What Does Steve Bannon Think?

Introduction

Steve Bannon appeared on our collective radars four years ago in August 2016, as the chief strategist of Trump’s campaign. After Trump won, baffled voters on the left looked to Bannon as the explanation, the eminence grise, the man behind the curtain. Bannon was mysterious, said some fascist-sounding things, and looked unhealthy like a Hollywood villain. It was easy to box him in as Darth Sidious.

Bannon lasted twelve months with Trump. He was fired in August 2017 after he pushed the “fine people on both sides” line for addressing Charlottesville. He then disappeared from media coverage, as swiftly as he emerged. I had forgotten about him until I heard a quick line in an interview:

Millennials, they’re like 19th century Russian serfs. They’re in better shape, they have more information, they’re better dressed, but they don’t own anything. Millennials don’t have a chance.

That was very true. Bannon’s comments about millennials being a generation of permanent renters, whose economic situation resembled feudalism¹ more than anything else, struck me as succinct, correct, and hardly expressed by anyone else.

From there, I was curious: surely there’s more to Bannon than the one-dimensional media caricature, especially due to his significant impact on the success of Trump’s election. So, I asked: what does Steve Bannon really think? I present my findings, as well as my reflections, below. My view is that Bannon’s publicly advertised positions make significant sense and are worth discussing, but Bannon himself is a suave trickster: some of his purported views are certainly not genuine.

Views

• Bannon describes himself as an economic nationalist. He believes that the value of citizenship has suffered greatly in the past decades. In the US,² the government has allowed its obligations to its citizens to fall behind its obligations toward corporations. Instead of maximizing citizen quality of life, we are maximizing shareholder value. The lower-middle and working classes have lost the value of their citizenship; Bannon seeks to restore it.³

• On the flip-side, Bannon believes that the world is effectively run by a permanent political class: elites who never lose, and who have dispassionately managed the decline of the US, using globalization to accrue more wealth and power to themselves.

• Bannon sees the 2008 financial crisis as a key coup for these elites: the banks were bailed out, not a single banker was punished, and the losses were socialized. That’s not capitalism. Following 2008, under Obama, the Fed’s balance sheet expanded from $1T to $4.5T. That quantitative easing (read: inflation) debased the value of the USD. The little guy – folks who hold, and depend on cash – paid for it. On the other hand, for people that hold real estate, IP, or equities, the last ten years have been the greatest run in history.

• Bannon describes this state as neofeudalism: people who don’t own assets are effectively serfs. Millennials especially are permanent renters. They do not own anything, and the system is so efficient that they will never own anything. The resulting economic fragility is terrible: people aren’t having children, can’t cover emergencies, and so on.

• Bannon views both Democrats and Republicans to blame. First for 2008, second for continuous wage suppression. To Bannon, both parties seek to let their corporate donors extract maximum profits – for Democrats, that’s by (legal or illegal) immigration⁴ that floods the labor supply, for Republicans that’s by free trade deals, which encourage outsourcing by having American labor compete in price with foreign labor.

• Bannon views the Republican party as playing to its donors, and opposed to their voter interests. In the last 20 years, the Republicans have sold their voters a Koch-brothers, Heritage-foundation, limited-government, free-trade vision. It has wrecked their education and healthcare systems, and sent all the jobs overseas. The effects have been ruinous. The Republican primary candidates of 2015/2016 were the strongest lineup of all time; any one of them would have won most presidential elections. But Trump could beat them all, because voters aren’t falling for the traditional Republican scam and policy mumbo-jumbo anymore.

• In Bannon’s view, in 2016, voters cared about basic sovereignty. Immigration, trade, employment, where’s my paycheck. Voters care about locker room talk, but that’s easily outweighed when bigger things are at stake. In 2016, a record number of people thought the country was on the wrong track.⁵ Voters want their sovereignty, their value as citizens back.

• To Bannon, core to this loss of sovereignty for everyday citizens are three items: (1) the recession and subsequent inflation, (2) pointless, expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and (3) outsourcing of American manufacturing to China.

• Bannon views China as a totalitarian, mercantilist, murderous dictatorship.⁶ He believes that the CCP poses the greatest threat to all freedom-loving people and industrial democracies, like Nazi Germany in the 1930s, a profound threat to the Westphalian order and Western democracy. Westerners are not taking the concentration camps in Xinjiang and annexation of Hong Kong as seriously as they should.

• In turn, Bannon views the shareholder-value-maximization-induced outsourcing of US manufacturing to China as a gargantuan mistake, inextricably causing to America’s decline. It has decimated employment in rural America, and lost American key competence in essential industries. Bannon believes that the CCP has been running economic war on the US,⁷ and Americans haven’t realized it because of our Wall Street interests in China. We’ve gained a little more short-term economic efficiency, but lost the sovereignty and welfare of our working class – the backbone of US society – and enabled China to lock down and own advanced manufacturing in perpetuity. A disaster.

• With respect to Bannon’s core issues, he views Trump as an “imperfect, but armor-piercing shell”: under Trump, the loss of American manufacturing, and foreign/trade policy with China, have gone from being marginal issues to front-and-center.

• Trump won because of his basic appeal to the sovereignty of his voters; addressing immigration and outsourcing to China as the key issues. He had planned to run on those issues for over a decade.⁸ He knew how to connect with working-class voters, how to rally them, and how to be accessible – getting rid of the political nomenclature and policy jargon.

• Bannon points out that politics has transitioned from the field of traditional politicians to the field of those who truly understand media. Mass communications is overwhelming and omnipresent. Trump is a master of communications, he knows how to drive the media, to force the media to play on his field. The media is always reacting, overwhelmed by his incessant scandal-generation. Bannon called the strategy “flooding the zone with shit,” and it’s undeniably effective.

• Finally, in this era of mass media, the country is all about politics. 118 million people voted in the 2018 midterms. Bannon’s view is that in terms of turnout, democracy has never been more engaged and robust. This view is obviously facile: the early 1900s had similar levels of political engagement, until the polarization boiled over and you had armed coups. Angry discourse is manageable until interests have diverged so far that they’re irreconcilable, at which point the guns come out. It doesn’t take much to figure out that polarization is harmful.

Commentary

Most of these views were expressed between 2018 and 2020. Taken at face value, they seem reasonable. Bannon’s articulation of why Trump won is clearer than any pundit’s or leftist’s, and he raises a serious question about priorities: are we on the left wasting our time arguing about pronouns when our children will get shipped to concentration camps in Xinjiang? Are we dumb for sweating the small stuff and the optics, while not paying attention to the big issues that, on net, might be a million times more impactful? Bannon’s mission is clear: the CCP is the great threat to Western democracy and way of life; boycott it at all costs, bring back American technological expertise in manufacturing, and in the process restore the welfare of the working/lower-middle classes.

But what’s suspicious about Bannon’s “economic nationalism” is that while he’s all about economic problems, he has little to say about economic solutions. While he aggressively blames the elites for 2008 and for shipping jobs to China, he doesn’t have anything to say for solving neofeudalism. Obviously bringing back jobs will help a little, but it’s neither a full solution, nor does it address the core problem. Neofeudalism comes out of highly efficient, industrialized wealth inequality, which occurs because the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of return on labor. This was the big problem that Piketty pointed out in 2013. While Bannon points out the same problem, and says that it’s important to restore asset ownership to the working/middle classes, he doesn’t offer any solutions for how. Shouldn’t an economic nationalist have cogent economic solutions to propose?

There’s good journalism from people who have tracked Bannon more closely than I, who claim that Bannon’s “economic nationalism” angle is new. Immigration has been his core issue forever. It’s central to his economic nationalism, which raises a crucial question: is Bannon’s economic nationalism just a vehicle for advancing his hostile views on China and immigration, which he has made the #1 and #2 priorities in his agenda? While there’s no debate that Bannon is a nationalist, it’s suspect how sincere the economic part of his economic nationalism is. If it is sincere, then there’s a real question as to how well thought-through it really is, since an overwhelming number of economists across the political spectrum view immigration as a net economic benefit.

Indeed, there’s something unsettling and sly about Bannon’s purported economic nationalism: he insists that he’s not an ethnic nationalist, but somehow he always ends up very closely aligned with them. Debaters point this out, but Bannon is a slippery debater: “everyone keeps calling me a fascist, but fascists, by definition, want bigger states! I want to deconstruct the administrative state.”⁹ Bannon plays excellent definitions-games – he is able to easily refute the accusation by definition, and in turn totally evade the connotation that his counterparties mean.

Bannon also always has well-prepared counterexamples to his opponents’ predictable attacks, but he never refutes them on an abstract level. For example, when confronted about Breitbart’s hateful, misleading content, he skillfully outmaneuvers his leftist interrogator by describing how Breitbart was made to subvert the Republican establishment. His defense of the “fine people on both sides” comment is an especially powerful example of his argumentative contortions. Bannon’s refutations regarding allegations of his ethnic nativism leave me with the feeling of when someone is playing games, moving the goalposts and feeding you bullshit, but you don’t have the time in the venue to pick them apart.

Bannon’s insincerity is clear in his Frontline interviews with PBS: he plays to the intellectual audience with the most centrist-populist version of his beliefs, but he’s hoodwinking the viewer: he fawns over Trump, both personally and politically. But we know that Bannon had been fired from the White House, and had then publicly disparaged Trump, and his family, in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. In the interview, Bannon is plainly lying in attempt to preserve whatever relationship with Trump.

Indeed, no matter how candid Bannon seems, his integrity is weak. Allegations have emerged that Bannon lied to congressional investors during Mueller’s Investigation. More shockingly – and in brazen irony – he’s now even been arrested for embezzling money from his “We Build the Wall” non-profit fundraising campaign. Convincing Americans they need to build a border wall, privately raising money for it, then defrauding them of those funds, takes unbelievable chutzpah.

The conclusion that I’m led to is that Bannon is a special type of grifter: sly, insincere, and self-serving. What kind of nationalist lies to congressional investigators? He’s a deeply skilled political operative. Who knows what his true personal goals are; but I suspect the “economic nationalist” agenda he laid out above is not the whole story.

That said, the economic nationalist agenda Bannon advocates is coherent, and many points seem reasonable, certainly worthy of serious discussion. Perhaps the issue with Bannon is the same as with Trump – they find a valid platform to run on, something that deeply resonates with the masses, and where there is genuine need for great change – but they wrap that in their own buffoonery and grift. It turns out that even when running on a righteous cause, all the habits formed over the decades, the little cons and lies, they stick. No man can escape himself.