The New Beginning: Steve Bannon

Showing posts with label Steve Bannon. Show all posts

Sunday, August 02, 2020

"Far Right"

Mike Cernovich recommends that Steve Bannon book.

War for Eternity is more conceptual than Devil’s Bargain. Devil’s Bargain is interesting, and written for the NPR / 115’er crowd. Pop stuff for the wannabe smart crowd.

This one goes deeper into the ideas shaping Bannon and others.

Spiritual work. https://t.co/uhTgTI87FC pic.twitter.com/n1k2u0vMxt
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 3, 2020

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War for Eternity is a spiritual / conceptual look at the philosophies and mysticism of the “right.” First book I’ve read (and I’ve read most of the other attempts) that tries to understand the zeitgeist of the movement. Deep insights written at an understandable level. Must-read.

A post shared by Mike Cernovich (@cernovich) on Aug 2, 2020 at 5:26pm PDT

Friday, May 29, 2020

DHI Win

Dignitatis Humanae Institute Wins Right to Set Up Academy https://t.co/rAyCChph2m @NCRegister
— Edward Pentin (@EdwardPentin) May 29, 2020

Thursday, May 28, 2020

Not About Steve Bannon

As it gives insight into the author instead.

AmConMag: The Mystical Steve Bannon by Rod Dreher

Benjamin R. Teitelbaum: War For Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers

Nobody can say Steve Bannon is boring. https://t.co/8AXnp0VveS
— The American Conservative (@amconmag) May 28, 2020

The Mystical Steve Bannon - https://t.co/64M3eqS8QD
— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) May 28, 2020

RD: In the Traditionalist framework, at least as interpreted by Bannon and Olavo, virtue resides in the ordinary people, those shut out from elite circles and institutions. They are supposed to be the repository of true spiritual values. How realistic is this, though, even in Traditionalist terms? In the US, the working class is less religiously observant than the middle class. I understand the trad-populist criticism of the spiritual corruption of the elites, and share a lot of it, but I can’t see solid ground for this valorization of the People. It sounds to me more like an ideological abstraction, the way the Bolsheviks instrumentalized the “Masses,” and the Nazis used “das Volk.”

BT: Yes, in those latter cases you see either a descriptive or a prescriptive vision for treating one part of a population as definitive of the whole. These populations have typically been abstractions and imaginations—the accusation against romantic nationalists, to say nothing of the Nazis, was that they had invented the integral “folk” of the countryside that populated their stories and paintings and songs, just as Marxists had marched off to find a proletariat when such a neatly defined population seldom existed. Most original Traditionalists saw instead the priestly elite as being the “culture makers” of society, the ones who ought shape the masses according to their own ideals.

In Bannon’s and Olavo’s upended version we see something that looks more like standard romantic nationalism à la Herder, where a sector of society deemed most insulated from the corruption of modernity (often rural, less formal education, stationary) was viewed as a vessel for timeless values and identity. And the question to those romantics would be the same to Bannon, and it’s the question you pose: on what grounds do you speak of those people as a whole, and how are you sure they possess the qualities you think they do?

Does Bannon know more about red America than Teitelbaum?

RD: I happened to be reading your book at the same time as Modris Eksteins’ 1986 history of modernism, Rites of Spring. Eksteins says that just prior to World War I, Germany thought of itself as the champion of true spiritual values, and Britain (as well as France) as exponents of a civilization that placed primacy on money-making and materialism. We know too what the Nazis did with the same general concept. There really are solid historical grounds to worry about a recrudescence. That said, the critique Team Bannon makes of the emptiness of commercial society, and modernity’s capacity to dissolve national and cultural particularity, is both solid and appealing. Can you imagine a way in which political actors could advance the best part of Traditionalism — defending local and national cultures from absorption into the globalist mass — without succumbing to the wicked parts?

BT: Here you are asking me to speak for myself rather than for the people I studied, but I’ll try to work with the question: I think people stand the best chance of deriving something good from Traditionalism when they treat it, not as a guide for action, but instead as a narrative to inspire new analyses of society, which thereafter might function as a basis for action.

In particular I wonder whether there isn’t a place for pondering a chain of correspondences the school proposes, namely, that the most meaningful commonality held by the modern political left and right is their peculiar focus on economics; that the relative disinterest in immaterial aspects of social life might be at the root of our tacit aversion to allowing people and communities to be meaningfully different from one another; that the insistence on building community based on visions of a shared future rather than a shared past—which has so many obvious virtues and which is a near necessity in countries like the United States—underestimates the importance that narratives of a common history play in forging social solidarity.

I think the “wickedness” of Traditionalism comes, not only from the content of the hierarchies it sometimes proposes (race, gender, etc.), and not only from the way it could encourage us to ignore or relish contemporary hardship, but also because of what it doesn’t say—the fact that its grand narrative of human history and the battle of good and bad leaves so much unspecified. Those empty spaces can and have been filled with demagoguery. One way to avoid this is to not subscribe to Traditionalism as religion, of course, but to allow its occasional, qualified insights to live in a wider complex of values and agendas—including those it maligns.

"Liberalism is a big tent that can tolerate many different views, so long as they don't step over the lines the state makes at our behest."

Why does Teitelbaum have the need to portray himself as a defender of liberalism?

RD: I’ve been corresponding with a national journalist who is trying to understand why some American conservatives (like me) are drawn to Hungary’s Viktor Orban. This journalist is a liberal, and can only see Orban as a villain. I’ve tried to explain that people like me certainly don’t endorse everything Orban does, but we see in him a figure of resistance to George Soros and what Soros stands for. That is, Soros is the epitome of a wealthy, influential globalist who believes localist and nationalist institutions and narratives are problems to be solved. I wouldn’t expect a Western liberal to support a politician like Orban, but tell me, why is it so difficult for Western liberals to grasp that politicians like Orban appeal to deep longings in people — for, as you put it, “community, diversity, [and] sovereignty,” that cannot be reduced to “racism”?

BT: I think it is common to fear complex portrayals of people who threaten you, and the liberal left is certainly afraid of Orban (as am I to an extent, I must admit): his transformation of election processes, his treatment of the media, and his self-proclaimed opposition to liberal democracy, etc. I’m not telling you or your readers anything new in noting how that last piece in particular—Orban’s opposition to liberal democracy—is disqualifying to many Western commentators.

But the added feature here is that he personifies a cause that can appear ascendant in global politics. That prompts some commentators to move from mere criticism to war, and thereby to the realm of us-versus-them thinking, of black and white, of telling people that they are either part of the solution or part of the problem. Muddy those waters with talk of qualifications, contingencies, and parallel interpretations, and—the reasoning seems to go—you can as well be an apologist for the enemy. And when confronted with an unexpected or strange account of someone like Orban—one, say, framing him as a right-wing force for localism and community rather than libertarian individualism—and you’d be lucky to be called “politically incoherent” as Thomas Chatterton Williams recently put it. More likely the instinct will be to accuse you of fashioning a façade to obscure what, allegedly, matters most.

Part of me gets this as a political strategy. I understand theoretically why someone would say that the political stakes are so high these days that a line-in-the-sand tactic might be needed to mobilize. What I want at a minimum, however, is for people to be honest with themselves if they choose this path. I want them to recognize that dividing the world in all-or-nothing terms, adopting and strenuously maintaining uniform definitions of each other and cultivating fear and contempt for inconsistency and the unorthodox constitutes self-imposed ignorance; a subordination of inquiry and knowledge for the sake of political expediency.

"Creating opposition is bad! Unity!" We can also throw in, "Identity politics for me, but not for thee!" Who is dividing the world in "all-or-nothing" terms? This is not about "definitions," this is about group identities. Teitelbaum is merely posing as a defender of liberal rationalism, while he distorts those whom he claims to be portraying "honestly" as a "researcher."

One can see why liberalism and civic nationalism are platforms for non-natives to rally behind to weaken and subvert the majority.

Teitelbaum is a half-Pharisee who is interested in "far right" and "ethnonationalist" movements? Such fringe movements are psychological maladies to be diagnosed?

Check out this review of his Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism by Cathrine Thorleifsson