Quinta Jurecic on Lawfare indulges in a bit of snark in this piece on the self-destruction of evil, in the form of Trump senior advisor Steve Bannon:
Over the first few weeks of the Trump administration, Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon has worked hard to establish himself as the would-be Grand Vizier of the White House. Bannon, the former executive chair of the winkingly white nationalist website Breitbart, was the driving force behind the executive order banning entry into the United States of immigrants and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries and now sits on the Principals Committee of the National Security Council.
Quinta is far too subtle to actually beat the point home, but I am not: applying “Grand Vizier”, a quintessential Islamic term from the Ottoman Empire days, to a self-proclaimed Islamaphobe of Bannon’s stature is quite satisfying.
Leaving aside the fun, I find her emotional mood is paralleling mine:
Three weeks ago, my libertarian panic was full-throated. I speculated that we had cause for concern that Trump might be our first president in the mold of the fascist thinker Carl Schmitt, who notoriously wrote that the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” In the worst-case scenario, I worried that we would see the executive branch directly rejecting the authority of the courts.
To be sure, I’m still concerned about how the country will fare under the presidency of Donald Trump. But Steve Bannon has proved himself to be so monumentally incompetent that I am fairly certain the Republic is safer than I could have believed three weeks ago, at least from Bannon’s flailing efforts to maximize whatever supposed contradictions he believes he has identified.Bannon isn’t an arch-villain. And he’s not the guy who’s going to destroy American democracy. Instead, as I’ll explain, he’s just an internet troll.
I think the resignation of General Flynn really reassured me that many, even most inhabitants of the White House still fear the Law; we aren’t going to have to actually have an armed march to ouster stubborn holdouts. But as more and more scandals come to light1, how long will Trump actually hold out? I have no real idea, but I suspect there’s a limit to his patience for the crap he’s going through. We may not get to impeach him – he may leave on his own, handing Pence a two word statement (think of Colbert wheezing in his best Trump imitation, I Quit!).
Then, of course, will be the problem of Pence. Will we be so tired of the mess that he’ll be able to run rough-shod? Or will our newly-remembered political will extend to putting him in his place, forcing him to keep to the straight and narrow? I think the latter – this has been a lesson to keep an eye on the denizens of our governments, both state and national – and to take it seriously.
This is no game for amateurs.
Quinta goes on to stomp all over the Breitbart and alt-right crowd:
Then there is the fact that Yarvin’s writing is, not to put too fine a point on it, terrible. Once you penetrate his bizarre prose, his conclusions are laughable and even boring to anyone with a basic understanding of political theory. Yarvin’s notion of a “Dark Enlightenment”—a systematic rejection of Enlightenment principles of equality and democracy—may sound sinister, especially when expressed so incomprehensibly, but it is not in the least new, though it is inflected with the particular anxieties of 21st century America.
I emphasize that Yarvin is a bad writer not as a potshot but because the obscurity and density of his work is itself a cultural signifier of the “neoreactionary” (or NRx) movement within which he situates himself, along with hard-right corners of the internet more generally. There is an obsession in these communities with proving one’s intelligence in relation to other people, with a tinge of eugenecism that ranges anywhere from the implicit to the smarmily obvious. (An Atlantic journalist recently wrote that a prominent neoreactionary writer refused to explain his philosophy to her because “115 IQ people are not generally well equipped to summarize 160 IQ people.”) For this reason, self-consciously sinister and edgy language, along with five-syllable words and obscure references, is common coin. It is designed to make the reader feel stupid in order to puff up the writer’s ego.
Quinta should have drawn the obvious conclusion – these alt-righters are simply children in adult bodies. They have votes, some have guns, but when you run into that attitude, you know they’re children – and they have the opinions of children.
Tell them to go away and grow up.
