"Devil's Bargain" by Joshua Green
Above: "Devil's Bargain - Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency." Joshua Green. 242 Pages.
Bannon believes that the rise of nationalist movements across the world, from Europe to Japan to the United States, heralds a return to tradition.
I completed reading this book today.
The book tells the story of how Steve Bannon and Donald Trump intersected to engineer Donald Trump's improbable election to President of the United States.
Most of the pundit and public focus on the 2016 US presidential election has been on why HRC lost.
"Shattered," by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, which I read in May 2017, suggested that HRC should bear the blame for her own defeat. Her actions before the campaign hamstrung her own chances so badly that she could never recover eg. private server, Clinton Foundation self dealing and giving out high compensation speeches to Wall Street in an era of populism. Also, mistakes were made in her data driven approach where computer models did not pick up changes in voter preferences.
In her own recently published book, "What Happened," HRC attributes her loss to mistakes made in her own campaign and externalities such as FBI head Comey's erratic - and putatively inappropriate - media interventions late in the campaign
"Devil's Bargain" focuses not on why HRC lost in her bid for the American presidency, but on why Trump won. And, the story of why Trump won cannot be told without telling the story of Steve Bannon.
Bannon's deep rooted conservative ideology melded with Trump's "can do" sense of himself to create a real "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" phenomenon. Without Bannon, there would be no Trump presidency... simple as that.
The best part of the book is the rehearsal of Bannon's life. Middle class, Catholic School, Navy, Harvard Business School, Wall Street, Hollywood and Andrew Breitbart acolyte.
Because he found repeated, hard charging success at various points at the apex of American professional life, Bannon was not one of those hard slogging, play by the rules, conservatives the Left likes to marginalize into the doofus category. He was smart; self confident. He knew how the levers of the secular, progressive world worked. If ridiculed for his conservative beliefs, he could fight back, easily cowing his antagonists.
The meeting of Bannon and Trump was facilitated by conservative news maven, Andrew Breitbart and conservative billionaires, Bob and Rebecca Mercer, though Bannon didn't become officially part of the Trump campaign (engineered by the Mercers) until just three weeks before election day.
In addition to backfilling Trump's ideological vacuum with conservative political principles, Bannon was able to link Trump with conservative money and backing, to include the Mercers.
Trump knew in general terms how much of America had been left behind by progressive policies which favored the rich. Bannon knew the details and how Trump could position himself, ideologically, politically and tactically, opposite Americans left behind to effectively tap their angst.
The fighting and "double down" proclivities of Bannon and Trump also served them well in a political arena where prim Pubs usually backed down in the face of constant Left attacks.
Trump's willingness to flout any norm was a powerful source of Trump's appeal. Bannon understood this and was able to leverage and amplify Trump's iconoclastic appeal.
When, in early October 2016, the Access Hollywood tape showing Trump's inappropriate references to women came out, Republican operatives thought that there was no longer any hope for a Trump victory. Some Republican insiders called for Trump to cede his position as their presidential nominee to his Vice President running mate, Mike Pence. Others wanted to redirect scarce campaign funds away from the presidential race to save Republican congressional seats anticipating an expected HRC blowout win.
Fighter Bannon - and the Mercers (also ardent, ideologically conservatively riven fighters) - said no! Trump can still win! Time to double down!
Bannon, new Trump campaign chairman, arranged for four, now elderly, women who claimed to have been harassed/raped by Bill Clinton, to stand in the entry passage through which HRC and Trump would have to pass to participate in their final presidential candidate debate. The debate authorities nixed this stunt, but, the women were still seated prominently at the debate. And, the news media gave a lot of coverage to the ploy.
By filling the news cycle with examples of the Clintons' own sexual predations, Trump/Bannon were successful in changing the media focus away from Trump and the Access Hollywood tape.
After that final debate, which most said HRC won, Trump's poll numbers rebounded from the polls hit earlier induced by the Access Hollywood tape.
The book talks about the influence of Andrew Breitbart on Bannon. In 2008 Bannon produced a film on causes of the financial crisis, "Generation Zero," suffused with Breitbart's influence. Bannon blames liberal social policies for creating the culture of Wall Street permissiveness that ultimately led to the crash.
"By the late nineties," a film narrator intones, "the Left had taken over many of the institutions of power - meaning government, media, and academe. And it was from these places and positions of power that they were able to disrupt the system and implement a strategy that was designed to ultimately undermine the capitalist system."
Broadly speaking, Bannon is a nationalist. Bannon's nationalist world view is very much in synch with that of Trump. How did Bannon's penchant towards conservatism come about?
From an early age, Bannon was influenced by his family's distinctly traditionalist Catholicism. He viewed current events against the broad sweep of history. He was hardly a moralizing social conservative, but, he objected bitterly to the secular liberalism encroaching upon the culture.
Bannon was highly influenced by the work of Rene Guenon, an early-twentieth-century French philosopher who was raised as a Roman Catholic, practiced Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim.
Guenon developed a philosophy referred to as "Traditionalism." Guenon believed in the idea that certain ancient religions, including the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism and medieval Catholicism, were repositories of common spiritual truths, revealed in the earliest age of the world, that were being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West.
Bannon brought to Guenon's Traditionalism a strong dose of Catholic social thought, including the concept of "subsidiarity." Political matters should devolve to the lowest, least centralized authority that can responsibly handle them... a concept that, in a US political context, mirrors small-government conservatism.
From the book: " ...Bannon believes that the rise of nationalist movements across the world, from Europe to Japan to the United States, heralds a return to tradition. 'You have to control three things,' he explained, 'borders, currency, and military and national identity. People are finally coming to realize that, and politicians will have to follow.'"
Full disclosure. I am a Bannon acolyte. I have long believed that the wave of nationalism sweeping the world will gain in size and momentum...a rising tide, as it were. And, that liberty and widespread economic benefit are more apt to thrive in a nationalistic, limited central government context.
In the western world, few from the progressive mainstream saw - or acknowledged - this global tidal surge of nationalistic fervor. In the United States, Trump and Bannon, prescient in detecting the tidal surge in the American context, united together to ride the wave.
The secular, globalist Left, which up to now has controlled all the US culture levers, is apoplectic at Trump's ascendency. Their unhinged resistance to Trump's administration exposes the bankruptcy of their own false worldview.
In the book's final chapter, Green, a main stream, liberal, political writer, pans the first five months of the Trump presidency in "I told you so" mockery. Still, his coverage of the Trump/Bannon "marriage" is pretty objective, and balanced throughout the bulk of the book. I recommend "Devil's Bargain" as a good source for understanding the genius arising from the Trump/Bannon synergy.
I would add, notwithstanding Bannon's ouster from his advisor position at the Whitehouse, don't believe for a minute that the mind meld between Trump and Bannon, and its outsized impact on Trump administration policy direction, is severed.