This is an important interview. I will add a few comments at the end. Excerpts:
You said something I’ve got to ask you about, that Trump’s a moderate. In what areas is the MAGA movement farther right than Trump?
BANNON: I think farther right on radical cuts of spending, No. 1. I think we’re much more hard-core on things like Ukraine. President Trump is a peacemaker. He wants to go in and negotiate and figure something out as a deal maker. I think 75 percent of our movement would want an immediate, total shutdown — not one more penny in Ukraine, and massive investigations about where the money went. On the southern border and mass deportations, I don’t think President Trump’s close to where we are. They all got to go home.
Also, on artificial intelligence, we’re virulently anti-A.I. I think big regulations have to come.
President Trump is a kindhearted person. He’s a people person, right? On China, I think he admires Xi Jinping. But we’re super-hawks. We want to see an elimination of the Chinese Communist Party.
[. . .]
Would you like to have some role?
No, no, no, no. We run this like a military command post. So I would only be giving up power. I went there before. I wanted out. I’m not a staff guy. I can’t do it. And also that’s not where the center of power is. It’s not how President Trump thinks. A big center of power is just media.
I call Trump a Marshall McLuhanesque figure. McLuhan called it, right? He says this mass thing called media, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said of the noosphere, is going to so overwhelm evolutionary biology that it will be everything. And Trump understands that. That’s why he watches TV.
He understands that to get anything done, you have to make the people understand. And so therefore, constantly, we’re in a battle of narrative. Unrestricted narrative warfare. Everything is narrative. And in that regard, you have to make sure you forget about the noise and focus on the signal.
And remember, our audience is virtually all activists. So even though it may not be the biggest, it doesn’t have to be. It’s the people that are out there in the hinterland that are on the school boards. They now control so many state parties. Our mantra is you must use your agency. It’s a spiritual war. The divine providence works through your agency.
[. . .]
Do you know the demographics of these activists? Education? Race? Income?
First off, I would say 60 percent female. Female and over 40 years old. A lot of that, a third of them brought in by the pandemic, and the Moms for America. A ton of moms, women who didn’t read a lot of books in college. They’re not politically active. They had no interest. It was only later in life, as they became the C.O.O. of the American family, they realized how tough it was to make ends meet.
And then they saw the lack of education, and it was really the pandemic when they walked by the computer and saw what the kids are doing. They’re now at the tip of the spear.
Do you worry that your broader movement will be fatally poisoned by antisemitic elements, the conspiracy crazies?
We’re the most pro-Israel and pro-Jewish group out there. What I say is that not just the future of Israel but the future of American Jews, not just safety but their ability to thrive and prosper as they have in this country, is conditional upon one thing, and that’s a hard weld with Christian nationalism.
If I can make one comparison: Early in my career, I worked for Bill Buckley. His manner at National Review reminds me a little of some of the things you do. He created an intense sense of belonging: We’re the conservative movement. We’re all in this together. Every day we’re marching forward. But he also had a strong sense of who was a wack job, a conspiracist. And he was going to draw a line. Pat Buchanan was on the other side of the line.So what I admire about Buckley is obviously the intense thing of belonging. What I don’t admire is the no fight. It’s very much an intellectual debating society, right?
I use you and George Will as examples of this all the time. Brilliant guys, but this is a street fight. We need to be street fighters. This is going to be determined on social media and getting people out to vote. It’s not going to be debated on the Upper East Side or Upper West Side.
I’ve found that most people are pretty reasonable. You can have a conversation, and you’ll at least see where they’re coming from.
I think you’re dead [expletive] wrong.
That’s where we disagree.
No, it’s 100 percent disagree. What are you talking about? They think you’re an exotic animal. You’re a conservative, but you’re not dangerous. You’re reasonable. We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.
Now, the biggest element that Buckley had that the book “Bowling Alone” had, and you talk about, is the atomization of our society. There’s no civic bonding. There’s no national cohesion. There’s not even the Lions Club things that you used to have before. People tell me all the time: “You changed my life. I ran for the board of supervisors, and now I’m on the board of supervisors.” They have friends that they never had met before, and they’re in a common cause, and it’s changed their life. They’re on social media. Every day, they have action they have to do.
[. . .]
Trump is taking America back to its more constitutional Republic for the third time, and that drives the credentialed left nuts because he’s not just a class traitor, he’s a low-end guy from Queens. He’s not up to their social — it’s too tacky. It’s the gold. It’s the Trump stuff. They hate him. They hate him to a passionate level. They look at the noise around Trump and miss the signal of what’s really happening, and they can’t get past that, and they’re blinded by it.
BV's comments:
1) Bannon appreciates the terrible threat posed by unregulated A. I. Does Trump? I don't think so. The Democrats, in contrast to both Trump and Bannon, reside entirely in Cloud Cuckoo Land, with their overheated hyperventilation over 'climate change' and "boiling oceans" (Al Gore at Davos) as the greatest threat to humanity. That's plainly insane. They also fail to grasp the WW-3 threat, which Trump clearly does grasp, and they are in addition blind to the Balkanization and social unrest and rampant crime which cannot be avoided with wide-open borders. They also show contempt for the rule of law and national sovereignty.
2) Bannon is also right that Trump understands in his inarticulate, gut-level sort of way the messages of Marshall McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin, two enormously influential intellectuals from the seminal 'sixties.
3) Bannon's talk of "unrestricted narrative warfare" leaves me uneasy. I agree with him that we are at war with the Left and thus with the contemporary Dem party, and that it must be defeated if our republic is to survive. I also agree that this cannot be achieved by having 'conversations' with them. It is far too late for that, they are mendacious to the core, as should be blindingly evident from the blatant 'cheap/deep fake' gaslighting the Biden administration has been engaging in, and in any case we and they share no common ground. They are out to overturn the American republic as she was founded to be, while we want her restoration.
What makes me uneasy is that Bannon's talk of "unrestricted narrative warfare" and "everything is narrative" suggest relativism about truth. Is Bannon a relativist about truth? Does he think that no narrative is true, sans phrase, and that every narrative is true only for those who tell it and hold it and are legitimated by it? If that is his view, then I oppose him. Aleksandr Dugin, I take it, is a relativist about truth. How close is Bannon ideologically to Dugin. I don't know but I need to find out.
There are some troublingly deep questions here. Right and Left are at war with each other, and so are their respective narratives. But if relativism reigns, and there is no "grand narrative" (Lyotard) or "meta-narrative" and every first-order narrative is only relatively true, then there is no hope of convincing or converting them: we have to crush them or be crushed by them. We are in the vicinity of Nietzsche's perspectivism according to which there is no truth, only interpretations from power-centers each out to expand its power. Perspectivism is the epistemology corresponding to Nietzsche's fundamental ontological thesis: "The world is the will-to-power and nothing besides." This onto-epistemology is the worldview that results from the death of God in Nietzsche's sense. No God, no truth, to paraphrase a line from The Gay Science.
But then what's with Bannon's talk of a "spiritual war" and "divine providence"? "It’s a spiritual war. The divine providence works through your agency." So God is on our side, but God is irrational absolute power? Sounds like a Muslim conception of God.
I am struggling to formulate the problem, but I am aware that I am not succeeding. I suppose I am not ready to give up on the possibility of reasoned discourse as a way to finding some common ground. But given what hyper-mendacious shytes our political enemies are, how these phucks will do anything to win, I find it hard not to agree with Bannon and see Brooks as just another impotent cuckservative clown along with George Will and the rest of the yap-and-scribble, do-nothing, leftist lapdog, bow-tie brigade. As Bannon said to Brooks,
You’re a conservative, but you’re not dangerous. You’re reasonable. We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.