Like many of you, I watched Charlie Rose\u2019s Steve Bannon interview on 60 minutes<\/em><\/a>. 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\u2019s comments.The ideas of \u00a0loyalty to a capital \u201cL\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The German sociologist and philosopher, Max Weber, broke<\/a> the types of socio-political authority down into three categories: legal-rational, traditional and charismatic. Bannon\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s attire, a double layer of black shirts, perhaps Mussolini and his Blackshirts would be more apropos<\/em>.) According to most accounts, the relationship of their followers to charismatic leaders are usually emotional in \u00a0nature and involve deeply-felt, personal, often self-transcendent devotion. It\u2019s constructive to consider Bannon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Bannon\u2019s loyalty to Trump is both absolute and extra-rational. He spoke of his litmus tests for others\u2019 loyalty to Trump \u2014 not their ideology or acumen \u2014 and quoted a line from The Wild Bunch<\/em>, that \u201dwhen you side with a man, you side with him,\u201d adding that one accepts both \u201cthe good and the bad. You can criticize him behind, but when you side with him, you have to side with him.\u201d In other words, for Bannon, policy, polity, and personal ethics are subordinate to personality and the interpersonal relationships it engenders.<\/p>\n

Bannon\u2019s loyalty is also militant. Although he praised the\u201cDarwinian\u201d management style that Trump cultivates, the clash of competing egos fighting it out for their master\u2019s 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 \u201dstreetfighter\u201d 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 \u201cwingman outside for the entire time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cBig Man\u201d 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\u2019t just speak for himself, he tells us, but represents, in his mind, all American citizens:<\/p>\n

\u2026 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.<\/p>\n

The big, happy American family led by Big Daddy Trump. Or not.<\/p>\n

Except for Bannon, there\u2019s no room for \u201cnot.\u201d To deny Daddy is betrayal and traitors will be punished.<\/p>\n

Public disagreement or even a hint of criticism will result in retribution. Hence, after the Access Hollywood<\/em> tapes surfaced, Bannon happily agreed with Charlie Rose that he\u00a0\u201ctook names\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cblack book\u201d at that time.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ceconomic nationalist movement.\u201d His assertion that he left voluntarily in order to reenter Trump political streetfight via Breibart.com, his weapon of choice, reeked of defensiveness.<\/p>\n

The title of a Guardian<\/em> column<\/a> by Richard Wolffe proclaimed that, \u201cif Trump read books, he\u2019d sound just like Steve Bannon.\u201d And while there\u2019s an element of truth in that statement \u2014 and more than an element of truth in the Wolffe column which is mostly spot-on \u2014 it\u2019s just a shade shy of the real deal. And that whisper of separation is the source of Bannon\u2019s tragedy.<\/p>\n

Bannon espouses, no matter how much he denied it to Rose, a racist, authoritarian nationalism with some populist overtones \u2014 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\u2019s part.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for his \u201ccause,\u201d he persists in casting Trump as the instrument who can realize the dream. But while parts of Bannon\u2019s formula for \u201cmaking America great again,\u201d 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\u2019s grand vision has been subordinated to Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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 <\/em>all by himself. Although it\u2019s 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,<\/em> 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 \u201cthe lemon chiffon comb-over,\u201d or \u201cApricot Idi Amin,\u201d will never cut a heroic figure.<\/p>\n

And there it is, Bannon\u2019s tragedy in a nutshell: no matter how much he loves daddy, daddy doesn\u2019t have what it takes to deliver.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many of you, I watched Charlie Rose\u2019s Steve Bannon interview on 60 minutes. Lots there to make one sad, lots more to make<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":645,"featured_media":37854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1683,1949,2826,1],"tags":[2821,2884],"yoast_head":"\n