning the lyrics to Trump’s “election anthems” was Bannon. And that marriage of minds has clearly continued, with the president’s not only having appointed Bannon his senior advisor, but also having named him to the National Security Council, ranking him above both the head of the Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence, who were demoted to as-needed advisors.

For those who ask where Bannon came from, Quartz couldn’t tell his story more succinctly: “Bannon transcended his working-class Virginia roots with a stint in the Navy and a degree from Harvard Business School, followed by a career as a Goldman Sachs financier. He moved to Los Angeles to invest in media and entertainment for Goldman, before starting his own investment bank specializing in media. Through a combination of luck (a fallen-through deal left him with a stake in a hit show called Seinfeld) and a knack for voicing outrage, Bannon remade himself as a minor luminary within the far edge of right-wing politics, writing and directing a slew of increasingly conservative documentaries.”

In one such documentary, his 2010 Generation Zero, he takes on his own generation, the baby boomers, whom he has referred to—in a 2011 interview for Gen Y TV with Discover Your Voice host, Britt Hysen—as being “the most spoiled, most self-centered, most narcissistic generation the country ever produced.” Very apparently pro-capitalist (“his” president is, after all, The Donald Trump) Bannon’s premise in that film was that the US was in a sort of political identity crisis, and that the baby boomers born in the immediate post-World War II era were to blame for it. He cast them as affluent youngsters of the sixties who had largely freeloaded off of their hard-working parents whose own values sprang from the hardships of the Great Depression of the thirties and the Second World War in the forties. He portrayed the counter-cultural revolution of the flower-power sixties and the era of the civil rights movement as the work of a generation of ingrates who sought to abandon the very US values that had made their lives simple through the sacrifices of the generations before them.

According to Bannon, the cultural shift that his generation introduced as those boomer youths grew into adulthood has undermined the values that made the United States great and replaced them with socialist policies that have weakened the US fabric. So wait a minute…Not a Leninist, then? Perhaps, but the truth is that extreme right and extreme left often come full circle and end up facing each other in mirror images.

Up until President Trump made his much-awaited first speech to a joint session of the US Congress a few days ago the bulk of his rhetoric continued to be the same kind of aggressively critical, politically divisive, openly combative language that Bannon and his team (known in the administration, by Bannon’s own admission, as “The Fight Club”) had penned for him during the latter part of his presidential campaign. However, after his congressional address—written, some observers have suggested, by cooler heads than Bannon’s on his staff—even some of his harshest critics cautiously praised the speech as more presidential, more conciliatory, less combative and at least slightly more substantive than anything heard previously in the early weeks of his administration. Lenin, who, himself (like Donald Trump), was from a wealthy background, was someone who (like Bannon) wanted to “bring everything crashing down” as well, and indeed he did. And the era that was ushered in under his tutelage in the Soviet Union was one in which the democratic institutions foreseen by Marx were abolished and the government was turned into a one-party system that eventually led to iron-fisted totalitarianism and the total repression of individual rights. Lenin continued to have a large cult-following long after his death—mostly made up of people as blindly loyal to and slavishly defensive of his image as many of Donald Trump’s followers have proven to be to his today—and he remains a highly controversial figure in political history even now. While Marxist-Leninists continue to revere him as a champion of the working class, critics on both the right and left of the political spectrum view him as the originator of a totalitarian dictatorship that was to crush democratic socialism by cloaking the work of government in secrecy and carrying out some of the worst human and civil rights abuses in the history of the modern world.

Could this be a “reset”? Could it mean that having the lowest approval rating of any president in living memory at this early stage of his administration has prompted Donald Trump to quit mouthing the words that his proud hell-raiser chief advisor is putting into his mouth? And if so, will it mean the fading of Bannon’s Rasputin-like power over the US president’s political thinking and the introduction of a somewhat more moderate line?

Not many of the most jaundiced of Washington commentators think so. In an ironic reference to Trump’s having recently dubbed the domestic and international press “the enemy of the people” (Bannon-Lenin couldn’t have said it better), editorialist Jacob Weisberg of the online publication Slate quipped, “Enemies of the people giving Trump positive reviews for not sounding like a ranting dictator.”

As The New Yorker’s John Cassidy pointed out in a post-address editorial, “If there was anything fresh about what Trump said to Congress, it was largely stylistic. He didn’t pivot, he merely pirouetted, and then he dug into the same political ground he has already claimed.”

So far, judging from the 54 billion-dollar military spending hike that President Trump touted in his address, and his plans to have the most powerful Armed Forces ever while slashing US foreign aide, Steve Bannon’s anti-globalist, ultra-nationalist and militarist view of the United States under a powerfully autocratic presidency would appear to remain alive and well in Washington.