I’ve been noticing occasional comments in various media about how Steve Bannon, White House senior aide, sees himself as a Leninist out to destroy the (sometimes administrative) state. However, the interest seems to be mostly along the lines of drawing mildly useful parallels with the Bolshevik Revolution, such as Anastasia Edel does here in Quartz.
But is that an end in itself? Certainly, it’s not hard to believe – some do seem to think that all 300 million of us running around without rules can make it fly with no end. But I’m doubtful in the Bannon case. I’m going to spin a little story which, while not backed by irrefutable research, does fit the facts as are currently advertised. Let’s start with beginnings.
Bannon was the Executive Chair of Breitbart, a web site notorious as an “alt-right” site – or, less euphemistically, a site devoted to white nationalism, even white supremacism. We can assume, therefore, that he’s a white nationalist. Now, who lives next door to a white nationalist in the metaphorical neighborhood?
That’s right. The white slaveowner.
And what happened to the American slaveowner? They were deprived of their most important possessions – their slaves, who did much of the work needed in the South – first by law in the North, and then by force in the South, when they attempted to secede from the Union in order to preserve their foul power over people, purely on the basis of skin color. (See here for a meditation on the true soul of the supremacist of any color.)
And what deprived them of their position on the mountain top? The common answer is the North, but I would fine this down a bit. The tool used to spike the cannon of foul oppression was … the Federal Government. It proved to be, once a succession of incompetent generals were finally cleared from the ranks, an efficient tool for coordinating the necessary efforts, and more importantly, to focus the intellectual repudiation of the entire pile of rubbish used to prop up the American White Nationalist movement of the latter half of the 1800s.
If I may speculate, for Bannon, the Federal Government is more than a symbol of the North, it’s the tool used to “oppress” (I can barely type that without laughing at him) Bannon and all of his fellow White Nationalists, all the way to that murderous wretch, Dylann Roof. And now Bannon, ensconced at the heart of the thing he hates, now works to eviscerate it, while keeping his other bugaboo, the Islamic world, at bay. So he suggests a bloated military budget be inflated yet again, while destroying the various departments that might bind his efforts, especially that of Education, and the EPA. The first, because education is his foe, as a white nationalist, while the second is more likely to infringe on his “right” to do anything he so wishes. He even has tentatively assaulted the Judiciary, although that is a bastion difficult to breach; it may yet bring him down.
But he has little to lose in the effort. White nationalists and supremacists are barely on the bottom rung of society, unless they hide their tendencies; and rare is one that achieves conventional success.
So there’s your bed-time speculation for the day. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be proven wrong. But understanding where he may be going with this is as useful, if not more so, than drawing parallels with Lenin’s approach, which worked well in that world – but that world is not this world.
[EDIT: 6/5/2017 fix typo]
