Understanding Steve Bannon
Bannon’s power, like Trump’s for the moment, may rest in his ability to keep us guessing.
The following article was originally published in “What I Learned This Week” on March 2, 2017. To learn more about 13D’s investment research, please visit our website.
We wrote a lot on Bannon long before the media figured out how important a role he is playing in the new administration. The most important piece of new information may be that Trump reportedly jokes that Bannon’s populist agenda makes it difficult to know if he is “alt-right or alt-left”. True to form, Trump likes to keep everyone off-balance and what better way to do this than to continue obfuscating his chief’s strategist’s agenda. The fact that Bannon doesn’t talk much in public magnifies the public’s eagerness to mis-label him.
While Bannon is a self-proclaimed ally of the alt-right this may have more to do with the fact that promoting this stance at Breitbart was, to quote Lisa De Pasquale, a contributor at the news site, “good for his business model.” Bannon will pander when it suits him, but his loyalty lies only with his own vision. That vision, as we have written, revolves around deconstructing the “administrative state” and establishing a new political order committed to “economic nationalism.”
Among Bannon’s rare public comments at last week’s CPAC, he dismissed the idea that Trump might moderate his positions or seek consensus with political opponents. He used some terms that are more often heard on the political left — “globalist” and “corporatist.” As The Washington Post observes: “Such words are rarely heard in a traditional Republican platform and underscore how Trump’s populism and suspicion of the world economy are in some respects similar to that of Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist.” Intentionally or not, Bannon’s rhetoric no doubt threw some cabinet members off balance.
The former Breitbart chief also told the CPAC audience that the White House is digging in for a long period of conflict to transform Washington and upend the world order:
I’ve said that there’s a new political order that’s being formed out of this. And it’s still being formed. But if you look at the wide degree of opinions in this room — whether you’re a populist; whether you’re a limited-government conservative; whether you’re libertarian; whether you’re an economic nationalist — we have wide and sometimes divergent opinions. But I think we (agree on) the center core of what we believe, that we’re a nation with an economy. Not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a culture and a reason for being. And I think that is what unites us and I think that is what is going to unite this movement going forward.
Bannon is not afraid to use words like “culture”and“nationalism”, even though they are an affront to the overriding political language of inclusion and assimilation. Such words would never mix in the mouth of an alt-left populist deriding Davos man. Or so we have come to expect. Bannon’s power may lie in his ability to remain obscure.
As David Paul wrote earlier this week for The Huffington Post:
“Bannon is an obscurantist—that is to say that he talks and acts in a manner to deliberately obscure what his intentions are. . .Bannon is opaque about what his notion of economic nationalism entails, or what he imagines the U.S. economy might look like after that deconstruction is complete. But it has to be about more than tax rates, tariffs and deregulation; that's pretty banal stuff. That agenda would not require a wholesale attack on the media and the judiciary, and would place him foursquare in the mainstream of the Republican Party, which he deeply disdains. Jobs have long been the currency of politics—and no one in memory made them as integral to their campaign as did Donald Trump— but Bannon has to have more in mind than jawboning a few American transnational corporations to build a factory or two in eastern Kentucky or the upper peninsula of Michigan.”
Is Bannon a Leninist? A crusader against Islam? A modern-day Teddy Roosevelt bent on using war to resuscitate the lapsed values of American Exceptionalism? Or all of the above? Or something else entirely? His power, like Trump’s for the moment, may rest in his ability to keep us guessing.
This article was originally published in “What I Learned This Week” on March 2, 2017. To subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit 13D.com or find us on Twitter @WhatILearnedTW.
