Like many of you, I watched Charlie Rose’s Steve Bannon interview on 60 minutes. Lots there to make one sad, lots more to make one shudder. I was struck, though, by certain themes that periodically surfaced during the course of Bannon’s comments.The ideas of  loyalty to a capital “L” leader and the identification of personality with policy colored almost everything Bannon said. I was also struck by his essential pathos; I saw a deeply sad little man, fearful of failure and desperate to be significant.

The German sociologist and philosopher, Max Weber, broke the types of socio-political authority down into three categories: legal-rational, traditional and charismatic. Bannon’s loyalty to Trump resembles the bond that exists between the charismatic leader and his devoted acolyte(s). Examples of such relationships, both positive and negative, abound. On the one hand there’s Jesus and his disciples (or, if you prefer, Robin Hood and his Merry Band), and on the other, probably more pertinent in the current situation, Hitler and his Brownshirts (although, given Bannon’s attire, a double layer of black shirts, perhaps Mussolini and his Blackshirts would be more apropos.) According to most accounts, the relationship of their followers to charismatic leaders are usually emotional in  nature and involve deeply-felt, personal, often self-transcendent devotion. It’s constructive to consider Bannon’s numerous protestations of unconditional loyalty to Donald Trump during the interview from the point of view of an aspirational follower of a man he wants to see as an apocalyptic, charismatic leader.

Bannon’s loyalty to Trump is both absolute and extra-rational. He spoke of his litmus tests for others’ loyalty to Trump — not their ideology or acumen — and quoted a line from The Wild Bunch, that ”when you side with a man, you side with him,” adding that one accepts both “the good and the bad. You can criticize him behind, but when you side with him, you have to side with him.” In other words, for Bannon, policy, polity, and personal ethics are subordinate to personality and the interpersonal relationships it engenders.

Bannon’s loyalty is also militant. Although he praised the“Darwinian” management style that Trump cultivates, the clash of competing egos fighting it out for their master’s attention, once the great man speaks, the matter is settled, and his acolytes are expected to leap to his defense no matter where they stand intellectually or morally. Bannon, tellingly, speaks of himself as a ”streetfighter” who, now that he is exiled from the White House, promises to fight for Trump, whom he envisions as a type of head gangbanger, and act as his “wingman outside for the entire time.”

The glue that binds Trump and Bannon, he seems to believe, is a shared mission, which he, Bannon, articulates and which can be embodied in the person of Trump who serves as a type of totem. This implicit pairing of a “Big Man” and a personality driven political cult aligns with the consensual aspect of the shared, almost ecstatic, fervor often experienced by the followers of a charismatic leader. Bannon doesn’t just speak for himself, he tells us, but represents, in his mind, all American citizens:

… Economic nationalism is what this country was built on. The American system. Right? We go back to that. We look after our own. We look after our citizen, we look after our manufacturing base, and guess what? This country’s gonna be greater, more united, more powerful than it’s ever been. And it’s not– this is not astrophysics. OK? And by the way, that’s every nationality, every race, every religion, every sexual preference. As long as you’re a citizen of our country. As long as you’re an American citizen, you’re part of this populist, economic nationalist movement.

The big, happy American family led by Big Daddy Trump. Or not.

Except for Bannon, there’s no room for “not.” To deny Daddy is betrayal and traitors will be punished.

Public disagreement or even a hint of criticism will result in retribution. Hence, after the Access Hollywood tapes surfaced, Bannon happily agreed with Charlie Rose that he “took names” of those who failed to stand up sufficiently tall for The Donald. We are led to suppose Chris Christie, for instance, suffered the fallout of having been written up in Bannon’s “black book” at that time.

It is here that the sadness begins to manifest itself. When Rose asked him about his exile from the Trump administration, the red-eyed, hung-over looking Bannon almost literally winced, his eyes widened and he seemed to swallow slightly before quickly denying the notion that he had been cast out by the leader of his great “economic nationalist movement.” His assertion that he left voluntarily in order to reenter Trump political streetfight via Breibart.com, his weapon of choice, reeked of defensiveness.

The title of a Guardian column by Richard Wolffe proclaimed that, “if Trump read books, he’d sound just like Steve Bannon.” And while there’s an element of truth in that statement — and more than an element of truth in the Wolffe column which is mostly spot-on — it’s just a shade shy of the real deal. And that whisper of separation is the source of Bannon’s tragedy.

Bannon espouses, no matter how much he denied it to Rose, a racist, authoritarian nationalism with some populist overtones — a vision with serious similarities to that sold by Hitler to war-and-deprivation-weary Germans after World War I. This set of beliefs seem to represent sincere, if unfortunate, conviction on Bannon’s part.

Unfortunately for his “cause,” he persists in casting Trump as the instrument who can realize the dream. But while parts of Bannon’s formula for “making America great again,” seems to be attractive to Trump, he clearly prefers a formula, any formula, for making Trump, not America, great. The guy has problems with both abstraction and with empathy; Bannon’s grand vision has been subordinated to Trump’s intrinsic stupidity and his narcissism. Instead of the powerful instrument that could, under the tutelage of Bannon, create the chaos incipient to a new world order, Trump is a loosely-strung wind harp, subject to any stray breeze that stirs his vanity and triggers his impulses. Bannon is one and only one of those multi-directional breezes.

Make no mistake, Trump is virulent and corrupt enough to do serious damage. But, while he would obviously enjoy the perks of life as a Supreme Leader, he doesn’t have the chops to deliver the type of leadership for which Bannon seems to yearn. Consider that Hitler, absurd as he was, managed to write Mein Kampf all by himself. Although it’s a horrifying, clumsily executed compendium of centuries of continental anti-semitism and other ugliness, it reflects the actual thinking of its author. Trump, on the other hand, had to hire somebody to write The Art of the Deal, a collection of stale business aphorisms and self-glorification passed off as his own work. A man who is regularly and openly satirized via epithets like “the lemon chiffon comb-over,” or “Apricot Idi Amin,” will never cut a heroic figure.

And there it is, Bannon’s tragedy in a nutshell: no matter how much he loves daddy, daddy doesn’t have what it takes to deliver.

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It has long been reported that Trump whisperer and white nationalist Steve Bannon has a whiteboard in his office, on which he meticulously lists his priorities. But until yesterday, few people outside the Trump inner circle knew what was on it. Now we know, courtesy of a selfie taken in front of the whiteboard by self-proclaimed “America’s rabbi” Shmuley Boteach.

What we see behind Boteach and his (strangely) good friend Steve Bannon are dozens of bullet points—some with check marks next to them indicating success—laying out the Bannon-Trump agenda. Many are not surprising: “Build the wall and eventually make Mexico pay for it,” for example. But others are chilling confirmations of our worst fears about what these guys are up to.  They’re not surrounded by self-negating air quotes. They’re not random thoughts. They are carefully written and organized—a battle plan for the devolution of American democracy, the institutionalization of xenophobia, and the dismantling of essentially everything that has expanded rights and contributed to a fairer shake for disadvantaged Americans.

I suspect that Bannon is not ashamed at all of what is on the whiteboard. But I do think that he and other Trump whisperers–who have demonstrated an unwillingness to openly discuss what they’re doing or to take responsibility–are at least slightly unhappy that the whiteboard list has been outed inadvertently.

Here’s a list of what I’ve been able to read from the board, and what others have noted as well. {My comments are in brackets.}

Topping the whiteboard list is the not-at-all secret section labeled, “Pledges on Obamacare.” The heading is followed by one bullet point:

-Repeal and replace Obamacare.  {Author’s note: No check mark appears after this one, thank goodness.}

Pledges on Tax Reform:

-Create a 10% repatriation tax

-Lower the corporate tax…

-Eliminate the estate tax…

…[Additional points obscured by Bannon’s head] {Note: Dammit!}

Pledges on Immigration:

-Cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities

-Suspend immigration from terror-prone regions {Note: This scheme is currently blocked by a federal judge}

-Implement new extreme vetting techniques

-Suspend the Syrian Refugee Program [Check]

-Create support programs for victims of illegal immigrants

-Expand and revitalize the popular 287(g) partnership

-Issue detainers for all illegal immigrants who are…for any crime, and they will be placed into immigration removal proceedings [Check]

-End “Catch and Release” [Check]

-Hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents [Check]

-Restore the Secure Communities Program [Check]

-Triple the number of ICE agents [Check]

-Build the border wall and eventually make Mexico pay…  {Note: Not happening in the current budget, probably not happening ever, but still a priority on Bannon’s whiteboard. Note the change to “eventually” make Mexico pay.}

-Sunset our visa laws so that Congress is forced to revise and revisit them.

-Finally complete the biometric entry-exit visa tra…

-Propose passage of Davis-Oliver bill {Note: This is an anti-immigrant bill that would give states more immigration-enforcement power}

-Immediate terminate Obama’s “two illegal………to pass “Katie’s Law.” {Note: This law would would impose a five-year federal prison sentence on illegal immigrants who are deported, but come back into the U.S. illegally. It was promoted by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.}

-…..of ISIS/National Defense

-Tel Aviv to Jerusalem

-…Iran deal

{Note: Man, oh man, do I wish Bannon was a little skinnier and had less hair, so we could see more of this text.}

There’s nothing on this list about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment benefits, voting rights, Supreme Court nominees or any other New Deal programs that Bannon-Trump and the radical Republican party are bent on destroying. It makes you wonder if there’s another whiteboard somewhere–either in the real world or in Bannon’s brain–with the rest of the nasty agenda. We can only hope that another narcississtic toady wants a selfie in front of that list, too.

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Even folks who have tried to restrain themselves from the use of fascist and Nazi labels have begun to run scared after the announcement today that racist, Jew-baiting Steve Bannon has just become one of the most powerful men in America. At The Political Animal Martin Longman writes:

One of the shocking things I’ve felt compelled to do since Donald Trump’s unexpected election to be the next president of the United States is to bone up on my history by reading Joseph Goebbels Wikipedia page. I did that last night, and I noted many disturbing parallels between Goebbels early career and the career of Trump’s new chief White House strategist Steve Bannon. Still, I was feeling vaguely guilty about even doing this research, as if I’m bordering on the paranoid and letting my fears get the better of me.

The problem is, I am hardly alone in thinking along these lines ….

After George Bush was elected, my family toyed with the possibility of leaving the country – a move that would have been facilitated by the nature of my husband’s work at that time. Now we are both retired and the truth is that few desirable countries welcome older folks who don’t have money to invest in job creating ventures, and who, in countries with progressive social programs, may put a strain on their resources. We also have companion animals that we are obligated to keep and protect and might not be able to bring them with us to places that would otherwise welcome us.

But we’re still worried that getting out of Dodge might really be the right thing to do. So the second thought to cross our minds is that if we don’t leave the country, we ought to leave Missouri.

Missouri’s a poor state, and its almost uniformly corrupt lawmakers don’t seem to care if it gets poorer as long as they can get rich doing what’s best for their even richer friends, and, in the process, free up businesses to discriminate along with putting uppity, promiscuous sluts in their places (nearly barefoot, pregnant and working for minimum wage in McDonalds’ kitchens).* In the Missouri boondocks they call it religious freedom.

Missouri’s also awash with guns and militias. Beginning this year there’s almost no regulation of firearms. Any type of firearm. You can shoot folks because they scare you. Stop and think about how many uptight, paranoid people there are, and then consider that in Missouri lots of the scariest of them have guns. And speaking of scary people, the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies 22 hate groups located in Missouri – more than in just a handful of other states.

The state’s a veritable petri dish for growing Trumpian authoritarianism. It’s got more than its share of those white people who are angry because the world rejects their version of reality, their anger both exploited and enabled by Trump’s election. When the fecal matter finally hits the fan, Missouri may be an especially bad place for an couple of older progressives. In the past, we braced up, got on with our lives because, as with most things, we knew that this too would pass. But it threatens to be much worse this time.

At our ages it’s not easy to upend our lives by moving. There are lots of things to consider and I don’t know what we’ll do in the end. However, given the appointment of Bannon along with the police-state and torture rhetoric that is emanating from Trump’s circle of domestic policy advisors, we are beginning to think that, at the very least, maybe we should get out of the heart of Trump’s own country.

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